Michael Ashcroft

Why jobs can be great, actually

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 CET

I’ve written a few times about how I had something of a culture clash with the world of traditional jobs, one that culminated in a burnout that put me on a different life path.

Despite that, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m anti-job, and I’m certainly not anti-work, though I admit to having a few beefs with much of the culture that can pervade and surround them.

With that said, I want to outline some great aspects of jobs that are hard to reproduce elsewhere. Unless they had a clear sense of what to do instead, I think I would still encourage a new university grad to spend at least a few years in an interesting job with a great company to get a solid foundation of skills, experiences and potentially friendships that they might otherwise miss out on. Here’s why.

Jobs let you work with smart, engaged people on shared projects, bouncing ideas around and helping each other. By contrast, I’ve felt the absence of this as a solopreneur, where a problem that could be solved by collaboration drags on in isolation.
In a job, you almost certainly don’t have to do everything for yourself. Specialisation of roles means it’s someone else’s job to do various things that benefit you, and vice versa. This web of reciprocal service both lifts mental load and, hopefully, fosters connection.
Similarly, in a job, if you can’t do something it’s likely that someone else will be able to do it on your behalf. Whether by negotiation, explicit asks for help, or just team structure, there’s less worry about “if I don’t do it, it won’t get done at all”.
Although this seems to have been declining in recent years, work remains a really good place to meet and get to know new people that could have an enormous impact on your life. I met many of my closest friends at work, and I now have a baby with someone I met at work (don’t tell HR).
Jobs can expose you to lots of people with really different temperaments. This helps you start to see patterns and diversities in ways of being and seeing, which is valuable in its own right as an important life skill.
When your sense of personal mission is aligned with your employer’s goals, it frees up an enormous amount of motivational energy. You don’t need to think about how to motivate yourself when the environment does it for you.
Similarly, being given tasks and projects to pursue, in one form or another, also represents an incredible mental load that you don’t have to worry about. Whether you’re in an entry level position, or you’re the CEO, the scope of things you could be doing is usefully constrained. As a solopreneur, not only is the potential task landscape enormous, but I’m the one responsible for all of it.
Built-in ‘progression’ gives you a reasonably accurate sense that you’re improving and growing. Sure, it may be a ‘default path’, but in many cases that’s still better than either no path or having to invent your own path. I chose the latter, but I see value in the former and for many people it’s the best choice.
Having structures imposed on you by some system can be really helpful for mental health and general sanity. It may seem annoying in the moment, and often feels like a grind, but there is still enormous value in waking up at the same time and being around other people most days.
Jobs provide ongoing encouragement to improve and they expect certain quality standards from you. These standards challenge you to grow, which in the right contexts can lead to a satisfying and rewarding professional life. Of course you can create challenge for yourself, but jobs do it for you.
A job can be contained. You can give the job your energy between the hours of 9am and 6pm Monday to Friday and then give it no thought at all at other times. You can then freely orient your life towards family, hobbies, whatever, with the job ‘just’ paying the bills. You don’t realise how valuable this is until every waking minute could be spent working and every interest could be monetised.
Getting a stable amount of money every month regardless of how well you perform or how the business performs provides an incredible sense of security in the short to medium term. Of course, poor performance on either side is not sustainable, but the ‘safety net’ is valuable. Still, Taleb wasn’t wrong when he said “The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
Jobs often confer a sense of status depending on what you’re doing and for whom. Introducing myself as the guy who designs innovation projects for Great Britain’s Electricity System Operator often felt higher status than “I have an online course and do coaching” feels now, depending on my mood and who I’m talking to.
Most people have jobs, so having a job immediately creates a sense of familiarity and shared experience with most other people. You can complain about your jobs, you can share job stories, you share many of the same habits, routines and aesthetics. This shared context is stabilising in its own way.
You can learn an enormous amount in a job that would be difficult or impossible to learn on your own. If you want to gain in-depth practical technical knowledge about how things are done, learn how to present to large audiences or how to work well with others, then a job might be your best route.
You often get given or offered work that is adjacent to or outside your immediate interest, or that’s on something you wouldn’t pick for yourself. While this may not always be fun, it creates serendipities where you can discover that you like something you’d never have considered on your own.

Of course, none of this is to say that jobs are the way. Obviously, I left to do my own thing. But it would be dishonest of me to claim that I don’t sometimes miss some of the benefits that jobs gave me, and under the right circumstances, I could imagine myself going back into that world for a while. Just… no big commutes again. That’s something I won’t do again.

(And, yes, this started its life as a tweet thread).

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Useless work darkens the heart

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:00:00 CET

“Odo wrote: A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well,—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.” – The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin

I agree that our natural state is to find joy in being useful, to learn, to grow and to participate in doing what needs to be done in service of those around us. And I agree that being made to do useless work degrades that joy and invites the heart to close.

The trouble is that, while I have had decades of doing work that has been both useful and useless, it was all treated the same way. Even when the work was genuinely useful and joyful, it happened within a context that I found oppressive. I participated for a long time, though with some awareness of the thorn in my foot, but eventually there came a point when I couldn’t live with how dark my heart was becoming.

I’m not unique in this kind of experience, but I also want to acknowledge that it’s far from universal. Many people do find joy and contentment on the default path, and I sometimes wish I could be a member of their ranks.

I think there are many great things about jobs that are hard to replicate outside of employment, and I had a lot of fun while working. I met great people, I did plenty of good work, I travelled the world, and, let’s be honest, I was pretty comfortable most of the time—until I wasn’t.

That thorn, though… it comes from what Le Guin is pointing at, and I’m still learning to remove it bit by bit today. When you spend your entire life essentially forcing yourself to do something that feels useless, sure you learn discipline, self-control and a level of integrity around doing what you say you will do, but there is a cost.

I’ve since learned that, for me at least, should suppresses want. This means that if I want to do something, and then I feel that I should do that thing, or that someone is making me do it, I suddenly stop wanting to do it. Perhaps this is a flaw in my own psychology, but it’s one I wasn’t able to exorcise whilst employed, and I have no desire to try now.

I’ll give you a little example of a lingering cost from my own 18 years in formal education and a further decade of employment. In the first few weeks and months after I quit my job, I often found myself sitting at my desk at home with an air of looking like I was working.

I was so habituated to being in an open plan office that I wasn’t able to recognise that no useful work was getting done in the moment, and bouncing between emails and staring at an open document was not a good use of my time. In the office, I would feel trapped, but at home I could go for a walk, read a book, take a nap or do literally anything else. Yet I didn’t, because I still felt the need to protect myself from some authority coming to punish me in some way.

So, since I had internalised The Boss as various kinds of villain somewhere in my psyche, I found myself at home, with no boss to speak of, looking busy. And the thing about looking busy is that to look busy, you mostly need to look stressed. So what I was actually doing was making myself stressed by doing useless work to protect myself against being forced to do more useless work.

Comical, no?

Working for myself has been a much more challenging and emotional journey than I could have predicted, because I didn’t appreciate just how deep those grooves of belief and habit had been worn. I’m grateful to Le Guin for pointing out how much of it comes from the economic system I’ve grown up in.

I’m learning that my useful work is ambiguous and scary in its ambition, and I’ve kept approaching it with the same ‘should’ energy that I’ve carried from employment. The more I sink into it, though, the more the should drops away to reveal a joy that feels durable.

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Zettel(s): 9.1

If money were a person, I would be a dickhead

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 CET

Back in 2022, during our year of nomad travel, I did a week-long Awakened Leadership group retreat in Bali. It was an intense experience where we explored our emotions on shadowy topics like death, sex and money, and we did it in a hot jungle environment that often hit 100% humidity.

One of the exercises on money was to explore our relationship with money as if it were an actual person. At the time, since I was making a decent income and our costs were low, this was one of the easier sessions for me. On the other hand, this might just mean that I found sex and death trickier.

Things are different now. I’ve been back in London for a while, where it’s very expensive, I have a baby, and I recently learned that I have to spend tens of thousands of pounds out of pocket on knee surgeries to, hopefully and finally, resolve lifelong knee instability. That’s not to mention a total right hip replacement that I’ll talk about another time.

So, the situation right now is that I want to be making substantially more money than I am and, at the same time, I’m spending a lot of what I have. Now that the stakes are higher, I’m realising that my relationship with money quite isn’t as harmonious as I told myself it was in Bali.

It doesn’t feel good to admit it, but it looks like my relationship with money is actually pretty dysfunctional, and at times even abusive.

I expect money to just be there for me, but I don’t put in consistent work to look after money. I worry that I’m not good enough for money, that I don’t deserve its loving presence in my life. I’m not that grateful for how money does show up for me, protect me, and give me the opportunities that it has. I feel I don’t know what money wants or how to make it want to be around me, which makes me both scared and angry.

Basically, I project an enormous amount onto money, when really it has nothing at all to do with money, and everything to do with my own insecurities and fears.

What’s interesting is that this becomes much more obvious when I think of money as someone I care deeply for, and who I could imagine caring deeply for me. I would feel horrible if I caught myself acting this way towards someone I loved, so why do I allow it with money? I can even see what remains of my disorganised attachment style making itself known, pushing away and pulling closer at the same time, sending mixed messages and always wondering why things are more complicated than they really need to be.

Looking at my relationship with money as if it were a person, it feels like what I really want is to feel in connection with money. I want to feel grateful, at ease and loving towards and around money. I want to see it as a source of fun and aliveness, not of craving and aversion.

I’ll start by recognising that the strategies I’ve been using so far aren’t working, because I’m trying to solve for the wrong things. Even if I got a lot more money, I’d likely feel similarly. Where my money scales, so does the dysfunction of my relationship with it.

Instead, I shall practice gratitude. I shall bow deeply to the dignity and freedom I have been afforded by money to be able to spend time with my boy, to travel, and to drop those tens of thousands of pounds to significantly improve my health for my and my family’s benefit.

And I will approach money with a spirit of play within the context of an infinite game. The point of money is not to win or to accumulate, but to flow as an expression of purpose, value and active participation with all the other games of life.

As with all other things, I want to relate to money sincerely, not seriously. I realise now I’ve been much too serious with money. I’d rather learn to dance with it.

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On wanting to disbelieve inconvenient things

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 CET

It might just be that I’m adjacent to Weird Health Twitter, but I keep coming across the idea that exposure to artificial electromagnetic fields (EMFs) may be harmful to health, or at least that they interact more with our bodies than we generally believe.

I’m not going to write about whether or not I think this is true, because that would require a literature review and a refresh of some key concepts from my physics degree¹, but I’m curious about my response to the idea itself. Whenever I encounter it, I notice two thought processes:

intellectual: this is really interesting and I’d love to learn more about it
emotional: nah this can’t be true though

It’s the second of these that I want to explore, because it reveals an interesting pattern: my tendency to dismiss things that would be inconvenient if they were true. And it’s definitely not just me who does that.

Let’s take this EMF thing as an example, but remember that it applies just as well to many things that have inconvenient implications, like wealth inequality, limits to economic growth, global warming and AI risk.

Artificial electromagnetic fields are everywhere in the modern era. In my home in central London, I am exposed to multiple Wi-Fi networks as well as cellular networks from a high density of masts, and then there are the phones, baby monitors, Hue lamps, and other sundry Bluetooth-enabled gadgets.

In order to minimise exposure, I would need to move to a rural location, live far from any neighbours, only use wired internet, use wired headphones, exile all bluetooth gadgets and keep my phone on flight mode or off most of the time. All this, of course, would be extremely annoying.

Rather than deal with the hassle—or risk being seen as a crank—it’s easier to dismiss the idea outright. And if you consider the scale of impact if EMFs really are harmful, it makes even more sense that we all collectively choose to dismiss the idea, and to enforce its dismissal amongst each other.

The problem is that whether something feels true has little bearing on whether it is true, and I find myself increasingly wanting to attune to what is true, alongside what is good and beautiful. If my habit is to immediately dismiss everything that feels untrue, I am likely to dismiss many things that are in fact true, because my feelings are almost certainly inaccurate.

It doesn’t help that the feeling of whether something is true or not is extremely easy to manipulate. I’m sure that for a long time the idea that smoking was harmful to health would have felt untrue, and we know how much effort and money went into generating that feeling. There are tremendous incentives in place to make sure people feel like EMFs are perfectly harmless, and the notion that they might not be should therefore be made to feel so preposterous as to be instantly dismissed as the product of a feeble mind.

In navigating what is true, it seems that one of the most important skills to train is to delay deciding. I don’t want to fixate on believing or disbelieving an idea without first having meaningfully inhabited the felt experience of not knowing. That doesn’t mean I can’t quickly land on one side or the other—the apple will definitely fall, and the Earth is not flat—but I still want to retain conscious control over delaying that assessment when necessary so that I can reason well.

