I optimized my life. It only came alive once I stopped.

I grew up in Weilheim, in Upper Bavaria, between mountains and lakes. From there it was basketball, all the way to NCAA Division I at Boston University. Then psychology, two master's degrees in Paris, and years in an industry where running yourself into the ground counts as proof you care.

It really started much earlier. I was five. The ball hung in the air, and for a second everything stopped. Swish. I don't remember my shoes or the weather. I remember that sound, and one thought: again.

In 2012 I came to Berlin with the idea of offering lab diagnostics by post. Not long after, the magazine brand eins ran a piece on me under the headline „Der Körperoptimierer“, the body optimizer. After that the phone didn't stop ringing. That's roughly where the German biohacking scene started.

Later came the point where my body stopped playing along. I responded the way a self-optimizer responds: tracked my sleep, analyzed my blood work, trained with neurofeedback that cost about as much as a trip around the world. The harder I chased flow, the less often it showed up.

Out of that grew Flowgrade, and from 2017 the flowFEST, by now the largest festival for flow, health and consciousness in the German-speaking world. Three books followed, and the Flowgrade Show. I'm still a biohacker at heart. But biohacking should never become the point. It's the method, not the goal.

One question has stayed with me ever since: what conditions make people disappear into their work in the best sense. The answer is in my third book, and it looks nothing like what I expected.

These days I live in Munich, an hour from where I started out, and I work in three places: on stages, in retreats, and with teams that are serious about how their people actually feel.

How far that can go is best told by a story from my first book. The neurosurgeon Jack Kruse dared me to ski in my underwear, for the sunlight above 1,500 meters and the cold that comes with it. The next morning I went. Sorry, Mom.