In the survey behind this play series, restoration was one of five ways adults described play. It meant feeling relaxed, lighthearted, and free to do something for yourself. Reading, cooking, and singing were examples. The survey described that feeling; it didn’t test a cure for fatigue.

So how do you find that feeling on an ordinary Tuesday? Here are three things to try. If you want the wider evidence, explore the full research review.

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How to restore when you feel drained

Pick something you want to do

The clue in the restoration pattern is that the activity feels pleasurable and freely chosen. Cooking can be play on Saturday and a chore on Monday. You get to decide.

• Follow your appetite: What sounds good with the energy you have right now? Read, sing, cook, doodle, or sit with someone you like. The same list won’t work for every person or every day.

• Drop the goal: No need to finish the book, learn a song, or make an impressive dinner. If you enjoy the process, that’s enough for tonight.

• Keep a small menu: Write down a few things you enjoy at different energy levels. When you’re tired, picking from a list is easier than inventing a new plan.

Leave the demand behind

You can be on the sofa while still rehearsing tomorrow’s difficult conversation. Research on recovery from work links mentally switching off and relaxing with less fatigue and strain. These are mostly associations, not a promise, but they suggest a useful test: Did you get some distance from what drained you?

• Close the loop: Write tomorrow’s first step on a note, shut the laptop, and mute work messages. You can come back to the task tomorrow.

• Change scene: Take a walk or try a few quiet minutes away from your desk. Two trials of lunchtime park walks and relaxation exercises found modest, short-lived benefits. A short break can still be worth taking.

• Give it your attention: A book, a song, or a conversation gives your mind somewhere else to go. When work thoughts pop back up, return to what you’re doing. If thoughts keep coming back, give yourself a few quiet minutes to process them rather than forcing them away.

Make room for recovery

Recovery has more than one clock. Studies of short breaks, weekends, and holidays find that brief pauses can ease fatigue soon after, restful weekends are linked with feeling recovered on Monday, and holidays can improve well-being. The studies rarely compare these options directly, and reviews disagree on how long the holiday lift lasts. There is no proven perfect schedule.

• Plan daily recovery: Make room for a short, enjoyable pause and time to switch off in the evening. Don’t steal that time from sleep. If sleep is the bigger problem, start with our sleep post.

• Clear a day: When you can, keep work out of your next day off and do something you choose for yourself. Weekend studies link detachment and relaxation with feeling recovered on Monday, but do not establish that exactly one day a week is best.

• Schedule time away: If a holiday is possible, use it for a longer stretch away from demands. Its benefits may fade after you return, and it has not been shown to replace regular recovery. If work or care duties crowd out rest, is there a task you can drop or help you can ask for.

Three things to try this week

• When you notice you feel drained, take a break. Check how you feel after.

• Before you start, write down the work thought that keeps returning and put it aside for the break.

• Commit to making time for it in the Euzoia app.

What helps you feel restored? Add it in the comments.

Decisions are all around us, all the time. Getting better at them will have more leverage on your life than each topic we share here in isolation. So in the spirit of other meta-posts we did in the past on habit building and skill mastery, I’ll summarize their framework here for an 80/20 on decision making.

Tried something new again this week - animated the post with AI, turned out better than expected, though not perfect. Let me know what you think!

How to make decisions

The Heath brothers start out by explaining why we’re bad at decisions: We only focus on what’s in the spotlight, frame too narrowly, seek confirmation bias (only look for evidence that confirms our beliefs), are driven by short-term emotions, and are overconfident in our predictions.

To fix it, they propose this four-step process. Try it out by taking a decision you’re working through right now and applying the questions to your decision as you go.

1. Generate options

Most decisions initially look like yes/no questions. According to studies they cite, this applies to both teenagers and organizations: 70% of decisions by both groups only consider one option, and it leads to bad outcomes. Generate more options by:

• Generate with reframes: Consider opportunity costs - what else could you do with the time/money? Try the vanishing options test - what would you do if the option disappeared?

• Find people who solved your problem: Outside: Competitors, benchmarking, best practices, AI brainstorms. Inside: Employees, situations where you solved your problem, methods that worked for you in the past. Up: Analogies.

• Evaluate in parallel: Prevents your ego from favoring one. Beware of sham options by making sure smart people disagree. Avoid decision paralysis by limiting to a few. Switch between avoiding downsides and pursuing upsides. Try A AND B vs OR.

2. Test assumptions

When looking for evidence to confirm/disconfirm the options we generated, we tend to look for information that supports our initial assumptions. This is called confirmation bias. To combat confirmation bias, apply these ideas:

• Consider the opposite: Encourage constructive disagreement in teams, ask disconfirming questions (or open-ended if power dynamics present), try doing the opposite, build discipline/habit to seriously consider “what if I’m wrong”.

