An Apology

If this is the only sentence you read: I apologize for broken promises, for not having been present, and for causing damage.

This is the first year in a long while onto which I don’t look back with a happy expression.

Transitions and change demand energy, and when all your energy is spent on that, the rest of your life starts to suffer.

After more or less having had settled in at Modash in January, February brought the revelation that if I want to stay relevant as a programmer, I need to adjust and properly engage with agentic coding tools.

Of course, often a job is just a job, but this was more profound: the thought of reskilling completely to make a fraction of the money in exchange for more work, and more demanding work at that, was daunting.

It was fear of becoming irrelevant that made not engage with Claude & Co in earnest, and thanks to Geoff, I managed to overcome that.

The result was leaving Modash, joining Amp and the most intense working period of my life: working with actual autonomy with highly-skilled people in a hot market was intoxicating and fueled professional growth. There are valuable experiences you can only get in certain environments.

What took me by surprise was the price.

Feeling that I need to prove myself a worthy member of the team made me push very hard, long, and often. Spending 12 hours at the office during summer was normal, and it was fun, and it was not going to be forever, but it sure does make other things suffer.

I barely made it to the gym, and…I’ve not been the best person to be around.

All kinds of relationships were neglected, and stretching myself so thin didn’t help with self-control, level-headedness, or general prudence.

Bills went unpaid, messages unanswered, people were hurt.

It took extremely immature behavior on my part in the latter part of the year, creating an explosion of sufficient size, to serve as a wake-up call.

All that is to say that if you have been on the receiving end of any of this: please accept my apology, I have learned from painful experience now.

On Building

For the price paid, I learned a lot more about building software, and built on system that has potential.

First and foremost, Decode Estonian now has a fledgling service it offers: a language tutor with memory, and access to news, accessible directly from Telegram. The basic idea is working, I have users, but the project needs more love and care.

Second: no matter what you’ll do, some people will always be unhappy. This hit me the hardest when building the permissions system into Amp and getting pinged five times a day for a week with people not liking the system for opposite reasons (“It asks too often!” and “It does not ask often enough!”) really tested my ability to function under stress.

Ultimately this pointed to a communication problem, and once we addressed it as such, the negative feedback disappeared. Not a lesson I’ll forget anytime soon.

For 2026

For the next year, I want to keep building, but at a more sustainable pace – of course there will be intense periods when nothing else really matters, but they need to be offset by rest.

Not only software, but also relationships – be a better friend, partner, colleague.

In the year 1834, just 189 years before Rocket Bean Café opened on Vana-Kalamaja and expanded my living room, 135 coins from the Abbasid Caliphate and the Persian Samanid dynasty were found in the small village of Birsta in northern Sweden.

These coins can be dated back to the early 900s, in part thanks to the detailed Arabic inscriptions on them:

It was the Vikings who brought home treasures from the Mediterranean to their ancestral land. The sea journey on a Viking longship, by a conservative estimate, would take around 33 days to cover the distance of about 10,000 kilometres to Syria.

Isn’t that amazing?

Almost 200 years ago, someone found that one thousand years ago, people traveled by ship for over a month to do god knows what, in the service of god knows who, getting handsomely rewarded in gold, just to sail back to where they came from.

Think about the many different cultures, climes, and conflicts those sailors encountered.

A thousand years ago, Estonians weren’t yet under someone else’s yoke.

Math, astronomy, and literature flourished under Islam – Baghdad and Córdoba being the intellectual hubs of the time before European cities forcefully reclaimed that title.

It was the height of Viking rule in the North: Dublin, Normandy, Kyiv, Greenland and Vinland in North America marking the largest extent of Viking influence.

It was in this time of expansion, turmoil, collapse, and rebirth of empires, that our gold coins made the long journey from a crowded loud hot yellow desert, to an empty quiet white one.

A thousand years later, much has changed, but some things also stayed the same.

Today, Birsta is essentially a town-sized shopping mall, Sweden’s third-largest of that kind.

I’ve been to Nyland two out of the four planned times this year already – once in February, dragging my friend Mete along to gently force him to experience the peace of Northern Sweden, unplugging from the hustle and bustle of Tallinn, careers, and ambitions.

And another time in May, bringing family and a friend along. Adventuring, playing, exploring, cooking and relaxing together for a few days. An excellent way to recharge.

Both times we went to Birsta, because it’s the home of the closest IKEA, being just one hour away by car.

Centuries ago it was a hub for trading skins and pelts, now you can buy fake fur carpets at Bauhaus.

In the process, I’ve gotten more clarity about the house and where I want to develop it. It still is in an excellent location for being a safe haven, a creative retreat and all kinds of other activities that require a change of scenery with a smittering of civilization.

However, it also turning more and more into a home. Yes, a vacation home, but still a home. The more people I bring there, the more time I spend there myself, the more it is starting to feel like a place with a soul.

Given the many small things that still need to be done around the house, it is a troubled soul, but a long and loving treatment over the coming years will fix that.

Good memories have been made there already multiple times, and with every trip the local community, history, culture and terrain become more legible.

It has become a place I look forward to returning to.

A few more years of gentle care, and this will be a feeling others will share.

A mere 20 years ago, Jared Diamond described his view of the future in the closing words of Collapse as two competing accelerating forces. The big question in essence is, whether the rapid pace of change will change cultures and economies faster than it will change our environment into an inhospitable one.

I feel that AI is a harbinger of this greatly accelerated pace of change, similar in scale to the spread and adoption of the internet.

It changes everything.

Sending paper mail for communication purposes stopped making sense in a world where you can have video calls with people across the globe. Processes that relied on paper mail eventually went away (yes, even in Germany, mostly).

Everything being connected all the time became the new normal, and a baseline expectation.

And it will be the same with AI.

It enables new ways of working that were just impossible before.

Now are the years when everyone is collectively trying to figure out what this means in practice.

Uncertainty is high, confidence low, and opportunity is ripe for those with an appetite for risk.

I used to be very skeptical of AI in Software Engineering, focusing on what it can’t do, using this as an excuse to avoid having to face the uncomfortable truth that maybe I need to radically change the way I think about software, my bread and butter for the last 15 years.

This blog was quiet, because I had to put my more tech-related thoughts somewhere:

The Cultivated Engineer

I have seen the light

The last four weeks have been tumultuous, as I crossed a particularly important chasm…

Read more

a year ago · Dario Hamidi

Changes like this one don’t happen often in your lifetime, and while I’m late with realizing the importance of this change compared to some of my peers I like to think that I’m not in the bottom 5% of late adopters.

As the scale of the change dawned on me, it became harder and harder to focus on my work, and on Friday I’ve finally drawn the consequences of this:

I’m leaving Modash to join Sourcegraph in June, developing Amp under Thorsten’s leadership.

I was too young to act when the internet came about 30 years ago.

Given that it took 30 years for a change like AI to manifest, the next one is due when I’m 65 years old.

So the time to act is now, and the right place to be is where the action is.

And this closes the loop from Baghdad to Birsta, from Tallinn to San Francisco – the distance is roughly 10,000 kilometres. Arabic gold coins are distant from viking villages, yet their impact was felt there. The same is true for this new technology.

Exciting times are ahead, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like my professional experience is aligned with what can deliver value, and what brings me joy.

Stay tuned!

Everything fell into place

The passing year ended on a high note: I feel like everything just fell into place:

• I successfully transitioned back into contracting and having business income 🙌

• Decode Estonian made around 16k gross 🎉

• and I found the right person ❤️

And together we got Hani in October – essentially turning us into a little family.