The lack of this skill seems like a failure mode of a kind of naïve rationalism, where if a sensible mechanism can’t be found to explain an observation, there must be something suspicious about the observation. The lack of a known mechanism creates a feeling of untruth, and the immediate fixation on not true happens without conscious consent. My concern is that this happens all the time, unconsciously, for most people and obviously this has enormous implications for our capacity to see clearly and address many of the big challenges we face.

In the case of EMFs, it appears there may be plenty of sensible mechanisms by which they might be harmful, but the felt untruthiness is already firmly established and shared. That’s another layer of difficulty, because when there’s an established feeling of untruth around a subject, evidence needs to really pile up before it shifts the Overton Window enough to allow for sensible discussion.

So, are EMFs harmful? Should I be seeking to minimise my son’s exposure, e.g. from baby monitors and wireless devices near him?

I have to say that I don’t know. The burden of not knowing is to be forced to feel the discomfort of not knowing, and to welcome feeling that way indefinitely. I’d rather feel my not-knowing than jump to knowing and be wrong.

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Forgive me, I can’t help but signal that I’m not a complete crank ↩︎

I don't wish I'd had children earlier

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 CET

There’s a refrain I sometimes hear from parents, which is “I wish I’d had children earlier”.

I recently had my first child, aged 37, and I can’t imagine wishing I’d had children earlier. This is not at all because I’m regretful or not enjoying being a dad. In fact, I love it, and not once have I felt even a flicker of regret. I’m grateful for this, because I suspect there’s a lot of good fortune in my being able to make that claim.

And, as a not-young—but certainly not old, either—dad with a sharper sense of my own mortality, I understand the desire to have more time with my son. It’s just that I can’t drop the knowledge of what an alternative life where I’d had children earlier would have looked like.

My life was different ten years ago. I hadn’t met Cécile, who was 100% the correct person to have a child with, and I wouldn’t have had this specific boy who I love deeply and can’t imagine swapping out for another. Children aren’t fungible.

If I’d had children ten years ago, I would have likely locked myself into a life that would then have evolved extremely differently and in ways I suspect I wouldn’t have liked. My life now is awesome, my choices and intuitions have been correct, and I do not regret for a moment how any of this has unfolded.

Of course, I say this now, when my son is five months old. Later in life, when I’m 55 and he’s 18, I will probably feel intense emotions around not getting more time with him. But there’s the rub: there is no alternative timeline where I could have had more time with him, because this is the timeline where I got him.

Put another way, wishing I’d had children earlier is just another way of saying I wish I’d had different children, and probably a different partner and different entire life situation to boot.

It’s entirely plausible that I would have felt the same way had I had those other children as a different person, by a different mother, in a different life. But, from my vantage point—right here, right now—this is the timeline where he got loving parents who have the confidence and capacity to be self-employed free agents, who can devote the time and attention they want to devote to him, and who have gained the skills and experience to be the kind of parents we don’t think we will regret being.

Maybe we’ll get ten fewer years together, but the years we do get are going to be so rich in a way that I doubt would have been possible in that alternative, earlier kids timeline.

I could wish I’d had children sooner, but I’d rather pour myself into enjoying the life I actually have.

And enjoy this life I do.

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On not caring to read AI generated text

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:00:00 CET

I recently read Wind, Sand and Stars (🇫🇷: Terre des hommes) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who is best known for writing the utterly wonderful The Little Prince.

Wind, Sand and Stars is a memoir of Saint-Exupéry’s experiences as a pioneering airmail pilot in the 1920s and 1930s flying routes across Europe, the Sahara desert and Andes mountains. Not only did he fly the routes, he established them, flying over unknown and inhospitable terrain with minimal instrumentation in aircraft built just fifteen years after Wright Brothers’ first ever powered flight.

He recounts stories of a fellow pilot surviving an impossible crash in the mountains, of his experience being stranded in the desert without water, food or hope of rescue, and of his negotiating the release of his colleagues from the Saharan tribes who took them hostage when they crashed. In his era of aviation he risked death with every flight, and he knew the grief of his fellow aviators dying in accidents that were an expected reality of his profession.

The book is written in a beautiful poetic style. Take this passage:

Nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon in its shade.

For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.

Words like these offer me the precious echoes of what he felt, and I know that the tears they bring to my eyes were hard-earned—just not by me. When I feel my heart ache as I reflect on the harsh truth that I can’t make new old friends, and that I will one day witness my friends dying as I grow old myself, I want to know that at the very least I’m not alone in that condition.

While an AI may conceivably be able to reproduce the words themselves, it’s not the words that speak to me, but the resonance I feel with the place the words came from, in this case a man who died when his plane fell into the Mediterranean some 43 years before I was born.

In an era where AI-generated text is proliferating, I find myself immediately losing interest in reading something the moment I realise that it’s synthetic. The work of the human is to bring forth a pearl from the deep places the AI cannot tread. Not information, but soul. And I do not want to put my attention on anything that masquerades as soul.

Three meditations from one month of fatherhood

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 CET

This was originally posted on my newsletter

He will never be this tiny again

My son, Étienne, is one month old.

Most early mornings I lie on the sofa as he sleeps on my chest, and these hours are the most precious of my day. I get to give his mother a little more sleep while I bathe in his presence during the stillness before the sun rises.

Each morning reveals a new version of him. He weighs a little more, his face is rounder and, when he wakes, his eyes are more alert, tracking me as I move.

Each day I catch myself looking forward to future milestones: when he smiles as he recognises us, when he can hold his own head up, when he sleeps for more than three hours at a time. In part, this is excitement to see him grow, to marvel as he unlocks subtler, more sophisticated ways of being in the world.

In truth, there is another part of me that wants him to get there faster, because this stage is tough. It’s frighteningly easy to see him as a sequence of jobs to be done, particularly when deprived of sleep. Change nappy, feed, burp. Tummy time, soothe, nap. Bath, feed, burp, sleep. He is immediately and shamelessly demanding. He takes and takes and gives nothing back.

Except, no, that’s not quite right. He takes everything we have to give, yes, but somehow he offers even more in return. Every time I look forward to his future, I’m pulled back to the truth of the rapidly-unfolding present, and as I sink into a wordless delight in his being I find a grief inextricably entwined. He will never be this tiny again.

Grief can be hard to sit with, but trying to push it away feels like missing the point. Each morning invites me to enjoy the grief braided through the connection in the pre-dawn quiet, and when I pause to appreciate it, that grief unfolds into its own bittersweet flavour of bliss.

That is his gift: he invites me out of my forgetfulness. He reminds me that this quality of being, this preciousness, is always and has always been there. It will always be there. My little prince, sleeping gently on my chest, is its avatar.

My son doesn’t know that my self-judgement isn’t his

In case I just gave you the impression I’m some kind of monk, let me correct that. Yes, many early morning contact naps with Étienne feel like sacred presence. But also: it’s 4am, I haven’t slept enough, and I feel tired and foggy. So when meditating on my son’s radiant perfection feels out of reach, I play rapid chess against anonymous strangers on my phone.

This is a terrible way to play chess. I’m bad at chess even when well rested and, at 4am, I blunder constantly, which irritates me to an unreasonable degree.

This morning, in a moment of post-blunder clarity, I noticed something that concerned me: my son, though asleep, was in contact with me while my body moved through familiar patterns of self-criticism and irritation. Familiar to me, anyway—he doesn’t know that those are my emotions, not his.

You see, I believe that a lot more information is shared through touch than is generally thought. This comes from my experience as an Alexander Technique teacher, where touch plays a huge role in 1:1 lessons to both tune into what the student is doing and to convey an experience to them.

Moreover, the more I learn about ‘Parts’¹, in the Internal Family Systems sense, the more I understand that parts are psychophysical, as FM Alexander might have put it: neither mental, nor physical, but both, indivisibly. Put another way, Parts are something the whole bodymind does.

What all this means is that when my self-critical parts get triggered by blundering a move, I consider it perfectly reasonable to assume that my body is tensing in ways that transmit something of my patterns and conditioning to my son. Obviously, I don’t want this for him.

This realisation opens up new territory: parenting as a practice. In the Alexander Technique context, I often advise the teacher trainees I assist to remove their hands from a student when they’ve lost touch with their own coordination and presence. The risk of transmitting something at best useless—or at worst actively unhelpful—is too high. Better to step back, reorient, and then begin again.

With my son I have two options, one easy, one more challenging.

The easy option is to avoid activities that trigger my parts in this way when I’m in contact with him. I can choose not to play chess if I know it will make my body broadcast self-judgement.

The harder option is to remain aware of what’s happening and practice compassion with myself in real time, so that what I transmit is something a little more sophisticated. Not just the inner critic part, but also the capacity to be with it, to welcome and love it. That’s something I do want him to get, because he’s going to get Parts of his own no matter what I do.

Ultimately, I’m holding this intention lightly. Looking after a newborn is hard enough and I don’t want to create a stick to beat myself with. It’s enough for me to gently notice my own inner experience when I’m with him, and to bring even greater compassion to what I find.

Holding my son’s attention as sacred

I saw two essays on my feed this week discussing how university students these days can no longer focus, read deeply, or engage with anything requiring more than momentary effort. Many no longer care about anything beyond the next notification.

I want to delve deeply into this topic soon, but for now, I know I don’t want Étienne to fall victim to this attention crisis, which I suspect we’ll one day look back on as a tech-induced pandemic in its own right.

I know how easy it is to use technology to zone out from feeling certain flavours of bad, because I’ve done it a lot myself. My favourite loop is “I’ve scrolled too much and I feel awful. Oh, I know, more scrolling will fix it!”, and so a deep habitual groove becomes worn in my mind.

This avoidance is my Parts trying to soothe locally, but making things worse globally, helped by tech companies happy to monetise the pattern. The way out of this, by the way, is to feel all the emotions all the way through, though this is often much easier said than done.

As Étienne gets older, there will be conversations and decisions around screen time, education and access to technology. I want to be flexible, cultivate his skill and curiosity, and give him experience fit for a child born in 2025.

At the same time, attention is sacred and deserves reverence. What he attends to, and how he attends to it, shapes the world as much as it will shape him and, for now, I’m its guardian. To that end, I have a few rules for myself:

Let his focus run, even if he’s just staring at a leaf or into empty space.
Leave him be if he’s absorbed elsewhere. He doesn’t owe me eye contact when I want it.
Model healthy use of attention, particularly with how I use my phone.

My hope is one day he’ll wake to find that in a world where attention is becoming increasingly dull, fractured and commodified, his has remained bright, steady and free, and will serve him for the rest of his life.

Image generated by ChatGPT based on a photo, in Japanese wood block style, because I don’t want to share any real photos of him online

In this model, Parts can be thought of as stable sub-personalities that crystallised in response to felt experiences of deficiency at various points in our development. They have their own goals to stop us feeling certain ways again in future, and they use various strategies to meet those goals. While well-intentioned, from their perspective, these strategies often create repeating patterns of behaviour that create problems and stuckness in our lives. Inner critics are a classic example of Parts. ↩︎

Notes from the threshold of fatherhood

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 CET

This was originally published on my newsletter.

My son is due on 15 March, and I’m surrounded by objects that imply his presence.

The empty bassinet, the changing table and chest of drawers filled with unfathomably tiny clothes each announce they will soon belong to a brand new someone. While for now he exists for me through these objects, as pictures from scans and as increasingly dynamic movements in his mother’s belly, I’m excited to meet him in person.

I’m excited to see his face and feel for the first time that this is no ordinary baby; this is my baby.

I’m excited to be the one who gets to (try to) console him when the sheer vividness of Being outside his cosy womb becomes unbearable.

I’m excited for his voice to create a third note in what has so far been a harmonious dyad, and to enjoy the music we make whether the emergent triad is harmonious or discordant.

And I’m excited to embrace the intensity of a ride that never stops, that never lets me off the hook or gives me an easy time. I’m excited that his mere existence will deepen my capacity and appreciation for love, yearning, fear, regret, joy, pain and all the rest.

Yet at the same time, I’m unsettled.

Global events of the last few weeks, the increasing ubiquity of AI, and an ache of disorientation about the utility of my skills remind me that the world I grew up in—the one that felt like home, to me—is gone.

If I am to gift my son a world that feels, to him, like home, I must first grieve the loss of mine, otherwise I risk falling into a self-indulgent nostalgia and denial of reality as it is, neither of which will serve him (or me, for that matter).

I don’t know how to make sense of reality right now, and I don’t know if I would feel that so intensely if not for my upcoming responsibility for this precious new life. But that’s exactly what I’m signing up for: I’m not allowed to opt out, nor to drift, nor to simply hope for the best. Not any more, because the consequences are no longer just my own.