• Zoom out, zoom in: Zoom out: how things unfold on average. We usually don’t give it enough weight. To get outside averages, ask experts (they’re great at base rates but terrible at predictions). Then sample your specifics up close for texture.

• Experiment: Dip your toe before jumping headfirst. Generates lots of data without risk of full commitment. Entrepreneurial mindset: Just try things and see what sticks. Try to make explicit what you want to learn in the experiments.

3. Distance yourself

Fleeting emotions can tempt us to make decisions we’ll regret. Careful with status quo bias: a combination of mere exposure (we like what we know) combined with loss aversion (losses are more painful than gains are pleasant). Get distance to avoid.

• Overcome short-term emotions: Try 10/10/10: how would you feel about this in ten weeks, ten months, ten years? Try using an observer’s perspective: What would my successor do? What would I tell my best friend?

• Honor core priorities: Agonizing decisions are often conflicts among core priorities (values, goals, aspirations). Explicitly rank them, then decide what not to do, what to deprioritize, and build a habit to review actions against priorities.

4. Minimize risk

No matter what decision you make, you’ll be wrong in some ways. We can’t predict the future, but we can take actions to minimize the fallout when things don’t go as planned.

• Think in scenarios: Consider a range of outcomes and anticipate problems: Try a premortem: “A year from now our decision failed - why? It was a great success - can we deal with it?” Add a margin of safety / plan with buffers.

• Set a tripwire: It’s easy to slip into autopilot, especially when change is gradual. Build in tripwires to force making a choice. Tripwires are: Deadlines, budgets (time, money, resources), go/no-go gates, processes for pattern recognition.

• Trust the process: Group decision making needs to be fair to get acceptance on the final decision. Bake these steps into a process that works within your life/team/organization. Link it to existing triggers.

Three things to start on making better decisions

• Stop for ten seconds: What’s your top decision to make right now?

• Block time in your calendar to use this process on your top decision.

• Check: How can you make sure you check this post next time you make a decision?

Missing something? Thoughts or feedback? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

Switching things up with the podcast: Instead of inviting guests we’ll try to narrate the same content as in the post, just in our own voices.

How to have adventures

Try novel experiences

Getting out of your comfort zone to experience something new helps to break monotony and thereby combat burnout, builds higher tolerance against uncertainty, builds agency and increases our openness and curiosity.

• Pick one: fix your plumbing, buy a random bus ticket, crash a stranger's wedding, enter an eating contest, join a random protest, … prompt AI to create an absurd and unhinged list. Can’t decide? Roll the dice on it to make it truly random.

• Grab a friend: Doing something new can feel scary but doing it together actually strengthens your bond by living through that slightly scary thing together. Bonus points for picking this for your second date.

• Integrate: Process the new experience in a way that works for you: Journal, tell stories to a friend, go through your pictures: Was there something in there that you can take with you to your day-to-day life? Schedule regular time for these?

Play within your day

Going on adventures is fun but to try something new you don’t even need to make much time for it - you can just stay in your routines and add spice to them:

• Work: Can you do an existing task differently? Try a new AI tool? Work with somebody you haven’t worked with before? Try sales? Work from a new spot? Grab lunch at a different spot?

• Life: What’s a show you’d never watch? Something you could cook that you never tried? A new type of sports class? Something your friends do you could join them on? A new activity you could explore with your kids?

• Take it easy: When trying something new in our existing patterns we can sometimes feel that we “should” know how to do something or already be good at something. Try to find areas where you can explore without risk and truly play.

Go on an adventure in your mind

For one of the biggest adventures you can go on, you can just stay on your couch. Psychedelic trips (LSD/mushrooms/ayahuasca) have been shown to have significant and lasting effects on one’s openness to experience, life satisfaction, and fear of death.

• Substance: If you are curious, starting with very low doses and slowly working your way up works best. Every body is different, this allows you to learn what works for you. Always test your drugs and study the risks.

• Set: Prepare your mind through enough sleep, intention setting, feeling comfortable, readiness to accept whatever comes up. Working with an experienced and trustworthy facilitator great way to prepare both set and setting.

• Setting: The environment you’re in, the people you’re with, the greater environment you’re in. Doing this in a country where it’s legal with people you trust in a cozy house in nature with calming music is what you’re aiming for here.

Plan your own adventure right now

• Pick a thing from the list: Which sounded most fun?

• Find somebody to do this with - text the idea to a friend.

