Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: Is action itself a resource? Recorded live on X Spaces during the community’s first test week off Clubhouse, Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Marc, Layla, Jürgen, Nazgul and Sabine dig into time, money, health, talent and information as resources for action — Marc explains why selling 500 units to one buyer beats chasing 500 individual customers, Jürgen draws a sharp line between the resources a purpose requires today and the ones a future goal will demand, and lands on a line everyone in the room wanted to write down: talent is the predisposition for what we’re capable of. Along the way: why time, strictly speaking, isn’t a resource at all — because we don’t have time at our disposal, time has us at its disposal.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Yasemin opened by kicking off their test week on X Spaces, running through Sunday, to gather experience with the platform while continuing their deep dive into the overarching theme of Action. Today’s topic: Action and Resources — specifically time and resource management, not resources in general. The question they wanted to explore: what role does time and resource management play in relation to action, and how does it all connect? She reminded everyone the room was recorded and would be published, and that anyone joining as a speaker automatically consents to that. She noted they’d go a bit easier on the usual three room rules (profile photo, name, bio) through Sunday, since this was partly a chance to test how things work on X Spaces without the Clubhouse-trolls problem those rules had originally addressed — anyone not wanting to be on the recording could use the chat bubble instead. She also reminded everyone to use emoji hand-raise signals rather than the soundboard feature, since soundboard sounds are audible to everyone and had proven distracting the day before, especially when someone was mid-sentence and a phone ring or applause sound suddenly played.
Marc opened, testing both his phone and computer simultaneously to make sure he could be heard either way. His first thought on action and resources, from an entrepreneurial angle: he often notices people think carefully about their business but never about their resources — specifically time, which he considers crucial. We only have a limited amount of time on earth, and only so much in a given day. Running a business isn’t just about staying busy or filling the hours — it’s meant to generate income to support his family, and yes, it’s also enjoyable, but part of the point is making the life he wants possible. He shared an example from his own field: imagine wanting to start an embroidered baseball cap business. A friend suggests pricing each cap at 30 euros; if he buys an embroidery machine and can sell to two people a day, that’s 60 euros a day, 420 euros a week — and that’s where the business model starts to take shape. But he prefers thinking in bulk: if he can earn one euro per cap, finding a single buyer for 500 units, sitting in his office for a week over coffee figuring out who might buy 500 caps, nets the exact same return as five days of individual sales — without the daily grind. He applies the same logic everywhere: if he were doing training sessions, he could charge 400 euros a day per person, or think bigger — 400 versus 2,000 euros, and how realistic is it to find three or four individual clients daily versus approaching a school with a large training need (say, around resilience) and training ten or twenty people at once? Less individualized, more general, but far more time-efficient. His resource is time, and with every business idea, he always asks: how much time am I investing, what do I get for it, and are there other paths? Another example: imagine having a great coffee recipe and opening a café in Hürth, hoping for 100 customers a day — or, in that same time, finding a business in Hürth or Cologne so impressed by the coffee that they buy it wholesale for their own two locations, ultimately earning far more than serving 100 individual cups.
Yasemin thanked him, noting he’d touched on something important: depending on which resource we’re discussing, there may be room for some kind of multiplication. With time specifically, we quickly realize it’s not infinite — we can’t multiply our own time as such, but we can steer processes and workflows to extract the maximum value from the time we do have. She wanted to look more specifically at what falls under time management, and more broadly, what other resources beyond time deserve consideration. She invited Marc to continue, noting Layla had also signaled wanting to join.
Marc shared a second resource example from his entrepreneurial experience: money. In the beginning, you only have a limited amount available. He described how modestly he lived during his first five years in business — borrowed furniture, furniture gifted by IKEA, an office chair he’d gotten for around 200 euros that fell apart within a few years, the cheap plastic flaking off. Meanwhile, he’d observed many newly self-employed people immediately buying the best phone, the best car, the most expensive office furniture. For him, every investment as an entrepreneur came down to one question: does this bring in more money, or does it just help me spend money that then disappears into a hole? His philosophy: spend money only as an entrepreneur when it directly serves earning more — he’d even borrow money, from friends, family, or the bank, but only when he had a confirmed order and knew the money would multiply within a week or a month. Not when the money is spent purely to satisfy personal comfort or create a nice environment — since many things entrepreneurs spend money on really only serve their own wellbeing and do nothing to advance the actual business goal.
Yasemin thanked him, noting this also illustrates useful distinctions: money brings us to financial resources specifically, which splits further into liquidity and investment — and borrowing money brings in the concept of financing. So there’s a distinction between how you acquire money and how you use or deploy it. And it doesn’t have to be money specifically — thinking in terms of assets, for instance, carries a monetary value too, opening up further distinctions worth exploring. She welcomed Layla.