I find myself standing on the threshold of a dream¹, and I can’t help but wonder which side is which. I have this uncanny sense that despite the looming sleep deprivation, I’m about to experience something akin to waking up.

There are few decisions I’ve made in my life that have been truly irreversible, where stepping over a threshold has meant there’s no stepping back. I can only imagine what’s on the other side of that line.

Whatever it’s like, though, I vow to embrace all of it, and all of him, wholeheartedly. It’s both the least—and the most—that I can do.

terrific album, incidentally ↩︎

Notes on gratitude and surrender

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:00:00 CET

I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude lately.

I am blessed in a great many ways. To name just a few, I am healthy, safe, and comfortable. I love and am loved. I am the master of my own time¹. These alone put me among the ranks of the most fortunate people in the world, and therefore, surely, among the most grateful.

Well, it pains me to admit this to you, but I am not as grateful as would seem commensurate with the scale of my blessings. Instead, when I gaze upon my lot in life, I notice feelings of lack, insecurity, craving and resentment. I still have many bones to pick with the universe for not making itself align more perfectly with my obviously correct preferences.

Since I’m sufficiently self-aware and well-socialised to know for sure (tongue firmly in cheek) that those where-gratitude-really-ought-to-have-been feelings are ugly, unwarranted and inappropriate, I also get a side order of shame about the whole affair, which makes me want to turn away from exploring further what’s going on.

So, when it was recently pointed out to me that the cure for my self-diagnosed condition of chronic stuckness might in fact be gratitude, I decided to take a closer look.

There have been some sublime moments in my life where, due to whatever confluence of factors, I have felt a supreme, abiding and unconflicted gratitude for whatever my attention landed on. Such experiences have been telling in both their power and rarity, because they revealed that the experience of gratitude is a wide spectrum, and most of the time I’m a long way from what’s possible.

On the one hand, gratitude can be merely perfunctory; spoken, but not felt, like I’m a child being forced to apologise for something I don’t think I did wrong. Yet on the other hand, gratitude can be felt as an infinite pool of surrender and joy, where every fibre of my being unfolds in the flawless presence of the way things are. These are states so profound that I have to make do with stringing words together to gesture vaguely at a level of gratitude that is no really completely pure and earnest and sincere and true and actually full gratitude though.

If it’s true that gratitude can be so sublime, and that I’m not feeling such a level of gratitude most of the time, there must be some resistance to it. What is behind that resistance?

To feel and express that kind of sincere gratitude is to accept, at a depth that at first feels disturbing, that my blessings in life are not entirely of my own design, as much as I may want to cling to the illusion that they are. Sure, I may work hard, make good decisions, be educated, talented and skilled (not to mention devastatingly handsome), but many people do, have and are those things, and they are not as fortunate as I am. Similarly, I am less fortunate than many who may be less seemingly ‘deserving’ than I am.

I may be able to encourage blessings in my life, to create the conditions where blessings show up more readily, but ultimately I’m not the final arbiter of the good that happens to me. That I have never been in a car crash is a testament both to my capacity to drive carefully and to my good fortune to never have had negligent, impaired or evil drivers nullify my best efforts.

To be more poetic about it, it’s as though my blessings flow into my life through a channel from some heavenly realm and there’s a kind of energetic exchange involved: the heavenly realm offers me blessings, and I offer a bright, pure gratitude in return, to balance the books.

To push the metaphor further, my experience over not just the last few years, but my entire life, suggests that the channel from that heavenly realm passes close to, or perhaps through, some less wholesome realms. That return flow of gratitude through the channel is not just a fair exchange for the blessings I receive, it plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the channel itself. Without gratitude, its edges become ragged and permeable, bringing smiles to the faces of any demons that lurk just outside it, allowing them to enter the channel, and so, my life. bringing with them resentment, disconnection and anxiety. They make me forget that I’m not in charge of the blessings I receive.

And it does seem that whatever lingering stuckness I experience is a symptom of clinging to the belief that I am, in fact, in charge. If I am the architect and master builder of the grand edifice I stand upon, I bear the full burden of responsibility for them. A poor decision, enemies at the gates, or a powerful storm may bring it all crashing down, so I tense my body and mind into whatever shapes they need to take to prevent that from happening. There is no rest here, except perhaps when I myself turn to dust.

The alternative is to surrender control. This is not to say that I am absolved of the need to work hard, to be invested in life, or to throw myself wholeheartedly and earnestly into whatever it is that life offers me. Indeed, the attitude of not just going with the flow, but surrendering into the flow is the means whereby life is actually able to unfold for me. Asserting that I’m the master of where I go is just struggling against the flow. In some cases, perhaps, it might work at great cost, but in most cases I’m likely to exhaust myself and get nowhere. ²

It reminds me of this story from Carl Jung, which I can’t find myself, but the Internet assures me he did actually say:

“Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days whereas nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: “Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.” – Carl Jung

To feel that pure, all-embracing gratitude is, in its own way, to bow low before God, so low that my sense of separation from the ground I emerged from breaks down and I remember my place within the interwovenness of all things.

Gratitude is a sacred expression of humility. I know that when I struggle to access it, I need only look to my own grasping for control to find the cause. To truly let in the gratitude for the fact that I have never been hit by a car is to look unflinchingly at the parallel world in which I was, allow my heart to break and to see that the gap between his life and mine may be as small as a single well-timed glance—from someone else.

If you enjoyed this, you might also like these:

I originally wrote"master of my own time and attention”, but if I’m being perfectly honest with myself, this is clearly not the case. ↩︎
This doesn’t preclude having agency about my direction while swimming with the current. I may be flowing downstream, but I can still decide to swim downstream towards one riverbank or the other. Going with the flow does not imply a complete loss of personal agency or influence over what happens. ↩︎

Why real change feels weird, unfamiliar and wrong

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 CET

This was originally published on my newsletter

We all have habitual patterns in every domain of life. We move, talk, think and feel in the same kinds of ways that we once learned were good and useful. Eventually, though, it becomes clear that those ways aren’t always the most constructive ones. The tracks that once guided a train somewhere it was needed later constrain it from adapting to a world that has changed around it.

Of course, we are not trains. We do have the capacity to step out of past conditioning, but as anyone who has consciously attempted it can attest, it’s a difficult project. One of the reasons for this is that doing something truly new—actually moving off those habitual tracks—feels like some combination of weird, unfamiliar and wrong.

What we do all the time comes to feel familiar, and what is familiar comes to feel right, natural and the way things are simply supposed to be. The problem is that it’s easy to use that internal sense of what feels right to guide behaviour. There’s a kind of safety in the familiar: it’s known, mapped territory from which it feels like chaos has been expelled. It’s the comforting sense of being at home, even if home also happens to be a chaotic mess. Better the devil you know, and all that.

One of my habits is to have a small amount of caffeine to start my day and when I want to feel motivated and invested in what I’m working on. On closer inspection, though, caffeine has the opposite effect on me: it makes me scattered and anxious about the things I’m not getting done because I’m too scattered. Even knowing this, it’s really difficult to learn my lesson and just cut it out completely, in part because sitting at my desk with a herbal tea in the morning just doesn’t feel right.

If I use that internal feeling of familiarity and rightness as a compass, I will, almost by definition, keep orienting towards my habitual patterns of thought and behaviour. Doing anything in a non-habitual way, like tying your shoelaces with a new technique, just feels somehow wrong, at least until it becomes familiar, at which point it starts to feel right again.

The trick is to learn to stay with the experience of unfamiliarity even in the face of the internal pressure to return ‘home’ to familiarity; to notice that urge to resolve the tension and instead stay with the dissonance of the new. The fact that something is unfamiliar is a good sign that it’s new, because it hasn’t already been mapped as a thing you do all the time.

While I’ve talked about this at an individual scale, I suspect it holds true at higher levels of organisation. How many decisions within businesses are taken because they’re the most constructive option versus being the one that feels right, both to the decision makers and to the culture of the organisation as a whole? How much of politics is just being able to read the mood of what would feel right to the public and then giving them that, or at least framing what they’re doing in language that avoids feeling wrong to voters?

For as long as this dynamic goes under-recognised, it makes the job of effecting meaningful change, whether personally or collectively, much more challenging than it otherwise needs to be. “You are going to feel a little uncomfortable and that’s a good thing” can be a bitter pill to swallow if you immediately equate the experience of the unfamiliar with pain or if the person telling you this hasn’t earned some level of trust.

One thing I want to emphasise here though is the difference between something feeling weird, in the unfamiliar sense, and feeling weird in the bad sense. I want to encourage you to spend more time in the unfamiliar, but I absolutely do not want to encourage you to spend more time in the bad. If something feels bad, stop.

When I sometimes do hands-on Alexander Technique lessons—and, surprise! this is Alexander Technique—various things I do with a student bring about a sense of unfamiliarity. Someone might say “this feels weird”. I then ask, “good weird? neutral weird? bad weird?” I’ve yet to have an experience where someone said “bad weird”, it’s always just…not what they’re used to. It’s usually good weird. That’s the constructive space where something new can emerge.

This is something I invite you to practice: can you bring the kind of awareness to your daily life where you can differentiate between just unfamiliar and the actually bad? The first is the path to the freedom to change, the second can cause harm. Language often conflates the two, though, so there’s a process of learning to be able to separate them. Trust your internal sense of what feels bad, but be a little suspicious of your internal sense of what feels right.

Friendship is a co-adventure

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:00:00 CET

This post was originally published in my newsletter.

I just spent a week in the middle of nowhere in the south of Spain at ‘RichFest 2’ (named after the organiser, Rich Bartlett), where about 20 people from the Internet gathered to enjoy each other’s company away from the familiar patterns of everyday life. There was a moderate amount of techno, there were participant-led workshops and there was all the joy of co-living, namely cooking and cleaning.

Lush morning scenes from Richfest

I had a wonderful time meeting new people, putting faces to names from Twitter and deepening a couple of relationships from previous in-person gatherings. There were some exceptionally resonant conversations that I suspect can only happen when you get a critical mass of like-minded weirdos together for a while.

In the last couple of days, as the social fabric started to shift towards a comfortable green velvet paired with a neon pink silk, I noticed a feeling that was remarkable in its absence from my normal life. I had the feeling that I was co-living with people, and I don’t mean in the ’living in a big house together’ sense. It felt like the adventures of my life were happening with other people who were also living their own adventures with me.

This sense is different from how my relationships with most of my friends has drifted with age, with living in a big city and with habit. It struck me that most of the time when I meet with friends in person or online, one of the first questions is some version of “so what have you been up to?” It’s like we’re living separate lives that we then tell each other about, not sharing in the living itself.

While it’s a genuine blessing to have friendships where we sincerely want to know how each other’s lives are unfolding, I realised that I also want more friends who I do life with rather than just talk about my life with. It seems that talking about my life takes me out of it somehow, putting me into a kind of reflective, evaluative mode that often makes my life feel less good than when I’m just living it.

‌And to my wonderful local friends who may be reading: this isn’t meant as a criticism of how we are together. I’m hugely grateful for all the friendships in my life, especially those that a comfortable, long-standing, high-trust friend group provides. Just consider this an invitation for further deepening and co-adventuring, if you want it.

I noticed another version of this experience a few months ago when I visited Barcelona with my partner Cécile. We were there at the same time as Paul, Angie and their daughter, and because Paul is also a self-employed weirdo, I had this wonderful, yet unfamiliar experience of impromptu hanging out.

Here in London, where I’ve lived for pretty much my entire adult life, with friends who are increasingly busy professionals, it’s common—necessary even—to arrange catch-ups weeks in advance, and then to walk or take public transport 30-60 minutes to get there. It’s always a thing that requires planning, coordination and a non-trivial amount of effort.

By contrast, it was a strange shock to my system that I could just send Paul a message in the morning and arrange to meet for brunch a 15 minute amble away. Of course, it helps that Paul’s schedule was as flexible as mine (he is the “Pathless Path” guy, after all), but it’s still striking how so much big city professional life makes these kinds of casual, low-key interactions less accessible.

The lesson I’m taking away from this is that there are forces in my current context that conspire to nudge me towards this strange kind of pseudo-isolation, a kind of loneliness that I was only able to notice by meeting a need I didn’t even know I had. Pushing back against these nudges requires some level of intentionality and environment design.

Here in London, I can be on the lookout for more events that might interest my friends and take more initiative in inviting people join me. Live music, the theatre or interesting talks all come to mind. Longer term, I can also decide to choose where I live based on proximity to friends, at least to the extent I have the resources and flexibility to do that.