• Commit money on actually doing it

We’re wrapping up our work series and diving into a 5-week deep dive on Play. Today, we kick things off with Adventure. Christoph breaks down how to use AI to generate genuinely fun ideas, how to inject micro-adventures into your boring work routine, and how to safely navigate deep internal adventures (yes, we’re talking psychedelics).

I draw the line between what is in and out of control. The execution, what I or my team are doing, is fully under our control. Where that takes us, however, is partly affected by us, but also largely affected by all kinds of outside factors.

One big cause of stress is when we confuse the two: When we try to manage execution on directional targets not fully in our control, for example revenue numbers that depend partly on our efforts but even more on the quirks of the world economy.

Super excited about this conversation with Ruben Timmerman on leadership. He sees himself as a “leadership nerd” - having been the first one in the Netherlands to roll out Holacracy at his startup, acting as operational lead for Volt Europe, co-founding the School for Moral Ambition, and most recently starting moralfabric.org - ops as a service for NGOs. In our conversation we keep coming back to the importance of being explicit, focusing on the why, and continuously evolving systems. As always, this conversation is meant as a conversation on this topic, independent of this post.

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How to lead

Lead yourself

Most people who are stressed have either unrealistic expectations of their productivity or targets that aren’t fully in their control. Get around both by learning what’s realistic and only setting expectations based on work time, not outcomes.

• Set direction: Every year, quarter, month, week, day, at an adequate level of detail, ask yourself the question: What is the most important thing to focus on / direction to go in to create the greatest value, based on the higher-level direction?

• Execute: Spend your time on moving into this direction. A good day is a day where you were able to spend a lot of time on your direction. Track your time to get a feeling for how much is realistic to expect from yourself.

• Reflect: In regular intervals, check in if your execution gets you far enough. Do you need to change your way of working, learn a new skill, outsource? Or is the direction not achievable and you need to change path altogether?

Lead your team

The same stress-fallacy applies to managing teams. When you try managing on targets, you are either burning them out (too high targets) or underutilizing them (too low targets). Instead of finding the perfect target, manage on motivation and time.

• Set direction: Use the same cadence idea but now it’s for your goals and your team’s goals. Your job is to understand their motivations, find the intersection of both, and make sure both of you are fully aligned on the final one.

• Execute: Set clear expectations for time spent or deliverables and communicate clearly and early when it’s above or below the bar. Adjust the granularity based on results: Start more micro-managy in the beginning and open as trust builds.

• Reflect: In regular retrospectives, 1:1s or offsites check in if the results get your far enough in the set directions and adjust as needed. I think retrospectives are the most underappreciated meeting. It’s the place to “fix the bugs”.

Lead your manager

Your boss is busy and a good employee for them is one that needs little time and generates lots of impact. Do the work for them, and manage yourself as much as possible.

• Set direction: Proactively suggest the direction for you to go in to maximize both the company’s impact and your personal goals (promotion, impact, time with your children, holidays, whatever they are). Get explicit agreement.

• Execute: Manage your own time proactively: When more demand comes in, flag to your boss that something else has to go and make a suggestion for what that thing will be.

• Reflect: Flag early when you can’t meet goals. Predictability is often much more important than achievement because it allows a change of direction while it can still be changed.

Three things to start building leadership skills

• Block time to reflect: What’s realistic to expect of you/your team?

• Track your time. It’s your most important resource at work.

• Build a habit to set weekly goals.

• Why "drive-by management" creates the exact bottlenecks teams keep repeating

• How to make change cheap with weekly governance and tight feedback loops

• The difference between writing roles down and actually building a system people can use

• Why explicitness matters even more in remote, diverse, and cross-cultural teams

• How AI is pushing every team toward clearer goals, better context, and more human oversight

Ruben also shares what he learned leading inside Volt Europe, where political culture made alignment both essential and painfully difficult, and why trying to impose a system without full buy-in eventually breaks down. Along the way, he connects the dots between Holacracy, GTD, meditation, and the broader habit of stepping back to see what is actually real.This episode is for founders, operators, team leads, and anyone who is tired of vague ownership and invisible friction. If you want a sharper way to think about leadership, self-management, and how to build organizations that can adapt in real time, this one will change how you look at structure, tension, and trust.Ruben Timmerman is a longtime founder and operations builder who helped scale a startup over 15 years, served in leadership at Volt Europe, co-founded the School for Moral Ambition, and now works on systems that help organizations run with more clarity and autonomy.

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How to build valuable skills

Lean into your strengths

To a significant extent, you are a product of your genes. That’s obvious for your physical build but just as much applies to your mental state. Instead of acknowledging this and giving up, identify where you are already great, and just double-down on that.

