David Nyeste

The World Is Full Of Problems  This is good news. Actually it is great news. Problems are opportunities for growth - if you are able to find -and successfully apply- the solution to a problem that will help someone in any way, you will inevitably create value. If you can find a solution to a big problem (e.g. cure for cancer) you will create an immense value. If you can find a solution to a not so gargantuan, but widespread problem, you will have created tremendous value. But even if you find a solution to a small problem that will benefit a few people, you might still have the benefit of being able to learn something valuable that you can apply later in the solution of greater problems. Don't let yourself be discouraged by the (lack of) magnitude of problems: keep your eyes open and help people even if they do not approach you proactively - this will invite good things to happen to you in the long run. However not everybody in the workforce seems to have the proclivity to solve pr...

Strategic Considerations To me it has always been of paramount importance to have a vision of my model identity. In order to develop towards that ideal my role models would help me strengthen that vision. One effective strategy to find fitting role models is to pick the right environment. Certain organizations will promote specific types of personalities over others. For example in the military there is a tendency to recruit engaging, clearly structured people who have a natural preference to take decisions and action in the face of danger, i.e. under pressure. Thus firm leadership is a skill that is highly valued in military organizations. Other organizations might promote creativity, diversity, individualism and so on. Ask yourself which values you regard as the most precious and then look out for organizations whose values might match best. How To Be A Role Model The good news: setting the bar for being a role model will entirely be up to you. It is your own mind first that you need...

Being Brave with Big Brutes How do you handle people who have an overlarge ego and a virtually insatiable hunger for status and attention? Managing people or groups of people with some 'challenging individuals' can be tricky, especially if you are in charge of a meeting or a project. Thus you will want to keep the balance and grant everyone their fair share of sunlight. In consulting I learned a funny but accurate term for these types of people: the 'silverback'. Typically silverbacks have a tendency to underline strong convictions with vigorous statements even in case their position is not firmly backed by facts or evidence. Sadly these people can sometimes intimidate peers who don't have an overlarge ego or don't have any bias to bold and brazen behaviour. Here are five ways I found effective to deal with 'silver backs' to everybody's advantage: 1. Avoid confrontation - Don't be confrontational with silver backs. In fact, don't ever be con...

Regardless if you're a young professional or an experienced veteran of the workforce, there will always be areas where you will have plenty of opportunity to earn the respect and the trust of your colleagues and clients. Here are my favorite focus areas for professional excellence that require zero talent whatsoever: 1. Diligence The quality of the work you deliver to your customers on a daily basis is your signature. In the perception of your customers and colleagues the impression of how much you care about delivering value to them is visible in the quality of your output. Hence it is always quality first and quantity second. Always put quality on top of your priorities. That being said this does not mean that you have to get everything right one hundred percent of the time. Often you will have to abide by deadlines and circumstances you can not -fully- influence. Oftentimes 'highest quality' means that you take a caveat of a given deadline into account. As a result a rou...

The Day I Decided To Be Rich On January 1st 2001 I was sitting alone in my room at the University of the Bundeswehr in Hamburg. I had woken up early and studied most of the day when it realized something had changed. I felt slightly depressed - it dawned on me that I was a poor bastard. It was a few days prior to my 24th birthday and I had just spent the entire Christmas holidays and new year's eve alone at the university in order to prepare for the exams of my first trimester. The perspective to also spend my birthday in solitude did not brighten the perspective. Since I had not made any new friends in Hamburg yet I didn't have a lot of tempting distractions that kept me from studying. However none of those facts were the reason why I felt a rupture. The last three months I had spent either in lecture halls or at my desk and was entirely dedicated to passing my first exams. My preparations were running well and I was confident to pass all three tests. But the statistics told a...

Success is like pregnancy  Everybody congratulates you but nobody knows how often you've been screwed. This joke was suggested to me on social media. It strikes me how thoroughly the algorithm must have analyzed my preferences in order to make such an accurate prediction, that I would enjoy it. However I would choose a slightly different analogy: Success is like impregnation: Everyone congratulates you but nobody knows how often you have screwed up. It is in screwing up that you'll learn the valuable lessons of life. You can think and analyze as much as you want. Analysis, planning and preparation are all fine. But only deliberate execution and the mistakes you make along your journey will guide you to success. That's beauty and pain in success at the same time. That is also the reason that success favors people who are passionate and enthusiastic about their journey and have a clear purpose. Enduring the frustration and the drawbacks along the way is much easier if you hav...

