By Ralf, Germany.

For me, curiosity can begin with a smell, a beautifully made object or one clever piece of engineering. Then the picture starts forming in my head — and after that, it can be very difficult to leave the idea alone.

I have really done this. I am standing at the supermarket cashier, I see a recipe in a book and think, Oh, that looks nice. Then I look at the ingredients. I don’t have this. I don’t have that. So I put my shopping in the car, go back into the supermarket and buy the rest.

This is completely normal for me. Perhaps the cashier thinks differently.

When an idea catches me, my brain begins working. I can already see the meal. I can taste it before I have cooked it. There is a film running in my brain and, once this film has started, you should not suddenly change the programme.

Especially with food.

First Comes the Smell.

Very often, curiosity starts with a smell. I remember Lisbon in 1994. My wife and I were walking somewhere away from the beautiful tourist streets when suddenly I had this smell in my nose.

Piri-piri chicken.

I knew the smell because Portuguese people back home made this kind of chicken. My wife was not so sure, but I said, no, I must look. We followed the smell and found a simple restaurant with chickens cooking over charcoal.

That was it.

We sat outside. I ordered piri-piri chicken with French fries and a Portuguese beer. I ate everything. Then the man from the restaurant came and asked if everything was okay.

Yes, everything was okay.

I wanted another chicken.

He looked at me and thought I wanted it to take away.

“No, no. To eat here.”

For this man, I think the world was going down.

We stayed a long time. There was food, beer, a Portuguese spirit and not much desire from me to continue sightseeing. I told my wife we could simply stay in this restaurant for the rest of the holiday. The next morning, friends told us we had been sitting in a bad area of Lisbon.

Maybe.

But the chicken was fantastic.

That is how smell works with me. At a festival, at a harbour event, somewhere in another town, if there is a good smell in my nose, I cannot just walk past and say, Ah, interesting.

I have to try it. Minimum.

Once the Film Starts.

And once the idea is there, I am not very good with a cooling-off period. When somebody tells me, “We are going there and we will eat this,” my brain prepares everything. The table is there. The food is there. The drink is there. I can already see it. If somebody changes the plan shortly before we arrive, I have a problem.

Mit Essen spielt man nicht, und nicht mit mir.

You don’t play with food. And especially not with me.

It sounds very serious. It is serious. But it is also this fantasy in my head. I don’t have a little note saying, Maybe we eat there later. No. The complete film is already running.

It sounds very serious. It is serious. But it is also this fantasy in my head. I don’t have a little note saying, Maybe we eat there later. No. The complete film is already running.

Fifty Knives and Counting.

The same thing happens with objects.

Last week I thought I had about 45 kitchen knives. Then I counted them.

There are 50.

This is important information.

In the beginning, knives are practical. You need a small one for peeling potatoes. You need a long knife for cutting roast beef into thin slices. You need a cook’s knife for herbs, a flexible knife for filleting fish, another one for Spanish ham or gravlax, another for taking meat from the bone.

So there are knives you need.

And then there are the knives you want.

This is where life becomes more interesting.

I like a well-made knife. I like the steel, the shape, the way it sits in the hand, the reason somebody designed it exactly like this. I see a good knife and think, Oh. I need it.

Maybe “need” is not always technically correct.

But we should not become too bureaucratic about these things.

And there is still no Porsche knife.

This is my big problem.

A Pencil Is Not Just a Pencil.

It is the same with pens. The Mayor said, “A pencil is a pencil.”

No.

Wait a moment.

I like good writing instruments. Montblanc, Faber-Castell, beautiful pens and pencils from Switzerland. With a Montblanc, it is fantastic simply to hold it in your hand. There is workmanship in it. Detail. A serial number. It feels like something made to be kept.

For me, writing with a good pen is almost a philosophy. I like when it glides across the paper. I like a broad, soft line. I hate a pen that scratches.

And there is the small pleasure of choosing one. If I am going somewhere, I can think: what do I take today? Orange? Yellow? Faber-Castell? The Swiss one?