🚀 2025 is launch year

🏡 Launch nyland.retreat

The main focus is on getting the house in Nyland up and running financially.

To that end, many volunteers contributed their labor and turned the place into a nice space.

In January the upper floor will get a new bathroom and then we’re really close to the finish line.

Furniture will be the final touch and then the place is ready to be filled with life.

The model is still a club – I just need to find 10 more parties to join, and then this project is “done”.

⚙️ Develop my craft

Being in a developer role again at Modash, I’m motivated to get better at my craft.

This means:

• achieving mastery of the tools used in this project (learning topics for me: MongoDB, getting to know AWS services in detail)

• providing solutions to business problems, and communicating accordingly

I want Modash to be happy about having me on board.

🇪🇪 Launch learn.decode.ee

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I’ve been busily working on my own platform for learning Estonian – based on the belief that consuming native content is the best way to develop your language skills.

Progress has been good, a few critical features are missing before it is considered “good enough” to fill the platform with actual content.

Launching the project means creating the first digital income stream for Decode Estonian and thus taking the first important step to a future where I have time and money.

🇸🇪 Sverige och Svenska

It’s time to learn Swedish, for good.

I’m tired of not being able to express myself and depending on others for language-related help when doing business in Nyland.

Besides getting fluent in Swedish, I also plan on making it to Nyland at least once per quarter, to keep an eye on things and also just enjoy the results of working on this project for so long.

🐌 What’s not happening

Diving into the numbers has shown me that I can’t have everything I want in 12 months, money being the main bottleneck.

🐪 Garaažistan ~ گاراژستان

Renovating and extending Garaažistan to host workshops and other events has to be postponed to 2026 for lack of funds.

Having the building renovated and existing as a nice space costs an estimated 50k EUR, which I’ll first need to earn.

❓Major changes

The how and what are not going to change much in 2025.

I won’t:

• change my business partner,

• move to another place,

• work from a different café,

It’s all about doing more of the same, because all of the things I’m doing are already taking me in the right direction.

Remote work doesn't cause disconnectedness, loneliness, and disengagement.

A culture that encourages people to work on their own does.

Collaboration doesn't "just happen" – it needs an environment that makes it the easiest choice.

With Bolt having introduced a return-to-the-office mandate recently, I find myself having this conversation more often – so it’s better to share these thoughts in writing.

Having worked in low and high team-spirit environments, both in-person and remotely, I've come to see that these two things have a tenuous connection at best.

You can work in an office, five meters away from people you never talk to – strangers in the same room.

You can work remotely, from anywhere, talking to your colleagues every day – friendships made possible by technology.

You can work in an office, not noticing how time passes because you are engaged in relevant and exciting discussions with your coworkers in front of a whiteboard.

You can work remotely, on your bed, and get depressed because you forget about basic hygiene.

It’s not about remote or office work.

It’s about culture.

Yes, getting everyone into the office will create a culture.

But if that’s all you are relying on, it’s a gamble – will all the people involved come up with a culture that serves the company’s needs?

Needs that include “employee well-being”, as well as “output”.

Like a garden, a culture needs to be tended to, bringing the vision of the gardener to life.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “culture” as:

the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization

The keywords here are shared and practices.

“We go to the office 3 days a week” is a practice.

But so is “all projects have at least two people working on them”,

Or “every morning, we gather and share our plans for the day”,

and “every Friday, we take turns sharing things we’ve learned”.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see that “We go to the office 3 days a week” is far removed from individual teams’ goals, let alone the company’s goals.

Unless “Spend a lot of money on office real-estate” is part of the company strategy.

Some people will be better at living these practices when they are in the office, next to people who do the same.

Others will be better at enacting all of this when they are in an environment they control.

Or when they have the freedom to work from Bali for a month – removing the tension between fulfilling your dreams and working a job.

We’re talking about the wrong thing

The “office vs remote” discussion is a false dichotomy and a distraction from the real problem.

It’s much easier to pick a side in this argument than to stop and think about difficult questions like:

• What are our goals and which practices serve these goals?

• How do we introduce these practices to newcomers?

• How do we create closed feedback loops to make these practices stick?

Without a closed feedback loop, behaviors don’t stick.

Compare these two scenarios:

Office: open feedback loop

• Action: you arrive at the office,

• Reaction: none – so you go the kitchen and get yourself a coffee,

• Reward: the coffee (and in the long term: you don’t get fired)

Office: closed feedback loop

• Action: you arrive at the office,

• Reaction: a coworker sees you and asks for help – you start working on solving the same problem, together

• Reward: you feel good about helping your coworker, and having solved a problem (ideally)

It is the reward at the end that makes the behavior stick.

Without rewards, it’s hard to reinforce behaviors.

These are simplified examples of course, but they should encourage you to think about shared practices in terms of “action/reaction/reward” guiding you to designing feedback loops in your own environment.

It also makes it easier to spot what ingredients are important to achieve useful practices.

In the example above, the reaction to “coming to the office” was “a coworker engages with you”.

Well, what other triggers could lead to spending time together to work on problems?

Does it have to be “physical presence?”

What about “a calendar invitation”, “writing a welcome message on Slack”, or “getting a phone call”?

Why you should care

So by now, we’ve established that the problem is not “office vs remote” but “conscious culture”.

That leaves the question of: why even care about remote work?

Here’s my claim:

The feasibility and enduring success of remote work are crucial for resilient societies.

Remote work allows us to collectively

• prevent more communities from dying because people move away from rural areas but nobody settles there in return,

• allow more people to own their home, because real estate is affordable further away from big cities,

• which in turn reduces the economical distance between the haves and have-nots, leading to less polarization in society.

Put differently, it allows most people to have their cake and eat it too:

• live on a farm in the countryside but have intellectually stimulating work that’s well paid? No problem!

• travel the world without saving up money for a year and then quitting your job? You can do that now!

• working from a café in the morning so you can hit the gym reliably every day? Yes!

These are great possibilities that people just 30 years ago could only dream of.

If you are running a company, thanks to remote work:

• you can save money on expensive offices and instead spend it on bonding experiences,

• you have access to talent all over the world, allowing you to save money on salaries or get exactly the skillset you need for the task at hand,

• you have lower attrition rates: if people are forced to choose between their dreams and their jobs, at some point most people will choose their dreams.

What you can do

If you are an employer, think about what culture you want in your company, and which shared practices are crucial for this culture to work.

Then base your remote work policy on that.

If you are an employee, think about what shared practices exist in your team and whether they enable engagement, collaboration, and communication.

Is there a feedback loop that you need to change?

Bolt is a great company full of amazing people, but after one year and nine months, my time at Bolt has come to an end.

I didn't get fired.

I didn't quit.

I didn't “leave my manager”.

In fact, my manager is great and I got extremely lucky joining Bolt in the Groceries domain.

I left Bolt because I found my 10/10.

Work that makes me so happy that I'll gladly do it for 8 hours on a Sunday and leave energized.

Teaching Estonian allows me to see people get smarter and better in the span of hours.

Years-long struggles are resolved in minutes.

I get to see happy faces and talk to my customers.

Now is the moment where I'm supposed to tell you that,

• I'm going all in on my Estonian-teaching business,

• work 80 hours a week,

• and burn myself out for a lofty goal.

That's not my plan.

I'm taking the next three weeks to build things for Decode Estonian - ideas that

have been floating around in my head and that need to get out.