• Find your strengths: Try personality tests (big five seems most predictive), do internships or find other cheap ways to experiment, get anonymous feedback from lots of people. Ideally you can combine a few strengths to become unique.

• Match them to the market: What can you get paid for the most is a good heuristic for what’s most needed. Your guess on what stays relevant with AI changing is as good as mine so I’d suggest to focus on the short-term for now.

• Put in the work: I cooked for many hours in my life, yet I never got beyond ‘feed myself’ level. In order to improve, you need feedback, a coach, and active learning time. We created a guide on deliberate practice here.

Manage your weaknesses

Compared to my peers, I have a worse memory. Instead of trying to somehow train my memory, I just built a note taking system around it and hum melodies instead of singing along to songs. Get your weaknesses to a level that they won’t get you fired.

• Acknowledge it: Same story as for the strengths: find your weaknesses through tests and feedback. Verify it in your own experience.

• Get creative: Use an AI to figure out how other people solve this. How far does training get you? What other systems are possible? Do you know people who are dealing with this as well? I know people who got PAs to do their admin.

• Work around it: Best case: Find jobs where this skill is simply not needed. Next best case: Build systems around it. If you feel safe, make your colleagues aware of this and see how they can support you or how you can work around this together.

Improve your productivity

No matter what you do, your productivity will have an overall effect on what you do. One way to become more productive might be just raising life satisfaction (following Euozia) though the causal link isn’t clear. Experiment with:

• Raise your motivation: Set goals you care about, work next to people, start with small wins, or start with big blocks, work on interesting things, take breaks, use commitment devices or accountability groups, celebrate wins.

• Block out distractions: Disable all notifications, block out focus time, block apps or news feeds, have one system where you can log all thoughts and tasks, negotiate response-time expectations with colleagues.

• Stay reasonable: I love the story of Derek Siver’s bike ride. The gist: you can overexert yourself and be 2% faster than if you just take it easy. Throughout history most people got 4 hours of deep work done per day.

Three things to start growing

• Ask a friend to interview people who know you on your strengths and weaknesses.

• Identify your biggest strength. Journal on how you could become even better.

• Commit yourself to deliberate practice sessions. Your future self will thank you!

What if the fastest way to become exceptional isn’t fixing everything you’re bad at — but figuring out what you’re unusually good at and doubling down?

In this episode of Euzoia, Christoph breaks down the science and strategy of skill development: how to identify your strengths, practise deliberately, manage your weaknesses, and build feedback loops that actually make you better.

We explore how much your natural predispositions matter, whether personality tests can reveal hidden strengths, why simply “putting in the hours” isn’t enough, and how motivation, focus and your environment can dramatically change how productive you are.

You’ll learn:

• How to figure out what you’re actually good at
• Why deliberate practice beats mindless repetition
• How genetics and personality can influence skill development
• When to improve a weakness — and when to work around it
• Why feedback is essential for getting better
• How to create a practice → application → feedback loop
• Why motivation can matter more than willpower
• How reducing distractions can dramatically improve your output
• Whether you should double down on strengths or become more well-rounded

The goal isn’t to become good at everything.

It’s to understand yourself well enough to become exceptionally good at the things that matter.

💬 What’s one skill you’re actively trying to improve right now?

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to skill growth and personal development
02:11 Identifying your strengths and experimenting
04:35 The role of deliberate practice and mentorship
06:37 Managing weaknesses and building around them
08:14 Doubling down on strengths vs fixing weaknesses
09:00 Boosting productivity through motivation and focus
09:56 Reducing distractions and organizing your thoughts
10:54 Effort vs enjoyment in productivity
11:23 Building a deliberate practice and application loop
12:28 How to start your skill development journey

Key ideas: skill development, deliberate practice, growth mindset, productivity, strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, career development, motivation, focus, self-improvement, learning faster, building skills

Super excited that I got to speak to Nina Friedrich, Executive Director of High Impact Professionals on what makes for a fulfilling job. Nina has advised many mid-career professionals on career shifts for more impact and purpose. She shared her learnings for what works and what doesn’t, her personal journey from software developer to director, and why community is so central to HIP’s work.

How to find work you will enjoy

Maximize upsides

Apart from looking for opportunities that uniquely match your personal fit and skills (upcoming post), the evidence suggests there are three things to look out for.

• Growth: If you only take one thing away, take this one: Always try to find opportunities in fast-growing markets and fast-growing companies. You will grow faster, achieve more, and have more fun.

• Engaging work: Work where you have freedom to decide how to do it, clear tasks with well-defined start and end, variety in tasks, and feedback on how you are doing on the tasks. Together this can put you in a flow state, similar to games.