Other people perhaps do this with shoes or handbags.

I do it with pens.

That is why usefulness is not the whole story. A normal pen can write. A normal knife can cut. But sometimes I like something simply because it is beautifully made.

I have the same feeling about an old Porsche 911 Targa from around 1972. I like it because it is special and because I could work on it. In my head, it has something of the Montblanc about it.

It has character.

The Table I Didn’t Know I Needed.

Curiosity can attack anywhere. Recently I was at a triathlon with my wife. I was near the place where people received their start numbers and suddenly I saw a table.

Normally, you do not go to a triathlon because you need a table.

But this was a fantastic table.

Aluminium. About three metres long and sixty centimetres wide. You could pull it apart and fold everything together. I looked at it and immediately thought about my outdoor kitchen.

So of course I had to find out where it came from.

I asked one person. She sent me to another. He told me about a supplier near Hamburg.

Now I had the information.

Then I told my wife, “I need this table.”

Ten minutes earlier, there was no table problem in my life.

Then I saw the table.

Now there is a table problem.

Curiosity Is Contagious.

Other people can start this process too. I have a friend who loves tools. If I look inside his tool cupboard, I can become very dangerous. I see one thing and think, Oh, this is good. Then the next thing is good too. We can pull each other upwards towards the newer tool, the better tool, the thing we did not know we needed five minutes earlier.

It happens with barbecue. Somebody gives me meat with a special herb mixture and it tastes fantastic. Immediately I want to know what it is and where it comes from. At one barbecue event, a man had created his own spice. He mentioned there might soon be a problem getting it from the same distributor.

I heard only one important message:

Buy it now.

The Mayor asked whether perhaps there are two Ralfs. One is the spontaneous one who says, “Interesting!” The second is the engineer standing behind him with a clipboard, asking for specifications before anything happens.

No.

There is only the first one.

Sorry.

I Don’t Need Hanoi.

The Mayor tried one last experiment. Suppose I taste one extraordinary Vietnamese dish. How far can food pull me? A restaurant? A cookbook? A cooking class? Or does Ralf eventually stand in Hanoi saying, “I came because of the soup”?

I don’t need Hanoi.

I already had my version of this story with Thai food.

Years ago, I was at a birthday where Thai food had been prepared. There was one dish I wanted to try, and a Thai woman warned me: no, no, this is not for German men.

My wife also told me not to eat it.

Naturally, this did not improve the chances that I would leave it alone.

I said I would only smell it.

Then I tried a little.

For one moment I thought, Where is the problem?

Then there was a bomb in my body.

People were calling for milk.

But this was not the end of my curiosity. It was the beginning.

Afterwards I spoke to the woman who was cooking and said I wanted to come into her kitchen and learn something about Thai food. So one Saturday evening we cooked together.

I did not fly to Thailand. It is too long a flight for me, and I don’t like this.

I went into a kitchen.

That was enough.

The Story Has Already Started.

Maybe this is what following an unexpected idea means for me. I don’t need every idea to become a huge adventure. I need to get closer to it. Smell it. Taste it. Pick it up. Ask where it came from. Find out how it works.

And sometimes, of course, buy the table.

Because once the film is running in my brain, the story has already started.

By Manfred, Germany.

What years of software development taught me about quality, curiosity, ego—and knowing when to try another path.

Imagine installing a software update by asking a robot to chisel the new code into a stone slab.

My first thought is simple: the chisel will break.

It sounds ridiculous, but it reminds me of the early days of software. Before downloads, we sent updates on floppy disks through the post. If an update needed five disks, you could almost guarantee that disk three or four would be unreadable. Then the whole thing had to be sent again.

That is what experience teaches you. The more small parts a process depends on, the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong. Sometimes it is not the grand idea that fails. Sometimes the hammer handle simply comes loose.

The devil is in the detail.

And yet experience creates its own danger. After doing something for long enough, you can become very sure that you know how it should be done.

