Category: life

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    Leadership, Teams and Bids

    Psychologist Dr John Gottman (along with his wife Dr Julie Gottman) is renowned for his work on marital stability, relationships and predicting divorce in couples. In his research he has famously predicted with a 94% accuracy which marriages will end in divorce. […]

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    Learning from Oaks

    Anyone who has seen me speak will know that I'm a fan of metaphors. A couple of months back I learned something about Oak Trees (via a friend) that I found myself reflecting on on this, the first day of a new […]

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    Shipped in 2022

    This is now my ninth year of doing an annual retrospective of my work year. It is (as I've said before in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021) something that I find personally useful to reflect on the pattern of work across the year and […]

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    Shipped in 2021

    Each year I do a kind of end-of-year work retro to look back on what I've been doing all year. It's something that I've done now for the past eight years (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020) and is really for my benefit – a chance […]

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    Saying No

    'We say yes for the wrong reasons: a reluctance to be labelled as negative; a perceived obligation to friends and family; an attempt to avoid the discomfort of the opposite. We feel pressure in the moment to agree to something, and see […]

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    We are not nouns, we are verbs

    All the talk about following your passion. I prefer to think about it as developing your passion. Which is why I liked this quote from Stephen Fry: "Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably […]

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    Continuous Partial Attention

    Back in the day (and I'm talking about 12 or 13 years ago) there was quite a bit of discussion around Linda Stone's concept of Continuous Partial Attention. Put simply, this is the idea that a modern behaviour of complex multitasking means […]

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    Murray

    I was so upset to learn today that Murray Calder had passed. I met Murray a few times – a couple when he came along to Google Firestarters events, and then again when he invited me to speak at a Mediacom Edinburgh […]

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    The Rule of Thirds

    I really liked this point made by Olympic runner, filmmaker, and writer Alexi Pappas (video here) and it feels like something a lot of people need to hear right now (including me): ‘My Olympic coach told me after a particularly challenging workout […]

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    Shipped in 2020

    Every year I do a kind of year-end retrospective taking a step back and looking at what I've worked on in the year. I've been doing it for the past seven years (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). And I do […]

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