After that I'll start contracting as a developer, because this year tech and

programming started to be fun again, and this is a good way to generate business income that I can feed back into Decode Estonian.

It's the first time in my life that I'm excited to be between engagements, because I actually have things to do.

Today's the first day when I'm starting my morning at my favorite café and don't have to go anywhere or do anything, for anyone else.

I can't wait to see where this road leads!

If you only have 1 minute…

I just came back from Greece after going there because I don’t like it there.

The plan: go to where I suffered and create new, positive memories there.

The outcome: success ✅

Like with fears, confronting uncomfortable memories allows you to move on.

2022: I hate Greece

After spending the two most difficult summers of my life in 2021 and 2022 in Greece, I returned to Estonia – this time alone – everything about Greece.

Why is it so noisy everywhere that sleep is difficult?

Why can’t you flush toilet paper down the toilet?

Why are there mosquitos year-round, in your room?

Why is there trash everywhere?

Why is drinking the tap water risky?

Why is everyone around me okay with everything being broken and chaotic?

I was permanently underslept, failed to build a social life, got depressed, and focused on everything Greece wasn’t good at.

The sweltering sun had bleached the beauty out of everything else.

Being in the best relationship I had ever been in at the time didn’t help.

No matter how much my partner cared and supported me, it didn’t get through to me and help me out of my depression.

Worse yet, I was letting her down by being a total wreck of a person at the time.

That’s not the person who I wanted to be and thus we had to part ways, for both of us to live our best lives.

2024: Athens - Meteora - Karystos - Varkiza

This year I returned to visit all the places that hold meaning, with my new partner (the best way to make good memories):

Athens – because I had good memories there, the triangle between Omonoia, Syntagma, and Monastiraki still feels comfortable like Kalamaja in Tallinn.

I still needed to work for the first five days of the trip, and Athens was well-equipped enough for this. Despite being in an air-conditioned space most of the time, 31 degrees during the day do take their toll on the body, and concentrating on anything was difficult.

Meteora – a new place to visit, because I didn’t want to only retread on the steps of the past.

Nestled on top of pillars of stone, in the center of Greece, are the mountain monasteries of Meteora.

I try to avoid touristy spots as much as possible, but in this case it was totally worth it.

Karystos was next – more good memories, from before the two difficult summers and lots of exciting nature. It’s a great place to disconnect from the rest of the world and the mountains close by allow you to easily regulate how much you want to sweat.

Varkiza was left for last – the final boss, the place of suffering.

Seeing this bench again was painful – one reason was that at my worst, it was here where I wondered about what I was doing with my life every morning, before distracting myself with work.

A lot of painful memories came back all at once.

But with every passing minute, it got better and the focus shifted to enjoying the things the place has to offer, together with my partner.

In the end, we had two amazing days in Varkiza, and my brain does not associate pain with this place anymore 🚀

For now, I’m done with Greece – I don’t hold a grudge anymore, and after spending so much time there, visiting and experiencing other places seems like a better use of resources.

Takeaways

• face your past so you can move on,

• if something feels emotionally painful, then that’s where you need to look/go

• it’s okay to feel your feelings, just don’t dwell on them – be sad for a minute and then move on, instead of consciously amplifying the feeling.

Changing relationships

That has been the core theme of the last few weeks, in all areas of life.

New relationships have started, and existing ones are changing their nature.

Some of them are on the way to ending.

🧑‍💻 Back to writing code

My relationship to writing software engineering has changed and after 5 years of distance, I feel a renewed spark and eagerness to build.

Only that this time I understand business value – being a business owner myself – and am more interested in exploring out-of-fashion technological approaches than learning ever more complex abstractions.

🕯️ Slowly burning my own money

Barring any last-minute miracles, my relationship with my closest friend will acquire another layer: we won’t just be close friends anymore, but I’ll be his employer with all intentions of putting him to work and being a great manager.

With the start of the fall season, that means leading a team of three people:

• Käti, factotum par excellence

• Mete, taking care of sales, landing pages, storytelling,

• and Kadri running and managing ads on Instagram and Facebook.

All of this takes resources, even when there is little business activity like in summer.

💸 Contracting to the rescue

Combining the previous two changes, getting back to contracting as a developer seems like a good move and ultimately that will be the next step.

It’ll happen sometime this year.

And it will mark the end of “being an employee at a big company”.

This time it is different because the income from software development is “just another income stream” of the company, fuel for something bigger.

⛑️ From insurance to community

The time in Sweden transformed my relationship with the house from being “expensive insurance” to “the seeds of something great”.

I’m currently building a community around the house to breathe fresh ideas into Nyland, and sharing the beauty of the High Coast with more people.

Click here to join the club

Clicking the button does not ask for your credit card information 😉

🔥 Passion and Commitment

As of recently, I’m in a committed relationship again, with a long-term outlook.

And it’s amazing, exciting, challenging, and immensely satisfying because this is a new level of opening up to someone.

I missed the mutual giving and receiving, the strengthening and deepening of an intimate connection over time.

Without experiencing it, it was easy to forget how satisfying this is.

It gives meaning to the smallest of gestures, to the simplest acts of daily life.

It feels like consciously building something amazing.

Exciting times!

Setting the compass

I’m sure you have experienced this in your life: you are in the middle of making decisions that set your course for the future and you are aware that these are course-setting decisions.

It’s the difference between a compass telling you where North, with you having to constantly figure out how to translate that into the direction you need to go in,

and having a compass that shows you where you need to go.

You pick your direction by looking at all the other directions you won’t take.

To go West, you look at the compass telling you where North is.

And the same idea translates to making life decisions, only that you can build a compass that actually shows you the way.

Your moral compass tells you what is right and wrong.

Your value compass tells you what you care about and what can safely be ignored.

This narrows the number of directions but still leaves many open ones.

Finally, you pick one and then stick to it.

Things like:

• a particular job vs a particular business venture,

• this particular person over all the other people you could be with,

• making a home here, not everywhere else

Once you’ve plotted the course, you can follow it aggressively.

Because you don’t need to look at the compass anymore telling you where North is when you want to go West.

You’ve learned that the sun sets in the West.

So all you need to do now is run after the sun before it sets.

In short

In Week 23, two “shifts” happened within me:

• the house turned into an exciting project (it used to be expensive insurance),

• an intense sense of urgency returned – whatever you want to do, now is the best time.

Nyland is Stardew Valley

For those of you who are not familiar with it: Stardew Valley is an indie video game, developed by a single person, that achieved tremendous financial success (as of this year: over 30 million copies sold).

Two things stand out about this game.

First, it’s a work of art – it was not created for profit, but to bring its creator’s vision to life.

Its developer, Eric Barone, poured his entire life into this:

To complete the game, Barone worked 10 hours a day, seven days a week, for four and a half years. – Source

learning all the necessary skills essentially from scratch, and ultimately creating a world with character, and attention to detail.

Second, the game is about village life, with the player/protagonist having inherited a farm, and trying to breathe life back into it while building relationships with the townspeople.

After having spent more than a week in Nyland, I can’t help but see lots of parallels:

Instead of building a farm, this particular adventure is about getting a house into good shape – the idea remains the same: take something old, make it new.

Just like in the game, there are lots of townspeople - each with an interesting life story, and many of them with entrepreneurial ambition, and just like in the game, there is “one of everything”.

Institutions aren’t faceless brand names, copy-pasted shops you could place anywhere on a map, but rather someone’s project.

