How hatred made me sick
1999 I started working for that Bosch subsidiary in Stuttgart. I soon realized that this environment wasn't right for me. However, it was a safe job. So it was like working as a civil servant. However, as I stated previously, I do not like the bastards; I rather hate them! I was now one of them! So my hatred for the Bosch bastards was mirrored, and I hated myself, and that was a kind of dishonesty to myself. As a result of this inner conflict, there occurred some psychological and health issues. The pain in my joints and muscles led to a diagnosis of rheumatic disease.
Then I got a prescription from the doctor, and I headed to a pharmacy. The owner of the pharmacy served me, looked at my face, and glanced at the prescription. He was shocked, so he asked, "Mr. Forster, may I ask you how old you are?" "Yeah, 46," I said. He looked at me and said, "Is it really necessary for you to eat such a shit at your age?" That woke me up! He was living from his earnings from selling the pills, and he had the courage to tell me that I shouldn't take them. I realized something was wrong here. I am very grateful for his honesty and for his courage to tell me that. Because it woke me up, and I started looking for a different solution.
Soon afterward, I attended a seminar where I met Dr. Mario Krause. During the seminar, we had some positive contact with each other, and even after the seminar, he mentored me for a while. Due to my rheumatic disease, I also asked him: "Can you do a test for me to find out what's wrong?" So, he did a blood test, and we realized I had a digestion problem. He treated that, and my symptoms almost disappeared. Well, at least for a year, then they came back! We did another blood test and had similar results. We repeated the same therapy with the same success, and it cleared for another year.
The truth is, I still had this hatred for myself and for civil servants, as well as depression over my unsatisfying marriage as well as living in scarcity. I still had all of that in my mind. So it kept creating the same results over and over again. You see, if you treat the problem on the surface, it fades for a while, then reappears until you've learned from it. In any case, Mario and I are good friends, and we keep meeting once or twice a year. I really appreciate his support and advice. He was basically laying the groundwork for me to understand and cure my health condition.
Healing without medication
So I am very grateful to Mario, whose therapy was to change my diet, and the pharmacist Mr. Steer, for making me aware, that pills to treat the symptoms are no solution. That helped heal my rheumatic disease in the long term. Nowadays, I can move freely. My joints no longer hurt, and I even started running marathons and finished seven or eight of them.
Bean counters, Korintenkacker, Dipfeleschisser, and Bosch
So now, let me tell you a little bit more about civil servants and about the “Korintenkacker”. They even lock up their toilet paper! As I mentioned before, they are like dogs, one can teach them any nonsense. And they will follow: For example, they are not allowed to eat when they are hungry, without explicit permission!
I'll give you some examples in state-owned organizations or in industry. So one of the organizations that are full of “Korintenkacker” is the Industry- und Handelskammer. They keep charging businesses without providing any meaningful service. They are only still there because the legal situation in Germany forces any business to pay for them. Nothing worthwhile can come out of them.
Highwaymen
Another highwayman is the “Gebühreneizugszentale” in Germany. They collect money for the state-owned radio and television stations. There was a sound reason for creating this organization when broadcasting came about. With the new technology, it became possible to broadcast news and music, inform, educate, and entertain society. In those days, the equipment to do this was expensive. It had to be financed somehow to build up the infrastructure. To me, the initial idea of passing legislation requiring the public to pay for radio and television stations sounds like a smart idea. But nowadays, it's so cheap to start and run your own radio station. It probably won't cost more than $100 to set up your own streaming channel and broadcast music over the internet. There are hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of private radio stations that do not get any money from this organization.
Therefore, this organization is very out of date nowadays. They collect money for the state to run an outdated system and broadcast the state’s propaganda. Private radio stations have a very small budget. Their main source of funding is advertising. They broadcast news and other stuff based on what advertisers pay for. The state-owned radio stations, however, are just a combination of advertisements for the government and for the advertisers. Yes, even though they get paid by the “Gebühreneinzugszentrale” they additionally sell broadcasting time for commercials. They represent a mixture of the government's interest and the advertisers. I doubt, that the government's opinion, their news, and their propaganda are closer to the truth than the truth influenced by ads. Neither is better or worse than the other. There's only one difference: state-owned radio stations are expensive, while privately owned stations have a smaller budget and don't waste as much energy. It is an outdated organization, a parasite!
