Life Choices

In 2007 i left Germany and a promising career and went to New Zealand. Never been there before, didn't know anyone, no job, all i had was my partner Manu and a rough plan of staying for at least two years. When we left New Zealand in 2019 we had built and sold a startup, built and handed over a consulting company, i have helped create the grassroots underpinnings of the New Zealand startup scene, made a ton of friends and still feel a strong connection to the place. When we left we moved onto a sailboat, got stuck in Covid lockdowns across Europe and settled down in Portugal for a while. Now, we have left Portugal after 5 years and live our nomad life again.

Over the years i struggled with depression, burnout, ADHD and also worked with and led people in all these situations. I also worked a lot with founders at the very early stage of their journey, with people that wanted to become founders and those that liked the idea of being a founder but never got there. I learned a lot about myself and a lot about people and the takeaway that stuck with me is "choices".

ADHD comes with an incredible asset, hyper-focus. As a developer i can focus for days on some piece of code, some architecture, things that seem boring for most. Most developers i worked with were on that same hyper-focus spectrum to a degree and that helped us build incredible stuff that others never could. It was a choice, i decided to focus on code, on building something, on working on a company, on setting up a server. That choice helped me deal with my hyper-focus. The flip side of that is that i often was a bad manager because my default reflex is focus on something when as a manager it is way more important to have a really broad overview. When i realised that i made a choice, i realised that having a broad overview and many constant interruptions is not something i enjoy much so i focussed on making my startup sellable so i can move on.

After having lived in New Zealand for over a decade i wanted to travel more again and get better at sailing so we packed up, bought a boat and started sailing. First short hops, then longer ones until we felt comfortable offshore. The point i try to get to here is that none of the things i have done "just happened" and all of them happened because i made choices. None of the things happened in isolation as well, all of them had others around me helping me achieve them.

I would love to but ... and i could never are the same mindset. Fear of change and the inability to make the mental leap to do something that might be uncomfortable initially. There are several different mental model that were built around this, high risk, high reward thinking or prioritising long-term outcomes over short-term wins. All of them, however, come back to making choices.

Our world is designed to not make choices. AI makes more and more choices for us, we optimise on making less and less decisions, we try to delegate responsibility for us to others, get the shrink to tell me what i should do, get my coach to tell me how to do sports, let my boss decide what i should focus on. That muscle of making decisions is dying and all that is left is a wall-e style blob sitting in a fully articulated chair slurping a delivered drink. I actually went back to watch wall-e again and hell it was ahead of it's time when it came out and when i look around i see so many people that are straight out of that spaceship that have not made a single decision in years.

I also learned that leading people is not making decisions for them but teaching people to be comfortable to make decisions. It is helping others train that muscle and that is why i love having people around me that i can inspire to build up that muscle and not become another wall-e style blob that just waits for decisions being made for them.

I will double down on making choices, inspire others to make choices and hope you, lovely reader, will do so too.