You speak about “The Café”, because it’s the one that’s there – and you know the owner by name, what their ambitions are and you can directly see the impact this project has on the local community.

Simple day-to-day things turn into little adventures: you need to talk to people to get information, and crucially, it’s about managing the relationships with the people around you.

So why draw a parallel to a popular video game/work of art?

Because Stardew Valley evokes a certain feeling in the player:

and Nyland evokes the same feeling once you spend time there in earnest.

By comparing these two things, people who have played the game get to experience a similar feeling that I felt this week.

And just like creating Stardew Valley was essentially an intense learning experience for Eric Barone, renovating my house is going to be an intense learning experience for me.

Hopefully with a similar payoff: creating a special feeling in people who choose to visit.

In contrast to the stereotype of small villages being full of close-minded simpletons who can hardly think in terms and ideas that go beyond the scope of their particular village, Nyland is full of people who have chosen this particular place in the world as their home.

A small selection includes:

• a Swiss event photographer,

• a Venezuelan ship engineer,

• an entrepreneur from Stockholm, who saw so much opportunity in one building that he had to open a café.

All of the above actually made me feel excited about the house in Nyland, for the first time.

It took:

• 17 months of just paying for the upkeep and some renovations,

• trying to convince people to stay there,

• and figuring out how to manage a property remotely,

before I got an emotional payoff.

But now it’s here, and Nyland feels like a second home.

Situational Awareness

Last week I read Leopold Aschenbrenner’s series of essays titled Situational Awareness.

What I read was unsettling because it sounded far-fetched and plausible at the same time.

If you have an hour to spare: go read this. It’s well-written prose, and you can skim through the part you find boring.

What was striking to me: the essays make a reasonable case for developments in AI reaching a point where you get a drop-in remote software engineer, who is instantly onboarded onto the entirety of your company, in three to four years.

And before we get into the whole “but LLMs are just inference machines that generate a text based on internal probabilities” counterargument - yes, but there is more to AI than LLMs, and according to Aschenbrenner, we’ve just reached the point when research results aren’t published anymore to get advantages over the competition – so without insider information (like from this former OpenAI employee), it’s hard to say where we’re at.

Regardless of how his predictions play out, what is real right now is anything related to AI receiving massive amounts of investment all over the world, and AI-based technology having made amazing progress in the last 2-3 years (just check the ChatGPT 4o demo and compare it to the first version of ChatGPT).

So why are fancy chatbots so unsettling?

Because it’s not about fancy chatbots or real-time audio translation.

It’s about rapid progress on what looks like an exponential curve.

Or in other words: the boat is about to get rocked, hard.

Not only because of this but also due to everything else that’s going on:

• China preparing for an invasion of Taiwan,

• the US preparing for China invading Taiwan,

• a new virus brewing (bird flu jumping to cows, and from cows to humans in the US),

• the US presidential election in November threatening continued support for Ukraine.

Oh, and climate change in the background.

Everybody in Estonia being happy about it finally being summer is also a reminder of how we’ve collectively forgotten (🇬🇷🔥) the (🇮🇹🌊) suffering (💀) of the summer of 2023.

There is little reason to believe that the summer of 2024 is going to be different.

In May 2024 there were 170 reported wildfires in Estonia alone – yes they were small, quickly detected, and efficiently dealt with, but…the trend is not exactly positive.

The point is: everything will become more difficult.

And that is difficult to imagine for people aged 40 or younger, because we’ve lived during a period of great prosperity and peace, where every passing year made life better for everyone.

Just because we haven’t experienced drought, famine, wildfires, hyperinflation, and other catastrophes personally during our lifetime doesn’t mean that they cannot happen again.

So whatever you want to do in life – now is the time to try it.

The boat is about to get rocked really hard.

Don’t be surprised when you feel it.

On the way to Sweden

The workdays last week passed quickly, before the long trek to Nyland on Friday, together with my brother:

• wake up at 5:30am,

• hop on a plane at 7:30am,

• land in Stockholm at the same time (yay, timezones),

• wait five hours for the train without falling asleep,

• sleep on the train for a few hours,

• finally arrive in Nyland in the evening around 5:30pm.

Next time I’ll spend a bit more money and reduce the wait times/allow myself more sleep.

Making it all this way up north was exciting because, without the hustle and bustle of a city, time seemingly comes to a standstill.

After recovering from the trip, Roberto and I spent the weekend exploring this little village.

You need to look a bit more closely, but it’s easy to find entertainment here.

Writing is easy here

The whole idea behind buying the house here – at least while the world isn’t collapsing just yet – was to have a place to “retreat to”, where you can work on any kind of creative endeavor.

In my case, that’s writing a digital book, essentially summarizing the “Decode Estonian” workshop, which I can sell online at a lower price point.

I have 5 vacation days plus two weekends to make this work.

So writing is definitely my main activity while I’m here – and for this purpose, the house works really well.

While the interior design can be best described as “quirky” and at worst described as “needs a complete remodel”, you’ll get used to every floor being of a different make and all the walls having differently terrible wallpaper rather quickly.

Food is cheap and plentiful, the village supermarket has a wide selection that exceeds that of many supermarkets of similar size in Tallinn while offering most items at half or three-quarters of the price in Tallinn.

With all the basic necessities taken care of, it’s easy to focus on the thing I came to do.

The people of Nyland

Sunday was the most social day of our first 48 hours in Nyland and besides a hike through the beautiful landscape, we managed to start a few conversations in our limited Swedish and learn more about the place.

First, we met some of the neighbors - a young family with two kids, both parents being from Nyland and working in the region. After laboring through our broken Swedish, we got a break by speaking English and quickly agreed that it’s better for everyone if we keep trying Swedish. They were very friendly, offered help with any handiwork necessary around the house, and knew everyone in the village.

The highlight of which: apparently an Estonian family is living on the same street. They aren’t here right now, but knowing you can speak Estonian in Nyland is great.

They also mentioned a German-Estonian couple living in the village, which is another opportunity to speak Estonian 🙌.

On Thursday the new café will open in the village and hopefully, that’ll be an opportunity to meet everyone.

Besides Swedish, German, and Estonian, Roberto and I also had a 30-minute conversation with Oscar:

Born and raised in Stockholm to Uruguayan parents, he moved to Nyland after an accident that resulted in brain damage and now enjoys the tranquility of the area to speed up recovery.

Speaking Spanish to Oscar was a real joy for both of us!

Infinite work

There is an infinite number of things one can do around the house.

So far Roberto and I put two screws into a place where they were needed.

It’s a start.

The hardest part is figuring out what to change, then in which order, and also what a reasonable investment would be.

Sinking 100k or 150k EUR into this house is not difficult.

The question is rather one of leverage: what are small improvements that improve the feeling in the house noticeably?

You get used to the house really quickly and things I expected to be bothering in the beginning really aren’t.

In an ideal world, we leave Nyland with a plan, so next time we return, we can preorder tools, parts, paints, etc and just get started with the work.

Entrepreneurship++

Given my current life plans, I need to figure out how to make the house not burn a literal hole into my wallet next winter (likely my wallet will be much smaller then).

That means producing a lot of content now, so I can turn the house into (another) business.

One that hopefully breaks even soon.

