David Nyeste

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...