David Nyeste

Why is it that plans can, sometimes even need to change over time? At the same time: Should guiding principles be designed to live long term and to be resistant to short term change? To both questions my answer is a firm yes. Here's why: The principle of the benefit of long lasting habits is one that fascinated me early on. The imagination that any person can improve to levels beyond their own imagination by merely sticking to a habit over a long period still strikes me. One of my oldest habits is sports. I started swimming as a member of a club -and later also as one of a competitive team- as a young teenager and have stuck to some kind of sports habit ever since. When I started first I went to training sessions twice a week. At my peak I did six to eight training sessions a week and most of my school holidays were spent either on training camps or competitions. So my first serious habit was established during those early years. After school I was not always able to swim due to re...

How NOT To Write Emails Work without email is hardly imaginable these days. Emails have become so ubiquitous that sometimes you have to take a step back and ask yourself: is this still communication or is this art? I am pretty sure, what I received today was the latter. To give you the necessary context, here's how it went: Sender wrote an email to multiple TO-recipients, of which I had the privilege to be one. Subject: FWD:FWD:FWD: "<<lots of acronyms none of which I was familiar with>> contract" Content: "Hello, this with supplements of <<more cryptic acronyms>> <<27 lines of signature>>" Attachment: <<acronyms>>.xlsx Somewhere not too deep in my mind I have three simple drawers for emails:  1. do now,  2. delegate,  3. art.  Upon first scan the lights of the art-drawer immediately started to blink. But then I hesitated. I doubted. I questioned. I contemplated:"Nah! That's too easy. Let's do this old...

Value For Valuables Work contracts usually can include a multitude of negotiables that are subject to mutual agreement. In Germany, as well as in most of the developed countries, the freedom of contract is guaranteed by law. This means that you are pretty much free to negotiate any contract without limitations. Namely, you can negotiate your salary, the amount of vacation days, your benefits and so on. Oftentimes there will be certain boundaries and corridors for salary. These can be determined either by market mechanisms (price mechanisms) or by governance (e.g. corporate guidelines, processes, financial limitations, and so on). The important thing to keep in mind here is that contract partners are free in the creation of a contract, hence any negotiation can start on a blank sheet of paper. In order to have the right amount of bargaining chips, you have to be aware of your options, of which salary in terms of regular payment for work is only one. Here's a list of compensations t...

With ongoing vaccination the end of the pandemic and the return to the office seems a realistic scenario. Having experienced the limitations of remote work people are already preparing themselves for post COVID_19 work at the office. Yes, you heard right: working together with colleagues in a common space at - the same time. This will however be anything than a 'back to normal', so here are my personal tips for post COVID working: 1. Try not to pour coffee in anybody's face in case anybody should tell you about his or her exotic vacation in some sunny piece of paradise. I have not been away from home for over a year and my only business travel worth mentioning has been between home office and the actual office. But I will do my very best to restrain myself. 2. Don't mention to anyone how you passed all those endless hours at home. In my case, I will eschew any confession about how many hundreds of hours I have spent in my newly created hobby room in the basement, let...

Understand Your Customer's Desire A generally underrated part of successful negotiations is knowing your potential customer's desire. You've clarified your own desires in the previous step. Now it is equally important to find out what your customer longs for. There is a big difference between what your customer 'needs' and what your customer 'desires'. Desire is more powerful. Appealing to a need will satisfy your customer. Appealing to a desire will excite and delight your customer. Always keep in mind: Desire is the fabric of which dreams are made of. When Apple marketed its first iPods, how did they do it?  Did they use the standard 'Super-awesome MP3-player'-pitch of their competitors? Of course not.  They came up with something simple and brilliant: They invented the slogan '1000 songs in your pocket'. BAM! The rest is history. Understanding your customer's desire makes all the difference. Answering the question, what desire you inte...

Know Thyself (Sokrates) Breaking news: You're in a marathon, not a sprint. Therefore the first step towards successful salary negotiations is a clarification process: you need to be very clear on your desires. Which values are important to you? How do these translate into your expectations on your potential occupation? Where do you see yourself in 5, 10, 20 years from now? Ask yourself this first: What do you really really want from life and who do you want to be? And by 'want', I mean the thing you are burning for so much, that you are willing to make sacrifices for it. Do you want to learn and become an expert in a specific field? Do you prefer to work in a dynamic and rapidly changing or in a well predictable environment? Do you rather want to work with a certain type of people e.g.  with creative, analytical or highly energetic colleagues? Do you prefer to work  in a certain environment, e.g. in an international, globally distributed team? Bonus task:  Also be very cl...

The Default State of Society The other day I read a post on my company's intranet that stuck with me and made me think. I'll try to give it in my own words: A teacher entered the class room and started to write equations on the board. 1x9 = 9 2x9=18 3x9=27 The class watched and there was only the usual murmur while the teacher proceeded. 4x9=36 5x9=45 6x9=54 7x9=63 8x9=72 9x9=81 10x9=91 On finishing the teacher turned to the class and noticed some murmurs and giggles. He paused for a moment and the giggles increased. Some pupils started to laugh and after a while others joined in until a majority of pupils found amusement in the teacher's mistake and joined the laughter. After a while, when the laughter dampened down, the teacher said: "I made this mistake on purpose in order to demonstrate a point. I wrote ten equations on the board, of which nine were absolutely correct. Most of you however decided to focus on the one equation that was false. None of you gave me any ...

