HomeAbout Martin Cordsmeier
Martin Cordsmeier The Practicing Utopian
There’s one question that changes everything, from the individual to the institution: what do you actually want?
I’ve spent over two decades posing this question, and studying the ways people respond. How they conform to what others want them to want. How they tune out the voice inside them that asks for something different.
- Conversations
- ~7,000 recorded interviews, from an eight-year-old to billionaires
- Research
- Roughly a decade, through a foundation in Germany
- Building
- millionways — built in New York around that data
- Author
- Nimm Dir das Leben, das Du wirklich willst (Ullstein, 2017)
Self-understanding is humanity’s missing layer.
From your workplace to your newsfeed, you’re prompted with ways to cope and distract.
No one is taught how to comprehend who they are, and act on what they want.
I deeply understand the alienation we face, and the ways it shapes how we see ourselves.
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Childhood
Adopted at one day old
I was adopted at one day old, so I felt slightly foreign in my own environment before I had any language for it. I was always interested in creative entrepreneurship, starting a “company” and building machines as a child.
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First company
My first real company
My first real company brought home-based work to people who could not go out and find it, including homeless men, single mothers, and disabled workers. As we worked, I found myself fascinated by their stories. Every one of them had something inside that nobody had ever asked about. Every one of them struggled to answer the question of what they wanted most.
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A decade
A research foundation in Germany
I built a research foundation in Germany to keep having and exploring those conversations. Over roughly a decade it became about 7,000 recorded interviews, from an eight-year-old to billionaires, alongside work with a national helpline where I learned that children now call in about stress rather than about school.
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Projects
Ideas that became real projects
Individuals’ ideas from those conversations became real projects in the world: outdoor products designed alongside homeless people who used them, a retro brand built with people in retirement homes who remembered the objects worth remaking.
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2017
The book, and what followed
In 2017 Ullstein published my book, Nimm Dir das Leben, das Du wirklich willst — take the life you actually want. A television show and a YouTube channel followed.
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The realization
A dataset with a pattern in it
The realization that changed everything was that the interviews were a real dataset with a pattern in it. The interviews became a model that reads what somebody actually says and returns what sits underneath it, reviewed by psychologists and unpacking the motivations people don’t realize they have.
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New York
millionways
I moved to New York and built millionways around that data, and the revelations it provides.
Now, I’m building a movement in public.
What happens when each of us follows the voice we’ve ignored, pursuing what we really want, with support from others around us?
What changes when two people with same goals but complementary talents are connected?
What kinds of institutions, communities, and societies can we build as a result?
I call myself a practicing utopian because the world I am describing — where following your own path is ordinary rather than brave — does not seem far away to me.
In my writing and in my newsletter, I ask the questions people have been avoiding.
- i.What a friend actually is.
- ii.Which rules deserve breaking.
- iii.What a life is for, once the work is absorbed by something else.
I write as somebody who has run every one of these on himself, not as somebody with a finding to announce.