Over-preparation can be a beautiful way to avoid reality. This is a love letter to enough: one meaningful choice instead of ten anxious drafts.
When the map stops matching the world, calm competence beats perfect planning. Cut the noise, keep the signal, and trust your competence to carry the moment.

Once a year, Cologne burns the Nubbel. A ritual that is a leadership masterclass in metabolizing failure. Most teams don’t struggle with making mistakes, but they struggle with ending the story. By blaming the system instead of the person, you clear the "emotional fog" and protect trust. It is the art of burning the guilt while keeping the obligation. Stop poisoning your future with the unburied ghosts of yesterday.

NYE is basically the world’s biggest collective planning meeting with zero agenda and too much champagne. The countdown feels like progress, but it’s just a cue. A strong year isn’t a personality upgrade; it’s a minimum viable year built to work on a bad Tuesday. Boring wins are repeatable actions that survive mood and noise. Pick one boring win for 2026 and protect it. Go big tonight. Go boring tomorrow.

Lead like a good host: don’t attend the room. Shape it by deciding the tone early, engineering belonging, protecting flow over perfect plans, anticipating needs quietly, removing friction before it shows, and ending meetings cleanly so stress doesn’t linger. If your team feels “unconfident” or scattered, it’s often a hosting problem.

Many organizations burn energy sanitizing the truth rather than solving it. This essay argues that the First Article of the Cologne Constitution, Et es wie et es (It is what it is), is not a phrase of resignation, but a critical leadership discipline. It proposes that admitting the raw, unpolished state of a project is the only valid starting point for progress. By swapping corporate euphemisms for "Tacheles" (straight talk), leaders stop negotiating with the facts and start acting on them. You cannot navigate a map you refuse to look at.

Great leadership isn’t about constant action, but about knowing when to trust the system you’ve already set in motion. Fjaka, the Dalmatian practice of intentional stillness, shows that doing nothing can be a deliberate choice: a discipline of presence, patience, and confidence. By resisting the urge to intervene too soon, leaders create space for teams, strategies, and systems to stabilize, and often discover that progress unfolds most powerfully in the quiet.