In the online context, one of the best examples I’ve come across for cultivating this co-adventuring vibe is the use of personal feeds in Cosy Web style non-public online spaces, like a Discord server or Slack group.

My friend Tasshin has written an excellent article on how feeds work, but in short, imagine an invite-only common-interest community where each member gets their own channel (#feed-michael) to write about whatever is alive for them. Other members can hang out in other people’s feeds, reply, give emoji reacts (a truly overpowered social technology) and so on, which means everyone can be in the loop with what’s going on in real time and also feel seen by others—all without the need for ‘catch ups’.

I’m in a few such communities, but I’ve been giving more thought to how I might create some Cosy Web instances of my own. My Alexander Technique course is hosted on a non-public platform with community features, but it feels far too big to qualify, unless I create smaller sub-channels. I’m keeping my awareness open to any common-interests around which I might like to cohere say 30 engaged people, but for now it’s a quiet background aspiration.

If any of this has resonated with you, I’d suggest a couple of things.

The first is to look at your local, ‘physical’ friendships and see where you can make a shift from telling friends about your life to living your life with your friends. If your primary way of being with friends is, for example, regular catch-up-flavoured drinks or dinners, are there events or activities that you could enjoy together?

The second is to look at your online life and consider if you have friends who might be interested in creating a small, non-public Discord community where you can implement this feed model. Even a small-scale online co-working community could scratch a social itch you don’t even know you have.

Notes on identity - authenticity vs 'profilicity'

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 00:00:00 CET

This was originally published on my newsletter

I’m part way through a book called You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity in which the authors argue that the meaning of identity, as influenced by society, has changed between different types: sincerity, authenticity, and ‘profilicity’.

In their use of these terms, sincerity refers to playing social roles that are largely assigned to us: farmer, husband, mother or devout follower of a particular faith. These roles, transmitted through such things as religion, gender, class, age or social standing, dictate how we dress, what we do, and how we see the world. To be sincere is to align one’s identity fully with the given role.

After sincerity comes authenticity, which points towards the idea that the ’true you’ is what lies hidden beneath all the masks that are imposed by social roles. The authentic you is what’s left when you cast the roles off and express what remains.

Finally we come to identity through ‘profilicity’, derived from the experience of profiles of various forms on social media, dating apps, CVs and the like. Profilicity is a kind of second-order identity that emerges when we see ourselves as being seen by others. And not just any other, but a general peer, a “larger, personally unknown public”.

The authors point out that none of these identities is any less valid than another, they just reflect the way society around us works. Depending on your generation, though, you may find one of them more resonant than the others. As a mid-thirties millennial, I’ve been steeped in the story of authenticity and tend to find sincerity, as expressed here, stifling.

But in a world where personal freedoms are limited and success in life depends on living up to one’s social role, merging your identity with the roles you’ve been given is an effective strategy. Yearning for a kind of self-expression that society simply won’t grant you is likely to bring suffering.

As society becomes more dynamic and old social structures break down, the idea that ’true identity’ can be found in the absence of the roles that once gave us direction is comforting. Authenticity offers us both a chance and an imperative to ‘find ourselves’, a mission that becomes all the more compelling as society retreats from telling us who we are.

Now that we live in a hyper-connected online world, where it’s increasingly difficult to exist without being observed in some way by a largely anonymous crowd, defining who we are by how we are perceived and judged by others becomes its own strategy for success.

While it’s tempting to believe that how others perceive you shouldn’t matter, as authenticity suggests, it really depends on which societal waters you swim in. You can be as authentic as you want in your online dating profile, but if everyone around you is presenting themselves through the more highly-curated perspective of profilicity, you’ll probably get fewer matches than those whose lives are naturally performance art. Those beautiful photos on an Indonesian beach, the well-regarded political views and evidence of social validation from the general peer start to matter more and more.

When I came across these three kinds of identity, I realised that it’s quite possible for them to coexist, overlap and come into conflict if I’m not aware of the dynamics at play.

For example, my profilic identity in the last three years has become, for better or worse, “that Alexander Technique guy on Twitter”. While this isn’t wrong, it has been creating tension with my authentic identity, which has found the profilic identity increasingly ill-fitting.

As my authentic identity started to drift away from a strong focus on Alexander Technique (“I’m more than that!! I want to explore other things!!”), I’ve struggled to reconcile my ‘observed self’ and my ‘felt self’, which created a stuckness that ossified both identities.

This shouldn’t be surprising, though, because each kind of identity is real. Many people would be inclined to say that profilicity is somehow fake or illusory, but that misses the point. The authors of the book point out that while employers know that CVs are profilic—a highly curated performance that everyone plays along with—they still expect you to be able to do the job. They hire your profilic identity and, if you’re lucky, allow your authentic identity to come too. But neither is more or less real than the other.

Do the people who pay me for Alexander Technique stuff care about the authentic me? I’m lucky that many do, for sure, but most care only about my profilic self. Again, there’s no problem with this, but I think it sets up a trap that a lot of online creator types can fall into—as, indeed, do many employed people— of feeling pressured to live up to their profile.

Personally, I’ve been stuck in this conflict for long enough and want to make my profilic identity less fixated. In doing this, I’m already feeling my authentic identity take a sigh of relief and start to come more to life. From here, change becomes more possible.

I’ll leave you with a question: how do your different identities interact, and how might that be blocking your continued evolution?

Prioritising my time as a free agent

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:00:00 CET

In his excellent paper “Knowledge Synthesis: A conceptual model and practical guide, Joel Chan makes passing reference to the idea of “funded time”.

We don’t always have the luxury of being able to devote (funded) time and attention at an intense level for a given project.

As an academic, I assume that most, if not all, of Joel’s work is funded through grants for specific projects and areas of research. Unfunded time still exists, but it’s an investment from individual academics who consider the work to be, for example, important for its own sake, more efficient to ‘just do’ than bother with applying for a grant, or useful to identify new fruitful topics to pursue more deeply.

A similar dynamic shows up in consulting, where I spent much of my professional life. Charging time to a client project—ideally a large one that is well below budget with an engagement manager who is more interested in content than admin—is ideal. The alternative is to assign time to non-client (unfunded) codes, like business development or training, which are ultimately paid for by the consultancy itself.

I’ve been a self-employed free agent for about three years now, with my income coming from a mix of online course sales, writing, coaching and the occasional workshop. As I drift further from traditional work, though, I notice my concept of what work looks like becoming a little fuzzy.

In terms of the model described above, I’ve been doing what feels like ever more unfunded work, to the extent that I’ve started to lose focus on what’s important to make money, both in the short and long term. And although I am not in any hurry to impose academic or consultancy-level systems on myself, I don’t think this lack of focus is serving me that well.

To remedy this, I’m going to start loosely thinking of my work as falling into one of the four quadrants on this 2x2, noting that in my context, “funded time” basically means anything that will lead to money.

Short-term funded time: Immediate Cashflow

This is about making money to pay my bills. The focus is on driving sales of existing products and services.

For me, this means:

getting more eyeballs on the sales page for my Alexander Technique course
scaling up coaching (nearly, but not quite ready yet)

Long-term funded time: Revenue Growth

This is about getting new revenue-generating offers into the market. This might include a focused sprint to create a new course, learning new skills that I can monetise easily or reading around a domain where I already make revenue to enhance the value of what I offer.

For me, this means:

Scoping out and working on major upgrades to my Alexander Technique course
Reading and taking detailed notes on Alexander Technique materials
Aletheia Level 1 Advanced Coaching Program
Building some version of a “Let the others find you” course I have mapped out

Short-term unfunded time: High-Velocity Serendipity

This is about being strongly involved in the world on a daily basis, talking to people and staying highly attuned to fast-moving opportunities as they present themselves. I’ve found that spending time here can lead to some really fun ‘right place, right time’ serendipities, particularly on Twitter.

For me this means:

Hanging out on Twitter and talking to people
Having lots of conversations with interesting people
Saying yes to invitations to things, unless this would restrict the other three quadrants too much

Long-term unfunded time: Self-Renewal

The world is changing fast in fun and weird ways. One of the best ways to prepare for whatever comes is to be flexible, adaptable and to focus on building resilience and even anti-fragility through self-renewal. Sam Sager wrote an excellent piece on self-renewal if you want to read more.

For me this means:

Reading broadly and developing my analogue Zettelkasten
Writing prolifically about whatever interests me
Publishing a newsletter consistently
Introspection and training for self-unfoldment (e.g. the Art of Accomplishment Decisions Course I just finished)
Intentional and fully ‘permissioned’ time off-grid, playing, not thinking about work at all

For now, I want to shift my attention in two directions.

First, I want to spend more time even existing on this map at all, as opposed to where I easily find myself, which might be characterised as “screwing around”. I have a lot of screwing around time I can redirect into any of these four quadrants.

My definition of screwing around is “engaging in low-value distractions (scrolling reddit, online chess) while ostensibly looking like I’m in one of the four quadrants, but not really doing anything”. This can also manifest as bouncing rapidly from thing to thing with a sense of perceived effort, but with no actual progress in any direction.

Second, since my revenue has been progressively dropping as a result of the aforementioned screwing around, and since I want more abundance in my life, I want to focus more on funded time. At first I just plan to keep this framework loosely in mind as I plan my day. If I feel a need later I’ll introduce more structure (e.g. minimum time targets in particular quadrants), but that feels altogether too institutional for my liking and I’d much prefer to be able to follow my nose. I am a free agent for a reason, after all.

I'd rather be uncomfortable than numb

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 CET

Indulge my whimsy for a moment.

Imagine that there is some other plane of existence filled with conscious entities that can peer into our world. And imagine further that these entities are formless. They have no bodies, which means they have no capacity for sensation. No pleasure, no pain, no anxiety, no excitement.

Knowing nothing else about them, I wonder if they look upon our capacity for feeling with a formless version of yearning. What must it be like to feel jealousy coursing through the belly? How delightful might the sensations of confidence be as they ripple up along the spine and penetrate out through the eyes?

My little fantasy about these watchers is that they would be quite different from most of the humans they ’envy’. Where most people crave sensations that feel good and push away sensations that feel bad, these entities might deeply savour all the sensations the way you might savour a nine-course Michelin-starred tasting menu. While some flavours might appeal less than others, there’s still a real enjoyment that can be found in that bitter chicory leaf or the slimy texture of the jellied eel.

(As an aside, I can only assume I read a story like this somewhere and forgot about it. Let’s assume it’s definitely someone else’s, and I just don’t know who came up with it, because it’s too good to be mine.)

I’ve invested a lot of time and energy into running from feelings I don’t like and, on reflection, my returns haven’t been great. After decades of numbing, distracting and avoiding, I’ve learned that all that gives me is a feeling of ever decreasing aliveness.

Aliveness is what matters to me. Do you know what it means to feel the searing hot and freezing cold sensations of grief, anger and embarrassment cascade through my body? It means I’m alive. It means that I am a vulnerable and complex mass of flesh, nerves and perception having an encounter with a similarly complex and vibrant world.

Now, when I encounter a feeling I don’t like, I find it easier to enjoy its raw sensations as a portal to my aliveness. I welcome and celebrate how, even if nothing else, I am blessed to be having the experience at all.

This doesn’t mean tolerating discomfort without seeking to improve the circumstances causing them, nor does it mean creating conditions that will create suffering. It’s just a way to step back from the automatic resistances that, ironically, keep the unpleasant feelings stuck. The moment I stop resisting and welcome them fully, they burn through me, transform and, oftentimes, leave.

Being in a position where I can almost look forward to intense feelings, either way, makes me much less likely to avoid them in the first place. I don’t like the idea that the path of my life might be strongly influenced by the set of emotions I can’t be with.

Bring on all the feelings. Come what may, I am alive.

Signing my children away

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 00:00:00 CET

As I was passed yet another consent form for a podiatry treatment this morning, I joked that I was signing my children away.

The podiatrist laughed. I laughed. The podiatrist applied liquid nitrogen to the sole of my foot. I stopped laughing.

Yet, despite the pain from my frozen verruca, I felt a gentle warmth spread across my chest. I don’t have children, but for a brief moment I had spun up a little world where I did. It occurred to me that it felt good to make that joke, and it would have felt good if I were in fact a father.

What was unusual about this little fantasy was that I didn’t quickly find myself in a tangle of tricky emotions. There was none of the usual “oh I should have children”, “what if I regret having children?”, or “we need to get on with it if we do want children”. I landed straight in a world where my having children was already a fact, and that world felt good and right.

I would say that I wonder what this means, but I know what it means. It mean I’ve been feeling into all the feelings of fear around having children, and I found myself on the other side experiencing a clear desire that I do want to have children.