The Weakness It is rare that I talk about my weight for the simple reason that it feels weird being open about it and second because I usually feel better and more comfortable when I gain weight. Weight should not be on my mind, but it is. I think a lot about it and I am never really satisfied with my own weight. 99% of the time the scale tells me I am in the range 80-85kg - at 1.88m height anyone should sleep easily with such a ratio. During the winter season I sport a 'protective layer' and as the days become longer during the spring and the summer I lose some weight again. In extreme cases my weight has already dropped below the 80kg floor and also broken the 85kg cap. In early 2020 I caught some kind of flu and in the course of the sickness my weight dropped to 77kg within days - I assumed dehydration as the main cause, as I could not eat and hat vomiting fits during the night for several days. However it was a slow process until I was able to regain my original weight. The...

The Sun Always Shines Complaining about age is like complaining about the weather. You can't change it, therefore you just have to accept it. That being said, there are a whole lot of things you can change and you don't have to accept. You should focus on things you can change instead of lamenting about the things you have to accept. That is exactly why I don't like to discuss the weather, age, talent and so on. Your level of fitness is a thing you can always change. Hard work beats talent any day if talent doesn't work hard. I am in my forties, but if I had only received one Euro in the past decades for every time someone said to me they were too old/not talented/too late to start or do any regular workout, I would have a nice amount of savings. Charged with the task to look for excuses not to do something the mind is very creative. On the other hand if you really want something -and by 'really want' I mean that relentless desire to accept no excuses- then your...

As a habit  I take my time and sit down every Friday and reflect on the past week. For this task I have a journal where I take some notes. I am not a hundred percent consequential to be honest even though the effects it had on my life are severe. As a standard scheme I ask myself five questions. 1. What was the most important change? For me it was my inoculation, which I had today. It wasn't the event itself, but more the perspective it triggered. The hope to see and meet friends and family, clients and colleagues again some day soon overwhelmed me. I am absolutely convinced that I belong to the lucky ones who benefited tremendously from the pandemic with all its ups and downs, so I don't want to sound self pitying. But like everyone I have been hurting. Hurting to see my kids not being able to visit their Granny, hurting not being able to meet with loved ones far away once in a while. Compared to that the restrictions at work felt miniscule. And now for the first time in 18 mo...

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility Meetings have become more ubiquitous during the pandemic. I am engaged in a constant competition to manage my own time and schedule against various interests. Therefore I regularly spend a reasonable amount of time in order to contemplate on the best ways to invest my own and sometimes also my colleagues' time. The best thing I could come up with so far are a few principles that serve as checks and balances against wasting time. But before elaborating on those principles, let me give you a visceral truth about the use of your own and other people's times in a business context: "If you are conducting a one-hour meeting at your company, you have effectively stolen one hour from every person in the room. If there are twenty people in the room, your presentation is now the equivalent of a twenty-hour investment. It is therefore your responsibility to ensure that you do not waste the hour..." [Matthew Dicks, Storyworthy] The Dem...

The Power of Inclusion My first post on this blog was in German. At the time it was a spontaneous idea to share a unique experience that I knew would mark a significant moment in my life. I shared it foremost with my friends and the members of my sports club. Later I started to write posts in English just to test how it feels. As a German native speaker I only speak English as a second language, so why would I write in English? A simple and obvious explanation is that English is spoken by a lot more people than German. I do not intend this blog exclusively for a German speaking audience. In order to grant access to this content for as many people as possible is of course a very obvious, however not my most important reason. More Eloquence is More Potential for Clutter During my professional experience on multiple international projects and assignments I have realized that English native speakers can sometimes fall into a squabble where they talk a lot but say very little. Especially Am...

Just A Feeling Despite all the drawbacks caused by the pandemic I have to admit that ever since the kids were born I have been feeling more happy in general. To set the stakes even higher, I have already been pretty damned happy ever since I met my wife several years earlier. Maybe it is because the kids fill me with hope that all is good and is steadily improving. Also they give a whole new purpose to everything in my life. I have only really had a few significant stretches where I felt so beaten down or lethargic, that I had issues to motivate myself. There were only three significant times I was struggling with my decisions and had serious doubts that I made the right choices.  Freaking Out In The Barracks The first time was in 1998, when I signed a contract as a contract soldier for 12 years. During my first couple of days with the military the magnitude of my decision sank with the utmost brutality. It totally freaked me out. I spent the first night in some spartan barracks in...