• Supportive colleagues: To quote 80,000 Hours: “It may sound obvious, but if you hate your colleagues and work for a boss from hell, you’re not going to be satisfied.” Lots of evidence for that.

Minimize downsides

Even the highest-growth, most-gamified, great-team job can be a dud if some hygiene factors aren’t taken care of:

• Commute time: Long commutes can have strong effects on life satisfaction. Remote work can fix this if you have a sufficient social life outside of work. If that’s not an option try to make your commute as pleasant as possible.

• Hours worked: The evidence for this is interesting: Satisfaction mostly depends on preferred hours vs actual hours and follows a U-shape with a drop at more than 9h/day and very steep drop over 12h/day. Culture (eg EU vs US) plays a role.

• Financial downsides: Unfair pay or job insecurity are also linked to low job satisfaction. Importantly, the perception of being paid unfairly seems to be more important than the actual pay.

Match your values

All the above factors can look great and we can still feel miserable. Nina Friedrich explained that this can be due to cognitive dissonance: When we actively work against our values. Finding a job that matches your values has a few caveats though:

• Meaning isn’t happiness: Similar to having children, work can give you meaning, but might not maximize happiness. For example, working on catastrophic risks can be psychologically taxing. We’ll cover other paths to meaning in later posts.

• Felt impact might not be real impact: In a simplified view, an NGO creates impact and the donor “buys” that impact. As an employee you are working for the donor, not for the beneficiary except when you implicitly donate your salary.

• If you can’t find meaning, find money: For many it won’t be feasible to find jobs fully aligned with your values. A more general proxy is money earned. High salaries suggest that society values that skill. It doesn’t work for net-harmful jobs.

Three things to start finding your perfect job

• Apply to high-growth opportunities. Commit to sending one application per week.

• Review your current work and work with your manager to make it more engaging.

• Identify the biggest downside of your job and explore ways to minimize it.

Quick question

We are exploring how we can support y’all more in making changes towards a fulfilling life. Here are a few options, could you please hit reply on your email or email us at christoph@euzoia.org if you are interested in any of these?

• Accountability buddies: You get paired with another Euzoia reader and you can hold each other accountable on changes you want to make (eg through WhatsApp)

• Peer coaching: With an easy-to-use coaching framework you coach each other on things you’re working on, either in pairs or rotating partners.

• Mastermind groups: Weekly or biweekly calls for groups of 6-8 people where in each call a few people can present something they want advice on and the group brainstorms together. Optional group accountability as well.

Let us know by replying to the email / emailing christoph@euzoia.org if you’d be interested in any of these!

Why? Because in all these cases I had built trust with these people. They knew what I was good at so trusting me was going to be easier than assessing hundreds of other options, especially because assessing candidates is hard, much harder than relying on a trusting relationship or recommendation.

The value of your network becomes more and more important as you advance your career: Whether in politics, business, or academia - the higher up the ladder, the more the person is leveraging their network and being paid for it.

I was lucky to interview Mark Moore for this podcast. I got to know Mark in a startup incubator and he is probably the best connected person I know. In the podcast he is sharing his approach (spoiler alert: helping others and being a good human) and lots of fun stories.

How to build a strong network

Make work-friends

Building a network is similar to making friends. Check our posts on being curious, giving, and being the spark. Plus if you frame it for yourself as looking for genuine connections, potentially finding friends, it’s also more fun, and less ugh.

• Be curious: Listen with intent, use their name, find commonalities. Find something you find genuinely interesting about that person and appreciate that about them. Then offer vulnerability when they are curious about you.

• Give: The classic networking example is to give “five minute favors”, for example making an intro, giving honest feedback, brainstorming, sharing relevant insights. Do those while you meet the person, so you’re not adding todos.

• Be the spark: Host events like regular drinks, coworking, workshops, conferences. This has lots of benefits: You can invite your favorite people, it’s very time-efficient, they can bring people who you’ll probably also like, …

Manage weak links

We can only be friends with so many people unfortunately, so many of your contacts will stay weak links - people you know but aren’t close with. Because they are not in your core network, they are often the ones who will know about opportunities your core group doesn’t. But for that to work you need to stay on each other’s radar.

• Build a rolodex: You need a system to easily find relevant people you know. For most people, that’s their brain, but at some point it stops working. Bill Clinton had index cards, I started using a CRM once I noticed my brain not keeping up.

• Stay top of mind: While a rolodex helps you remember your contacts, your contacts also need to remember you. For this, people used to send birthday and christmas cards. Nowadays, regularly posting on socials can do the trick.

• Activate dormant ties: Even better than posting on social media and much easier than making new contacts: Reach out to people you met before, check in how they are doing. If you two hit it off back then, they’ll love you thinking of them.