I found this on the internet right in time for that realization:

If you want to stay in the house for a skiing vacation in winter (the season starts in November), or just a summer getaway, here is the pricelist and availability:

• 15th of June – 15th of October: all free, 100 EUR per week to cover electricity and utilities,

• 16th of October – 31st of March: all free, 200 EUR per week to cover heating, electricity, and utilities

Book now

From conference to conference

The last two weeks must have been the most intense period of socializing in…a long while.

After recovering from the Polyglot Gathering in Prague, this week was dominated by Latitude59, Tallinn’s annual startup conference.

I had been to the afterparty’s afterparty (yes, there are two - the latter one being somewhat open to the public) two years in a row and – as a newly minted business owner – decided to attend the conference proper this year.

Given my general state of tiredness and the beautiful weather in Tallinn, I wasn’t inclined to visit the conference when the time came.

What helped me go in the end: reminding myself of the ticket price 😅

Luckily I did go - it was an extremely relaxed atmosphere to talk to all kinds of interesting people.

Hunting Hungarians

The thing I enjoy the most about learning languages that few people bother learning is the “wow” effect you can have on native speakers.

There is nothing more motivating to keep learning than the genuine appreciation shown by Estonians, Hungarians, and all other speakers of rarely-learned languages when you can converse with them in their language.

Knowing this, I made a point of talking to everyone at the conference with a Hungarian-sounding name and talking to them in Hungarian.

I wasn’t disappointed - besides this being good practice, it also brought smiles to many faces.

Finding luck

The “afterparty afterparty” had the biggest impact on me though - just as I was about to leave, I ended up in an extremely interesting conversation with an extremely interesting person.

Besides being a pleasure to be around in general, Louwai shared his model for “getting lucky” with me.

What a find!

Here is how he explained it: imagine your life on a two-dimensional graph. The x-axis is time, the y-axis is the effort you spend on something.

On this graph you have points, representing the “wins” in your given endeavor.

If you operate in a mature field, there aren’t many possible wins and/or they require high effort.

So to be lucky, you need to choose a field that still has many available wins:

Now, over time you are going to execute your project, capturing some of these wins:

Sometimes you will face setbacks:

But if you keep executing, you are guaranteed to collect enough wins to make a difference:

Success is just a question of time

That’s the reason why I like this model: it explains “getting lucky” in a way that allows you to act on it.

The important questions to ask yourself are:

1. Am I even playing the right game (i.e. are there enough wins distributed within areas that I can reach)?

2. Am I putting in enough effort?

3. Am persistent enough?

The first question is the critical one to answer because being persistent and putting in a lot of effort when you are operating in a field with few available wins is a recipe for burnout.

But if you have clearly answered that question with a “yes”, then it’s easy to answer the other questions.

So if you are not successful now, but playing the right game, then ramp up the effort you are putting into this and keep at it.

It’s just a question of time.

Personally, I find this idea really exciting because it means anyone can be successful as long as they choose their field wisely.

As for me, I feel like I’m onto something with the “make hard languages easy” thing, playing on a field where most wins are still to be had.

So now it’s time to put in more effort.

And time.

See you next week!

The End of This Brothering

Goodbyes are always difficult, but I didn’t see this one coming.

Last week has been intense.

So intense, that I feel surprisingly functional given only 3 hours of sleep before writing this piece here.

What made saying goodbye so difficult this time was the closeness of the bonds established - a core group developed, eating, working out, and socializing together for days in a row.

Sunday night ended with everyone speaking from the heart about what they appreciate about the other person, which was deeply moving for everyone involved.

The level of authenticity and open communication is pretty high at these events.

Pause and Play

More than one person highlighted the same thing: the Polyglot events are like a separate dimension and it seems as if no time has passed between them.

Or to put it another way: at the end of the last event half a year ago, we collectively pressed the “pause” button on our relationships, and a week ago, we hit “play”.

The extent of this effect is not only limited to time but it is also reflected in space:

Essentially I spent the whole week in this triangle.

Why?

Because it contained everything I needed, and then some.

✅ two parks for working out
✅ friends and soon-to-be-friends
✅ a hipster café for hanging out and doing focus work

Where next

The next event, the Polyglot Conference, will be held in Malta early in November.

Tickets are limited to 300, but sale hasn’t started yet 🥲

Being constantly surrounded by entrepreneurs in the language teaching space made the next steps for me this year unmistakably clear.

Update halfway through

While I have been in Prague since Sunday, the main event has only been on for two days now.

Which means intense socializing from morning to evening 🦋

Tomorrow is the big day: I have to give my talk in front of an audience I don’t know, without having rehearsed anything, because I don’t believe in scripting.

It’s my first conference talk, ever 🤞

It’s not about language

Surprisingly enough, nobody here speaks about the intricacies of any language.

Everybody is here to have a good time, so you hear a lot of Spanish, English, and German for communication.

Most people know each other already because the Polyglot world is small (this year, the event had a record number of participants: 800).

What I’ve found is that this is a great environment to make lasting friendships.

I met David (second from the left) last year in Budapest, and now six months later it still feels like no time has passed in between.

Leo (right) and I clicked instantly and even though we’ve only known each other for two days now, we both know that this is the start of a great friendship.

John (left) entered the picture today and fits right into the group.

We’re exercising and eating together every day, in the meantime discussing business: how to achieve more freedom, working less, earning more, and spending time doing things you enjoy.

It’s a great group to be a part of!

Hungarian and Estonian are still ultra-niche languages

I still haven’t gotten over the fact that even at an event like this, where all the people with niche interests come together, you have only tens of Hungarian and Finnish speakers, and even fewer Estonian speakers.

When people who speak 6+ languages on a high level tell you that knowing Estonian and Hungarian is impressive to them, it actually means something 😅.

Definitely more motivation to keep at it!

So what’s next?

Well, being surrounded by successful overachievers in all areas of life actually made me sit down, get my act together, and finish something I had been procrastinating on for 6 months:

This is critical because I believe the new approach can achieve better results for participants, as well as open up more opportunities for running workshops.

But it needs to be tested first, and testing, for the longest time, had been blocked by design.

Not anymore though!

Why

After three months of wallowing in my own thoughts and outsourcing my thinking to my close friends (thank you for enduring this), I realized I found my emotional footing again and am ready to sort out my thoughts in writing.

What

The intention of this blog stays the same: share what I’ve learned so that you can learn from my mistakes.

What’s different this time: while the baseline content is still a summary of my weekly errors and the lessons learned from them, occasionally you’ll find travel content here or articles about specific topics.

Where

Today I arrived in Prague for the Polyglot Gathering, starting on Wednesday.

It’s also the start of a two-week vacation, the longest I’ve had ever since December.

I’ll be back in Tallinn next Monday.

In the last three months…

… I developed a clear vision + plan of action for:

• exiting Bolt,

• growing Decode Estonian,

• and getting financially ready to live off entrepreneurship

So far so good.

Don’t overpromise

What I’ve learned:

I’ll never make two-year promises to myself again.

It’s unnecessarily limiting.

There will be a certain satisfaction in keeping my promise (or so I tell myself) in December, and this experience will hopefully be a useful reference experience (I can make long-term commitments and keep them, even if it gets hard).

However, it pains me to say “no” to so many interesting opportunities that have come up on the way so far, let alone opportunities coming in the next six months.

The worst thing is: I primarily promised this to myself.

Which means I am the only person who can release myself from that promise.

This really feels like having painted myself into a corner :)

Feelings

Breaking news: you can express feelings using words and actions.

I made an effort in the last three months to express my feelings (of any kind) more proactively and be more honest with myself and others.

