Learning Archives

Animal Farm by George Orwell (Nik’s Book Notes)

March 22, 2026March 24, 2026 Nik

My grandma grew up in a Communist country—East Germany. A large part of her family fled from there just days before it actually collapsed. Given the stories she and my great-grandma told me, I never believed in communism as a workable alternative for a nation. This belief has only been solidified as I’ve grown older.

Democratic countries aren’t perfect by any means. They, too, offer room for corruption, inequality, and censorship. But what they do better, in my opinion, is provide space for a fundamental truth: Humans are self-minded creatures. Democracies try to give them ways to grow, advance, and build ownership, then rein in how much power any one party or individual can accumulate.

In Communism, on paper, “everything belongs to everyone.” Technically, there aren’t any incentives to strive. But humans want to strive. And they do. And when some inevitably rack up power behind the scenes, it usually comes at the expense of the rest—except this time with even fewer guardrails than in a Democracy which openly acknowledges these patterns.

But that’s just me. I’m only one man, and I’m not trying to convince you. And while we could talk about many other pieces of the puzzle, one of the most interesting ones is, perhaps, a story—a story like George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

12 Great Books Written by People I Know and Admire

March 1, 2026March 7, 2026 Nik

In the mid-90s, the Russian artist duo Komar and Melamid conducted an interesting experiment. They hired research firms in 11 countries — including the US, Russia, France, China, Turkey, Iceland, and Kenya — to interview 1,000 people each and ask them: What do you most want in a visual work of art? Then, they painted the results. Here they are:

What was supposed to be a beautiful exploration of human diversity turned out to be, according to Komar, “a collaboration with [a] new dictator — Majority.” 30 years later, the duo’s People’s Choice series merely seems like the tip of the iceberg.

When opening his viral essay “The Age of Average” with their example, designer and strategy director Alex Murrell concludes: “The landscapes which Komar and Melamid painted have become the landscapes in which we live. […] Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.”

Murrell’s article about our statistical convergence mostly deals with the visual, but books do make an appearance. First, for their titles, which, among other trends, seem to love swear words these days, and second, for their lack of breadth in authors. Murrell quotes Adam Mastroianni: “In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the top 10 [of bestsellers] had been there before. These days, it’s closer to 75%.”

While I’m still waiting for my first top 10 bestseller, let alone repeat visits on those coveted lists, even being an aspiring self-published author has its benefits. Namely, you get to know other aspiring authors. The ones who haven’t quite made it yet but are taking their craft seriously. So, for today’s book recommendations, I have the incredible privilege of sharing titles written 100% by people I personally know and admire. Some of them, I’ve worked with. Others are old friends. But all of them are awesome writers.

ChatGPT would never suggest these books to you. You likely won’t find them on the New York Times Best Seller list or at the next airport bookstore any time soon — not that they don’t deserve it. But if you want to pick up some unique ideas from underrated people, look no further than these books.

Here are 12 great reads that’ll help you break out of the age of average.

5 Lessons From Reaching My Mid-30s

February 22, 2026February 22, 2026 Nik

A few days ago, I turned 35. When I was 28, that number felt inconceivably far away. Now, those seven years seem like the blink of an eye.

On my birthday back then, I noticed the trend of racking up ever more life lessons as we get older — a trend I wished to break. Instead of the expected 28, I wrote down 14 lessons for myself, wondering if even those were too many. “Less is room for more of what’s not there yet” was one of them.

Here’s another lesson I learned around that time: Aging won’t magically free you from stupidity. Only learning will. Wisdom is not guaranteed.

Unless we reflect deeply and continue to improve our habits, we’ll keep making the same mistakes. And while it looks smart if you share more and more life lessons on paper each year, you could argue what’s happening is actually the opposite of learning. If you truly got wiser, surely you wouldn’t need ever more reminders!

Even if we try our best, we’ll have to learn many lessons twice. What better way to create more space in our minds than to distill our knowledge as time goes on? The longer I live, the more I want to condense the sum total of my experiences into a few principles I can easily remember and live by.

So, rather than list 165 individual insights, here are five big-picture lessons from making it halfway through my 30s.

My 10 Favorite Books of 2025

January 25, 2026January 25, 2026 Nik

Every minute spent reading is a minute of culture defended. That’s what I believe.

