"Is is that hard to make us look cool?" Short answer – yes. Only you can do that. The reason is that your brand is not what you say you are, but what everybody else says you are. Sure, I can probably make you look cool for a night or two, but it's going to cost you way more than what it's worth and then you'll be back at square one.

What I've learned over the years is that a good brand is a philosophy. A good culture is when people are aligned with this philosophy. When that happens, all your actions will point in the same direction and people will start taking note. Now when someone mentions you, other people will chiming in because they've noticed the same thing and people love finding alignment. They will start reinforcing each other's thoughts about you and you will come across as authentic and true.

You now look cool.

Thank you for stopping by. If you're looking to increase the effectiveness and value of your brand, I recommend heading over to Honesty's website. Here you'll find more about me and things I do outside of branding, including writing, movement training, music, philosophy, and one of my favorite projects: The Alien Embassy-community.

Work

Despite my background as an engineer (or in many ways thanks to it), I ended up developing brands for more than 50 industry-leading companies over two decades, as well as advising political leaders, corporate executives, and startup founders on business- and product development, creative leadership, branding, and communications.

In 2009 I founded Honesty, my brand consultancy that quickly became Sweden's most profitable, and was awarded many of the industry's finest honors, including the Titanium Prize, Golden Egg, and 100-W Award for long term effective brand development.

Today I have the luxury of being able to work in a much more free way. I take on 3-4 client projects per year and the scope is typically much broader than before, including management, product development, coaching- and advisory roles, AI-workflows, investing, and much more. I limit myself to these client projects to have time to create my own projects, both in business and entrepreneurship and in purely creative art- and community projects, including the Alien Embassy-project that I may disclose a bit more about in the future.

The early days of Honesty is perhaps best known for the rebranding and massive growth of the youth mobile brand Halebop from 2010-2016, for which we were awarded the Titanium Prize for best long-term brand building and the Golden Egg Award for the film concept.

In the phase of Honesty, post buying out my original partners, our most famous project is arguably the rebranding of LYKO and the creation of the "Your Beauty Playground"-concept. I still get a lot of questions about LYKO's rebranding and growth from 2018 to 2022, as the effectiveness numbers were extraordinary and the strategy unorthodox for the category. LYKO's "Your Beauty Playground" concept has a special place in my professional heart, and you can read more about it on the Honesty website. This project culminated in LYKO acquiring Honesty's production capabilities and Södermalm-based studio in 2022.

Leveling The Playing Field for Small Businesses

While creating breakthrough brands for big corporations remains rewarding, I'm investing in ways to help smaller companies build their brands in an accessible and affordable way. The goal is to provide tools that would typically require large enterprise budgets and do my part to level the playing field.

Philosophy

My interest in philosophy is quite practical. Much of it is centered around developing useful "software for the mind"–ways of thinking that enable me to live a better life.

...which begs the question, "What is a better life?" You can read more about that and other topics in the Philosophy section.

Health, Movement, and "Cat Training"

Being able to move well is a more significant part of my professional output and overall quality of life than I first gave it credit for. I decided that I wanted to move like a cat when I was 60 and started exploring yoga, movement, animal flow, TA, pilates, acrobatics, breathwork, and meditation. All combined, I refer to it as "Cat Training," for lack of a better term (plus it keeps my eyes on the prize). I practice daily and do small classes, mainly for Honesty clients.

I'm not big on watching sports, but I like playing them. I've been all over the place with soccer, basketball, ice hockey, judo, wing chun, BJJ, wakeboarding, and even baseball for a short while. The ones where I really got in deep were basketball and wakeboarding. And I love skiing.

Quitting Alcohol for Fun and Profit

I stopped drinking alcohol by mistake in June of 2022. My doctor said something about that I should not combine a medicine I took with alcohol, and when I realized it was not THAT serious, I had already quit for a couple of months and felt something very strange. I felt 20 years younger. I literally felt like I had been shot up with some magical potion, and it turned out that I had – testosterone. 

Quitting alcohol doubled my testosterone levels over four months (and then doubled again another year later). In year one of zero alcohol, I felt twenty years younger physically (you can read more about it in a separate article if you're interested). The following year, my mind started feeling faster, more creative, and easier to control. In the third year, all emotions became more colorful. The price I thought I would have to pay for this zero-alcohol life in terms of having less fun turned out to be a dividend payout instead. I've never had more fun partying and dancing than now.