It’s difficult to admit, but at the age of 33, I still feel felt insecure about dating and relationships, i.e. while everyone around me seemed to enjoy this part of life, it felt like I don’t have access to this for a lack of … knowledge and experience.

Following repeated recommendations, I read Mark Manson’s “Models”.

Not expecting much from the book given its cheesy title, the first few chapters about neediness and honesty had a real impact:

• I was more needy than I thought I was,

• there is a way out of neediness

Manson defines the latter through three principles:

1. Honest Living - understanding what you want from life and acting accordingly (e.g. not staying at your comfortable job when you want to be an entrepreneur), or to put it differently: investing in the identity you want.

2. Honest Action - acting despite any fears you have (e.g. will they fire me if I tell my boss I’m thinking about leaving, even though everything is great?)

3. Honest Communcation - communicating true intentions and feelings clearly (e.g. “I really like working here, but I feel like teaching Estonian is my calling and eventually I will have to follow it”)

As you might have noticed, while these ideas come from a book about dating, all of the examples given above aren’t about dating.

That’s because all of this is true for having integrity and quality relationships of any kind.

So much for the good news.

The “bad” news is that all three of these are a skill that requires regular practice.

Practicing these skills never ends, at least if you want to have relationships of any kind with the people around you (which for most of us is until the end of our lives).

Stuff I found interesting on the internet

🎬 Love and relationships are at odds with each other - Never stop to think about this, but YouTube decided to show me a new channel and I actually don’t mind recommendation - it certainly gives food for thought.

💭 Hedonism is not necessarily “the egoistic pursuit of short-term gratification at the expense of others.”, but can also be “an introspective attitude to life based on taking pleasure yourself and pleasuring others, without harming yourself or anyone else”. The latter definition actually sounds attractive.

💡Adam Curtis on self-expression being the conformity of our time, which prevents us from taking effective action as groups, because group membership and making sacrifices for the needs of the group is at odds with self-expression and hyperindividualism.

What happened to the first 6 weeks?

The nature of my job makes me think in quarters and execute in weeks.

I don’t know what happened, but the first half (!) of Q1 passed in what feels like the blink of an eye.

Taking the time to write another article felt like too much.

So many more important things to do:

• decorating my new home to make it feel like a home,

• figuring out how to heat the place,

• annual performance review at work,

• attending sTARTUp day in Tartu,

• getting back into running “Decode Estonian” workshops,

• settling into new routines, now being based in Kalamaja,

• and so much more

January started…

…with a feeling of restlessness.

I just completed one year at Bolt and reached the point where I started to feel like it was time for a change.

That feeling is exactly why I vowed to stay at Bolt longer than anywhere else before.

I want to experience what comes after that.

Losing any kind of emotional attachment to my previous home of 6 years didn’t help.

In fact, that opened up a new fantasy:

• I could sell my other apartment and the garage,

• pay back the new apartment, and

• have cash left over,

• while removing a substantial future money sink (developing the garage/garden)

Essentially this would mean retirement: allowing me to teach Estonian only and live of whatever I earned that way.

Tempting, but also really stupid.

Both the apartment and the garage/garden are things I’d never ever be able to afford again.

Owning the garage costs nothing (well, 180 EUR of land tax per year, but that’s close to nothing).

The Mulla 2 apartment can carry itself financially.

So we’re talking about liquidating almost all my assets to save…640 EUR a month.

Not smart.

I need to write this down and publish it here, just to have proof of this being a stupid idea in case I start fantasizing about it again in the future ;)

Keep on grinding

After attending Logan’s Quarterly Strategy Workshop to get some accountability and direction for Decode Estonian, a few interesting things happened:

• everybody walked out of that workshop with an action plan for the rest of the quarter,

• and a high level of motivation - none of us wants to disappoint any of the other participants, let alone Logan

As a result, my days now look like this:

• work (Bolt)

• gym,

• dinner,

• work (Decode Estonian)

• sleep (22:30)

And I absolutely don’t mind this right now.

Executing the plan to my business forward has become enjoyable.

Progress is visible.

Things are moving.

Going to the gym every day helps: while not the most effective thing for muscle growth, it’s excellent for flushing the brain and resetting it.

So that another round of work becomes feasible.

オフィスにいます

Speaking of strategy, I’m finally getting to the point where I feel like I can think about my future in the long term because I have dreams and aspirations now.

One of these possible futures has me teaching Japanese alongside Estonian because Japanese is actually really easy (at least it looks easy).

Since Japanese looks easy, but I have no idea what I’m talking about, I need to get good at Japanese in the next 3 to 5 years.

To that end, I’ve started just using Japanese, because language courses are useless for learning a language.

Also, I signed up for a Japanese language course.

Not to learn Japanese.

But to have an enjoyable group activity in Estonian to meet like-minded people.

For that, language courses can be great.

On having a vision

I never really had one.

Until August 2023, everything I did was just “what seemed like a good idea at the moment” and that led me to all kinds of interesting places and activities.

Mostly this happened in the context of a relationship, taking pleasure in helping my partner’s dreams come true.

Being out of a relationship for over a year now showed me that…I was really bad at having my own dreams.

It took me two months in 2023 to get to the point where now I have a rough idea of what kind of adventure I want life to be.

Dreaming is a skill

It needs constant practice and feedback, like any other skill.

Some dreams turn out to be not important to you, but you only realize that after exploring the dream for a while.

Others suffer from the opposite problem: you are 100% sure that this is what you want, but figuring out what “this” means exactly is like shining a light into the fog: the reflection blinds you.

Reading “The 12 Week Year” helped me with putting a vision into place for my life, starting with very big ideas and then gradually refining them on smaller and smaller timescales.

The word “vision” comes from “vidēre” - to see

Having a vision is about seeing the future clearly as if it were a reality already.

This image will guide you through the present to move closer to your desired future.

Eight futures

For each of the eight areas I identified this year, I had a milestone that I wanted to reach this year:

✅ Bolt: starting a mentorship program for engineers in my department. I did, and it was well received.

In 2024, I aim to get at least one team member promoted.

✅ Garaažistan (گاراجئستان): turn it into a dry box. It is dry, and a box. And it even found a renter now.

In 2024, it’s time to ⚡️ electrify the place, and optionally add a💧water connection as well.

✅ The House In Sweden: get to the point where I can manage all operations remotely.

In 2024, the roof will be replaced and the house will have its first paying client.

⏳ Relationships: originally I wanted to find a partner – then life happened – and after having been swept off my feet by two amazing women and ultimately realizing that we’re not compatible, I’m taking a step back from a concrete vision here and trying to pursue that vision.

In 2024, I’ll create space - physically, mentally, and emotionally - for another person in my life.

⭐️ Decode Estonian: I reached my turnover goal for 2023, which has shown me that the language courses have value and deserve more energy.

In 2024, Decode Estonian workshops will happen outdoors during summer, with new teaching material, and paid subscribers will get access to video lessons.

⏳ Fitness: I fell short of my 70kg @ 12-13% bodyfat goal. This morning, I weighed in at 67.9kg.

In 2024, I’ll keep grinding with high intensity, dial in my nutrition more and keep putting on weight.

❌ Eesti 200 / Politics: after seeing the amount of sacrifice active involvement in politics requires, I decided to drop my ambitions of becoming actively involved.

✅ Personal Growth: my sole goal this year was to get Estonian citizenship and thus cement my bonds with Estonia. That’s done 🇪🇪

In 2024, the important milestones are passing the B1 exam in Hungarian and getting certified as a personal trainer.