Therefore, I was both shocked and delighted when Goodreads told me I had managed to read 19 books in 2025. It was my first year of working a full-time job while still writing on the side, and I didn’t feel I read all that much.

Some of those books were short. Others were long. Six of them were part of a journey to read the classics that I began in 2024. The rest were a mixed bag of books written by friends, targeted research, and some bestsellers I picked up along the way.

Books are my all-time favorite gifts to both give and receive. Thoughtful book recommendations are almost as good. Maybe some of my 10 favorites from the year will make for beautiful presents for you as well. You can give them to yourself or whoever they make you think of — because the only surprise better than getting a book is getting a book on a random Tuesday when you didn’t expect anything, let alone the wisdom of a lifetime condensed into a few hundred pages.

You never know where your next great read might come from. Maybe you’ll find yours below. In no particular order, here are my 10 favorite books that I read in 2025, along with the ideas they inspired in my own writing.

How To Set Yourself Up for a Successful 2026 in 30 Minutes

December 31, 2025December 31, 2025 Nik

What does it mean to “be successful” over the course of a year?

In my early 20s, I believed success meant setting lots of New Year’s resolutions and then maintaining all of them throughout the year. But I kept failing at that. So at some point, I started thinking success might be about hitting certain milestones. “Get 10,000 email subscribers.” “Make $100,000 in revenue.” “Sell 10,000 copies of my book.” And so on. But I kept failing at those, too. Even when I reduced my goals down to just one ambitious target per year, I still kept failing.

Eventually, it dawned on me that goals might be a bad way to define success — and thus, to some extent, my happiness — altogether.

As soon as you set a goal, you’ve declared a void in your life. “Until I achieve this outcome, I won’t be happy.” It’s a choice to fight against some self-inflicted lack until it’s fixed, and once it is, you’ll quickly move the target further away. Goals are a great way to exact pressure and make yourself feel inadequate. That can work in the short term, but if it’s your only strategy in the game of life year after year, you’ll be miserable most of the time.

Once I was fed up with arbitrary numbers, I took a break from goals for a few years. But my life still needed direction. Over time, I slowly built a new process. That process involves a short annual review, a yearly theme, and a few simple experiments. It has just the right balance of ambition, contentment, and flexibility.

Thanks to this process, my big-picture happiness no longer depends on whether I hit some goalpost or win a trophy. “Did I have fun?” “Have I been learning and growing?” “Am I moving towards where I truly want to go?” These are the kinds of questions I ask myself when I look back at the end of a year. Answering them with an enthusiastic, genuine “Yes!” — that’s what having a successful year means to me.

If you’d like to measure yourself against healthier, more sustainable yardsticks too, here’s how you can do it. It only takes two tools, one commitment, and absolutely zero goals. Oh, and you can do it in the next 30 minutes. Let’s begin.

Startups for Outsiders by Amardeep Parmar (Nik’s Book Notes)

December 1, 2025December 1, 2025 Nik

Ordinary people have the most billion-dollar ideas.

Think about it: A billionaire is just a normal person who executed a plan and succeeded on an extreme scale. Don’t believe me? I’ve got proof.

As of mid-2025, only one third of the world’s 3,000 billionaires inherited their money. Meanwhile, around 70% have either founded or co-founded the business that made them wealthy.

What’s more, most billionaires build one billion-dollar business, not seven. Quiet Elon! So even if you already have all the capital in the world, scaling a global business ain’t easy. It takes more than money to make money.

Why does this little fact check matter? Because it shows the playing field is more level than we think. Innovation is not the prerogative of the rich.

My friend Amardeep Parmar understands this. “Humble startups founded by people like you have changed the world,” he begins Startups for Outsiders.

28 Lessons From 5 Years of Meditating Every Day

December 23, 2024December 24, 2024 Nik

I started meditating on August 29, 2019. I haven’t missed a day since. That’s over five years — almost 2,000 days — of sitting with my eyes closed for at least five minutes, usually 15, without fail.

I originally started meditating for two reasons. First, I felt called out when I heard Naval Ravikant say in an interview that meditation is “one of those things that everybody says they do, but nobody actually does.” I was already a mindful, self-aware person — but noticing is not the same as processing. Instead of just realizing that I was, say, biting my nails, I wanted to feel calm and present enough to actively stop, too.