Let me give you a different example involving Nokia. Nokia used to be the world's top mobile phone provider. When the iPhone came out, Nokia kept thinking people would want to use a normal mobile phone just for making phone calls. Nokia didn't realize how much people would value having a toy in their hands and playing around with it. Think about what you do with your phone nowadays. How many hours per day do you hold it in your hand and play with it? How many minutes per day do you spend talking or texting on it? As far as Nokia was concerned, they still thought people just wanted to use a phone to make calls. Nokia produced a smartphone. Do you remember the Nokia Communicator? I bought all those Nokia communicators they had during the product life cycle and loved them. It was a small computer, rather a business tool than a toy! However, Nokia wasn't ready for Apple's plan to turn phones into toys. A few years later, Nokia became bankrupt. A few years later, Microsoft bought Nokia for probably less than 1% of its peak value. Unbelievable, isn't it?
Protectionism’s limited lifecycle
Banks and the banking system are another type of organization that has not grasped modern development. Overall, banks follow the old rules and try to keep things more secure for you. But security is your business, not the business of a bank. As well as that, the government keeps forcing banks to make things more complicated and secure. I think that's ridiculous because it makes everything more complicated and more expensive. Fortunately, nowadays there are fintech companies that provide financial services in a more convenient and easy-to-use way. PayPal, for example, used to be one of them. But PayPal is aging, and it's now a pain in the ass. Better examples are Wise or Revolut, which allows sending money internationally for a relatively small fee compared to what a bank or PayPal transfer costs. Moreover, you get better exchange rates and a shorter time until the transferred money arrives. You can also monitor the entire process from your phone while it is transferred, for which rate it got exchanged, and when the other person received it. Fintechs are doing a much better job than banks with their old-fashioned, outdated systems. Banks don't realize what's going on! A lot of fintech businesses use blockchain technology. That's the silver lining on the horizon, I think. My favorite part about it is that it's going to put a lot of Korintenkackers and highwaymen out of business, by simplifying the processes. We'll get rid of parasites in industry and in state-owned offices.
Well, I assume traditional banks will either have to drastically change their business model in order to serve customers better or end up bankrupt. It is unfortunate that the latter scenario may have some negative consequences for those who have parked their money with them. But perhaps that's the price we have to pay. Or we have to learn how to invest and park our money better than just keeping it in a bank account. Traditional banks do not understand the impact of blockchain. Just like print media did, when the internet came along. The print industry didn't understand what the internet meant to them. They kept printing books and newspapers and tried to protect their business. Many of them were forced out of business. As a result, print media makes only a small fraction of its revenue and turnover compared to the times before the internet. It's a positive development. In other words, it cleaned up an outdated market.
I can also offer the example of German history as a suitable political example for non-sustainable protectionism. The East German communist tried to protect themselves by building a wall around the country. They tried to protect their socialist ideas from capitalism, and that worked fine for 40 years. That was the Cold War era. It was actually a very stable political situation between the East and the West, even if it was not a pleasant one. I grew up in it. For me, it was normal to live in a situation like that. But at the end of the day, all of this protectionism doesn't help. It only works for a while. But what this protectionism does, is it blows up the system, It's like cancer. And sooner or later, all of those systems collapse. That one turned into the German reunification. A revolution in which no blood was shed, unlike other revolutions. Germany can be pretty proud of that because such peaceful revolutions didn't happen too often historically.
Another nice example where people tried to maintain the status quo was in England when they invented the railways. People started protesting against railroads because they feared trains. Doctors at the time even stated that: “If you move someone faster than 30 km/h, they will become insane.” Can you believe it? Yeah, they just wanted to keep their horses!