Sometimes that is exactly when you need to question yourself.

Proper Means More Than Correct.

I trained as an electrician and started my apprenticeship at sixteen. I came out of a protected home environment and suddenly entered a completely different world. I had to learn responsibility, standards and what a proper piece of work actually looked like.

For me, a job is properly done when two things are true. First, it meets the required standards. Second, I am satisfied with it myself.

That second part matters more than people sometimes realise.

Recently, workers opened the pavement outside my property to lay cables. When they closed it again, I watched them pick up each paving stone and look carefully at how it fitted with the next one. They could have thrown the stones back into the hole and left.

They didn’t.

You could see that the result mattered to them.

I think you can often recognise that in somebody’s work even when you know nothing about their profession. You see whether they care.

But caring has a dangerous side too.

When 110 Per Cent Is Enough.

I have a tendency to make things too perfect.

Software makes this particularly easy. You finish something and think, perhaps I could improve this part. Then another idea appears. Then another function. Then a better design.

You want the people using it to say, “Wow, this is fantastic.”

So you keep going.

At some point experience has to apply the brakes. There was a requirement. Have I fulfilled it? Does it work? Am I satisfied?

If yes, stop.

Sometimes 110 per cent has to be enough.

I have learned another version of the same lesson: a finished version 1.0 is better than a half-finished version 2.0.

You can have a thousand ideas for what comes next, but first you need something that works. Use it. Test it. Learn from it. Then improve it.

Otherwise you can keep adding until you have created an enormous block that looks impressive but no longer functions.

Better a small block that works.

I learned that the hard way. Once, I reached a point in a software project where I could no longer understand what I had programmed myself. I had followed one idea into another until the structure had become too complicated.

Once, I reached a point in a software project where I could no longer understand what I had programmed myself.

I threw it away.

Weeks of work went into the bin and I started again from zero.

Software is like building a house. If the foundation is bad, you can keep adding walls, but the house will always wobble.

The foundation has to be right.

Don’t Attack My Baby.

There is another problem when you create something yourself.

It becomes your baby.

Software development is a little like writing a book. You put time into it, thought into it, perhaps even part of yourself into it. Then somebody comes along and says, “I don’t like it.”

My first inner reaction can be rather dramatic.

Who are you to criticise my baby?

You immediately want to defend it. The other person does not understand what you were trying to do. They don’t know how much thought went into it.

Then comes the difficult part.

Maybe they have a point.

Perhaps something could be changed. Perhaps there is another route to the same goal. Perhaps they simply don’t experience your creation in the way you expected.

The art is getting out of defence mode long enough to look again.

That is not easy.

The Fight With Yourself.

A few years ago, I began working with a colleague roughly half my age. Naturally, he had a different style and different approaches. He had also learned things academically that I had learned only through years of experience.

That tested me.

The real question was not whether a younger colleague could have a better idea. Of course he could.

The question was whether I could look at it properly and say, when necessary: yes, this is better than the way I did it.

The biggest fight was mostly with myself.

Experience is valuable, but experience does not only mean that you have seen many successful things. It also means you have seen plenty of things go badly wrong. That can make you cautious.

Sometimes too cautious.

A younger person may simply try something because they do not carry all those old disasters around with them.

The best situation is when both sides bring something useful. Experience says, “Be careful.” Curiosity says, “Have a look.”

I am now working with people much younger than me, and I can still work at the same level. My work is respected.

I take something from that.

Apparently, I haven’t done everything wrong.

But staying at that level means continuing to learn. In software there is no standstill. You go to bed, wake up the next morning, look online and suddenly discover something that makes you think: that is exactly what I was looking for.

You do not have to jump onto every passing train.

But you need enough curiosity to look at the timetable.

Tarte Flambée Changed Something.

Strangely, I am much braver with software than I am with food.

A few years ago, on my way to southern France, the Mayor presented me with a Tarte Flambée for the first time. I looked at it with considerable suspicion.