Layla, checking whether the audio quality was coming through well on X Spaces, said she found it funny that she was currently reading a book specifically about ADHD that also touches on action and resources. The book poses a tough question around a kind of “super-focus”: how many resources do you invest in what? With ADHD (not necessarily relevant to anyone in the room, she noted), you don’t always get to choose where that investment goes. The author asked a crucial follow-up: if you have a hyper-focus day and accomplish hours of work, how does the next day go if you’d planned for it — were you still successful? The answer was no, because you have to budget your resources; the recurring problem is that we tend to run sprints rather than marathons. She admitted pointing the finger at herself here too, since she’s not always sure where she’s “borrowing” resources from — her health, or some other personal reserve. Either way, you have to work with what you have and really listen inward — whether it’s fear or something else holding you back. She joked to Marc that at least it wasn’t about having a small apartment — she’d seen her brother’s impressive office setup, while she works out of a 20-square-meter space with a boiler in the basement, but never mind that.
Yasemin thanked her, noting that the question of how many resources you invest in what quickly raises another fascinating angle: is action itself — simply doing something — a resource in its own right? Given their core question of what role time and resource management plays in relation to action, this opens up yet another perspective: to what extent is action itself already a resource? She welcomed Jürgen, who’d just joined.
Jürgen apologized for the delay and jumped right in, noting they hadn’t yet actually defined what they mean by “resource.” He offered the standard economic definition: a resource, economically speaking, exists to fulfill a purpose. Building specifically on Marc’s repeated use of the term “goal,” he drew a crucial distinction: a resource, in the economic sense, focuses on an investment good serving a purpose — not a goal. And there’s an essential difference here. A purpose is what you do something for — not why, mind you, but what for — a concrete, identifiable occasion against which you can immediately allocate your currently available resources, whether time or capital. A goal, by contrast, isn’t reality — it’s a fictional conception of a potential future. And here’s the crucial reason this distinction matters for resources: the resources needed today to serve a purpose (say, the idea of starting a company) can be entirely different from those needed once you’ve actually become the entrepreneur you envisioned as your goal. His conclusion: at the meta-level, we should always distinguish between “is”-resources and “goal”-resources — and, by extension, between “is”-action and “goal”-action, both influencing and depending on the different quality of resources involved.
Yasemin thanked him and asked for a concrete example of the difference between “is”-action and “goal”-action. After a brief audio hiccup, Jürgen clarified: “is”-action addresses a concrete challenge against which he can clearly map his current resource allocation — do I have the time, the capital, the know-how to start a company? That’s different from the specific demands of actually running a company once it’s founded. The essential difference, to directly answer her question: the “is” state is a fact, fixed in the present, checkable off a list — have it, don’t have it, missing it. A goal is a conception, where the necessary resources — capital, know-how, and so on — operate on an entirely different level. Speaking personally: if asked whether he could found a company in some specific field, he might say yes, that’s his core competence — but if asked whether he could then also run that company, his experience tells him only in a limited sub-area.
Yasemin thanked him and welcomed Nazgul, joining for the first time. Nazgul greeted everyone, checking she could be heard clearly (confirmed), and said she’s long been interested in time management and resources. She shared that she’d just taken on a new, marble-sized project the week before and had spent Thursday and Friday genuinely worried about whether she had enough resources for it — going back and forth in her head before ultimately deciding simply to commit and get started. (Her account trailed into a bit of a repetitive loop describing that internal back-and-forth, but the gist was clear: extensive deliberation before finally committing to action.) Yasemin thanked her and moved to Sabine, with Layla and Jürgen also signaling they wanted to continue.
Jürgen, without wanting to belabor the terminology, responded directly to Marc’s earlier point, tying it to his purpose-versus-goal distinction: Marc’s account had made this difference transparent, and it’s exactly why different resources are needed for each. Sticking with the company-founding example: the purpose — what he’s doing it for, deliberately not calling it motivation — might be wanting to become an entrepreneur, achieve creative freedom, reach a certain degree of self-determination. Building the company itself, beyond the initial requirements analysis before any management effort, is the second essential reason this distinction matters: recognizing, within yourself, what you’re doing something for versus where you actually want to end up. Two entirely different undertakings, in his view, with two entirely different resource requirements.
Yasemin thanked him and welcomed Sabine, who said the conversation so far had leaned heavily toward the material side of resources. She’d visited a friend with cancer the day before, which brought health sharply to mind as, for her, the absolute core resource — building on something she’d learned in school long ago: before anything else, you have to assess what fund of resources you actually have, and health, she believes, is the essential foundation. In the past, “resources” had always meant raw materials to her — something external. But what’s internal is, for her, an equally significant resource. This led her to wonder aloud whether that’s better classified as a competence rather than a resource, since it circles back to learning — she admitted she still has some trouble drawing a clean line between the two.