Second, in that same interview, Naval actually provided a doable way to meditate. “It is literally the art of doing nothing,” he said. “All you need to do for meditation is to sit down, close your eyes, comfortable position, whatever happens happens. If you think, you think. If you don’t think, you don’t think. Don’t put effort into it, don’t put effort against it.” Freed from all the gurus, gadgets, and distractions of what has since become a $5 billion industry, I could finally start meditating right then and there, without complications or expectations. So I did.

After my first, intense week of meditating for an hour each day, I wrote down some initial lessons. Then, as my habit became smaller but stayed consistent, I reflected some more on day 800. Since then, I’ve shared the occasional, individual insight on my daily blog.

For my five-year anniversary, I figured why not round up all lessons, organize them, and present them in a way that makes sense? So that’s exactly what I’ve done. This way, you can get a comprehensive overview in one post but also dive deeper into any particular idea that interests you.

Here are 28 lessons from five years of meditating every day.

10 Lessons From 10 Years of Writing

September 28, 2024October 14, 2024 Nik

Today is the ten-year-anniversary of my first blog post. Back then, I didn’t know the first thing about headlines, title case, or narrative structure. I had no clue I was going to be a writer, let alone that I would get to do it full-time. And I definitely didn’t imagine landing here, a decade later, fully intending to write not just for another ten years but for the rest of my life.

Still, somehow, I’ve managed to publish over 2,000 pieces of writing since that first post. I rarely feel all the wiser, but I’ve undoubtedly learned a thing or two along the way. To mark the occasion, I’d like to share ten of the more palpable lessons from my journey: one particular theme that emerged during each of the years that I’ve been writing.

Here are ten lessons from ten years of wordsmithing.

Balance Is a Verb, Not a Noun

September 7, 2024September 14, 2024 Nik

“All I want is work-life balance.”

How often have you had this thought?

In theory, it makes sense: We strive to spend our lives well. That means directing the right amounts of time, effort, and attention to life’s many domains, from the necessities to taking care of ourselves to what’s most important to us.

Therefore, if we could allocate our limited resources perfectly, we’d achieve the ultimate equilibrium — and with it calm and happiness, right?

I don’t think so. In fact, I believe work-life balance doesn’t exist — and I can prove it to you with a single question:

What does perfect work-life balance look like, in detail, in your very life?

Choosing To Get the Education I Deserve

August 23, 2024September 16, 2024 Nik

It was one of those weeks where one and one just add up to three.

First, I woke up at 5 AM one morning. Groggy, unable to sleep, I dragged myself to the couch and opened a new fantasy novel. I struggled with a phrase on the first page. Then another on the second. I read and read, and by page 24, I was scratching my head so hard it started hurting: “Is it just me, or is this written so badly, it’s barely comprehensible?”

Between the multi-paragraph sentences, needlessly verbose descriptions, endless adverbs, and backwards unwinding of the action, I gave up on The Atlas Six right then and there. I confirmed with several friends that the writing was indeed atrocious, and after some googling, I found out why: It’s a self-published book that became a bestseller because the 15-year-olds on TikTok are all over it. Now, I’m not too old for a Booktok recommendation, but I am too old to read bad, unedited writing. Aren’t we all?

A few days later, my friend Franz sent me a list of the top 100 literary classics, aggregated across a decade of rankings. “How many have you read?” he asked me. I did a quick count. The answer was five. Ouch! Here I was, a writer with ten years of experience, apparently wasting my time on TikTok drivel, yet having read almost none of the all-time greats of English literature. “What the hell am I doing?” I thought.

In that moment, something clicked — and then so did I. I proceeded to Amazon, loaded my shopping cart like a kid on Christmas with an unlimited budget, and hit “Order.” Over the next week, box after box arrived, and while I watched them pile up, I finished two early birds — Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Turning those pages felt like taking a big breath through my nose after stepping outside for the first time in days. “Ahhhh! That’s better.”

I’m currently enjoying J. R. R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion, and while I do feel like my literary train is finally heading in the right direction again, the whole incident made me reflect: How can someone who writes for a living cruise right past the most important works in their industry for a decade?