
Acceptance vs Ambition (Part 2)
Last week I wrote a piece about acceptance, ambition and profound truth. Since then I've been thinking more about acceptance, and how for some reason it's both important to have acceptance, and to resist acceptance and aim for ambition instead.
And…

Posts About Energy #2: The Ripple Effect
I was never a brilliant science student at school, but I remember something that means a lot more now, with all the experiences of adulthood.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
The first action takes energy. And the energy…

Posts About Energy #1: Energy = Currency
I will write about energy more than once on this. I will write about energy a lot. So it makes sense to start off the initial energy post in this daily blog series — about energy is currency — with the #1 attached, as this is likely to…

Happy Friday
Call me curmudgeonly, but I've always struggled with "Happy Friday".
"Happy Friday" says, "Well done, you've made it to the end of the week", as if Monday to Thursday are for survival, not celebration.
"Happy Friday" says, "I'll introduce…

Stillness and stagnation
It's a world of fine lines.
Stillness is a wonderful thing. The stillness of a meadow at dawn. The stillness of the surface of a lake on a calm day. The stillness of a violinist's fingers before a crescendo.
Stagnation, defined in the…

Remember November
November feels like the forgotten month.
When I was a child, we set up our Christmas tree and Christmas decorations on the day of our school holidays (so, around December 21st). That would be ludicrously late in 2018.
December 1st is…

Ambition, acceptance and profound truth
It's the paradox of profound truth in our daily happiness: balancing the restless ambition to be better with the restful acceptance of being just enough.
To have the ambition to improve and develop ourselves is, I think, a critical ingredient…

The power of setting intentions
I'm quite sure there will be people reading this for whom the words in here will be simplistic beyond belief. People who habitually set an intention to do something, and then go and do it, and don't think the slightest more about it.
If that…

Global literacy and the threat to reading
I remember hearing a story about a Dublin bus driver. He was talking about the risks to his personal security he faces on a day to day basis in the course of his job. He was happy, he said, to see someone carrying a book, because he knew anyone…

Critique versus Criticism
Yesterday I wrote about criticism.
Whatever you want to call it, constructive criticism, or feedback, or something else, it's almost uniformly hard.
But it's necessary.
Thinking critically helps make everything better. So finding a…

The problem with criticism (and the opportunity)
Few of us enjoy criticism.
Over time, criticism became synonymous with stuff being wrong. With negativity. With conflict and confrontation.
Criticism is almost always difficult. We must brace ourselves for it. Prepare ourselves to react…

The art of passing time
Every day, most of us are passing time.
We often pass time without thinking too deeply about how.
We prefer pursuits with zero or minimum friction to distract ourselves away from valuable but difficult things.
Passing time by low friction…

Diminishing tolerance
As life goes on, our tolerance diminishes.
When we're younger, our appetite for tolerance is high. As the years and decades pass, this reduces and reduces and reduces. A typical 71-year-old accepts much less crap than a typical 21-year-old.
Accepting…

A new experiment in daily blogging
This is the first day of a new experiment in daily blogging, inspired by Seth Godin.
I've been reading Seth's daily blog for about six years now. I don't read every one of Seth's emails, but I open them several times a week. I don't love…

Your Guide to Uncertainty: Why It's Good, and What To Do With It
Sometimes you come to a time in life and for a while, the same word just keeps coming up. That word for the last while has been "uncertainty".
Every now and then something—an idea, a way of thinking, making big changes for a new chapter…