Category: life
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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 year. Oaks are incredible. They support 2,300 different species and over 300 species depend…
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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 what I’ve actually spent my time doing. It’s all too easy to plough…
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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 to take a step back and look at the patterns of what I've…
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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 a simple yes as a way to protect us from the awkwardness of…
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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 become it…that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can…
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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 that we are continuously dividing our attention between multiple, often quite demanding tasks.…
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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 event that he was putting on in his role as CSO there. Recently…
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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 where I could not hit my splits before going to the Rio Olympics,…
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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 it for selfish reasons. When you work for yourself you don't have work…
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On Being Made Redundant
I have a confession to make. Almost eleven years ago I left the large media owner that I had worked for for 14 years. At the time I talked about it as though it was a proactive decision that I had made to leave the business. But the truth was that I had been made…