When it comes to food, I can be very traditional. There is an old German saying: What the farmer doesn’t know, he doesn’t eat.

That can describe me rather well.

But I tried the Tarte Flambée.

And I liked it.

I cannot say that one meal changed my life, but something did shift afterwards. Over the years, I started trying things I would once have rejected immediately.

I even discovered that I like tzatziki.

Earlier I would have said: absolutely not. I don’t want that stuff on my plate.

Then I tried it.

Oh.

Not bad at all.

That is perhaps how curiosity often works. Something unfamiliar becomes easier when there is one familiar piece you can hold onto. Tarte Flambée looks a little like pizza. Fried fish is still fish. There is a bridge from what you already know to something you do not.

You do not suddenly become open to everything.

You just find a doorway.

Then you decide whether to walk through it.

Keep a Way Back.

At the end of our conversation, I was asked what I would tell a young apprentice who wanted to know when to follow the way they had been taught and when to question it.

I don’t think there is a perfect answer.

Perhaps only this:

Stay on the paths you know until you are prepared to accept the risk of taking another one.

You have to gain experience. You can try things gradually. You can test another route.

But curiosity does not remove responsibility.

There is still limited time. The work still has to function. Standards still matter. Your own standards matter too.

And I like to keep a way back.

When somebody wants to make adventurous changes to working code, I make a backup first.

Then we can experiment.

Because trying something new does not mean forgetting what experience has taught you. It means using that experience without allowing it to become a cage.

Think about the change. Think about what it will affect.

Then think one step further.

And one more.

Three steps ahead.

That may be the real value of experience: not knowing that the old road is always right, but understanding that every new road has consequences.

Sometimes the difficult part is not finding the new road.

It is allowing yourself to take it.

By Fabrice, France.

The world once pulled me towards unfamiliar countries and dangerous work. These days, adventure can be much closer to home—but I still need something that takes me beyond the routine.

There are places in the forest near my home where you can sit down and hear almost nothing except the animals and the forest itself. They are not far away. Maybe 300 metres from the road.

That is enough.

I like going outside. I walk, swim, go into the forest, look for mushrooms, go fishing, see animals. Sometimes I simply sit. Going outside is already part of my normal life.

Of course, I can stay at home. I can watch television, listen to music or spend time on my computer. I don’t need an adventure every day.

But after some time, if everything becomes too predictable, I get bored. Then I start looking for something else.

That has probably always been there.

A New Country.

When I was younger, going somewhere new meant something rather different.

Lebanon. Kuwait. Saudi Arabia. Other countries and completely different environments.

Every time I arrived somewhere I had never been before, it was exciting. There were things I knew and many things I did not know. Everything was different.

Every time I arrived somewhere I had never been before, it was exciting. There were things I knew and many things I did not know. Everything was different.

In Lebanon, I remember the landscape, the sea and Mount Lebanon. But there were also destroyed buildings, destroyed cars and the remains of war.

Other countries brought other pictures, other landscapes, other ways of living. Sometimes the differences were beautiful. Sometimes they were difficult to understand.

But I was curious.

When you enter a new country, you don’t yet know what you are going to see. For me, that was always interesting.

Janita asked me to think of one adventure I would happily do again.

I said, “Clearing a minefield.”

There was a short silence.

“I don’t think that’s an adventure,” she said.

For me, it was.

When I was in Kuwait, part of our work involved clearing areas where mines and ammunition had been left behind. There was danger, of course, but there was also a purpose. You searched, you found something, you dealt with it, and at the end of the working day—if everything had gone well—you had a good feeling.

It was useful for the people who lived there.

Janita and I clearly have slightly different definitions of the word adventure.

She prefers something like a national park.

I apparently prefer minefields.

The Challenge Changes.

Today, I do not need to travel to another country to find a challenge.

I already know what I want to do next: another 100-kilometre walk.

I am training again, and this time I want to do better. I have a time in my head. Perhaps around 24 hours.

