Tokyo is one of the most structured environments I have ever experienced. From high above the city, I watched people moving like tiny dots between buildings. On the metro, thousands move together quietly. Streets are remarkably clean. Smoking is restricted to designated areas. There are rules, systems and social norms shaping how people move and behave. And then, right in the middle of all this order, you can walk into the forest surrounding Meiji Shrine and feel your pace ch

For the past two and a half years, I have been paying more attention to my physical health than at almost any other point in my life. Food. Movement. Sleep. Recovery. Not obsessively, but curiously. What works? What doesn't? What can I sustain? And lately, a different question started bothering me: What am I trying to be healthy for? What am I trying to be fit for? And more broadly: What are we performing for? Problem: Performance without Purpose For years, I thought physica

I have been writing almost every week for more than a year and a half. Then I stopped for three weeks. This was for a good reason, as many of you know. After six weeks of working from Vietnam and traveling through Japan, I came home to Vienna with lots of photographs and ideas, which I thought would be enough to start writing again effortlessly. They weren't. Opening my laptop and returning to something I had done every week required more effort than expected. For me, it was

I've always wondered whether the destination waiting for us might be very different from the one we imagined when we first began. Last week, I wrote that rhythm carries us from where we are to where we hope to be, one small step at a time. But what if reality turns out to be richer than we imagined? Ba Na Hills gave me my answer. Before we went, I had done my research. I knew we would visit the famous Golden Bridge, and I knew there was a French-inspired village on top of the

Last weekend, we spent four days exploring Da Nang, Hoi An, Ba Na Hills and Hue as a family. I left each place with a different observation about human performance! This article is the first of four reflections inspired by that journey. Like most family trips ours too began with some chaos, flight schedules, hotel check-ins, keeping two teenagers happy, deciding what to see first, adapting to a new city, and trying to make the most of four short days. By the end of our first

Mountains have never really been my happy place. Give me an endless coastline, the sound of waves, or the horizon, and I instantly feel at home. Until Sapa. Walking across a glass bridge above the clouds and standing on Vietnam's highest peak, I experienced something I had never quite felt before. My heart felt more open. My mind felt quieter. And suddenly, the problems I had been carrying no longer seemed as heavy. The problems hadn't changed. My reference frame had. Problem

The biggest challenge of spending time in a new country is rebuilding the systems that make you feel like yourself again. We've now arrived in Hanoi! One of the first things we did was rearrange the furniture in our apartment so we could recreate the routines that matter to us. I've always been a person of routines. Meal times. Deep work. Sessions. Exercise. They all have a rhythm because these systems support the way I think, work and organise my family and profes