This is all happening in the context of an intense online course I’m taking — “The Great Decisions Course”, from the Art of Accomplishment — and a commitment I’ve made to stop avoiding feelings that make me uncomfortable.

I have complicated feelings around the decision to have children. I have a lot of fears, resistances and concerns. Whenever these unpleasant emotions would come up, my habitual response has always been to numb or distract myself from them.

As I allow myself to feel those feelings fully, all the way through, I find that they start to dissolve. I always half-consciously assumed that these fears and resistances meant that I don’t want children, but with some of the noise out of the way, I can see more clearly that I do in fact have a desire to have children. I just also have a bunch of fears.

It turns out that the desire to have children and the fear of having children are both valid feelings that can co-exist. Being scared of having kids doesn’t mean I don’t want kids, it simply means I am scared of having kids. And from what I hear from parents, being scared of embarking on the life-changing project that is raising children is a perfectly sensible fear to have.

I’ve been playing with this kind of stuff for a while, yet it continues to surprise me that suppressing feelings I don’t like also suppresses the feelings that give me access to my deepest wants. There is only one master volume dial on experience, and I keep turning it all down. I’m done with doing that.

And I want to have children.

Should suppresses want

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 CET

This was originally published on my newsletter.

A few weeks ago I finished the Art of Accomplishment Master Class, an eight week course that is largely about welcoming and feeling all your emotions.

There was one particular lesson, which explored the relationship between want and should, that really caught my attention. It’s become a cliché that you should (ha) avoid using should, because should brings with it a kind of heaviness of expectations.

There’s even an expression – “don’t should all over yourself — that has become the kind of advice that we hear, say “yeah, I really should stop doing that” and then change precisely nothing.

This time, though, I found a way to actually stop the should process, and it does indeed work. It’s quite annoying for something that clichéd to actually work, but I guess they’re clichés for a reason.

What really stood out to me is what happens when should and want overlap.

When I want something, without the should, I feel un-conflicted about pursuing it and things generally feel light and easy.

When I feel like I should do something—or, perhaps worse, should want something—the whole experience is tight and pressured. I should do this project at work, but because I feel like I should I’m going to procrastinate, moan and not enjoy it.

But what if I feel like I should do something that I also want to do? In my experience, the should overrides and shuts down the want. It becomes much harder to see and experience my wants when they’re shrouded in should.

There are a lot of big decisions in life—whether or not to go to university, whether to have a child, whether to go for the promotion—that come with an externally-derived should.

Imagine not knowing if you want to have children because you’ve been too exposed to the idea that you should (“all of your ancestors reproduced!”) or shouldn’t (“the planet can’t handle more people!”). I realised that this is the situation I’m in for many things, and I suspect I’m not alone.

The way out of this, I think, is to look clearly at all the should narratives and give yourself full permission not to comply with any of them.

Then, when the power of should has been reduced, remember that the underlying want remains. Now is the time to listen for it, protect it from being poisoned by other people’s expectations, and go after it.

Grieve the road not taken

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 CET

This was originally published in my newsletter.

All my life I’ve been tantalised by little wisps of dreams. Whether these dreams belong to me or to others is hard to discern, but they arise and tempt me all the same. I could live here, or there. I could be this kind of person, or that. I could marry this person, or not.

While the wisps stir a powerful yearning, they tend to be ambiguous with their imagery and narrative. Like a siren call, they pull me away from my life as it is, towards my life as it could be.

There have been times when I listened, smiled and decided to follow that call. Sometimes that paid off, sometimes not.

There have been times when I listened, smiled, and decided to stay my course. Sometimes that paid off, sometimes not.

And there have been times when I listened, frowned and, in abdicating a decision, I tore myself apart.

Through these experiences, I suffered mostly through abdication, not through decision.

When two roads diverged in a wood, Robert took the road less travelled by, and that, he said, made all the difference. I wonder whether Robert grieved the other road, and in so doing liberated himself to step wholeheartedly onto the road he took. Or, once his decision was made, did he allow the wisps of his unfulfilled potential tear his spirit from his chosen road?

Perhaps it wasn’t the road he took that made all the difference, but the nature of his decision to take it.

I was born as a field of pure potential. As I grow, my potential crystallises, piece by piece, into actuality. To welcome this is to look directly into and accept my own finitude and death, to be rewarded, perhaps, with a sonorous, bright life of potential made manifest. To deny it is to cling to the promise of potential without action, to be rewarded, perhaps, with anxiety and resentment. It is the nature of the wave function to collapse when it encounters the world of matter—of things that matter.

In tying himself to the mast, Odysseus made his choice. He invited the full force of a road not taken to ravage and transmute his soul, yet he remained steadfast on the road he took.

I feel that I must do the same. Wherever those dream wisps come from, and whether they’re mine or not, I shall listen to them with a smile. Some I will pursue, the rest I will decide against. From time to time, I shall tie myself to the mast and grieve the road not taken.

But, above all, when I have decided which road to take, I will walk it wholeheartedly.

Choose what you want to feel rewarding

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 00:00:00 CET

This was originally published on my newsletter.

I’ve been feeling more and more distractible and, to be quite honest, I don’t love it. There are many factors at play, but the one I want to explore here is the role of technology and its downstream effects on the rest of my life. To do that, I’ll compare and contrast the two kinds of day that I seem to have.

The first kind of day is when I ‘check’ my phone in the first few hours after waking. Because I’m Very Online, I’m basically guaranteed to have a wave of notifications about interesting things and conversations I’ve been tagged in. There’s a general sense of wanting to connect with and feel like a part of the world that exists beyond my head.

Often I do this within 10 minutes of getting out of bed. From here, if I’m not extremely careful, then something like the following cascade of events happens:

I scroll around the various feed-based apps for a while. Usually this is just Twitter, but with the recent buzz on Bluesky and the launch of Substack Notes, there are now more online spaces that I want to catch up on.
I get ready for my day… with YouTube videos playing. For whatever reason, little chores like emptying the dishwasher and brushing my teeth feel like they need some kind of background entertainment, even if that entertainment is whatever trash YouTube Shorts offers me.
I rapid switch between apps between sets in the gym. It feels like exercise is great for my body, but the way I do it isn’t great for my brain. I find myself scrolling, refreshing, watching video clips, and whatever else in the moments that I’m not physically pushing or pulling something heavy.
I play music from my phone while I’m in the shower. When I’m in this mode, not even the shower provides safety from the intrusion of external content. And once I get out of the shower, I might put some more YouTube on, because words are more engaging than music.
Then, when it comes to work… suddenly I can’t focus. After a morning like that, I find my ability to tolerate the normal resistances that arise when focusing on work-shaped things is massively reduced. I’m much more likely to flip across to Twitter or a quick game of chess when I don’t know what to write next or if I think of some overdue task that makes me feel bad.

On days like this, hours can pass in a flash, because I’m not really all there. I don’t realise how much energy and time I burn on either bouncing around those apps like a squirrel on meth or struggling with the fuzzy brain state that I created by having done so. At the end of the day, I find myself strangely exhausted, unhappy and dissatisfied by how little I’ve achieved relative to my expectations.

Okay, so that’s the worst-case scenario version of the first kind of day. Now let me tell you about the other kind of day, where I am diligent about not engaging with any kind of technology in the first few hours after waking. It looks like this:

I go about my morning with greater calm and presence. I do all the same things in getting my day started as above, but I feel much less anxious. The world feels more vivid. Time passes more slowly. My breathing is deeper. I can better notice the shapes and textures of my own thinking and sensations in my body. I occasionally feel the tug of my phone, which hasn’t moved since the night before, but since I decided not to look, I simply don’t look.
When I turn my attention to work… I can simply work. After a morning without what may have been a couple of hours of preliminary hyperactive context switching, my mind is much more likely to gently slip into focusing on whatever I want it to focus on. I still feel the resistances and challenging emotions, but the idea that I could ‘just check Twitter’ is simply less likely to occur, and if it does, I’m better equipped to ignore it. My mind feels sharper, my senses are clearer and I get a lot more done.
At some point I look at my phone and engage with the world. These tools aren’t bad and I don’t want to avoid them completely. But after a several hour period of not really engaging with them, I find that I just have much less interest in them. I can look and engage, but I get bored faster. If I avoid external input early in my day, I am more likely to pick up a book later in my day.
The day feels longer. Seriously, there is so much more time in a day when the grabby grabby apps are less part of it.

This is an enormous difference, even at the daily level, let alone when considering that my life is nothing more (or less) than a sequence of days like these.

The thing is, I’m not one of those optimise your life maximise productivity get out there and hustle sleep when you’re dead types. All I really want is to end each day with a felt sense of “yes, that was a good day”. This doesn’t even necessarily mean “a pleasant day”, but at the least a day where I felt fully engaged, having made constructive choices about where and how I focused my time and attention.

Looking at the ‘bad’ day I describe above, I think one reason it feels bad is that I know, deep down, that whatever sense of reward I feel while scrolling is largely illusory and detrimental to my larger goals. It’s generated by teams of engineers who designed their app to trigger a release of dopamine that I associate with the satisfaction of attainment. Of course, it’s also generated by my shadow desires to avoid the struggles that would create a natural feeling of reward, as evolution intended. And, it’s important to mention, plenty of actual, genuine value.

Ultimately, the problem is that when I’m not caught up in that cycle of frenetic switching—perhaps when my dopamine is level and my nervous system is calm—the things I would list as ‘rewarding’ are not the things that technology gives me. This is perhaps a novel way of defining values: what are the things that, when you reflect from your wisest mind, you feel uncomplicatedly good about finding rewarding?

On the one hand, I may feel rewarded when I get lots of notifications, but in the evening I feel bad for having engaged in excessive notification seeking. On the other hand, I may feel rewarded when I write and publish something, and in the evening I still feel good about having written and published something.

This is how I’m choosing to interrupt the rapid app switching pattern when I catch myself in it. I ask myself: is this something I want to feel rewarded for? What would I rather feel rewarded for? Usually the answers are ’no’, and ‘something more aligned to my long term goals and values, even if that involves greater struggle.’

I don’t want to imply that this is easy or that this is the only way to interrupt the pattern. There’s a lot that could be said about the functioning of dopamine, in particular, that suggests it gets more and more difficult to escape this pattern once you’re in it. Each rewarding thing creates a short term peak in dopamine, which leads to a short term trough in dopamine, experienced as craving for more reward. A very large release of dopamine from an unnatural super-stimulus leads to a large crash and a reduction in baseline dopamine, which feels demotivating. And I recall reading that the waste products of dopamine metabolism (i.e. the cleanup of lots of dopamine) are also inflammatory to some degree, and contribute to that fuzzy, buzzy, brain fog experience.

All of this suggests that engaging in highly and artificially rewarding experiences, like notification surfing, early in the day, is an excellent way to set yourself up for a terrible day. At least, that’s consistently the case for me.

The more I choose to avoid technology in the first few hours after waking, and the more I ask myself what I truly want to feel rewarded for, the better I feel at the end of every day.

You are large, you contain multitudes

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 00:00:00 CET

This was originally published on my newsletter.

I often find myself thinking about authenticity, the idea that it’s possible to ‘be myself’, or not. Although I’ve encountered many people who scoff at this, I think it points at a real thing that’s well worth digging into.

“Be yourself” is common advice, but it’s easy to get stuck when you try to follow it. Trying implies doing, and being oneself isn’t something that can be done. It’s something that happens, something that emerges of its own accord. Children, up to a certain age, don’t try to be themselves. They cannot help but be themselves, because they lack the kind of self-consciousness that tangles the rest of us in knots.

Once we become aware that it’s possible, through conscious intervention, to be other than what we naturally are, we lose that child-like state of grace. And, although it’s impossible to get it back, another version beckons to us. I’ve written in more detail about the journey of rediscovery elsewhere, but in summary, I see five stages:

Stage 1: Unconscious naturalness. The spontaneous child who can only be as she naturally is, but lacks the awareness of her own state.
Stage 2: Conscious unnaturalness. The self-conscious teenager who tries on many different masks in an attempt to fit in. No longer spontaneous, but increasingly ‘held’.
Stage 3: Unconscious unnaturalness. The adult who has long forgotten that she ever put masks on. To try to be herself is only to put on another mask.
Stage 4: Conscious unnaturalness, revisited. The adult who starts to see the masks once again, but doesn’t know how to take them off. She knows she is not herself, but the final move remains inaccessible.
Stage 5: Conscious naturalness. The child’s spontaneity has been rediscovered and is able to express itself through the conscious direction of the adult. The adult is herself once again, but fully aware.