Before a challenge, I don’t normally ask myself, “Why am I doing this again?”

I am excited because I chose it.

Nobody forces me.

During the 100 kilometres, of course, there comes another moment. Somewhere around 50 or 60 kilometres, the question becomes much more reasonable:

Why am I doing this?

Then you continue.

What attracts me is not proving something to other people. I don’t need that. I want to prove to myself that I can do it.

It is a competition, but mainly against yourself.

If I do the same challenge a second or third time, I want to improve. That gives me another reason to go back.

Boredom Is Dangerous.

Routine is not a bad thing. We all have routines.

But too much of the same thing becomes boring for me. When I know exactly what will happen every day, sooner or later I start searching for an escape from it—something different.

This is perhaps where my motorcycle problem begins.

I would like another motorcycle.

My wife says no.

Probably she has a point.

Janita suggested that this might be the beginning of a midlife crisis: first the motorcycle, then pierced ears, then black leather trousers and boots.

I am not convinced.

But I admit that getting older has not made the attraction of adventure disappear.

What has changed is the approach.

When I was 20, I might simply do something. Now I think more about the risk beforehand. I calculate. I prepare. I use the right equipment.

The attraction may be the same, but the preparation is better.

That seems a reasonable combination.

Not Finished Yet.

There is also another side to all this.

Adventure does not always mean danger.

Sometimes it means walking through the forest. Sometimes it is sitting somewhere quiet and listening to the animals. Sometimes it is swimming, travelling, discovering a new place or deciding to try another physical challenge.

The outward movement is still there, but it does not always have to take me far away.

Janita finally asked me to imagine that we meet again in ten years.

What would surprise her more: that I am still looking for another adventure, or that I have finally said, “Enough. I am staying at home”?

I hope I am still looking.

In ten years I will be 69.

That is far too early to stop.

Ask me again when I am 99. Then maybe I will think about it.

Until then, I prefer to remain optimistic.

The problems come by themselves.

I don’t need to go looking for those.

By Sylvie, France.

Some adventures need a plan. Some only need trust. And sometimes curiosity is simply waiting to see what happens next.

If I had a lot of money, I think I would only travel.

There are so many places I would like to discover, especially other cultures. Friends are preparing for a safari in Tanzania and then a few days in Zanzibar. Another friend went to Bali. I saw Vietnam on television recently and the beaches looked fantastic. A colleague is spending three weeks in Argentina. Peru could also be interesting.

The problem is that when I think about one place, another one immediately appears.

Next year, if we make a big journey, I would like it to be the trip of my life. I just do not know yet where that trip should be. Probably not a cruise. Friends have asked us to go on one with them, but I am not convinced. I imagine it being noisy, with many people together, and I remember seeing stories about illness spreading on cruise ships.

Perhaps I prefer the idea of discovering something with a little more space around me.

Of course, there is one small problem with my plan to travel everywhere: I do not play the lottery. So I cannot win.

And France itself is full of places I still do not know. Sometimes I see somewhere on television and think, wow, this is in my own country? We have so many castles, for example. I have visited some, including Versailles, but there are still many places to discover.

Maybe curiosity does not always require travelling very far.

Curious, but with conditions.

When I try something new, how I feel depends very much on what it is.

If it is something I have planned for a long time, I am excited. I want to know what it will be like, and mentally I am already prepared for it. If it is unexpected, I can be more careful. There can be some stress because I do not know what I will meet, what I will see or how I will react.

I am also not curious about everything simply because it is new.

Painting, for example, is not really something that interests me. Mosaic is not especially my hobby either, although I once spent an evening doing mosaic together with my daughter. That was nice because we were doing something together.

For me, curiosity needs a reason.

If a friend said, “Don’t ask questions, just come with me,” I would probably go. It is a friend. This person knows me, and I know them. There is already trust.

If one of my daughters said the same thing, I would definitely have questions. Perhaps they only want to show me something we could buy, in which case it might be safer for my bank account not to go at all.