Recently, I had to make my tax declaration, and my tax consultant has been sending me paper invoices. Basically, he's advertising bookkeeping online and putting receipts into the DATEV software in a digital format. I hate the software, and it looks like shit and runs unbearably slowly. The license for the software is expensive, and for me as his client, it's almost useless. To understand it, you've got to use it every day. You can't operate it if you only look at it once a month. Well, my tax consultant, the bean counter, is also one of these highwaymen. He keeps sending me his invoices on paper! I keep telling him to just email me a copy of the invoice and withdraw the money directly from my account. He says, he needs to do it for legal reasons. I keep asking him how often I need to tell him to withdraw money directly from my account. In his DATEV software, the invoiced amount should be withdrawn at the push of a button on the day it should be paid. Done!
It is a lie for him to call himself a tax consultant because he is just a bean counter! In order to optimize my tax situation, I must come up with ideas myself! He never came up with an idea! Basically, he talks about the risks if we follow my ideas. When it comes to tax savings, he doesn't consult me on what's legally possible. There is always a little bit of a range in how you can declare taxes to put yourself in a better position. My tax consultant never offered a recommendation like that! When I sold my business, I asked him what the right way to do it was. He came up with a simple calculation that would have fit on the edge of a stamp. He charged me about 1,400 Euros for it! Well, that's his salary for his expertise; fair enough. As a tax consultant, I would have expected him to think ahead, and he would have done this before I asked for it. But, hey, isn't that the old highwayman mentality?
Luckily, we can observe some developments in the world nowadays that will make all highwaymen obsolete. So let's think a little bit more about that. Highwaymen and organizations that are based on old rules and traditions manifest old rules. I do not like that at all! Because it stops development, it stops progress, and I can only think this about them:
"Father, forgive them,
for they do not know what they're doing."
Jesus
We talked about the cold war and the eastern and western conflicts in Germany after the Second World War. It reminds me that we have a similar situation right now. Nowadays, the United States is in a trade war with China. They accuse China of stealing their technology and ask their own companies not to do business with the Chinese anymore. But I think the real reason behind it is that they just want to protect the value of the American dollar. They realized the growth rate in Asia, especially in China, but also in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, is much faster than growth in the West, especially in the U.S. I assume this trading war is basically about defending that. Obviously, the Americans have understood what is taking place, and by bringing up this trade war, they are attempting to protect themselves. That will work for a short while. But like the Cold War, it won't last forever. Asia will exceed in growth in the next 10 to 20 years the growth of the western world and will strike back. That's also something I see as having a silver lining in the future.
Did you also make these mistakes?
So let's review together what my most valuable learnings from these insights about the bean counters, Korintenkacker, Dipfeleschisser, and Bosch are:
Well, I had to understand that the rheumatoid pain I experienced was basically self-punishment. As I worked for this civil service organization, Bosch, my hatred of myself was a reflection of how much I hated working like a civil servant. My body was just reflecting my hatred, and the pain I felt was me punishing myself. I didn't understand that back then. It took me 20 years to figure that out.
Another key learning is my hidden agenda for this book, which is to help you understand mechanisms like that better. I wanted to serve you with that because I'm so grateful for what I have learned. I need and want you to do the same. Therefore, I'd appreciate it if you could pick up some of those lessons.
I need to come back to something else. I recently asked my son, "Did they teach you quantum mechanics or quantum physics in school so far?" He replied, "No, but maybe soon." I mean, the knowledge about quantum mechanics and quantum physics is 100 years old, and they're still not taught at school yet. Today, we know, and it is scientifically accepted, that it explains 80 to 95 % of what we experience, which Newtonian physics cannot explain. Despite being aware of quantum mechanics and quantum physics for more than 100 years, schools don't teach them to children. That creates creatures that believe they make decisions logically. Our emotions affect more than 80 percent of our decisions, and only a small part of them are consciously and logically made. This hidden agenda is to make you aware of how much you rely on your emotions and how you can manage them. Then comes the third part, so the first one is the logical part, the second is the emotional part, and the third part is our ego. Sometimes your ego just wants to play. When you give your ego a playground that also supports your emotions and logical thinking, you'll be able to align all three forces. And that's what causes healing.
In the process of making my tax declaration, I thought for a very, very long time about my hatred for civil servants, for the “Korintenkacker”, and for the “Dipfeleschissers”. Well, I experienced some immediate healing. That was a wonderful experience. From the bottom of my heart, I believe this book will help you do the same. And that you start