Why I Cook - And You Should Too The difference between cooking and cooking is best demonstrated by an analogy. My wife does not like to cook. She just doesn't enjoy the activity, hence the only reason for her to prepare food is in order to serve a biological need. To her great credit, most of the time it is not her own hunger that makes her prepare food - we have two kids and two cats therefore the majority of our family are non-autotrophic. I enjoy cooking as a form of relaxation, sometimes even as a form of meditation. But don't get a false impression: in terms of purpose I totally share my wife's purpose to cook for the effect. I just happen to enjoy the activity, hence the reason I prepare food does not serve the sole purpose of getting anyone fed. The second reason is for my own well being - for me cooking is a type of lone time. Therefore in 9 out of 10 times I don my noise cancelling headphones, turn on some awesome music thereby shutting out the world when I cook. I...

Be Brilliant Subject matter expertise has its perks. Being an expert on any field requires deep learning as well as deliberate practice over years and years. The more professional experience you gain the more you'll swap a minimum principle mindset ('What do I need to do to achieve XY?') for a maximum principle ('How much can I possibly achieve with my available resources?'). When I started as a consultant I had a very basic and fragmented knowledge in most of the technical aspects in my subject matter. At the time I was already a certified and experienced supply chain management expert with some merits. However, as the branch I had worked in (military and defence) neither used the latest technology nor had a business model that promoted short development or change cycles in leadership or management, I did not feel 100% competitive. Therefore I faced some serious challenges when I started my career in the private sector.  At the time when I joined a consulting compa...

Be Prepared To Pay The Price Excellence comes at a cost. In my years as a teenage swimmer I learned about the effects of deliberate practice and the possibilities to tap into my own potential to a depth that I would never have thought possible. Johnny Weismueller is remembered for two accomplishments: First for playing the legendary Tarzan figure on screen as an actor and second for being the first human to swim the 100m freestyle in less than 60 seconds. At the time the 60 seconds mark was an incredible feat to accomplish. These days anyone can break the minute mark. We know what it takes and we know how to train for it. Nevertheless, only few people actually break the minute mark. The reason is that only few people are willing to pay the price (approximately 2-4 years of deliberate swim training as a grown up). Let's face it: (Luckily) there is no shortcut to excellence - no cheating yourself to brilliance and mastery. You have to be prepared to pay a price in time, sweat and blo...

How a Reading Habit Benefits You If you think this advice is a no brainer, then think again. My kids will finish first grade shortly and have developed another super-power: reading. However being able to read in the sense that you can decipher a conventional code and being able -and willing- to consume knowledge on a regular basis are two different cups of tea. It's like poker: You'll learn the rules within minutes, but mastering the game will take a lifetime. My point here is to foster a firm and steady reading habit that will train your capability to consume knowledge and develop your personal unfair advantage in the form of wisdom. That does not mean that I am making a case for any kind of subject matter or type of books. You should just read, no matter what. I've read the Harry Potter novels three times - and I have not yet read them in German nor Hungarian. Also on my done list: tons of cartoons - DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Dragon Ball, Mangas, Asterix, Clever and Smart...

Writing Helps Clarify Your Thinking I started this blog in 2010. It was without any specific agenda or strategy. (Yeah, I used to do that :-) In my first post you can read about my humbling experience at the Ironman Spain in Lanzarote. I still like that article because that specific experience has forever changed the way I compete. If I would not have written that article, I might never have realized in all clarity why I love to compete. According to the statistics it has some hundred views. Judging merely by the lack of public interest one might suggest I should never have written that article. I am convinced that is a wrong conclusion.  Clarity of mind is invaluable. Up until a few weeks ago I was not seriously committed to blogging. It was a sporadic pastime I used to engage in whenever I felt like sharing something important or even trivial. It has been almost one year since I started writing on a daily basis. For the longest time I only wrote for myself in order to clear my th...

Digital Minimalism Is Overrated Over the past years I have strived towards a more self determined digital and professional identity. Minimalism is a huge and timeless topic. Social media, video and streaming platforms, books and magazines are filled with digital and material minimalism content. It seems the present value maximizers (e.g. #yolo) are currently losing ground in the battle for attention against the end value maximizers (e.g. #firemovement). However I am convinced a focus on minimalism only misses an important point: the road to happiness in modern day's fast paced communication cycles is not a question of principle, but a question of the right balance. Hence the answer to the question of the right digital strategy, regardless whether private or professional, can not be answered by a one time decision to embrace a monk like minimalism. Rather you should continually reevaluate your options, necessities and focus on balancing your digital habits. Why I Turned Off All Push...