With somebody I do not know very well, it would be different again. I would need more description, more precision. What are we doing? Where are we going? Why?

With somebody I do not know very well, it would be different again. I would need more description, more precision. What are we doing? Where are we going? Why?

So perhaps my formula is fifty-fifty: fifty percent curiosity, fifty percent trust.

Red Like a Tomato.

Tennis is a good example of something that has returned unexpectedly to my life.

I used to play, but it has been about ten years since I played officially. Now I have agreed to take part in a competition, which means I needed some practice.

The training was hot. Very hot.

In a match there are natural pauses, but in training you keep playing. You run, hit the ball, run again and continue. After one hour I was finished. Completely tired.

I was red like a tomato.

Still, I did not play badly. I am quick, and that helps me. What I am missing is the technical side after so many years away. The women I will play against have official classifications. I do not, because I have been away from official competition for such a long time.

This does not make me especially optimistic.

People want to come and support me, which sounds nice in theory. In reality, I think it will make me more stressed. I hate losing, and I cannot really imagine that I will win.

There are possibilities, of course. Perhaps there will be a lot of wind. Perhaps my opponent will have the wind against her and all her balls will fly outside the court.

Then I can have some points.

You never know.

I have arranged to share the competition with another player, so I only need to play two matches rather than four. That is enough for me. I have other commitments on some Saturdays, and I am not trying to become a professional tennis player after ten years away.

But I said yes.

Sometimes curiosity is not about discovering something completely new. Sometimes it is about finding out whether an old part of yourself is still there.

The Things We Cannot Plan.

At the moment, though, the thing I am most curious about is much closer to home.

One of my daughters is beginning university and moving into her own apartment. She is excited, and she is motivated by the international side of her studies and the amount of English she expects to use.

There are also many practical things we still have to discover. How will she travel backwards and forwards? Will she use the train or the car? What will be easiest with luggage? What will make sense when fuel is expensive?

We do not know yet.

“We will see and react on the situation we will have.”

Even the furniture is creating questions. She wants to take a sofa from our house to her apartment. Unfortunately, the family cat considers this sofa to be its own property. The cat sleeps there regularly, and I am not convinced it has approved the moving arrangements.

Perhaps the cat already suspects something.

The bigger questions cannot be solved so easily.

How will my daughter react to living alone? How will she manage a new school and a new environment? Will she become more mature? Will she go out too often during the week? Will she be safe?

I hope she will change in a good direction. My husband tells me that perhaps I put too much pressure on myself about this. I may have an idea of how she should change, and reality may not follow my plan.

He is probably right that I cannot decide the direction for her.

That is difficult, because this is where curiosity becomes mixed with worry.

I can ask questions. I can help. I can give advice. But in the end, she will have experiences that I will not see. She will make decisions herself. She may listen to everything we say and still do what she wants.

And perhaps that is part of growing up too.

For both of us.

I can prepare for a journey. I can practise for a tennis match. I can ask a friend where we are going before I get into the car. But not everything gives us that kind of control.

Sometimes we only discover the answer by living through it.

For now, I think fifty-fifty is still a good balance: curious enough to go, careful enough to ask, and willing to see what happens when the plan finally meets real life.

By Alexander, Germany.

After a 4–1 win, an offside thought experiment and a difficult team discussion, one question became harder than it first looked: when is a rule useful, and when are we simply used to it?

On Monday morning, I was not really ready for difficult questions.

Everything hurt. My head was still somewhere in the weekend. But there was a good reason for that.

The day before, we had won our football match 4–1. I had played in a different position, scored one goal and assisted another.

So naturally, the first question was:

What would happen if FIFA removed the offside rule?

I had never really thought about it.

My first reaction was that it could be good and bad at the same time. I am quite fast, so without offside I could stay higher up the pitch. If our defence played a long ball, I could simply run towards the goal.

That sounds good.

But then I thought about the rest of the game. Defenders would stay deeper. Huge spaces would appear in midfield. The whole shape of football would change.

