Will Smith once said:

“The first step before anyone else in the world believes it is you have to believe it. There’s no reason to have a plan B because it distracts from Plan A.”

When you’re half-in, half-out of something, it never works. Have you ever been in a relationship when you’re half-in, half-out? What about a job, an exercise regime, a diet, or a life plan? It never works out.

If you want to succeed at anything you have to commit.

Perhaps we know this on an intuitive level but we still have great resistance to commit simply…

There’s a weird phrase that’s always thrown up at you when you’re growing up: “Be yourself”.

You must have been told this some time or another. I was, often. It mostly cropped up at pivotal points going from child to adult; when I started a new school, when I was trying to make new friends, when I went on a date, when I had a job interview… It’s the classic one size fits all advice regurgitated by people who mean well but don’t know what to say.

However, it is terrible advice.

How can anyone get from A to B…

Each morning I run an ice-cold shower and I stand beside it, looking into the bathroom mirror and telling myself I can get under that freezing waterfall.

And for better or worse, each day, I do.

I’ve done this now for two years, and the mental resistance never goes away, it never becomes easy.

I began the ritual as part of the Wim Hof Method, a daily breathing and cold exposure routine that claims to boost immunity. …

I’ve got writer’s block. Again. Here it comes, the big, lumbering… thing, over the horizon. What’s the coming over the hill, is it a monster, is it a monster?

No, it’s just our old familiar friend writer’s block.

Though it’s not really writer’s block, is it? It’s not a block at all, it’s all doubt, writer’s doubt. I have loads of ideas to write about, a whole drafts folder of ideas, over 100 or more titles, paragraphs and scraps of articles ready to be embellished and brought to life, but as I look through each of them I think “Oh…

Recently, for reasons I cannot explain (a sneaky algorithm that knows me better than I know myself is probably to blame), Twitter compiled a crowdsourced list of “harsh writing advice” from across their platform and threw it up at me as I mindlessly scrolled through my timeline, procrastinating from writing.

It popped up at a time where I’ve been in a writing lull, it’s as if Twitter knew what I was thinking.

So out of desperation and curiosity, I had a dig through the advice and it turns out there’s indeed some gold to be found – gold from real…

I got angry this morning trying to cancel a monthly subscription and the website in question had posted incorrect instructions on how to do this. In my frustration, I took several screenshots and wrote a belligerent tweet to them in an act of public revenge. It wasn’t until I was about to send the tweet I realised I’d read the instructions wrong and it was all my fault.

This, my friends, is a metaphor for happiness. Or at least, it’s a metaphor for how we (I mean me) misinterpret the phrase “happiness is a choice.” We’re reading the instructions wrong.

…

This article is for those who feel disillusioned, for those who feel uninspired, for those who work hard, set goals, and do all the things they’re meant to do but for some reason, still feel oddly unfulfilled. This article might be the remedy. It is a reminder. A gentle nudge back on course. If you feel like this, then this article is for you.

Recently my friend WhatsApp’d me my goals list from 2013. …

“If those who control the media control the minds of the masses (to quote Malcolm X), it’s important for us to think seriously about who we give that power to.” — Caroline Caldwell (Artist)

As you know, on Wednesday 6 January 2021, a mob of pro-Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol building in Washington DC, angry about the alleged (and highly contested) “election fraud” as Congress moved to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the November ’20 election. [1]

It was one of the worst security breaches in American history and shocked the nation to its freedom-loving, democratic core.

In the…