Yasemin thanked her, noting that clean boundaries aren’t always possible across the various models used within self-management, and that health specifically can indeed factor into resource management, while also being important and relevant enough to warrant its own dedicated area in the model she’d drawn from — which is why the next day’s room would specifically cover Action and Resilience, going deeper into health specifically. But health can certainly be touched on here too, within time and resource management — things like how to allocate your energy, how to recharge, how to switch off, especially depending on whether a project is short-term or long-term, whether you’re sprinting or running a marathon, and how you distribute your energy and focus accordingly to maintain balance.
She invited Layla to continue. Layla wanted to follow up on Jürgen’s distinction, since Yasemin had also just unpacked it further: Jürgen kept framing things in organizational/business terms, but Layla saw her own resources, as an individual, as her gifts and talents — so she wanted clarification: did his framework cover both the organizational and the individual/private dimension?
Jürgen said he wasn’t sure he’d actually mentioned “organization” specifically — Layla clarified she meant the entrepreneurial/business context he’d been using versus the private context she was thinking in, both falling under his resource definition. Jürgen, initially hesitant to open what he called “an enormous can of worms,” clarified briefly: he sees the entrepreneur as a person, homo economicus, but still fundamentally human — and whatever a company does, it does only because people do it. So for him, a company is essentially a mirror of the intentions and motivations of the people acting within it — meaning both the business and private dimensions are ultimately about people either way.
Layla apologized for pulling him back into a side discussion and added, addressing Sabine’s health point, that this also matters in a corporate context — specifically around duty of care: who does a company deploy, and where? As an employee herself, she’s heard the line “I’m unmarried, I have no kids, so I have to work more” — raising the question of how and where a company actually allocates its resources.
Yasemin thanked her and invited Marc to continue, who wanted to add two more terms: given that they’d already discussed people as a resource, he’d call that “human capital” — regardless of whether you’re working alone privately or as an entrepreneur, the abilities and skills needed to build a company, or achieve personal goals (like in sports, in his case), constitute human capital, along with the knowledge behind it. He also added “information” as a resource, private or professional alike — where do you get information, what channels are available? Information-gathering itself is changing rapidly through AI, opening entirely new territory. And alongside information comes technology — using the technology available, and since it’s often too complex to fully understand alone, that’s where social resources come in too: being able to ask Yasemin or Jürgen, having networks, relationships, and people to exchange ideas with, in order to understand and reflect on these new processes. Once again, he noted, a single topic opens up countless sub-drawers of complexity.
Yasemin thanked him, noting this picked up both threads raised so far — gifts and talents on one side (which is what Layla meant by “organization,” since, as Jürgen said, an entrepreneur is a person, and organizations are made of people too), and Sabine’s addition of competencies. She invited Jürgen to weigh in on how competencies fit into time and resource management specifically, suspecting he’d have a good answer.
Jürgen said he assumed her question pointed toward the methodological toolkit — tying back to their earlier competence discussion, where they’d established competence as encompassing ability and aptitude. Aptitude/talent is what’s innate; ability is what’s built up and learned — and they’d already established elsewhere that learning itself must be learned. So, taking the lead a bit here: every competence except talent itself is built on a learning process, and learning itself largely depends on the methodological knowledge and competence one brings to the act of learning. He hoped that answered the question she’d tossed his way.
Yasemin thanked him, adding, as a reminder tying back to an earlier term they’d used: talent, in this context, is the predisposition already laid down — but we still can’t escape the learning process if we actually want to shape and develop that talent into something realized.
Jürgen jumped back in, delighted: “please, everyone hold onto that — what a wonderful sentence, Yasemin! Talent is the predisposition for what we’re capable of.” He said he had to note that down immediately, thumbs up all around — his spontaneous reaction, which he wanted to share right away.
Yasemin thanked him, noting they’d pulled together several threads today and drawn valuable connections back to earlier rooms, including the “toolkit” concept Nazgul had also implicitly pointed to — she’d mentioned using various techniques herself to work through things, move into action, or reflect, depending on which technique applies. Ultimately, all these pieces come together like puzzle pieces forming an overall picture of time and resource management, covering the many facets they’d explored together today. She checked whether anyone else wanted to add anything before moving into the closing round.
Getting no further signals, she moved into the closing round in the order shown on her screen: Nazgul, Sabine, Jürgen, Layla, Marc.
Nazgul thanked everyone warmly, saying she hadn’t expected to end up on X Spaces, but had reactivated her account the day before and found the audio quality excellent, having also explored some of the platform’s features in the meantime. Her highlight from today: Jürgen’s point about requirements analysis — something you always need to do first, asking how you’ll do something and where you’re headed with it, since starting with that analysis lets you find the answers to your own questions. She thanked Jürgen and everyone else for a wonderful contribution.