Initially, I felt somewhat alone and estranged, but since then, many of my friends and girlfriend have followed suit with similar results. I get a lot of questions about this and will try to answer some of them in the Quitting Alcohol for Fun and Profit post.

Ice Bathing

What started as a stupid meme where I posted myself jumping into an icy lake on Instagram became a steady habit of hundreds of ice baths. While I'm sure there are physical benefits in these icey dips, the mental training is where I've found a treasure chest of value. It's a daily experiment in stoic philosophy where you learn to separate nerve signals from their interpretation. When you learn to control what they mean, many other aspects of life, especially stress-related ones, are also suddenly controllable. I've shared hundreds of these swims and many of my thoughts around them on Instagram and will probably write a bit about it here, too.

Photography

I became interested in photography in my mid-teens. There was something about being able to share with someone how I saw them. My first professional assignment was for the school newspaper when I attended high school in Miami. Or, well, at least they paid for film and development. I've since shot hundreds of thousands of pictures, both privately and professionally. 

Tech and Gear

Technology and gear have always been an obsession of mine. I can't decide if it's a pathological obsession or true love. I can get lost in reviews of things I neither need nor will ever buy, just out of pure fascination. In some ways, I feel that it's as useless as porn is to procreation, but if you ever have a question about the best light, lens, or coffee maker, drop me a note, and I may very well have hours of research on it under my belt. Figuratively speaking.

Boats, Sailing, and the Archipelago

The sea has always inspired me. I've been sailing since I was a kid, competed in wakeboarding in my late teens, and picked up surfing around the same time. Sailing through the archipelago is one of my favorite things to do. Being on the water reminds me that there is a point of balance where you have optimal use of the wind. It's not too relaxed, not to strict, there is a point in between. It ties nicely into how we navigate chaos and control our daily lives.

I've always said I'll captain a garbage collection boat in the archipelago when I retire. To that end, I got my Deck Officer Class VIII certificate a few years back. Perhaps I'll name my boat M/S Honesty.

Academic Achievements

I hold a Master of Science in Media Technology and Engineering from Linköping Institute of Technology. I studied business at Lund University (one year at triple speed, but mainly for the infamous student party life in Lund), philosophy at Stockholm University, and communication at Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm. While academic achievement may be a poor proxy for wisdom, it did provide solid scaffolding for pursuing it.

Monkey Brain vs. Man Brain

The brain may be complex, but a helpful simplification can be to think of it as two brains: the old monkey brain and the new human brain.

The brain evolved from the back and forward. On a good day, you can think of it as the monkey brain in the back seat and the human brain in the driver's seat.

The monkey brain wants safety, sugar, sex, resources, recognition, and status. The human brain wants meaning. So, what feels meaningful to the human brain?

Entropy

Perhaps a good start to figuring out the meaning of life is to figure out what life is. To do that, we first need to talk about entropy. We're going to use this concept a bit here, so bear with me:

Entropy is a measure of disorder and randomness. The second law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (which the universe may or may not be), entropy tends to increase over time, leading to the concept of the universe's "heat death," where all energy is evenly distributed and no more work can be done.

At least since the Big Bang, the universe seems to naturally move towards higher entropy, so you could say that the universe gradually decays into disorder and randomness. It is much like your room that never magically cleans itself but instead seems to randomize itself or a swimming pool where body-tempered... water... slowly gets evenly dispersed in the pool... while I quickly get out of it... if given due warning... sorry, where was I?

Anyway, that's entropy. So, moving a system in the opposite direction, towards lower entropy, can be done but requires energy, as in cleaning the room, or building a civilization, both of which can be a pain in the ass to do but generally seem to lead to meaningful outcomes, such as a happy partner in the former case or the current state of humanity in the latter.

Entropy can also be applied to information theory, where you can define information content in an event as the inverse of the probability of said event. An example would be me asking you to find the tipsy man in the black suit at the tail end of a lawyer's party. This individual could be challenging to single out as the probability of a participant displaying those specific characteristics is significant. Pardon the prejudice.

