What do you find when you spend three days alone in the forest?
I spent three days alone in the forest with no food, no phone, nothing to read and nothing to write. On the first day I rebuilt the school system in my head. On the second day I was on the floor. I came out with three words I then wrote under my emails for years: explore, enjoy, share. It started with a trip. My mother booked the flight to La Palma because she did not want me sleeping outside in the snow. That one trip turned into two years on the road. I wanted to know whether I could manage without knowing anything in advance. Those years were about growth. I went into panic on purpose and into excitement on purpose, and almost treated myself as a cartoon character I could steer and shape. The idea is not mine. It comes from a tradition of indigenous peoples of North America, in which young people go into nature alone for a few days as they become adults. I took it from the outside, without being part of that tradition, and that belongs in the telling. The frame: alone, no phone, nothing to read, nothing to write, no food. Water from a small waterhole and a fire.
Spontaneous Talk: My Life Motto, Lightning Talks Munich
Five minutes, told on stage without preparation. The whole story the way I tell it in public.
Three days, only water and fire
The idea is not mine. It comes from a tradition of indigenous peoples of North America, in which young people go into nature alone for a few days as they become adults. I took it from the outside, without being part of that tradition, and that belongs in the telling. The frame: alone, no phone, nothing to read, nothing to write, no food. Water from a small waterhole and a fire.
Day one and day two
The first day was wonderful, full of ideas. I renewed the teaching system in my head, worked out how it could be built as a system for distributing resources, and solved world hunger along the way. By the evening I had solved everything and went to sleep stressed.
the first day was amazing, I was excited, full of ideas
On the second morning my body did not move. I had slept on rock, maybe that was it. I dragged myself to the water and was too tired to get at it. So I sat on a stone. Someone very tired sits almost the way someone depressed sits: shallow breath, shoulders turned in, head down. I had nothing to do anyway, so I let myself fall into it.
Then the questions came. I called myself a liar. I was connected to nothing, my body was limited and so was my time. I wanted to solve world hunger and be a clown and an astronaut, and I could not do it all at once. Three metres in front of me was a cliff. I looked down and thought about what it would be like to jump. I would dissolve, become part of everything, finally be unlimited. I allowed myself to go into the dark. If thoughts like that visit you, talk to people about them.
The word
Then a question arrived that tipped it, and I still ask it when I am stuck. What is good about the thing you are despairing over? A moment later a single word jumped into my head, big and bright.
one word popped into my mind and it flooded my body
The word was enjoy, and I was back immediately. I thought about my little brother, seven years old, and about my little sister. Children try everything and do not ask beforehand whether it pays off. That is how enjoying works.
The stick and the waterfall
On the way back to the water there was a hole in the rock wall, a pipe that water normally runs through, less than a metre across. You only get in lying flat, crawling. I pushed my walking stick ahead into the hole and crawled after it, over stones, over sand, over rock. It was completely dark and hot. After forty or fifty metres I saw light. On the other side lay a large waterfall.
That is where the third word came. I wanted to tell someone. The tap I had been too tired to reach that morning became a picture of myself: take in what comes from everywhere, let it flow through, enjoy it, pass it on. If we share what we enjoy, one body and one lifetime stop being the end.
- Explore openly. Try things out instead of calculating them in advance.
- Enjoy courageously. Enjoying is a skill, and it takes courage, because it takes the ups and downs with it.
- Share what you enjoy. What you pass on no longer hangs on your time and your body.
What is left of it today
Ten years later I gave a speech in a dream and dictated it as I woke up. It is called Three Keys and names three things: clear values, a north star, and the things you unreasonably want to keep doing yourself. The third key is the word from the forest, only sharper. The north star in the speech is education, rethought from first principles. That is what I already had on day one, in a form nobody could use.
that is my life motto that I'm living right now: explore, enjoy, share
The middle part sits in the school. At Paideia a mentor builds the world, sets a challenge, holds the consequence and does not deliver the solution. The hero story belongs to the child. I got mine because nobody helped me for three days. A child should not need a cliff, and that is where the work is.
Two things I would say differently today. I let myself fall on purpose, as if that were a technique. I would recommend it to nobody and would not set it up that way again. And what worked was the quiet. For three days nothing came in, and that can be arranged harmlessly. From the same summer comes a second find: a deeper purpose, and an exchangeable form for it. That later grew into World Modeling.
The first minutes of a crisis stand in What do you do in the first five minutes when everything falls apart? What an uncomfortable feeling reports stands in What is an uncomfortable feeling trying to tell you? The moment I first stood up for myself stands in When do you stop living someone else's script? What became of the thought from day one stands in How long does an idea need before it becomes a school?
Sources and links
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2026-09-03: Planted from the public talk "Spontaneous Talk: My Life Motto" and an interview from 2016.