Sabine agreed the audio quality here was noticeably better than Clubhouse, and found today’s topic surprisingly broad, especially all the connections back to previous rooms — genuinely impressive. She wished everyone a nice day.
Jürgen thanked Nazgul for mentioning him and for the positive feedback, agreeing the quality and flow of today’s session, thanks to this new medium Yasemin had chosen, deserved a thumbs up. He offered gentle feedback to Sabine: he had to concentrate very hard to understand her, since her audio quality was noticeably worse than everyone else’s. And as his final point: today’s definition of talent was his absolute highlight, plus a lighthearted (though genuinely meant) observation about today’s title distinguishing time management from resource management — he wholeheartedly agreed that time isn’t actually a resource, since we don’t have time at our disposal; rather, time has us at its disposal.
Yasemin thanked him, noting as an aside that X Spaces limits room titles to a fixed character count with no room for a subheading like Clubhouse allowed, which is why she always has to communicate that additional context verbally instead — something to keep adjusting to going forward. On Jürgen’s audio feedback for Sabine, she asked Layla and Marc to weigh in too, noting she personally had heard Sabine very clearly today, though Jürgen had also had trouble hearing Sabine the previous day while everyone else could — suggesting a possible technical issue worth flagging to X Spaces’ creator support group for investigation, since audio quality apparently varies depending on the listener.
Layla said she could hear Sabine just fine, though she hadn’t been present the day before so couldn’t compare. She committed to joining the rooms more consistently going forward — itself a matter of resource and time management, she noted. She called today a lovely room, apologized for accidentally interrupting Sabine earlier (purely to ask a clarifying question), and closed by wishing everyone a good day, urging them to look after their resources — and, since they now had the option on X, to maybe read a short story sometime.
Yasemin picked up the moderation point here too, noting they’d follow the same practice as on Clubhouse: when addressing a specific follow-up question to someone, name who it’s for and let the response route back through the moderator before continuing — this naturally builds in helpful pauses, partly enforced simply by muting and unmuting microphones.
Marc said he understood Sabine well content-wise but sometimes had trouble hearing her clearly — agreeing with Jürgen’s point, especially referencing the previous Saturday’s test session, where Sabine had sounded like she was outdoors with poorly fitted headphones, very quiet and hard to make out, though today was fine. He closed with a reflection: one of his most valuable resources is exactly this kind of experience-sharing, like within Deep Talk with Yasemin. He shared a phrase that had helped him become a better partner, from someone named Andreas Wollermann: “do you listen to understand, or to respond?” As a man, he sometimes catches himself immediately offering solutions when his partner just wants a hug and to vent about something work-related — when what’s needed isn’t a clever male solution, but simply an open embrace. That phrase stuck with him and, whenever he remembers it, has meaningfully improved his relationship. He wished everyone a great day.
Yasemin thanked him and asked a quick clarifying question, since he’d referenced “Saturday” — was that actually about Clubhouse, or the Sunday test session here on X Spaces? Marc clarified he meant the Sunday test session specifically — that’s when he’d had real trouble hearing Sabine clearly, like a poorly connected headset, despite full volume and everything else being crystal clear; today it was fine. Yasemin confirmed she understood he could follow Sabine’s content perfectly well, just sometimes struggled with the audio clarity itself — worth noting as a possible platform quirk, since she personally found Sabine’s audio noticeably better on X Spaces than on Clubhouse, though there might be other factors too (Sabine being on the move, for instance), alongside genuine technical differences, especially recalling that Jürgen had, at one point, been completely unable to hear Sabine’s contribution while everyone else could.
She closed by saying today had brought together a wonderfully diverse set of angles and built some lovely bridges. She previewed the next day’s topic: though the underlying model technically calls this area “health and stress management,” she’d chosen to frame tomorrow’s room specifically as Action and Resilience, since she wanted to bring resilience itself into sharper focus — naturally touching on health along the way, but really examining the concept of resilience, which they’d referenced before in passing, in direct connection with action. Tomorrow’s question: what role does resilience play in relation to action?
She reminded everyone, for anyone who’d missed the previous day: they were now running a full test week on X Spaces, having tried out various features for the first time and found things working well enough to commit to the whole week here. This coming Saturday would feature their regular Expert Talk, with the guest already informed and happy to do the interview on either platform. Sunday would bring their digital campfire session, where she planned to share her own broader perspective on X Spaces and open up discussion, drawing on the accumulated experience from this test week to help inform upcoming decisions and next steps, which she’d then communicate to everyone. So, for the coming days, no need to look for them on Clubhouse — they’d be here on X Spaces every morning at 8am through Sunday. She said she was looking forward to it, thanked everyone, and hoped to see them again tomorrow. Ciao!