Focus on the right people

One of the ideas of Euzoia is that we have to spend our time well. In an ideal world we can spend hours with every person we come accross but most of us are probably having difficulty keeping up with our regular friends. So: How to prioritize?

• Fun x potential: A friend working for BCG had to learn to network and sell after he became partner. Being BCG, they broke it down into a 2x2 matrix: Focus on people you like to hang out with and people with high potential.

• Ask for recommendations: Very simple hack that I see few people doing: When you go to events, ask the organiser or regular of the event: “whom should I meet here?” They might even intro you to the right people.

• Go through referrals: This might be obvious but it wasn’t for me for a long time. If you want to reach a hard-to-reach person (investor, philanthropist, …) try to find creative ways to get intros through (chains of) people that will vouch for you.

Three first steps to build your network

• Re-engage: Before building new connections, check in with people you like.

• Go to events: Make a commitment to attend networking mixers.

• Show yourself: Post on social media once a week.

While this article is my own perspective, I am super happy I got to talk with Sofia Balderson, founder of Hive, about agency. In the podcast (youtube link) we talked about the book You Can Just Do Things, posts from her substack on accountability, emotions at work, and language learning, and her coaching business. She also posted her own take on agency on her blog. Check it out.

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How to navigate your career

Agency in selecting your work

Performance differences within a field of work are high: A few people bring most of the results. The best way to find which work this is for you is to explore a lot, especially early in your career, to see what fits best. Then double-down later.

• Aim high: Early in your career you typically have little to lose. Use that to shoot for the stars, you can always do safer things later. How do you know you aimed high enough? If you failed or got rejected a lot. This also helps to minimize regret.

• Act like a scientist: Make a list of your best guesses for what would fit you best, then add more out-there options. Next, identify uncertainties you have on each, and resolve those by talking with people, doing work trials, doing internships.

• Do ABZ planning: Exploring and aiming high means taking risk and taking risk can feel uncomfortable. What helped me was ABZ planning: What’s my plan A. What’s plan B if that doesn’t work? What can I fall back to (Z) if nothing works?

Agency within your work

People are busy and overwhelmed. That doesn’t just apply to me but also to every manager I ever had. By acting agentically you save them the energy of having to manage you and at the same time buy yourself tons of freedom.

• Deliver impact: You are hired with a job description but at the end of the day what counts is: How much impact did you have on the success of the organization. Continuously find the best ways to do that. Look for leverage.

• Be autonomous: When impact is the “plus” on your internal balance sheet, the headspace required by others to get you there is the “minus”. This is why seniors are getting paid more then juniors. “They just get things done”.

• Ask for grease: “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” - be that wheel. Ask for support, feedback, resources, responsibility. You know your job better than your manager, and they’ll be grateful if you make sure you can do it.

Become ambitious

Nobody is born agentic, Turns out people are born agentic. 75% of variance in self-efficacy is explained by genes, according to twin studies. The same holds for grit, and the genetic factor increases with age. Nevertheless, you can still practice it:

• Track achievable goals: They should be at the sweet spot of achievable but still matter. To show you that you can make a difference through your actions. Tracking them helps build an evidence base you can look back on.

• Coaching and mentoring: Ideally from people in the domain you are practicing in. This could be a more senior person in your organization. They must be a) agentic and b) relatable to you. A role model for agency.

• Be ambitious: Once you built a solid level of agency, set ambitious goals you still believe are achievable. Think you are doing this already? Challenge yourself to be more ambitious. Picture your favorite celebrity: They also once set crazy goals.

Three starting points to become more agentic

• Journal / discuss with a friend: Is what you are doing right now the most ambitious thing you could be doing? How could you easily test options?

• Practice agency: Set one small goal that is achievable but a bit outside your usual zone. Track it.

• Want to dive deeper? A lot of this content is inspired by the 80,000 Hours guide.

Why do some people consistently create opportunities, recover quickly from failure, and shape their careers—while others wait for permission?

In this episode of Euzoia, Christoph sits down with Sofia to explore agency: the ability to take initiative, make meaningful decisions, and influence the direction of your life.

They unpack whether agency is something you are born with or a skill you can deliberately develop. From experimenting early in your career to building high-agency teams, Sofia shares practical strategies for becoming more proactive, resilient, and impactful.

They discuss:

• Why exploration is essential early in your career
• How to choose work based on impact, autonomy, and culture
• The balance between exploration and exploitation
• How “duocracy” encourages initiative within teams
• Why rejection and failure are necessary parts of growth
• How small experiments can increase your tolerance for risk
• The hidden danger of waiting for permission
• How strong leaders balance freedom with structure
• Why emotional recovery speed may matter more than avoiding failure
• Practical ways to start building more agency today

The biggest lesson? You probably have more permission than you think.

