so often by others that I began to believe it myself.
The system didn’t want me. It chewed me up and spat me out again.
After achieving poor results in my school exit exams, I became a flight attendant and later found myself, via a rather circuitous route, studying psychology. I wanted to find out what was wrong with me. Around the same time—call it coincidence—I ended up with a position in a telemarketing company, which also allowed me to discover some of my strengths. Talking was my thing. The system had never made that clear to me, but I found it out by myself—albeit after more than twenty years.
I became my own guarantor of success, and built up relationships with over a thousand sales partners. Eventually, I became vice president of the company. I had a penthouse with a pool on the roof, a girlfriend who worked as a model, and a custom Mercedes SLK AMG, which I drove through the streets as if I were the king of Wuppertal.
I really thought I had it all. And I did—until I didn’t.
Mistakes were made and, after reaching the pinnacle of success, the empire I’d built collapsed within a week. My monthly salary and sales partners, my savings, my penthouse, my car, and, you guessed it, my girlfriend—everything was gone.
“Was that it?” I asked, sobbing, sitting on the loft bed of my childhood bedroom. Above me hung the David Hasselhoff poster I had taped there as a child.
With newfound modesty, I put myself to work. I slowly got to my feet and embarked on a personal journey to gain happiness and find out what success really means.
I engaged in life-changing conversations with the giants of personality development: Tony Robbins, T. Harv Ekert, Les Brown, and many more. I did my training and put in the hours. I realized that we fight the way we do because we equate success with material goods.
“Moments, not stuff” became my new motto. Changing lives instead of making money became my new mission. Giving back to society instead of taking became my new passion.
From all the adventures, experiences, and conversations I’d had, I derived my personal life principles. As I did so, I found that more and more people approached me and wanted to hear about it. A number of these people encouraged me—or, more accurately, kicked my ass for weeks—until I sat down and finally put Unbox Your Life on paper.
In my everyday life, I am a speaker, not a writer. As such, this book is authored in a rather cheeky, unconventional, and entertaining style. It is as far as you can get from literary perfection. Marcel Reich-Ranicki is probably turning in his grave.
Unbox Your Life is bold. I am very much aware of how polarizing it might be. This book is intended to wake you up, scare you a little, and sensitize you. It is based on fifteen years of personal experience in the field of personality development and behavioral psychology. Under no circumstances does it claim to be technically correct.
I have made it my mission to make as many people as happy and successful as possible. For me, chronic complainers, the people from whom we aim to free ourselves, are those who can never be happy and think the world is out to get them, despite having it relatively good. No matter your culture, skin color or creed: do not let the energy vampire in you gain the upper hand. Help those who are truly in need.
For me, this is what “Unboxing Your Life” really means.
On the plane to Munich, I glanced at the man sitting next to me and a pair of dead eyes looked back at me.
“The aircraft is always late on this route,” he said.
I’d only sat down a minute before, and I’d never seen this man in my life. Yet his words immediately made me want to ring the bell for the stewardess.
You may be wondering why, so let me ask you this: Do you know people for whom everything is hard work? People who look for hair in their soup, who are too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, people who just know that the pharmacy leaflet heralds bad news, people who let small details ruin their day, and seem to exist merely to rain on your parade?
Know what I mean? Great. And do you know what I call these chronic complainers? Well, read and learn.
I pressed the button above my seat, and the stewardess appeared. “What’s wrong?” she asked me.
“There’s an energy vampire sitting next to me,” I said.
I registered the shock on her face. “A what, please?”
“An energy vampire,” I repeated, without missing a beat. A few minutes later, I was assigned a new seat.
Why did I go to this trouble? Well, because otherwise, my seatmate would have used the entire route from Frankfurt to Munich to tell me about how hard life is. That’s exactly what “energy vampires” do—and with great enthusiasm! I’m sure you’ve been in a situation just like mine: when you’ve wished you could just kick someone out of your personal space, so that positive energy could flow again. I’ve found out how best to keep these downers at bay—and you’re welcome to follow my approach in the future.
Let’s go back to the basics for a moment and define what energy vampires actually are. Energy vampires are people who Google diseases out of boredom. Energy vampires live according to the lunar calendar and look to the changing of the weather to explain their health complaints. Energy vampires get upset that they cannot rotate the square in Tetris. When energy vampires talk about “goals,” they’re referring to what they intend to do after work. When they talk about “long-term goals,” they mean the weekend—and then they get upset that the day between Saturday and Sunday is missing.
In and of itself, the fact that these people spend their lives in a constant state of dissatisfaction is not a problem. The problem lies in their most annoying habit: they talk! They pipe up to tell such stories as how their third cousin on their mother’s side stubbed her little toe on the water butt. And why do they do this? Well, it’s nothing more than a greedy ploy for attention and recognition. But here’s the thing about attention: the more you give it to someone or something, the stronger that person or thing becomes.
I like to illustrate this by imagining the movement of a fan. Imagine that you’re fanning air toward a campfire with a piece of cardboard. What’s going to happen? That’s right—the area you’re focusing on will gradually increase in size and strength.
This is exactly how it is with you and the energy vampires in your life. The power of energy vampires grows stronger as they talk to you. What happens next? If you pay too much attention to energy vampires, what becomes of you? You guessed it: you become one yourself! Is that what you want for yourself? Certainly not—and that’s why I wrote this book. I want us—that is, you and me—to live in a world where fewer people complain about the hole in the doughnut. In the end, most people I meet want only one thing: to be happy by achieving their goals.
I don’t have a secret formula for happiness. But for more than fifteen years, I’ve been working on what makes people really successful. And all these successful people have one thing in common: they live a life without…well, you guessed it: without energy vampires!
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