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That stupid advert kept popping up on Facebook. “Be the best you” or “Super power your life” or whatever it said.

It was one of those adverts where someone good looking smiles into the sunshine, dressed in smart-casual clothing with a smug expression on their face because their life is so fucking together.

I’m not sure how Facebook does it, but I’d been considering getting a life coach for a while and it had been throwing Tony Robbins Performance Coaching adverts at me – like an…

Hi American editors,

Listen, I don’t want to get all colonial on you, but we came first. We, the British. The British who speak English. We were speaking English before the United States of America existed. We were speaking English before anyone even thought of baseball.

In fact, we thought of baseball first, called it “Rounders,” and made our kids play it in school. Look it up.

We organically grew as a nation to develop stupid spellings and use erroneous letters. It’s our birthright. It took centuries and centuries of hard words to make our spellings bizarre and un-phonetic.

Flavour…

Breaking news: You’re playing it small.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging you, I fully understand why. Small is safe, easy, convenient.

The human brain loves nothing more than playing it small. It’s got a job to do and that job is to keep you alive. The smaller you play it, the safer you’ll be and the more your brain will be pleased.

Every time you step out of your comfort zone, it will throw a truckload of anxiety your way to make sure you step right back.

To your brain, discomfort equals danger.

Forget about your dreams, goals…

COMEDIAN Mitch Hedberg had a joke that went like this: “At a radio interview the DJ’s first question was ‘Who are you?’ I had to think. Is this guy really deep? Or did I drive to the wrong station?”

It’s funny, but if someone asked you that same question, what would you say? Your name? Your job title?

“Who you are isn’t what you do, it’s deeper than that. It’s who are you despite what you do.

Ideally, you want the “who” and the “what” to be as closely aligned as possible. …

I hear a lot about how writers should call themselves “a writer” to legitimise what they do. I agree with that. It’s easy to feel like a delusional freak when you’re tapping away on a keyboard alone and pinging words out into the ether for strangers to read (or, more often than not, ignore).

Calling yourself a writer makes all those lonely hours wrestling with the keyboard make some sense.

But for me, I’d go further than just calling myself a writer. I am an artist — or at least, a “creative”.

It’s taken me years to come to terms…

How many WhatsApp groups do you have? I’ve got at least four that are active daily. I’m sure it’s the same for you.

How many of those groups are full of memes, viral videos, and forwarded jokes?

I’m guessing all of them.

WhatsApp has become a digital fly-tipping zone where people mindlessly forward on unfunny, irrelevant, and uninspiring crap to dozens of people in one easy click.

If you don’t know what fly-tipping is (it might be British vernacular) it’s when people fill up a van with old mattresses, washing machines, cupboards, broken chairs, and general waste and then they…

I’ve written all my life. I guess everybody has. You learn to write in school and then you don’t stop; filling out forms, taking notes, scribbling down phone numbers on the back of envelopes and writing shopping lists in dog-eared notepads.

On reflection, perhaps the smartphone has killed off even that last bastion of human pen-to-paper activity. When was the last time you had to physically write anything down?

I am a writer. Not a jotter of numbers or a scribbler of lists, but a Writer with a capital W. I can admit it now.

One of my earliest memories…

Self-help books are everywhere. From the ones with the word F*ck on their dust jackets all the way back to the private diaries of Roman emperors and advice written in ancient Sanskrit, if you want self-help, you got it.

Universal truths and sage advice have become so ubiquitous we ignore them. Advice such as “It’s better to regret something you have done than regret something you haven’t” is so overused and trite we don’t even think about its meaning but instead, turn it into a banging house track (Orbital, if you’re asking).

We treat timeless advice like adverts flashing on…