Agency is not about having total confidence or knowing exactly what to do. It is about taking the next useful action, learning from the result, and continuing to move forward.

Whether you are starting your career, changing direction, managing a team, or building an organisation, this conversation offers a practical framework for creating more opportunities instead of waiting for them.

About 15 years later, my thinking on this has completely changed. Maybe it’s my biology, maybe I got tired of living that exciting life, maybe it’s because I’ve been living with a child for the last year, or maybe it’s a result of the voices I heard on the topic over the years. I summarised them below, I hope they are helpful.

As with all decisions, it’s good to remind ourselves that there isn’t a right or wrong here. There are many great lifes to live - some with and and some without children.

While this article is my own perspective, I am super happy I got to talk with Julia Wise about the topic of children and parenting. She has her own substack where she writes about parenting, leads community health at the Center for Effective Altruism, and is portraied in the book Strangers Drowning - one of the best pieces of writing on the question how far we should go when focusing our lives on a greater good.

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How to think about a life-changing event

Your own perspective

Would you want a child, from a purely selfish perspective? If you feel a clear no to that question then you probably don’t need to keep reading, but in my experience most of us like the idea but are worried about the impact it will have. Some thoughts on this:

• No happiness, but meaning: The research on this seems to be pretty clear: Children are on average neutral for wellbeing, but they will add meaning. You can get meaning through other ways, but children seem to hit differently.

• What will you say no to?: Economist Bryan Caplan argues in his book “Seflish Reasons to Have More Kids” that you can invest less time than the average, a lot is influenced by genes anyway. While this might be partly true, your time has to come from somewhere. What would you say no to? Try to map out days.

• What support you can count on: While your wellbeing won’t change on average, your support network is the strongest predictor of changes. Think partner, parents, policies. Your overall health and money going in. Is it worth waiting for?

The world’s perspective

Let’s start with the obvious point: We are below replacement rates. This leads to collapse of safety nets, the economy, research, progress. If you are reading this, your kids have a good chance having a positive effect on socity. We’d love to have them.

• Highly impactful people had children: If you are doing impactful work and are worried children will eat away from your time, here is a fun fact: Nine of the 10 most impactful people them had children. You can’t be 24/7 productive anyway.

• Role modelling: A movement that would celebrates self-sacrifice to not have children to e.g., use their members saved time to save “more lives” asks too much of it’s members, thereby won’t grow, thereby will limit it’s potential impact.

• Biodiversity and resources: You can take two perspectives here: a) more humans = more destruction or b) more humans = more invention and solutions. If you are worried about this, you and your children are exactly the people needed in b)

Your child’s perspective

Not sure about you, but I’m pretty grateful for my parents for having made the decision to gift me this life.

• It’s a gift: It’s hard to compare not being alive to being alive, it’s philosophically murky territory. And yet. Giving the gift of life is the biggest gift you can give. Can you get it cheaper by donating malaria nets somewhere? Probably.

• What world it will grow up in: We live in a highly unpredictable world. AI, climate change, risks everywhere. But even in some of the less good scenarios, I personally would prefer to be alive, to live through it. Would you?

• You don’t have to be perfect: I sometimes hear people say they don’t want to pass on their genes to avoid the pain they suffered. This of course is a highly personal decision. But we all have faults, and maybe you, having gone through this, are especially well placed to help your child growing up.

Start with one thing

• What points evoke the strongest emotions for you? Talk about it with a friend.

• Are you a parent? We’d love to hear your story in the comments!

• Missing something? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

Having children may be the most meaningful decision you ever make—but how can you know whether it is the right one?

In this episode of Euzoia, Christoph speaks with Julia Wise, licensed social worker, Community Health Lead at the Centre for Effective Altruism, former President of Giving What We Can, and mother of three.

They explore one of life’s biggest and most irreversible questions: Should you have children?

Julia shares the honest reality of parenthood—from sleep deprivation, lost time and reduced freedom to the extraordinary love, meaning and connection that children can bring. She also explains how she approached the decision through an ethical lens: considering the money, energy and attention that raising children might take away from helping others.

The conversation explores:

• Whether you can predict how much you will enjoy being a parent
• Why parenthood often feels more meaningful than it feels “happy”
• The hidden cost of children: not just money, but attention and focus
• Whether having a second or third child is really much harder
• Why many people may wait until they feel “ready” for too long
• How to think about the possibility of future regret
• Why becoming a father may not feel real until the child arrives
• The pressure to become financially and emotionally perfect first
• What contradictory parenting advice gets wrong
• Why imperfect parents have successfully raised children for thousands of years

Julia also shares what living with a newborn before becoming a parent taught her, why having her own children felt completely different from watching someone else raise theirs, and how parenting created a form of meaning unlike anything she had experienced through work or charitable giving.

