How To Work Better

Mar 9, 2022 | ,

In my post Owning Your Platform, I wrote about how, having written and worked for a number of media outlets and brands, a lot of my writing has disappeared into the ether. Fortunately, I have multiple folders with versions of some of the things that I have written. In the interests of ensuring that they aren’t totally lost, I have started sharing some of them here. This is something I wrote in 2020, having spent most of 2019 exploring the idea of productivity and using the time I work efficiently to create more time for other aspects of life. I probably went through at least 8 books and...

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Owning Your Platform

Mar 1, 2022 |

In October 2021, Facebook experienced an outage which also meant that Instagram and Whatsapp also went down. And everyone turned to Twitter to complain. In early February 2022, Twitter also experienced some problems with loading Tweets. When these outages happen, I am always reminded of discussions I have had, over the years, with various corporate and media platforms on the importance of owning your platform – in other words a website that you pay for - and using social media as a way of amplifying your stories. Social media has become pervasive in ways that we initially couldn’t imagine....

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There are benefits to taking up hobbies

Jan 10, 2022 | ,

Some time, in the last 20 years, we became busy. It was around the time mobile phones started to fill the gaps in between everything else. Prior to this, we were simply connected to those around us physically and time seemed to move at a different pace.   When you were in the office, or at home, you were only available via landline phone – if you had one – or if someone actually visited you. In the car, you had the radio or your thoughts. In a queue, you had something to read, if you remembered to bring something, your...

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Book Extract: Escape

Dec 10, 2021 |

This is the fourth in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc. THE RUSSIAN author Fyodor Dostoevsky is quoted as having said, ‘To think too much is a disease.’ I have always wondered how one measures thinking too much. I have spent a lifetime in my head and been told I think too much. I have always felt, in some instances, we don’t think enough and what children should be taught is how to think. So many things in the world seem to happen because zero thought has been put into a situation...

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Book Extract: On the edge

Nov 19, 2021 |

This is the third in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc. I READ Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd when I was in high school and the title has always stuck with me, although it is probably as much for the idea of a ‘madding crowd’ as it was for embarrassing myself in English class because of it. We were supposed to have written a composition on it and, because I hadn’t actually read it, I read the first two chapters and the last chapter and wrote an essay that totally...

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Book Extract: My heroes were on the walls

Nov 10, 2021 | ,

This is the second in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc WATCHING A documentary about Muhammad Ali, I was struck by how big an impact he had on me when I was a child. I was eight years old when he lost to Larry Holmes, and I have memories of watching the fight with my father. I has heartbroken because, even at that young age, I could see that Ali was at the end of his career. I read a copy of an early biography of his as a young teenager and, by then, had watched a lot of his...

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