In my view, one crucial skill that allows the transition between conscious unnaturalness and conscious naturalness is being able to stop doing something you’re already doing, but without doing something else instead; to take off a mask without putting another one on. Said differently, the way to be yourself is to stop doing all the things that aren’t yourself. Create a kind of void into which ‘you’ can show up and express whatever is authentic in that moment.

Here’s an older YouTube video I made on this idea, if you’re interested.

I wonder about the self that emerges when you get out of the way, particularly as it relates to the question of agency. If there is a spontaneous self that acts according to its own sense of authenticity that is appropriate to each moment, does that mean that having conscious naturalness implies one single way of being, making life fully deterministic?

I keep finding myself avoiding digging too deep into the literature around ‘free will’, because most educated people seem to think it doesn’t exist, and I don’t want their strongly held, well-articulated arguments crowding out the confused, nebulous whispers of mine (and articulating why I think this is good, actually, is a topic for another time).

Perhaps I am clinging to an illusion, but I maintain that agency is a thing and that life is better with it. We just need to be clear about exactly where the agency shows up, because it really seems like this thin veneer of consciousness on top of my biological organism of unfathomable complexity must be useful for something beyond just watching it all happen.

In fact, my view, for now at least, is something like this: there is no one, single spontaneous self. There are multiple ways to respond in any given moment and the expression of any of them would be fully authentic, as long as it is allowed rather than ‘done’.

As Walt Whitman puts it in “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The role of conscious agency, then, is to select between one among the multitudes of available authentic responses. In the context of a heated argument, going quiet, asking questions and launching a tirade may all be perfectly valid ways to be yourself, but you may consciously decide that some are more constructive than others. Like a conductor who wants to bring out the sounds of the violins and hear a little less of the brass section, you have the power to choose which parts of you gets a say, moment by moment.

This is importantly and emphatically not the same as putting on more masks, where you would actively impose your conception of “respond reasonably” on your own behaviour, as opposed to allowing the part of you that naturally wants to respond reasonably.

The first, putting on a mask version, requires cognition and simulation, and the idea of what ‘correct’ behaviour is has to be generated from somewhere. The second, allowing yourself version, gives access to all the wisdom of that aspect of you to flow of its own accord. This is like the difference between thinking about and trying to hit a baseball versus just letting your body move itself in response to the ball.

I want to acknowledge one potential area of confusion I may have that I will need to work through, which is how similar this model is to that put forward by Internal Family Systems (IFS) and other parts-based frameworks for your internal world. Am I just rehashing and misconstruing that? I don’t think so.

In IFS in particular, the framing is that there are different parts (managers, protectors, exiles) inside you that can take you over in service of their own aims and learned functions. They have good intentions for you (says the model), but they are not your capital S Self—that which is left in the absence of the parts. Much of the work of IFS is to ‘unblend’ from the parts to access the positive qualities of Self.

Looking at this, I think that what I am proposing here is that there are multiple authentic expressions of what IFS calls Self, and I’m not just describing the landscape of ‘parts’.

Going back to my example of the heated argument, on one hand it’s possible—and likely, for most people—that different parts, in the IFS model, will be triggered. One might make you go quiet, another might get you to lash out, and another might want to drop emotion completely and go fully analytical. All of these could be considered self-protection strategies.

But what I’m pointing at here is another level that looks similar, but in reality is very different. In the absence of parts taking over, it seems possible that Self, while unencumbered by parts, can still express itself in many different ways, any of which would be ‘authentic’.

Consider that you are the water of a river with many branching distributaries, where the river splits into smaller rivers. Trying to be yourself is like asserting that there is a new branch, that the river does and will flow that way. An IFS part taking over is like all paths but one suddenly disappearing, such that you can only flow that one way. Often you’ll also forget that there were many routes you could take.

But the ‘multiple authentic selves’ model would leave all the distributaries open and give you conscious control about which one you decide to flow down. In the language of Daoism, you’re still ‘going with’ the natural flow of the river, but you’re also gently using will to affect the way in which you go with it.

Perhaps there is a link to multiverse theory, where in another universe you flow down a different path, and there’s no free will after all, but that’s too esoteric even for me right now—maybe another time.

Job titles are contemporary archetypal energies

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 00:00:00 CET

This was originally posted on my newsletter.

I’m going to open this piece with what is likely to be a gross mischaracterisation of what an archetype is. If you can forgive and bear with me, let’s get to it.

Jungian archetypes are “a universal, inherited idea, pattern of thought, or image that is present in the collective unconscious of all human beings.” (Wikipedia). They are perspectives, roles and perhaps development stages that have played out repeatedly throughout human history—and perhaps earlier—and are in a sense encoded into how we relate to ourselves and the world.

Examples of archetypes, according to Jung, include ‘The Mother’, ‘The Shadow’ and ‘The Wise Old Man’. Contemporary thinking includes more examples, like “King”, “Warrior”, “Magician” and “Lover” (from the book of this name, which explores ‘mature masculine’ archetypes specifically).

My way of making sense of this idea is something like this: there exist what might be called ‘energies’ that are both part of us and also transcend us. An individual may be a father in the technical sense of having children, while only sometimes tapping into and expressing the qualities contained within The Father.

The metaphysical assertion here is that there are meta-patterns called “The Father” and “The Mother” that manifest themselves through you. Whether or not these things actually exist seems irrelevant, because they can be experienced all the same, although some might argue convincingly that this counts as ‘existing’.

For example, if I ask you to close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and tune into “The Warrior” for a few minutes, as if it were a kind of magical radio station, I suspect you’d be able to get at least something from the experience. Perhaps your breathing and posture would change. You might have different thoughts about how the world should be, about what’s important to you or about where your attention should be.

However subtle, it seems there is some extra content there that shows up when you make yourself available to it. And if someone you cared about were being threatened, I suspect the Warrior would make itself known much more powerfully in a way that would likely surprise you.

This idea got me thinking about how it shows up in less arcane contexts, like at work. I wonder if job titles are a modern-day version of these ‘archetypal energies’. Perhaps not as powerful as the ones that go back hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years, but I suspect they’re still influential in their own way.

Consider the CEO. On the one hand, CEO is a title that an individual can hold in a business. On the other hand, it’s a perspective, something larger than the individual that the individual can step into and out of. The archetypal CEO cares about certain things, wants certain things and has certain goals. In this frame, job descriptions become an attempt to crystallise the archetype in writing.

To illustrate what I mean, imagine a work meeting where participants, who are all employees of the business, are asked to sit in different seats around a table. Each seat represents a different role in the business: perhaps CEO, manager, engineer and clerk. There could be a label, a brief job description, and even some kind of talismanic object that fits the role.

Participants would be invited to move between each position and ‘tune into’ the energy of each role. As with the example of tuning into the warrior above, my assumption is that each participant would be able to follow this instruction and get some kind of useful perspective-shifting experience, however subtle. The manager would gain a greater appreciation of the CEO, and the CEO would gain a greater appreciation of the clerk.

But, importantly, I don’t think this is due to the manager empathising with the CEO as an individual. Instead, the manager is becoming available to the ‘archetypal energy’ of the CEO that whoever holds that position also tunes into.

This is feeling particularly relevant and useful to me recently, because as a solopreneur, I am every single role in my business. Sometimes I need to be CEO, sometimes I need to be designer, and sometimes I need to be office manager. However nebulous, unscientific and woo it may sound, I’ve found that when I ‘tune into the energy of the CEO’, I find it to be a useful way of orienting myself towards behaving and seeing like a CEO.

Then, later, I can put that down and tune into a different energy. This can also be difficult, though, and I suspect a lot of people get into trouble when they ‘blend’ with the archetype.

Consider the image of the CEO who can’t stop being a CEO when they go home to their families. Like the persona in ancient Greek theatre—the mask that actors wore to portray their characters—it’s vital to be able to stop playing the role once it’s no longer appropriate. You never want to forget that you’re wearing a mask.

When the body knows more than the mind

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 00:00:00 CET

This was originally published on my newsletter.

There’s a period of my life, aged 27, that I rarely talk about these days, when I was Managing Director of a tiny crowdwork-based technology intelligence startup.

I learned an enormous amount in that time, but one lesson stands out: my body knows things that my mind doesn’t.

For context, technology intelligence helps organisations monitor and make sense of technological developments that could affect them. Crowdworking is a way of doing work that spreads tasks among lots of individual contributors who get paid per task.

Our workers were mostly PhD students and postdoctoral researchers specialising in highly technical domains: materials science, aeronautical engineering, computer science, chemical engineering, and so on. We had hundreds of them on call. They would spend some of their free time scanning for interesting developments and submit them into our system. We’d refine the best stuff, with their help, to send on to our clients.

We had spent weeks pulling together a proposal for a five-year contract doing this for «enormous redacted defence company you’ve heard of». We designed an offer, they interviewed us and then…we won.

I was elated, in part because at the time I was still working the three-month notice period of my previous job. We had pulled this off in evenings, weekends and a little annual leave, and I suddenly had a solid foundation to jump to.

But that afternoon I felt more than just proud of our achievement. Strangely, I also developed a pain in my upper chest. Thinking it was heartburn, I drank some chalky medicine and hoped it would go away. It didn’t.

On the commute home, I was reflecting on the win. What would it take to deliver it? Could we meet the necessary standards? I knew we had won, in part, because our model allowed us to radically undercharge relative to our competition, but could we even pull it off?

As I got more and more caught up in this cognitive noise, I noticed a thought float gently through my mind. It said “We haven’t signed yet. We can still walk away”.

I looked more closely at that thought and, as I accepted its message, I felt an enormous release of tension that radiated through my chest. At the same time, my imagination filled, unprompted, with scenes of a cave collapsing in on itself. It was as if some load-bearing structure in my mind had given way.

It turned out that my ‘heartburn’ was actually anxiety, panic even, screaming at me to pay attention to something I was missing. I was just too caught up in my head to notice it.

What I was missing wasn’t that we should walk away from the project; we actually went ahead and delivered strong outputs, although I left the company about six months later as I didn’t see even a medium-term path to not working for just defence clients.

In fact, what I was missing was the fact that I was terrified and that we—that I—could walk away. The latter part relates to an idea I call couldness, where having the freedom to choose from a larger set of options actually changes performance, but I didn’t know about that at the time.

Instead, I was left with a deep impression that my body knew full well that I was terrified and that I wasn’t owning up to it. My mind went straight to heartburn—that’s how disconnected I was, how much I was avoiding admitting that I was scared.

Ever since then, this experience has served as a powerful reminder for me that when the body talks, I should listen. Admittedly, that doesn’t mean I’ve always been good at listening or at wanting to deal with the consequences of what my body was telling me. In fact, my later experience with burnout is evidence of my failure to take my body seriously, but despite not always being perfectly aware or sufficiently courageous, I’ve still been getting better and better at tuning in and honouring the messages my body gives me.

This is not to say that I think my body is necessarily always right. There have been plenty of times when I’ve noticed resistance from my body that comes from out of date patterns, where my body maps “unsafe” even in contexts that are now safe. This is particularly true when it comes to stuff like attachment styles, since I am unfortunately not always in ‘secure attachment’ mode (working on it).

Since I reject the duality of mind and body, there is no contradiction here. It’s all one continuous process whereby different kinds of information can show up in my awareness in different ways, and it’s vital to use both feeling and reason together, always available to both, but never fully trusting either one.

Still, I suspect that most people over-index on the mind and disregard—or even completely fail to notice—the body, like me back then. So if any of this resonates for you, I encourage you to tune into your body a little more. What might it be telling you that you’re not consciously acknowledging?

If you’re looking for more guidance on how to actually do this, the best technique I can point you towards is Gendlin Focusing, which provides a step by step process for listening to and navigating what the body has to say.

Staying alive to aliveness

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 00:00:00 CET

This was originally published in my newsletter.

From July to December last year, I lived in a little surfer town called Uluwatu, which lies at the most south-westerly point in Bali. It is among the most wonderful places I have ever been.

The beaches are clean and sandy, the food is delicious, and the region is densely forested with quiet, winding little roads perfect for scooters. The people—Balinese and foreigners alike—are largely relaxed, cheerful and friendly.

And the view from my bedroom window looked like this:

But this is not a travel blog about Uluwatu. I’m sharing this only to contrast it with the experience I had in returning to London.

Something stood out in the first few days back, aside from the familiar grey skies and soggy air. A distinct tension emanated from the people around me. It was as if I could sense the fatigue, anxiety, and even despair of my fellow Londoners.

Of course, it’s not that weird that returning to a fast-paced, hyper-developed city like London would be a shock to my system after six months in Bali.

