Hi! I am the writer behind the German blog ERWACHSTUM, where I write about the challenges and neccessity of becoming and being an adult. I also have a new...
In my "real life" 1 , I am a police officer in a specialized unit and have been one of the unit's full-time instructors since early 2022. My switch from being an operator into the training cadre was, among other factors, initiated by the lead instructor — who had just a few years prior overseen my own development — requesting me personally. That was very weird and obviously very special for me.…
I am a huge fanboy of the German stationery brand Leuchtturm1917 . 1 A few months ago, I wondered about the notebook-price-ratio of each of the different formats LT1917 offers — from A6 to A4+. So I did the math — or rather, the Excel formulas. Here are the results: (HC = hardcover, SC = softcover) You're welcome. Contact me! Footnotes If you ever wonderd: "Leuchtturm" is the German word for…
Most notebook enthusiasts have heard about the " Extended Mind " concept that David Chalmers and his co-author Andy Clark coined in their 1998 paper on the topic. They argued that any tools or devices a person might use to augment their biological memory or consciousness function not as something the mind puts to use, but as an extension of that mind — with the body's skin being only an arbitrary…
I just read an article by one of my favorite writers, Henrik Karlsson , about how his work on his major pieces — which often take him months to finish — benefits from having a small, lesser-known "waste book" or "shit blog" for brain-dumping anything and everything. "What has delighted me about the shit blog is how abundant it has made me feel. I sit down and type as fast as I can, and the…
In I started a "dirt notebook" , BearBlogger kwist describes his reluctance to take messy notes in his regular notebooks: "I start cherishing every notebook that I start. I can't seem to keep my notes messy. Eventually, I start structuring the notes, doing cleaner handwriting, adding a cover or some stickers ... and before I know it, the notebook is too well-organised for simply scribbling into."…
I'm perpetually perplexed by dating/relationship/marriage advice that revolves around the idea of “picking someone that… “ I don't know about you guys, but when I fell in love with my now-wife, I fell . There was nothing voluntary or deliberate about it. Despite not knowing all that much about how she handled conflict, what kind of life or how she thought about having kids, I had no choice but to…
There is a small number of writers who's work has had an outsized impact on my own thinking (and therefore on my writing, too). One of them is the modern-day stoic Ryan Holiday. Not only have I read (and re-read and heavily annotated) several of his books, but I have also listened to hundreds of his "Daily Stoic" and "Daily Dad" podcast episodes. In other words: Over the course of the last few…
Good writing, as every long-form writer knows, springs into being during the editing and rewriting process. 1 The first draft is there to be there. It's not supposed to be anything more than the starting line for what, in most cases, is going to be quite a long race with quite a few laps to endure. And at least in my case, "enduring" is the right word, because I like collecting ideas and…
I've been using physical notebooks for years now. After leaning into digital personal knowledge management for a while before that 1 , I now do most of my note-taking and writing with pen and paper. And because I am a stationery nerd, I have also consumed a lot of content about using notebooks. Many of the ideas and "hacks" from those videos and articles made it into my practice, at least for a…
More thinking, more writing, more polishing, less publishing