A blank canvas. And how to fill it with colors.

This page is a blank canvas. That is the exciting part about writing: The empty piece of paper. The empty word file. The empty screen.

A blank canvas. Just the blinking of the cursor. Hemingway once said: There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. As always — Hemingway was right.

Every new page is a new opportunity. To tell a story. To tell your story. To tell somebody else’s story. The story of your company, your startup.

And that is true for me as well. Writing always was my life. I’ve spent years doing nothing else than writing. Okay — I also travelled. And I built a few companies.

But ultimately — what I did always boiled down to writing. Posts. Copy. Research. Communication. Always writing, always a new adventure, always a new world.

Where I am today.

That is what lead me here. I am writing about simple things: My journey. Both my personal journey and my professional one. Always transcending borders, one way or the other. And I am among the lucky few: My life has been great so far and I aspire for it to be even greater tomorrow. I have been blessed: I get to decide where I live, how I live, with whom I work, and what I work on.

So I turned passion and experience into business. The experiences I have made among my journey shape what I am building today: SHÄP. A platform to enable people to live better lives. To live by a different set of rules than many thought possible. We want to enable people to live a life of financial freedom — a life of hedonism, but of sustainable hedonism.

Now where does all this come from?
From my own experience of what it means to be broke? Yes.
From my own experience of finally making it? Yes.
From my own experience of what friendship and community mean? Yes.
From seeing our society struggle and getting divided? Yes.
From seeing that there are still places on this planet, where things work? Yes.

A new beginning. A new way of doing things.

Ultimately, The Bahamas changed my life. — And for the better. Come for the beaches, stay for the people. There is no place on earth where this is more true. In a small community of just a few thousand beautiful individuals over a 100 mile stretch of (is)land, I learned what community actually means. What mutual trust actual means. What experiences mean. What sharing means. What openness means. And how little — cold, hard cash actually means.

This is, where I feel reborn every day.
This is, where the idea behind SHÄP was born.

See, life on an island tends to be simple — if you are open to it. There is no food delivery and there is no Amazon. It can be hard to get what you need — if you rely on global corporations on conglomerates. And money is tight, for many.

But the ultimate truth is: While many people here are poor in cash, they are rich in experience and in friendship. They are rich in trust and rich in joy. That matters more.

So how do things work? By sharing. There is so little we need to own — and so much we need to use. This is a discrepancy we see in most countries all over the world: Garages and storage units full of stuff we don’t need. And our neighbors’ garages are full of the same stuff — that they don’t need. Our wallets — they are empty, and so are our neighbors’ wallets.

Friendships. In an unfriendly world?

I came to this beautiful island with only a few suitcases. And the first days and weeks — I wondered: How to make it? There is no Amazon. There is no UPS. There is no … Target, no Publix, no Home Depot, no … you name it, we don’t have it. So how to make it here? It’s gonna be tough, I was decidedly sure.

And it did take a few weeks — and a few new friendships to see: Whatever I need, somebody has it. And somebody is more than willing to share it with me. Most want not more in return than a smile. You’d do the same for me, my friend. And what I learned about myself? Yes — I would. I would do the same for you, my friend — and I will.

I am trying to bring this back to the world. Together with friends — new friends and old friends — we are trying to re-create at least a little bit of this spirit. Not because we want it — but because we are certain that the world needs it.

So this is, what I decided to put on this blank canvas. A journey full of colors and emotions. Join me in conversations about sustainability, a remote life, and freedom. Freedom above everything, always.