On the other hand, if I did ask you to find the mushroomed-out raver-girl in the burner outfit at the same lawyer party, there would be little doubt who I mean. Low probability gives high information content.

To Live is To Move Towards Lower Entropy

So, the universe moves towards higher entropy, but what about life? On an individual scale, you are born quite basic, relatively speaking, compared to where you are at the peak of your life when you've gotten your Ph.D., learned to negotiate babysitting with your spouse, and mastered the art of paddle. You move towards higher complexity, more sophistication, more order, and higher information content – in other words, you move towards lower entropy.

In everyday language, we say that we evolve or grow. At some point in life, you reach an evolutionary peak and start to degrade towards lower sophistication, less order, and less information. I sometimes use a recent American politician here as an example, but let's stay off the politics for now.

Eventually, after becoming like that politician, you die, and your remaining meat vehicle decays further into essential elements and returns to the universe.

There is No Such Thing as Life, Only Living

We could say that the word "life" is not particularly good, as it's a noun. Life doesn't exist in the noun form. Life is a verb, something you do, a process, a vector with a speed and a direction towards evolution and lower entropy until it reaches its inflection point and starts its descent in the opposite direction towards higher entropy and death.

The Meaning of Life, in One Word or Three

If I were to describe life in one word, it would be growth. Or expressed in verb form: Living is to grow.

I have two more words for you to describe living. You could say that they are subcategories of growing, but valuable nonetheless:

Sometimes, your growth spawns creations that can leave your physical body – like an idea, a book, a tool, a song, or a painting. Those are still part of your growth, but have a specific word to describe it: creations. And this is the second part of the meaning of life – to create.

A single individual has limits to what they can create alone. Creating new individuals would be one example (takes two of us ❤️), but skyscrapers, computers, airplanes, or cities would be others. And there is only one aspect of that co-creation that you have agency over: what you give. So this is the third and final part of the meaning of life – to give.

And here we are, with a complete description of the meaning of life:

To grow, to create, and to give.

When you engage in these processes, life feels meaningful.

It also works on different scales, like a fractal, where life for the individual, the couple, the village, the city, the country, the planet, and most likely, the universe is alive, or more precisely, becomes more alive when it does those three things. You could argue that unless you become more alive, you are dying. There is no equilibrium of life.

In other words, when you stop growing, you start dying.

The Battle Between Monkey and Man

Does all this sound obvious to you? Good. Then you're listening to your human brain. Because your monkey brain feels otherwise. Evolution is almost always found in the direction of hardship, challenge, and pain. (Pain, by the way, is separate from suffering, which is an interpretation of pain. You can choose an alternate interpretation). Your monkey brain doesn't like when you take that path. You can think of it like a compass where meaning can be found due north, towards hardship, and monkey pleasures can be found towards the warm and cozy south.

Hide Your Money From the Monkey

But before you say, "Hey! What's wrong with some cocktails and beach weather!" let me offer you this perspective:

Have we not all seen examples of people becoming super successful only to take advice from their monkey minds on what to do with their success? How about going to the Riviera, getting on an expensive yacht, drinking Champagne, doing coke with an army of gorgeous ladies (sorry for the prejudice again, but gender equality hasn't quite reached the monkies yet), and just overall taking part in limitless consumption. Suddenly, you don't evolve, don't create, or give, and life eventually starts to feel devoid of meaning. When your meters run too low on these metrics, the monkey tries to fill that hole with more consumption, and one day, you die from an overdose of speed or a handful of sleeping pills. Dark. I know. Sorry.

Child stars are, by the way, a sad but excellent example of this. In happiness research, they are often cited as the most unhappy cohort of people. Think about it: How easy is it to evolve from being a super celebrity at age 12?

It's fine to indulge occasionally, but overall, your quality of life over time depends on starving the monkey and feeding the man.

Starve the Monkey and Feed The Man

Starving the monkey and feeding the man is something you can train. The best way I've found so far is ice bathing. Your monkey certainly doesn't want to get in that cold water.

And here is where the analogy from the beginning of this text makes its comeback. Luckily, the monkey was in the back seat, right? It will do everything in its power to convince you otherwise, but it depends on using your fantasy to grab the wheel. It's dependent on you fantasizing about how cold the water will be in the future to stop you. The antidote to this is to be present in the now because you can't be in the now and fantasize about the future simultaneously.

