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Interview

Every cloud has a silver lining: an interview with Rolf Dobelli

Black cats, ladders, broken mirrors: today is Friday the 13th, and many people avoid all sorts of things. Swiss author Rolf Dobelli takes it a step further and has written an entire book about what you absolutely must not do. In this interview, he explains what this has to do with bad luck and self-awareness.

  • Interview
    Michael Köckritz
  • Cover image
    Bodo Rüedi
Mr Dobelli, your new book *The Not-To-Do List* isn’t about happiness, but about unhappiness. Why on earth would we need something like bad luck?

Because unhappiness is more meaningful than happiness. By that I mean happiness in the sense of contentment. So it has nothing to do with chance when people are happy. When you’re happy, there can be a thousand different reasons for it, and it’s very difficult to work out exactly which ones are at play right now. Perhaps it really was chance that made you happy. Sometimes it’s just a fleeting moment. Perhaps you saw or read something beautiful, or simply gazed at a lovely landscape.

‘You take misfortunes more seriously; they spur you on to change something about this or that situation.’
Rolf Dobelli
And is it any different with misfortune?

With misfortune, you can usually pinpoint exactly how it came about. You know of one or even several factors that are responsible for it. Misfortune is more compelling. It’s more stirring to talk about it – more exciting than talking about happiness. People take the factors behind misfortune more seriously; they spur you on to change this or that situation. If, for example, someone says: ‘Yes, you just have to go for a five-kilometre jog every morning to have a good life, and you have to take three more pills and ring your friend every other day’, that’s neither snappy nor thought-provoking.

So, if you know your own factors contributing to unhappiness, can you make better plans to change a particular situation?

Exactly. It gives you more motivation to make a change. You also understand reality better because you can pinpoint the causes of unhappiness – unlike the vague causes of happiness.

Does that only apply to happiness and unhappiness?

It works in other areas too. For example, with success or failure. It’s always easier to analyse why ( … )

→ You can read the full interview and an extract from the book in rampstyle #33, ‘When You Know, You Know’.

Michael Köckritz

Michael Köckritz

Editor in Chief
As a journalist, author, artist and media maker, Michael Köckritz succeeds time and again in creating both attention-grabbing and sustainably stimulating impulses in the context of contemporary and future topics as well as lifestyle and luxury worlds. As publisher and editor-in-chief, he has realised a whole series of book and lifestyle magazine formats that have regularly won numerous national and international awards over the years. The car culture magazine ramp, the men's lifestyle magazine rampstyle and the design magazine ramp.design are published internationally and are considered style-setting.
rampstyle #33 When You Know, You Know + Uhrenspecial
Every cloud has a silver lining: an interview with Rolf Dobelli

rampstyle #33 When You Know, You Know + Uhrenspecial

Wissen macht den Unterschied. Fundiertes Wissen erlaubt nicht nur eine solide Orientierung – es bringt uns auch auf neue Gedanken. Wissen wirkt. Mindestens anregend. Weil wir uns, neugierig geworden, in ein Thema vertiefen, erfahren, worum es tatsächlich geht. Klare Sache, dass wir Lust bekommen, dieses Wissen frisch anzuwenden. Veränderte Perspektiven oder Einsichten die wunderbaren Risiken und Nebenwirkungen.

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