That oppressive sense did seem stronger than I’d ever experienced in my 15 years living here previously, though, which I attribute in part to what feels like an ongoing and saddening decline of the UK. Or perhaps it was always thus. After all, William Blake was complaining about the same thing in 1794.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

– London, William Blake (excerpt, with thanks to @Rosalind)

All that aside, what strikes me is not so much that I felt this heaviness in the air, but that, over the last few weeks, it faded into the background. I’m no longer caught off guard whenever I go outside, no longer bracing myself to share in the burdens of the people I pass on the street.

Although it’s arguably more pleasant not to be so affected by the group stress, I am troubled by the fact that my sense of it is fading so quickly. London hasn’t changed since I got back. I just became more numb to it.

But what other choice is there?

I could choose to remain sensitive to it, to feel the ‘energy’ of this place and its people. Let it all affect me.

I don’t believe it’s possible to numb myself selectively; some of that felt-sense-anaesthetic must spread to the rest of my system, no matter how careful or conscious I am. If I close myself off to part of my experience, I inevitably close myself off to other parts of my experience.

My sensitivity is important to me. It allows me to notice and be affected by all the wonderful things in the world. It helps me stay available to parts of myself that need my care and attention. And, ultimately, it gives me the power to orient, make sense of, and navigate the environment I inhabit.

That’s great then—stay sensitive—but it still leaves me with the problem of being sensitive to all the difficult stuff. In The courage to feel it all I talked about this in the context of tantric practice and shadow work. I’m learning that if I can just be with ‘bad’ feelings for long enough, they usually transform into something positive and leave me with the sense that I’ve discovered or integrated something new.

Perhaps the same is true of that experience of London. If I choose to stay alive to and present with those “mind-forg’d manacles I hear”, perhaps those sensations too will transform into something positive. And if not—if it turns out that London is no longer the place for me—well then I’d rather notice that, too.

Either way, for me, the only way out is through.

A densely-patterned fabric of meaningful stories

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 00:00:00 CET

This was originally published on my newsletter.

In February 2022, my partner and I packed our lives into a 35-square-foot storage unit in south London and headed to Mexico with a couple of suitcases and backpacks. After three months in Mexico, we spent time in Hungary, France and Singapore, ending with a full six months in Bali. I will tell stories about what happened.

But returning to London has been a psychedelic experience because everywhere I go reminds me of something. I moved here in late 2006 when I was 18, and until the nomad year, here I stayed. Fifteen years of life contained within a few square miles.

When driving to visit my grandmother at Christmas, just a few days after arriving from Bali, I passed five different places I had lived over the years. Each came with a flood of memory and emotion. As I walk around familiar streets, I feel the tug of the many people I used to be. Their stories, troubles, hopes and dreams call out to me as I navigate Tube stations, sit in cafés and walk these well-trodden streets. This experience is why I wanted to leave in the first place; to see who I would be without the influence of these narrative gravity wells.

And it worked. Riding a scooter around the back roads of Uluwatu was so far removed from my previous life that thoughts and feelings unencumbered by my past selves were free to show up. Couple that with the culture of personal transformation modalities that are abundant in Bali, and that period, in particular, ended up being one of the most powerful periods of my life.

Despite all this, I knew that unbounded long-term travel wouldn’t suit me. I never set out with the intention of not coming home, a sentiment I was surprised to see echoed so soon after returning in The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, which I’m currently reading. Describing Shevek, the protagonist:

He would always be one for whom the return was as important as the voyage out. To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back. In such a tendency was already foreshadowed, perhaps, the nature of the immense exploration he was to undertake into the extremes of the comprehensible. He would most likely not have embarked on that years-long enterprise had he not had profound assurance that return was possible, even though he himself might not return; that indeed the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of the globe, implied return. You shall not go down the same river twice, nor can you go home again.

In coming home, I realise, more clearly than before, that I’m choosing to embed myself back within the fabric I had worn in the previous fifteen years, choosing to weave new stories while acknowledging and bowing my head and spirit to the old.

As I settle into a new property in London for what is, I think, the fourteenth time, I wonder if that’s all ‘home’ really is: a sufficiently densely-patterned fabric of meaningful stories told across time and overlaid on a single place.

This time, the year away from these stories provides a new perspective, a break in the pattern—perhaps even the crack where the light gets in. Maybe this fresh perspective in the familiar home offers the firm foundation for “the immense exploration he was to undertake into the extremes of the comprehensible,” which, honestly, is a pretty exciting proposition.

Let’s see, but it feels like it’s going to be a good year.

The courage to feel it all

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 CET

It was a pleasant Saturday afternoon in Bali when I found myself doing standing hip thrusts while yelling “FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!” as angrily as I could at a man I had just met. He was doing the same to me. It’s not as weird as it sounds—although it’s still pretty damn weird. I was at a workshop on Hindu Tantra and another thirty or so men and women were doing the same all around us.

Photo by Conscious Design on Unsplash

As it happens, it’s quite difficult to feel the full force of rage while doing standing hip thrusts and yelling “fuck you” at someone you’ve just met. We both gave it our best, but found ourselves laughing our way through it, I think as a way to apologise and acknowledge the weirdness of the whole affair.

That laughter, though. It says a lot. Why would we be laughing?

The exercise we were engaged in was to embody our ‘shadow masculine’, the parts of the masculine energy that feel dangerous, dominating and perhaps even violent. The kinds of feelings that we civilised gentlemen—and ladies, who were doing the same exercise—couldn’t possibly have within us. The feelings that we deem unacceptable or intolerable, shove behind us and then pretend aren’t there. Feelings like shame, anger, disgust and grief.

I’ve learned that shadow feelings are often those that felt unsafe or shameful to express fully in childhood. Perhaps our emotional state triggered feelings in our caregivers that they found hard to be with, causing them to withdraw, yell, or just distract us from our feelings that made them feel bad. Regardless of the method or the intent, the lesson was the same: some feelings are bad and not allowed.

As a child, I sometimes found myself in circumstances where I wanted to scream and shout in frustration but, knowing it was unwise, I clamped down on it. I have an image in my mind of a young boy frozen in the eternal moment of unbearable tension just before a scream that never comes.

Given a lifetime of resistance to feeling these specific things, they can be hard to be with when they do arise. And since we’re not taught how to summon and explore them safely, we lack the skills, so it’s no surprise that in our workshop we wanted to retreat to the familiar safety of laughter.

There are a lot of feelings that are hard to embrace and feel in all their raw, unfettered intensity. When these hard-to-be-with feelings arise, it’s tempting to distract from them or drown them out. This is the realm of addiction, even when the addictions hurt us, because some kinds of pain are easier to be with than others. I don’t know about you, but I seem to prefer the pain of procrastination over the pain of shame.

This is where Tantra enters the picture. Tantra invites us to turn and face these intense feelings, to welcome and embrace them. It teaches that our experience of the world is not just the bits we like, the bits we pick and choose. Life is all of it, and when we turn down the bad, we also turn down the good. This is also the context for why you may associate the word tantra with sex, where there are many intense feelings you can learn to amplify and just be with, neither grasping at nor denying. But that’s not the focus here.

From my limited experience of tantric practice so far, the perspectives and skills I am stepping into are already proving transformational. I’m seeing that all those things in my shadow, all those aspects I once decided were bad and weren’t really me, are actually deeply okay. Yes, all of them. In fact, the things I keep assiduously hidden in my shadow are more likely to cause problems if I don’t bring them into the light and integrate them with the rest of me. As Carl Jung said:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

I’ve had many experiences now where a hard-to-be-with feeling shows up, I notice my habit to push it away, and choose instead to stay with it. Rather than falling into addictive patterns (hello, Twitter), I’m more and more able to surf on those feelings. There’s a way of being whereby I can gently coax them out even further and just let them be, while also not getting involved with them, to allow them to be there without trying to figure out how to fix them.

This may sound like a passive process, but no. So far I have screamed with all my might while a guide played drums, I have pummelled cushions, yelled obscenities and thrown tantrums on the floor. If you haven’t done it, I encourage you to try to scream as loud as you can. It’s surprisingly difficult—even into a pillow with no one around—about as difficult as repeatedly yelling “fuck you” at a stranger while doing hip thrusts.

After a while of being with these feelings, they transform, perhaps dissipating completely with a sigh of relief or transmuting into something else, like a new hard-to-be-with feeling, or joy. Maybe there are tears. There are usually tears beneath screaming. But, consistently, the shift feels good, even if the feelings remain intense, as a stuck process moves another step towards completion. An unobstructed flow of difficult feelings seems to be more enjoyable than a fixity of difficult feelings.

Although I’m learning that feeling the ‘bad’ feelings often makes me feel good afterwards, that doesn’t make it easy. Not least because these feelings were probably suppressed with good reason: it wasn’t safe. Often these feelings need activation, coaxing, encouragement, and repeated reassurance of safety.

This is where my daily Tantra practice comes in, via the body, through sound, breath and movement. Shaking, screaming into pillows, beating up a cushion and saying things that feel unsafe to say—in a safe environment—activates them. Meditation and breath provide the space to observe them and the energy for them to flow.

I don’t know where this practice will lead, but I know one thing. I have but one life, and I want to be someone with the capacity for great depth of feeling, to be here for all of it. If that means turning around, looking those parts that I’ve rejected in the eye and welcoming them home with love, then that’s what I’ll do, no matter how uncomfortable it may be at times.

—

A note of caution: I’m no psychologist, and I don’t play one on the Internet, but I suspect this approach is probably not desirable or safe for everyone. Sometimes powerful memories and traumas can come up and I imagine that some feelings really are too much to be with safely without professional support. So if you’re someone for whom this may be true, and you’re curious about all this, I encourage you to seek out whatever support you need before trying any of this.

Needing things to be finished

Sat, 25 Jun 2022 00:00:00 CET

I’ve been noticing a subtle background feeling whenever I work recently. It seems to be saying “this isn’t done yet, why isn’t this done yet?” In fact, I can feel it right now, even though I’ve only written 50 words. But this is clearly insane, since I’ve only just started writing. Nothing starts out finished.

This feeling is sufficiently uncomfortable that it makes me want to avoid it, which is how I end up on Twitter so easily.

I wonder if this is partly the cause of The Rut I’ve been in these last months. It shows up mainly with creative work, the kind where the starting point is nearly, though never entirely, a blank slate. It’s almost as if I consider there to be value — or perhaps more accurately, reward — only when I hit publish. Or, perhaps even more accurately, when someone hits ‘like’.

If the only enjoyment I get from creating is the moment I share it, then I’m gonna have a bad time, quite literally. I’ve fallen fowl of the classic trap that Alan Watts talks about:

“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”

And the thing is, I know this! I teach this, even! This is not new wisdom or insight for me, but it’s funny to see how sneaky it can be in showing up again and again. It’s like a whack-a-mole of stuckness.

This is not how I want to be, though. I want to fall in love with the process, in all areas of life, over and over again. Life is in the living of it, not in arriving at any particular destination. Or, as Ze Frank says so perfectly:

And God, let me enjoy this! Life isn’t just a sequence of waiting for things to be done.

Perhaps this is a lesson that is never fully learned. Perhaps this is a lesson that deepens every time I re-learn it, when I see it playing out again and again across the fabric of my life.

Right now, I’m enjoying writing this note. Publishing it will be a nice little extra, but I’m choosing to enjoy articulating my thoughts, the tactile sensation of my fingers on the keyboard and the serene writing environment that is Obsidian.

I’ll play with generalising this attitude again. There’s no such thing as a finished YouTube channel, a finished blog, or even a finished online course, really. It’s all an unfolding flow of creation that I get to participate in.

Certainly, there’s no such thing as a finished life. But it seems that needing things to be finished is an excellent way to suck the enjoyment out of the journey.

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I'm afraid you'll see my many faults

Sat, 04 Jun 2022 00:00:00 CET

The last time I published a note here was 12 February, a few days after I left the UK at the start my nomad travels. I thought that note would represent the start of a new wave of creative energy, given that I had published the previous note three months earlier.

I was wrong.

If my ability to ship these simple notes is representative of my creative life as a whole, I’ve been in a rut now for about six months. I’ve got plenty done in that time, but it’s all been administrative, process oriented, or just general maintenance. Nothing new.

I’m not certain why this is, but two ideas come immediately to mind.

The first that is that I have unwittingly slipped from sincere to serious. I’ve lost the sense of playful abandon I had when all this was a fun diversion from my full time job. Well, I quit that job, and slowly the fun drained away. It became important that I be creative, and that caused internal interference.

I’ve written about this exact effect, and yet here I am. I guess the lesson is that the same challenges will keep showing up, over and over, and the game is to keep getting out of them, over and over, in new ways. Not only can you never step in the same river twice, you can never get out of the same river twice, either.

The second block is that I’m scared.

I’m scared that I’m no good at this. My background is in electricity networks, so what do I know about whatever the hell I’m doing now?