This is not an argument that everyone should have children. It is an open, thoughtful and unusually honest examination of what the decision involves—and why complete certainty may never arrive.

“Children are the most immediate, ongoing and ever-present project that you can do.”

00:00 – Meet Julia Wise
01:29 – Living with a newborn before becoming a parent
05:11 – Can you practise for parenthood?
07:00 – The ethics of having children
09:30 – The true cost: time, money and mental focus
11:54 – Can non-parents understand the experience?
14:28 – Is having more children much harder?
18:47 – Do you need to be completely ready?
23:01 – Children, commitment and future regret
24:22 – Happiness versus meaning
27:50 – Why parenting advice is so contradictory
30:32 – Why imperfect parents are probably doing better than they think

Find Julia’s writing at juliawise.net and on Substack.

Subscribe to Euzoia for more conversations about health, relationships, meaning, fulfilment and what it takes to build a genuinely good life.

Chapters

Up until that point love just kind of happened to me. I fell in love, acted lovingly towards my partners but almost like a child would act towards their friends. When something came natural I’d do it, otherwise I’d just kind of drift somewhere else.

Since then, I try to be more conscious about how I act towards people I love. I want the best for them, after all, so spending some time thinking about it is the least i can do. So: How do you love?

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How to love

Love languages with evidence

You might have heard about the “five love languages” from a pastor in the 90s. Turns out there is little evidence to back those up. While the theory doesn’t hold, there is evidence for specific actions you can take:

• Date nights: Meaningful quality time, not just time, is linked to better conflict resolution through perceived perspective taking. Bonus points for doing novel activites together for added excitement and shared growth.

• Small gestures: Think affectionate messages, nicknames, small acts of care, small gifts or favors. All these help signal thoughtfulness, support, and care.

• Check-ins: I love these, and there is some evidence for them: Make time (we do it every two weeks) for taking turns just sharing everything that’s on your mind. I feel it’s a natural vent to any “bottled up” thoughts and if you build a nice ritual around it it is a much better place to have a difficult conversation than right before you go to sleep.

Get good at intimacy

For most people, their partner is the person they’ll get most physical intimacy from. So it’s only natural that physical intimacy is associated with relationship satisfaction. But physical intimacy doesn’t necessarily mean sex:

• Loving touch: Kissing, hugging, cuddling, touch: They all lead to happier relationships and especially in couples who are beyond their first years have a higher impact than the sex alone.

• Talk about it: The single thing that predicts sexual satisfaction most is quality of sexual communication. This beats the more commonly assumed predictors: intercourse frequency or scheduling time.

• Explicit consent: The second most powerful factor is strong internal willingness expressed as active, enthusiastic consent vs assuming passive assumed consent. This predicts satisfaction for both partners.

Take action when things don’t go well

Loving actively also means not avoiding difficult times. Address issues when you see them, otherwise they will build up to an insurmountable pile of emotions.

• Breakup predictors: Verbal aggression, ongoing negative interactions, low commitment, satisfaction, and support all predict breakups. The question is: Will it get better? Give yourself a dedicated time to work on these and quit if it doesn’t.

• Therapy works: Not perfectly, but about 70% of couples do get better and half of those can maintain the improvements even after two years. That’s worth the shot if you are in a place where you feel like you could use some help.

• Online couple programs: Seem to work pretty well and might be more accessible than traditional therapy. They work mainly through reducing negative communication and increasing emotional support.

Start small

• Plan a check-in with your partner, consider making it a recurring one

• Missing something? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

Most relationships don’t fall apart because the love suddenly disappears. They weaken because people stop actively practising it.

We tend to think of love as a feeling—something magical that either exists or doesn’t. But lasting love is closer to a skill: something built through attention, affection and deliberate action.

In this episode of Euzoia, we explore four evidence-based strategies for creating stronger, happier and more deeply connected relationships:

⏳ How to spend genuinely meaningful quality time together
💌 Why tiny gestures often matter more than grand romantic displays
🗣️ How regular relationship check-ins prevent resentment from building
❤️ Why affectionate touch matters—even when it doesn’t lead to sex

You’ll learn how novelty can bring energy back into a relationship, why sending one thoughtful message can have an outsized impact, and how to discuss your relationship without making it feel like a performance review.

These ideas aren’t limited to romantic couples. They can also help you become a more loving friend, family member and person.

Because love isn’t only something you feel.