Moving to Kalamaja

As part of “creating space”, I decided to move to Kalamaja in December.

You can now find me at Suur-Laagri 18 most evenings and if you are reading this, you are invited for tea in front of the fireplace 🫖

The last week of December was spent in construction stores and shopping centers to make the place not just liveable, but actually nice.

It’s the first time I’m taking charge of creating a nice interior space and after this week I find it very understandable why “Interior Designer” is a profession.

Wait faster

One would think that still being excited about something that you’ve been waiting for for over 8 years, while you have already done everything in your power to achieve that thing, is difficult.

After all, waiting around and not being able to do anything to accelerate the process would be an adequate way of defining the phrase “not exciting”.

It’s the opposite of excitement.

Just like you can’t make a tree grow any faster after you have planted it, acquiring citizenship was mostly about waiting.

The word that best describes the experience of actually receiving my new passport is dream-like.

Having taken so many years, this change fundamental change of reality took a while to fully register with my brain.

I wish I could have “waited faster”, but unfortunately your active role in acquiring citizenship is quite limited:

• learning the language (I had already done that before moving here),

• going through an exam testing your knowledge of the Constitution (a 45-minute formality).

The passive parts are:

• living in Estonia for 8 years, the last 5 consecutively (= not being registered anywhere else),

• giving up any other citizenship you possess.

The price of belonging

Why would you give up your German citizenship?

👆 that’s the most common question I’ve received about changing citizenship.

On the surface, it seems like a bad tradeoff:

• Germany is Europe’s largest economy,

• with a strong social security system,

• geographically far away from belligerent countries,

• strong diplomatic connections all over the world (= more visa-free travel)

Estonia scores worse on all of these dimensions.

Once you dig deeper, you’ll find some interesting facts though:

• Net salaries in IT are often significantly higher in Estonia than in Germany (because the cost to the employer is lower in Estonia),

• Being unemployed gets you fewer benefits in Estonia, but the benefits you get are qualitatively different, like free education plus some starting capital for starting your own business,

• History is still fresh and its lessons aren’t forgotten yet,

• While many people still don’t know that Estonia exists or where it’s located, it has an international reputation that it can actually live up to.

Looking at these arguments, you can make the case for Estonian vs German citizenship being roughly equal in benefits (depending on what you care about).

So why switch?

The reason is emotional.

Tallinn is home.

And I want to always have access to my home.

Just like I care about my home being in order and getting along with all of the other people living in the same building.

Germany does not feel like home, more like a curiously familiar, yet strange place.

I don’t feel associated that much with Germany anymore, at least compared to my feelings toward Estonia.

Thus renouncing German citizenship felt like a price worth paying.

So what do you get as an Estonian citizen?

Preferential treatment! While I haven’t put my theory to the test yet, based on prior interactions I’m pretty sure you get better loan conditions with Estonian banks as a citizen of the country.

I can finally renew my ID card and request a new passport online and don’t have to appear at the police station anymore because I’m not a citizen.

I don’t need a “residence permit” anymore.

I’m part of the in-group, not the out-group.

More rights and responsibilities! I finally get a vote in the parliamentary elections. With the rise of the far right all over the world, Estonia being unfortunately not spared this development, this is something I strongly care about.

Getting a notification about now being in the register of people who are part of the reserve made me pause for a moment, given how much more real and immediate war has felt over the last few years.

While my feelings about this are still conflicted, remembering that a lot of my friends are also in the reserve by virtue of being a citizen makes the thought more bearable. After all, it is a shared responsibility.

No more ticking timers! Whether you are waiting to qualify for citizenship or just here on a temporary residence permit, you have this timer ticking in the back of your head: you need to fulfill certain conditions until day X, otherwise you jeopardize your goal.

Not having to count anymore where I spend just how many days comes as a great relief.

A transformational week

When I booked the trip to Budapest, I had no idea about how it would turn out.

Technically, that qualifies the trip as an adventure.

Well, actually that is not true.

I thought adventures were about venturing into the unknown, but the dictionary disagrees: it’s about taking risks 💡

Estonian is a special language

Before I came to the conference, I thought I’d be the dumbest guy in the room.

Which is good, because that means you are in the right room.

As it turned out, there were actually very few people who spoke anything close to 10 languages.

What surprised me the most was that even at an event like this, with some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world when it comes to language learning, two languages held a special place and actually stood out to people:

That was an extra motivation boost to stick with Hungarian now and get it to a decent level 🚀

Out of the 400 or so conference participants, only 5 (!) spoke Estonian.

The reputation of Estonian, even on an event like this, is that it’s a hard language to learn.

I seriously didn’t expect this and well, maybe having mastered Estonian is the biggest achievement in my life.

It sure feels like that in moments like this!

Surround yourself with the right people

It was nice to be in an environment where people regularly quip that “Spanish doesn’t count as a language” and “Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese are the same language”.

It actually opened me up and got me out of my “I need to preserve my Estonian at all costs and other languages are taking away from this” feeling.

In an environment like this, I had no issues with speaking Spanish or Greek or trying to get what people were saying when the conversation switched from Spanish to Italian.

In fact, everybody was exceptionally warm, welcoming, open, smart, adventurous, and a whole lot of other positive adjectives 😊

Some of the people – too many to list them all here – I spent a considerable amount of time with, talking not only about language but also about

• running and scaling a language business,

• why you might want to drink fertilized chicken eggs,

• how to get a book printed on Amazon,

• and Swedish real estate.

Confidence…appeared?

This is the question nobody asked at the event – thank god!

However, outside of Polyglot events, I get this question a lot and I used to answer it with: “Three - German, English, Estonian”

After this week, I feel confident enough to say: 6.

Dropping in and out of conversations in Hungarian, Greek, and Spanish – as well as getting the gist of conversations in Italian – made me realize that maybe, just maybe, I don’t suck completely at these languages and it’s okay to say I speak them.

Again, this is just a discovery that the open environment at the conference produced.

Languages stopped existing in the past-oriented context in which they were acquired:

• Greek in Greece where I suffered a lot,

• Spanish in school where I didn’t care about it at all,

• Hungarian only on paper, at home, out of curiosity

and started existing in a future-oriented context of actually using them:

• Greek, as a more rare, “secret” language, allowed me to connect on another level with some people at the conference,

• Spanish allowing me to participate in more non-English conversations,

• Hungarian brightening peoples’ days in Budapest, because it’s so rare that somebody is actually learning it to a decent level.

Where next

This week was so amazing that I want to do it again!

The Polyglot Gathering in Prague in May is the earliest chance for that ⏳

More urgently, I need to:

• go to 🇸🇪 Stockholm and connect a bunch of Hungarian speakers and practice Hungarian,

• go to 🇩🇪 Germany as a tourist to visit at two new friends, my mother, and one old friend, talking business and maybe teaching Estonian 🤞

• go back to 🇭🇺 Budapest and also visit Szeged for more new friends and more Hungarian practice (and also for taking the Hungarian exam!)

Vacation Day 1/3

So I actually took a few days off work and decided to have an actual vacation doing only what I feel like:

• sleeping long,

• wandering around aimlessly,

• chatting up strangers,

• getting a haircut

• talking to my psychologist

• sleeping (again)

• writing this article

Funnily enough, “walking around aimlessly” got me – I kid you not – back to the café I visited on Monday.

Today was a better day for approaching strangers!

What I love the most: no small talk!