The concept of pain versus suffering also returns here because the electrical signals from your nerve endings signaling cold must be interpreted to mean something to you, specifically, suffering. The same thing here: if you concentrate on the signal, you can't also concentrate on the interpretation. Again, the secret is to be focused on the present. This is counterintuitive to most people I've talked to, as they try to distract themselves when going in the water. Still, that distraction is precisely the crack the monkey needs to make its way into your consciousness, make you afraid, make you panic, and make you suffer.

I will write a separate chapter on ice bathing, but it is surprisingly relevant to the meaning of life, is it not?

Our mind is basically a meat computer. Just like its silicon counterpart, it runs software in different layers of abstraction. There are lower-level languages that are further away from our everyday conceptual human understanding and higher-level languages where we can understand the code more readily, even without a PhD in Neuroscience.

Code that we run without actively choosing to do so seem to us like things "we are", since it just runs, without you deciding for it to do so. The meat computer takes input from events within us and the world around us and triggers output responses. In the lower levels of code we call it the autonomic nervous system but in the higher levels we call them habits. But is it really things "we are"? Isn't it really things that "we do"? Are we really a noun at all? Aren't we really a process? A verb?

If this is the case, you can still treat aspects of you that are helpful as things that you are, codebase that you don't mess with. "I am a person who works out every morning" would be an example of that. Other aspects that are not helpful on the other hand, you can stop looking at as something you are and start looking at like a routine or habit that you can and should rewrite. "I'm just a realist" is something you sometimes hear people say to rationalize a negative outlook on life, but if that gets you into depression or sadness you can treat is as a habit and put that code up for review.

We can't simply rewrite our minds' code on a keyboard, but we can create ideas, philosophies, stories, and ways of thinking and then consciously run them enough times to train our minds to change their code, routines, and habits – thus changing what we do unconsciously, thus changing who "we are". Interestingly, that is kind of where silicon programming is heading as well with us training software systems rather than writing them.

I think of these ideas, philosophies, and stories as apps for the mind that you can install and run to improve your life. Whenever I find one that works for me, I'll try to write it down and post it here so you can try it out. Mileage may vary, but if you find anything that works for you, let me know.

I quit alcohol by mistake in June of 2022. My doctor said something about not mixing my new ADHD medication with alcohol. By the time I realized it wasn't that serious, I had already been off the muggle juice for two months and was feeling something strange—I felt 20 years younger. It was like I'd been injected with some magic potion, and that potion turned out to be testosterone. Quitting alcohol doubled my testosterone levels over four months, and then doubled them again the next year. Declining testosterone is a marker of aging for men, so alcohol was literally an inverted fountain of youth.

Year One: The Physical Time Machine

In the first year without alcohol, I physically felt twenty years younger. My body fat dropped from 12% to 6.5%, and my strength increased. My knees, which had been crackling and hurting for at least a decade following a career in basketball and wakeboarding, felt perfect again. Even my gut felt like it was living its best life. Turns out that what I thought to be an insignificant drinking habit had a significant effect on my testosterone—while it may be a one-subject study, alcohol was a potent poison for this one subject.

I initially worried about missing out on a lot of fun, but the opposite happened. I had more energy to party, I could dance until morning without gassing out, and I felt more attractive—because, honestly, I was. Alcohol dulls everything: looks, energy, and emotions.

Year Two: Increased Processing Power

By year two, the benefits went to my head. In a good way. My thoughts felt sharper, more dynamic, and more precise. I didn't feel any of these effects the first year, so I can only guess that the brain needed some time to repair from years of being poisoned.

Year Three: Ecstasy Without the Pill

There is also something going on with how I experience emotions. You could say they feel more vivid. Did I unlock some extra serotonin reserves or something? During a Monolink concert in Stockholm I could feel the hair on my arms stand on end. Granted it was a perfect storm of a concert i every way, but there was some kind of high going on here that was kicked off by the perfect night, the music, and the vibe alone. I can remember feeling similar waves of emotion in my teens, but perhaps it was not age numbing my emotions later in life, but what I was drinking.