DISCLAIMER I am not making this public to brag or to make anyone feel bad or jealous. Negotiating my salary is just one of many habits I applied over the past decade regularly, so I acquired some experience in what worked and what didn't. Depending on the context, this experience may or may not benefit others. I regard the consequential increase of my salary rather a side effect of my actual overarching self improvement strategy, than the result of merely smart ninja-negotiation tactics. My foremost desire was -and still is- to become the best possible version of myself. But that itself is a topic for another post.  In this series of posts I will share some details of my salary, its development over time and some further specifics that I hold necessary to demonstrate my point. So in case you should feel offended, jealous or bad in any way about gaining insight on that kind of information, this is your opportunity to exit this post here and now and to skip to the next one right away...

The Vehicle This simple model may help you to lay out your strategy for the development of your skills, your personality and ultimately a large part of your identity, that will be influenced and defined by your work. Over many years I have developed a model for work that generally resembles a generic type of vehicle that will take you from A to B. Anybody is free to pick their own type of vehicle according to their personal preferences and thus embark on their individual journey. Basic Idea The basic idea behind the model: Different types of vehicles with different kinds of implications make up the unique work experience of the individual. Whether you would rather focus on the journey itself or rather on achieving certain goals, you can make your choice accordingly. For instance there is the hot air balloon,  which could represent the work within a large corporation. With minimal attendance it moves slowly and comfortably -pretty much on autopilot all the time- and is only mildly s...

 #HWBTWTDWH Action and execution are the only means that will move you towards your goals. They will always have a larger stake in the value rendered than any groundbreaking idea, any bulletproof plan, or talent and genius. Don't get me wrong: great ideas, plans and talent are all viable multipliers. However, without execution they will not make any difference. Thus t here's one law to career making and success in business or life in general: Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard . And for the work part, there’s good news: smooth and steady effort is more effective than sporadic strong effort. 'Hard work' thus should not be understood as excessive, over ambitious but sporadic work, but as a steady and sustainable flow of effort over a long period of time. The compound effect will make the difference. It is like throwing dice: It's not about trying to throw the maximum sum with one or a few handfuls. It's about accumulating the desired results over...

Imagine what if I think most of us can picture ourselves lying at a cloudless beach with a pina colada, interrupting our sunbath only for the occasional coolings in the blue ocean and sporadically checking in on the regular returns of our passive incomes (plural of course) provided by our ridiculously vast assets. But can you actually? True capability of imagining a dream or creating a vision also means to come up with a -more or less- specific plan or some kind of a roadmap towards that dream. A plan that you trust will -upon execution- pave the way to your vision. So make sure you have a vision and you have a -specific- plan. Which brings us to the hard part:  Relentless Faith  The catch of course is the ‘believe’ part. There’s a famous quip in the US Marines Corp: ’Everybody wants to go to heaven, nobody wants to die.’ To truly believe in something will imply that you are willing to make the necessary sacrifice in your pursuit of the goal...in fact, to make any sacrifice n...

 Why Long Term Motivation Matters Motivation is doing things when you're feeling good. Long term motivation is doing things regardless of how you feel. Jan Frodeno applied a specific motivation method during his preparation for his first Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing, where he won the gold medal in the olympic triathlon. Eventually he went on and won the Ironman World Championship in 2015, 2016 and 2019 in Hawaii applying the very same method to stay highly energized and motivated over a long period of time - over more than a decade to say the least. Here you will find the method he used analyzed. I will show you how I use it and how you can also apply it for your own purposes. Since I am always susceptible to advice on motivation and I have been interested in the topic of self improvement, inspiration and motivation for quite a while. The other day I stumbled upon this interesting method, how to get and stay motivated and instantly felt energized. So I decided to share this piece ...

Start with a purpose Any business related document should start with a purpose. Unless the purpose of the document is not entirely, 100% clear, don't put any effort into the creation process. The typical archetypes of purposes of most business documents can be summarized into three categories: 1. create deeper insight into a subject matter, 2. trigger some decision, 3. trigger some action. Once you are clear on the purpose part, you're free to start into the creation process. Structure your creation process There are certainly myriads of ways and methodologies to create business documents. Chances are you will develop your own approach along with your own style and flavour to create business related documents eventually, once you have sufficient experience. However, as long as you have not created a ton of great ones, a standard framework is a great way to start off and to acquire some practice. In my career I have created more than more than 10.000 slides and hundreds of pro...

To be able to lead others, first you need to lead yourself  When my 12 years contract as an officer in the German armed forces came to an end, I left the Bundeswehr as an Air Foce Captain with mixed feelings. On one hand I felt happy for the perspective to start something new. My learning curve had dampened during the final period of my 12 years time contract with the armed forces and I was left with the impression that my constant challenging of the status quo often times annoyed or plainly outraged some of my colleagues and superiors alike. During my final months in office I recruited my successor and convinced him to take my job. Few weeks later he started and we immediately started the transition process in which I shared my knowledge, introduced him to my contacts, familiarized him with everything of importance so he would gradually take more and more responsibility to fill the new role. As my work required me to collaborate (remotely) with multiple experts all across Germany...

Back to burn After five years away from this blog, I feel the urge to write again. There is one vital difference this time: My earlier posts on this blog were sporadic in frequence and impulsive in motivation. In hindsight I must admit that it was merely for fun's sake and without a doubt lacked a deeper purpose. I want to keep the 'for fun's sake' part but add two vital ingredients: purpose and action. I want to change and decided to become more steady in sharing my thoughts and inspirations. This is a big leap for me. I will share bits and pieces of the things I am burning for on a habitual basis. In the hope to help people grabbing those opportunities that will similarly change their lives, I see these exerpts of my story as an obligatory contribution to give back something valuable. It might seem miniscule to others, but without a doubt it has been, and still is, the world to me.