Tomorrow I’ll go back to Madal and speak to more people, seems like the cool crowd is hanging out there.

Impressions from wandering around

So many monuments, designed to make you feel small

I believe it is no accident that there are a lot of majestic, colossal, imposing buildings all around the center, projecting the splendor of the forgotten empire.

So many of the buildings here are incredibly ornate, their facades encrusted with countless little details.

You can’t help but feel small and insignificant next to them.

Just like you were supposed to feel in 1900.

Budapest has its own Telliskivi, but it’s a street

Pozsonyi út appears to be Budapest’s Telliskivi area with boutique cafés, laptop hipsters, and an artsy vibe.

Will definitely come back!

Haircut adventures

Finding a barbershop that was open turned out to be surprisingly difficult because the information on Google Maps wasn’t terribly accurate.

In the end, I walked into a random barber shop that advertised the service in the following languages: English, Arabic, and Turkish.

The barber was very nice, but his English was not.

Still, we managed to communicate and he was very kind.

What shocked me was that he has 23 years of experience.

At the age of 33.

He started working when he was 10 years old 🤯

I was happy to hear that he’s enjoying life in Budapest and Hungary is treating him well.

Bolt is changing lives

A Bolt taxi got me back home from the Telliskivi-like area and the taxi driver was the coolest I’ve seen in a long time:

He looked basically like this and is heavily into calisthenics, just like Alex Lorenz in the picture above.

When I asked him about his earnings, he was very pleased to report that he’s making a decent living driving a Bolt!

In fact, he seems to have a really chill life: driving taxis most of the days, resting a bit, and then training body and mind.

He takes weekends off to spend time with his family and other than that is really deep into the biohacking rabbit hole:

• he’s on a keto diet,

• going to a Wim Hof workshop next weekend,

• exercising a lot using just calisthenics,

• and is working on getting his English to a level where he can effortlessly use it

Literally, his only problem appeared to be that he can’t speak English and only understands it when it’s spoken slowly.

I actually felt really proud about working at Bolt and contributing to his freedom 🚀

Managing the whole conversation in Hungarian was the 🍒 on top.

Off to more adventures

Signing off for today, some of the polyglots attending the conference have already arrived and are hanging out just around the corner, so time to pop by and say hello!

Talking to people

After sorting out my emotional issues yesterday, I felt energized and decided to take a walk and find people to talk to.

Three rounds around the block later Szimpla Kert still seemed like the best hunting ground.

The two bouncers seemed like they had interesting stories to share, but…not with me.

We’re actually busy, go talk to people inside. There are a lot of people.

Aaah, rejection!

A testament to my mediocre skill level at reading body language 😄

Ultimately, I found Marcos from Argentina, who was alone at a table.

As part of my Hungarian practice, I started translating this article about the upcoming presidential elections in Argentina.

And turned out to be super relevant so Marcos and I hit it off and started talking politics and history within 5 minutes of getting to know each other.

Sweet!

For those of you who know Hungarian (or how to use Google Translate), said article was actually full of colorful expressions like:

• faszszopó

• bozontos hajú

• láncfűrészt lóbáló

Basic needs…still not met

The first roll is the last one and you don’t know whether it’s enough.

Exciting times!

100% made me spend my lunch break on going to the supermarket again.

Wanting to make scrambled eggs, I realized that I didn’t buy oil and only had a regular stainless steel pan 😬

At least cheese consists mostly of fat, so I slowly melted the cheese first and everything turned out just fine in the end.

For now, I feel like I’m done “figuring things out” 💪

Free Sales Training

I thought I was good at approaching strangers, but apparently only in Tallinn :D

I managed to get another rejection from strangers today, but this time it was not misreading body language, but…a crappy sales pitch.

Definitely something to work on in the next couple of days.

Today’s lesson is that:

I’m just looking for people to talk to

is literally the worst value proposition you can think of.

Now that I tested the worst one and know that is actually the worst, I can use my brain and be a bit more creative with opening lines to get people to talk :)

Hungarian is better German

One of today’s highlights was meeting a former colleague of mine from my time at Toptal, Attila.

Toptal being a 100% remote company, we only briefly met in Greece over a year ago so this was a welcome reunion.

Additionally, I managed to get my 30 minutes of conversation in Hungarian in - one of the weekly goals.

The parallels between Hungarian and German are striking - there are so many shared ideas and expressions, that it is hard to overlook:

• ki-zár is literally aus-schließen (come to think of it, that is also what English ex-clude means 🤔)

• ki-kép-zés is the same idea as the German Aus-bild-dung

• fel-ad is German auf-geben - not only in the sense of giving up but also in the sense of sending a letter or package

And so many other examples that there is no point in listing them here.

Unlike German however, Hungarian is almost perfectly regular, logical, and has predictable pronunciation.

In the conversation with Attila it also became clear that Hungarian is actually a super useful language, for the same reason that Estonian is useful - it allows you to establish quality connections with people in a very short amount of time.

That’s how Attila and I started talking in the first place at Toptal and tomorrow I’m meeting a Hungarian who’s based in Tallinn. Again, we just connected through language and now we’re meeting up in Budapest 🚀

5 minutes late to the parade commemorating the 1956 revolution.

About which I learned after seeing the last few horsemen leaving my field of view as I approached Budapest’s Freedom Square.

First impressions

It has been 4 years since I last visited Budapest and honestly, in October it is very nice here: it feels like an extended Estonian summer!

Both Stockholm and Budapest are former imperial capitals and of comparable size with 1+ million inhabitants.

The vibe is completely different though – Budapest is way more grandiose, dirtier, more hectic, and also more…lively compared to Stockholm.

Also, it is nice to hear and see a reasonable language everywhere, not fake-German-English (or is German fake-Swedish? 🤔)

When I booked my accommodation, I was looking for a place within walking distance of the conference venue on Friday and I somehow managed to book myself straight into the 24/7 party area full of partying tourists 😅

A new experience for sure and luckily only a temporary one.

Share Everyday Adventures

Feelings

It’s the third time this year that I have gone through the same stages of emotions when traveling:

At first, I’m physically tired from travel, which leads me to focus on fulfilling basic needs like sleep and food first.

In the course of fulfilling these needs, I realize how much I depended on my existing routines in daily life and start to feel lost: too many choices, it’s hard to make the right diet choices, and generally everything feels difficult.

For example, I didn’t bring razor blades to this trip, because they rarely make it through airport security and are cheap to buy on the spot. I failed to find any in the shops yesterday evening and only today I got the idea to ask the shopkeeper because apparently razorblades (yes, even 1 EUR throwaway razors) are often stolen.

Anyhow, being unshaven for a day just adds to the “basic needs not met” feeling, which sets off a downward spiral.

…and then I slept and felt bad for it

After work today I took an extended nap and managed to feel bad about it.

I’m in Budapest, I shouldn’t be napping, I should be out exploring and talking to people!

In my half-sleep I had all kinds of fun feelings like “what am I doing here”, “I would like to spend time with my friends now”, etc.

It is usually when I hit this point that I get the one thought that puts me back on track.

What do you enjoy? Do that!

So, after feeling off and demotivated the whole day, I finally reached the point where this feels worse than taking charge of my situation here and decided to do just that: do the things I enjoy!

Step one: writing!

Which is why are you reading these words now :)

I didn’t plan on writing about my trip, but knowing that I’m not the only one who is reading my thoughts pushes me to generate new ones.

By having new experiences!