Dating Without Alcohol

I had recently separated when I gave up the booze, so dating had just returned to my life. How would that work without alcohol? It turns out it was more fun than ever. There was no poor judgment, no regrets, and infinitely better conversations. I also attracted a different kind of people. When you are more awake, attractive, and intelligent, you attract people who are, you guessed it, more awake, attractive, and intelligent.

Driving Without Alcohol

With alcohol off the table, driving was suddenly back on. As going to zero was never a financial decision for me, I figured I could redirect the booze budget to some new wheels instead. I bought a Tesla Model X Plaid to celebrate this new chapter–a 6-seat party bus doing 0-60 in under 3 seconds. Much more fun! Driving to parties added a new dimension of freedom. No taxis, no waiting—just spontaneity, music blasting, and a comfortable "green room" whenever I needed a break, a costume change, or a powernap.

Healthier, Happier, Better

Quitting alcohol wasn't planned, but the benefits were undeniable. The health perks are obvious—increased testosterone, more strength, better knees, and a happy gut. But beyond that, life just got better. There was no sacrifice; only gains—more energy, more fun, more authenticity.

I also felt I'd been lied to throughout my life about the effects of alcohol. It isn't at all as harmless as we'd like to think. A big study published in The Lancet ranked alcohol as the most harmful drug when societal impact is factored in. Remove societal harm and alcohol drops to fourth place, after crack, meth, and heroin(!). When we look at the bigger picture, it's clear that alcohol's cultural standing is way out of sync with the reality of its toxicity.

It Zero for You?

For anyone considering a change, life without alcohol isn't just possible; it's amazing. It's not a trade-off between health and fun. It's a boost to both. No regrets, just a clearer mind, a stronger body, and more colorful experiences. The price I thought I'd pay for sobriety—less fun—turned out to be exactly the opposite. I've never had more fun, and I've never felt more alive.

People often ask me how I learned how to type so fast. Well, the answer is in this photo. I type thousands of characters every day on a keyboard with all black keys. Initially, it's about forcing yourself to learn where the characters are located, but once you have that down, it's about learning not to second-guess yourself. If there is nothing to look down on, you eventually learn not to even think about looking down. That's when you start trusting your instincts, and that's when you get really fast.

I think there is a bigger lesson here too. Comforts dull us down and make us slower, weaker, more tired, and less agile. Challenges sharpen our game. Only use the ladder to get out of the water if you drown otherwise. Climb up using your arm strength, or you'll eventually lose it. Take the stairs and not the elevator. Hell, climb on the outside of the stairs if you can. 

Let the compass of your mind always point due north toward the hard, the cold, and the challenging, and you'll keep growing and improving. Enjoy the struggle or suffer the decline. Isn't it strange to pay a fortune for a gym membership only to marshmallow yourself through the rest of your life?

...yet many people and brands communicate to the “most people who simply don’t give a damn” by playing it safe. They think that they’re avoiding risk by not angering anyone, forgetting that then no one will love them either, forgetting that passing by unnoticed is the ultimate crime in marketing.

People like Charles, who has consistently touched people's emotions over many decades, and continues to do so long after his death, are the people whom we should look to for inspiration. Be gritty, be dirty, be risky, be ugly, be chocking. Be amazing if you can be. Just make sure you are something worth giving a damn about for someone.

There is a famous quote by the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus that goes like this:

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…” — Epictetus, Discourses, 2.5.4–5

So, the chief task of life is to figure out what you can control and what you cannot, and only spend time and energy on what you can control. Worrying about things outside of your control gives you nothing in return and is a recipe for stress and anxiety. It’s pretty obvious when you think about it.

What is not as obvious at first glance is what this means for relationships – romantic or otherwise: That the only thing you actually have control over in a relationship is what you give into the relationship. Yet, we tend to focus a lot on what we want to get from our relationships – what the other person should do for you.

Yes, I do realize the main objection to this is that there will be times when people take advantage of you and won’t give back; and yes, I do realize that this can become unsustainable in draining your time and resources, but perhaps this is not a signal to stop giving, but a signal to reconsider the relationship. This may sound a little harsh, but I do think that you ultimately want to be in relationships where you become the best version of yourself, providing value at the edge of your ability. And where the people you choose to keep around you do the same.