If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already proven you can push through. The career. The results. The discipline. People look at your track record and see someone who has it figured out.
And still, somewhere along the way, the next goal stopped pulling.
This page is my story. Read it as a blueprint, not a biography.
I dropped out of school and went all-in on what mattered to me: water polo. Not because I was reckless. Because I had a target, and I refused to let the wrong environment slow me down.
After military service I moved to Innsbruck with one bag and one goal. What followed was years of building. Simultaneously.
Construction worker by day. Evening school by night. Water polo training after a full shift. Maths textbooks at 23:00 with burning eyes and a sore back. Not because it was easy. Because I’d decided.
That stubbornness earned me a law degree from the University of Innsbruck, a career in corporate leadership, and nine national water polo titles.
I became a husband. A father of five.
I was exactly where I had fought to be. Then the call came.
When Life Knocks You Down, Set a New Goal
The diagnosis arrived in March 2016. Eleven days later I married the woman I love. Two days after that, chemotherapy began. Three of the most significant moments of my life, compressed into thirteen days.
I went from leading and training at Bundesliga level to a body that could barely walk 500 metres. But the physical loss was almost the easier part.
The harder part: the version of me I had built, the athlete, the leader, the man who always found a way, went quiet. Nobody around me knew how to talk about that. They spoke about treatment. About fighting. Nobody spoke about losing the person you’d spent your whole life constructing.
I had to work that out without a system. So I built one.
During treatment, I set a goal most people thought was irrational: win my 10th national water polo title. Not despite cancer. Alongside it.
Not because the trophy mattered. Because I needed a direction that had nothing to do with the illness. A Why outside the therapy, outside the hospital, outside the question of whether I would survive.
I stood on that podium in June 2017. Not as a patient. As an athlete who had also survived cancer. Which is a very different thing.
What followed was years of testing what the system could do. Different sports. A trail marathon. And eventually the decision that defined everything: swim Lake Constance. All 65 kilometres. Non-stop. Without a wetsuit.
Over time I refined what I learned into the SWIM framework, the backbone of my book “Against the Current”:
S – Self-Leadership: Know your strengths and your values. Lead yourself before you lead anything else.
W – Why: Motivation runs out. A real Why doesn’t. Know what’s actually driving you.
I – Inner Belief: Steadiness in the middle of uncertainty. Not passive hope. Active certainty.
M – Momentum Together: Take the first stroke. And don’t take it alone. No big goal is a solo project.
This isn’t motivation. It’s an operational system, built inside a crisis, tested in extreme conditions, and designed for people chasing a goal bigger than anything they’ve proven so far.
I needed to know the system actually worked. Not just in a hospital. At the edge of what a body can do.
So I started The Alpine Seven: seven crossings of the great Alpine lakes across Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. 339 kilometres in total. I’m still a manager. I train before and after work.
Lake Attersee – brutal elbow pain two and a half hours in. I kept going.
Lake Constance – 65 km, non-stop. First Austrian ever. 6th person on earth.
Wörthersee – after a full week of gastroenteritis. I started anyway.
Lago Maggiore – 61 km after two of the hardest days in my head. First Austrian. 3rd person ever.
Four done. Next: Lake Lucerne, September 2026.
These details aren’t about toughness. They’re about what a system allows you to do when conditions are never perfect. Because they never are.
That’s what 5%, applied consistently, produces.
I’m not a theorist. Everything I teach I’ve lived, then studied, then tested in extreme conditions.
Education
Law & order
Coaching & Human Systems
Performance & Resiliance
Mindset & Psychology
This is for high performers. Managers, founders, leaders, athletes. People who have already proven they can push through, and who now want a goal bigger than their track record.
You don’t need saving. You don’t need motivation. You need the one goal that finally scares you again, and a system that carries you there.
Because here is what I see in almost every high performer I work with: the results are real, but somewhere between the achievements, the connection to why it all matters has gone quiet. Most people can’t name that gap. We don’t start there. We start with the goal. The rest follows.
This is not for people in an acute crisis, and it is not therapy. If that’s where you are right now, please reach out to proper professional support first. Come back when you’re ready to build.
If any of this felt familiar, you’re in the right place.
I work with people who take on the one goal that scares them. Not with inspiration. With an operational system, built during eight months of chemotherapy and tested across 339 kilometres of open water.
The best place to start: my weekly letter, The 5% Letter. One idea per week on endurance mindset and discipline. Subscribe and see if my way of thinking fits yours.