And suddenly I realised something simple.

I think the offside rule is a very good rule.

Stupid at first, sensible later.

We already have several new football rules this season.

One concerns substitutions. When a player is taken off, he has only a short time to leave the pitch.

On Sunday, I was substituted after about 80 minutes. Normally, I would walk off slowly.

This time the referee started counting.

Five. Four. Three.

If I had taken too long, the new player would have had to wait before coming onto the pitch.

I made it.

At first, this kind of rule feels stupid.

But I understand why it exists.

Players use substitutions to waste time. The same happens when goalkeepers hold the ball or teams take too long over a throw-in. Now the referee counts, and everybody knows what has to happen.

The rule can annoy you and still improve the game.

That is an important difference.

A rule should have a reason.

Why Monday?

Then the questions moved away from football.

Why does our Stammtisch meet on Monday evening?

My answer was obvious: people have commitments. They have to work.

Why not meet at lunchtime and go back to work afterwards?

Well, because we might drink alcohol.

You do not have to drink alcohol.

That made things more difficult.

The truth is, we chose Monday because it gave us something good at the beginning of the week.

It was Monday, yes.

But in the evening, we had Stammtisch.

And then we simply carried on.

We have not seriously discussed the day or the time for years.

Maybe there is nothing wrong with Monday evening. I still think it is a good choice.

But I had to admit something.

Sometimes “we have always done it like this” is not really an argument.

It is just a description.

I hear that sentence all the time.

In sales, I know that sentence very well.

“We have always done it this way.”

I hear it all the time, and professionally I cannot simply accept it.

In an earlier job, part of my work was getting customers to use a new webshop.

That sounds easy until you sit with people who already have a system they know. The new webshop is unfamiliar. They do not know where anything is. Their old process works.

That sounds easy until you sit with people who already have a system they know. The new webshop is unfamiliar. They do not know where anything is. Their old process works.

Why should they change?

That was difficult.

I remember learning in a training course that people need repeated contact with something new before it stops feeling new. Whether the exact number was 27 times or something around that, the idea stayed with me.

Change becomes easier through repetition.

People do not always resist something because the new idea is bad.

Sometimes the old way simply feels normal.

But that does not mean every new idea is better.

That became much clearer when we came back to football.

The harder question.

Our team had a bad start to the season.

On Friday, we had a serious discussion about what we could change. One idea was to bring back some older players who had already stopped playing regularly.

Most people thought this was a good idea.

I did not.

Not because the older players are bad. They could probably help us immediately. We might win more matches and improve our position.

But for me, that gives us a better picture without necessarily solving the real problem.

At some point, we have to change.

We have to learn to play without always bringing the old players back.

There is also another side.

We have younger players who come to training all the time. If experienced former players return whenever things become difficult, those younger players train all week and then sit on the side during the match.

For me, that is not fair.

My brother had a strong argument against my position.

If we are relegated at the end of the season, he thinks the situation could become much worse. Players may lose interest. The whole team could suffer.

I understand that.

It is a good argument.

But then Sunday came.

We played with the new players.

And we won 4–1.

Maybe the question is the important part.

One victory does not prove that I am right.

Perhaps the older players will still be needed. Perhaps the younger players need more time. Perhaps, at the end of the season, we will look back and decide another solution would have been better.

I do not know.

But there is a difference between keeping something because it works and keeping it because we are afraid to change it.

There is also a difference between changing something because it is necessary and changing it simply because it is new.

The offside rule still makes sense to me.

The new time rules annoyed me at first, but I understand their purpose.

Monday evening is still a good time for Stammtisch, even if nobody has questioned it for years.

And with my football team, I would rather find out whether the new generation can succeed than immediately return to the old solution when things become difficult.

Apparently, even on a Monday morning, with your whole body hurting and your head still tired from football, a strange question can make very normal things look different.

That does not mean you have to change them.

Sometimes it is enough to know why you want to keep them.