I’m scared that the success I’ve had until now was a fluke, and at any moment it all might come crashing down, revealing me to be a fraud worthy of public ridicule.

I had a recurring ‘failure mode’ at work. I would feel incompetent at something, which would lead me to avoid it. I would then feel ashamed of both being behind and of avoiding the thing, but I would avoid asking for help, because then others would see first that I was behind and then that I was incompetent. This, of course, was a vicious circle.

I think I’ve been stuck in a similar loop here.

I don’t have a boss, but I do have 11.7k Twitter followers, 2673 email subscribers, and 845 students in my course. That’s a lot of people who might witness my faults.

I haven’t sent an email newsletter since early March, so when I do finally send one, that will reveal to thousands of people how long it’s been since I’ve sent a newsletter, and therefore how incompetent I am at sending newsletters. So I’ve been avoiding it.

I know how very much over the top this is. This is not a job and you are not my manager.

But something about that emotional resistance remains. It goes “I am not very good, people will see that I am not very good. I cannot be with that feeling, so I am going to distract myself from the whole thing.”

The solution in past job contexts was to summon enough courage to Do The Thing, whether this meant grinding through the work or admitting that I needed help. At this point, the block dissolved enough for me to get back in the game. I’d then be unblocked for a while, until it happened again with something else.

I could repeat this approach, but grinding is not the path I want to take this time.

As I write this, I see that the time has come to finally undo the core beliefs that drive those distressing emotional responses that I apparently can’t tolerate. They aren’t true and they aren’t helpful. But knowing that intellectually is not the same as knowing it emotionally.

There’s an expression in the personal growth world: “what got you here won’t get you there”. You can get stuck if you don’t update your methods to account for where you are.

I seem to have fallen foul of its opposite: I stopped doing something that was working. I got here by not caring so damn much, by thinking out loud about things I was working through, and by focusing on being of service to others, rather than worrying about what others thought of me.

So let this note be the minimum viable creative act needed to get my engine re-started enough to work through healing those stuck patterns that I no longer want holding me back. And may sharing this journey be helpful to anyone who is in a similar place.

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So, now what?

Sat, 12 Feb 2022 00:00:00 CET

Hello from Oaxaca de Juárez, the capital of the state of Oaxaca in Mexico.

A typical street in the centre of Oaxaca

The last few weeks have been a frenzy of activity.

It was my partner’s last couple of weeks of work before taking a year-long sabbatical. We packed our lives into two suitcases, two backpacks, and everything else into a 35 sq ft room in south London. And then we flew across the world, spent a few busy, tourist style days in Mexico City and finally arrived in Oaxaca yesterday afternoon.

And then, about half an hour ago, the long-awaited moment came. With breakfast eaten and plates cleared away a moment of peace came, within which arose a question.

Now what?

We’re here for five weeks. There’s no rush to see or do anything. We have long, open days ahead of us to carve out some kind of lifestyle before moving elsewhere in Mexico.

I’ve actually been in this city before, but only for two days before getting on an overnight bus to my next destination. I was backpacking from Mexico City to Playa del Carmen, trying to see and experience as much as possible along the way.

That trip, although three weeks long and utterly fantastic in its own way, felt very different from what we’re experiencing right now. Rather than three weeks, we have three months. Rather than expecting to go home soon, we will be going somewhere else and doing this again. Rather than taking a break from work and life, this is work and life.

So, indeed, now what?

I decline to answer. I’d much rather let myself be surprised by what comes up if I keep the question alive in my awareness.

What I will say is that there’s something special, sublime even, about the sense of spaciousness that makes it possible even to ask it.

Now what?

That’s not a question you can ask easily, let alone answer, when life is full of noise and stuff and tasks.

Now what?

In place of an answer there is a void.

But what a sonorous, vibrant, full void it is.

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Beware the trap of the long, slow decline

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 00:00:00 CET

I’m going to use an example from crypto, but this note is not about crypto. It’s about how a long, slow decline can be the most dangerous kind of collapse.

Photo by Andrew Amistad on Unsplash

Back in 2017 I got quite caught up in the crypto bull run, getting particularly interested in a privacy coin called Verge (XVG). The team seemed good, they promised the option of both public and private transactions and they had very low transaction fees. So I bought Verge and spent a lot of time in Telegram groups.

There were a couple of problems with Verge, though. One was that it became a bit of a meme coin, subject to the kind of market manipulation that is common in crypto, but that would be illegal in regulated financial markets. Another was that it was surrounded by enormous amounts of hype.

One particular hype cycle happened just before new year 2017/18, when there were rumours of a new tech launch and some big new partnership, something that would revolutionise the world of crypto. I remember the value of my Verge holdings increasing by $1k every couple of hours until I was at something like $20k on a $4k investment.

Having been through this once with Verge, I would now respond by selling and taking profits on the way up, but I didn’t do that, and guess what happened. There was no announcement and the price crashed.

What’s interesting is that after that big crash the team apologised and insisted that a big partnership was on the way. This ongoing hype, coupled with ‘bag holders’ hanging on (people who bought high, lost money, and wanted the price to go up again to recoup their losses) created a similarly overexcited sentiment.

So I, like many other people, held.

There was indeed an announcement of a partnership a few months later, except it wasn’t with a big global payment processor as had been hoped, it was with MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub and other adult entertainment websites. Again, many people said this was stupid, while many more said things like “porn has always driven innovation in tech, this is good actually!”

So I, like many other people, held.

You can see from this chart how that went. In retrospect, it looks like the decline happened quickly, but look at the timescales — the decline back to its pre-hype baseline was a full year. The coin bled its value first quickly, and then slowly, and all within the context of a general sentiment that it could go up again at any moment.

This is a common story in crypto, but it’s the warning of a long, drawn out decline with the promise of improvement that never comes that I want to take from this experience, because this pattern can be seen in many places outside of crypto.

Consider a relationship that starts well, suffers a shock, and then starts to slowly decay. No single moment feels bad enough to leave, but it’s never what it was, and it might get better one day, you never know. A job can go exactly the same way. As can nations and entire civilisations.

While I have had experiences like this, and I’m writing this note in quite blunt terms, I don’t actually consider myself to be particularly cynical or jaded. Indeed, I suspect most people have seen this effect at least once in their lives.

No, I just want to learn to spot these patterns so I don’t get stuck in them for too long.

If the situation is such that I have the power to improve it, then let me notice that and cultivate the agency to improve it. If the situation is not one where I have influence, let me notice that and cultivate the agency to step away before all that was once precious is lost.

Whether it’s in relationships, in work, or in investing, the long, slow decline is perhaps the most insidious trap of all.

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Be aware of the rhythms that bind you

Sun, 07 Nov 2021 00:00:00 CET

One of my favourite books is The Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand. It’s a book about what it means to think and act responsibly over extremely long time frames.

The book is framed around the idea of a physical clock that can keep time for 10,000 years and an institution that can maintain it for as long. The clock would serve as a buffer against the ever shortening length of ‘now’:

_When I was a child, people use to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. Now, thirty years later. they still talk about what will happen by the year 2000. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life.

I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of the Millennium. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks one a year, bongs one a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium. (Daniel Hills, 1993).

I have a lot to say about this idea, but this note is not about deep time or long-term responsibility. This note is about the mechanism the clock would use to remain accurate and what this tells us about similar mechanisms in our lives.

And how do you keep such a monumental clock accurate over its 10,000 year life? Here’s how:

Its works consist of an ingenious binary-digital mechanical system that has precision equal to one day in twenty thousand years, and it self-corrects by phase locking to the noon sun.

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Phase locking is where a control system checks for a difference between the current state of a system and a reference state, taking some kind of action if there is a difference. In the case of the clock, the control system would check when the clock thinks noon is against when the sun thinks noon is and would correct the clock.

This, of course, is very clever. A consistent external source of truth keeps the system in line essentially forever or, in practice, until something breaks or there is an error too large to correct.

I hope that makes sense, because I’m going to bring this idea kicking and screaming into the idea of having a job. Yes, really.

One of my most persistent gripes during my former career was that evenings, weekends and holidays were never long enough for me to think the kinds of thoughts and feel the kinds of feelings that might have been available in the absence of a job.

Every weekday morning I would experience a subtle jolt. Every Monday morning I would experience a more noticeable jolt. And the day back at work from a two or three week holiday I would experience a particularly strong jolt. Indeed, that jolt was the felt sense of me being phase-locked to my job and the rhythms it wanted for me.

For the Clock of the Long Now, synchronising to the solar noon was a good thing, but in my case I felt continually dragged back into a pattern that didn’t fit. I wanted to get more out of step from this external forcing function and, in the end, the phase-lock released only when a part of the mechanism — me — broke.

Phase-locking is great when the reference signal is healthy and wanted. My circadian rhythm is now strongly phase-locked to the sun and I want it that way, so much so that I intentionally go for a walk first thing every day to synchronise my body with the morning light.

Phase locking is not great when the reference signal pulls you away from where you want to be. Bonus points if the bad reference signal is hard to notice, if you don’t know where you want to be, or if the people around you insist that the bad reference signal is good, actually.

I suspect that persistent phase locking to an inappropriate reference signal is a source of chronic stress. It may be hard to notice, but it’s there. I’m pleased to report that I’m finally allowing myself to deviate and I’m enjoying the discovery of new and more appropriate reference signals.

If anything in this note resonates, I would encourage you to gently ask yourself: what would need to change for me to feel like I fit in the rhythms of my life?

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Why I created a limited company instead of remaining a sole trader

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 00:00:00 CET

Hello, I am Michael Ashcroft. I am a human who owns and is employed by a business called Michael Ashcroft Ltd, because I have no imagination.

I created the business in March 2021. Until then I had been doing freelance work for about ten years (around full time employment) as a ‘sole trader’, also known as a sole proprietor in other parts of the world. Any income I made from these ‘side hustles’, as people who aren’t me call them, just counted towards my personal income, so all I had to do was declare this and pay a little extra tax.

There was nothing stopping me from remaining a sole trader, so why create a company? There are lots of benefits around tax, separation of my assets and liabilities and those of business, and nudging others to take me more seriously as a seller and buyer of things.

These were all extra perks though. I created the company mainly because I wanted the business to have a separate identity from me.

The moment I created the business I felt this rush of what I can only call opportunity. Suddenly there was potential, an agency that could act in the world independently of me, pursue strategies independently of me, and collaborate with other people in various ways, again independently of me.

Of course, right now I’m the one doing everything, because I’m the only shareholder, I’m the only director and I’m the only employee. I have strategy meetings with myself (they’re bangin’, we have keto doughnuts). I’m okay with this, and of course I’ll tell you why.

In his excellent book The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber explains the difference between working in your business and working on your business. To work in your business means to do the work of operating the business: making things, selling things, marketing things, talking to customers, all that stuff. To work on your business means, among other things, to define what the work actually is, to create structures and systems so that the work gets done efficiently, and to recruit people into the roles you’ve defined, as needed.

Even if I never hire anyone, I want a business that encourages me to work on it and not just in it. This is the perspective shift that happened when I created the limited company: suddenly working on and working in clarified themselves and became separate from what was before a foggy mix of both working on and working in at the same time.

The idea that, as a result of me working on it, the business might one day grow to become something larger than me gives me a helpful injection of ambition. It’s not me who makes things and sells them to people, it’s the business that creates products and sells them to customers. I find that a powerful and helpful difference.

At this point I can hear the concerns of a little voice in my head. Doesn’t this make everything more impersonal? Aren’t I at risk of creating a job for myself? Is this a hustle trap in disguise? Am I still caught in Total Work?

Honestly, there’s certainly a risk of all that, but there always is. Growth and scale for their own sake are not what I want, but if I get the incentives, motivations and targets wrong at this stage then that’s what my business might push me towards.

I’m comforted by the other constraints I am bringing to my business, though. First and foremost, at least for now, I am optimising for things that aren’t lots of money and prestige.

I want a lifestyle that gives me space for adventure and to focus on my health, relationships and learning. I suspect this will also make me better able to be of benefit to people, not only through the work I do, but in the way I am able to be in the world.

Right now the idea of growing enough to hire people so that I can grow more doesn’t seem like fun. Perhaps one day it will, but for now I’m happy to be a solopreneur who just happens to have a thoughtfully-designed company.

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Crabs helping each other out of the bucket

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 CET

When you put a load of crabs in a bucket together, any crab near the top that tries to escape the bucket is pulled back into the bucket by the other crabs. This is known as crab mentality.

Photo by Chandler Cruttenden on Unsplash

Crab mentality is often invoked to demonstrate the mindset of “if I can’t get what I want then I won’t let you have it either”. Of course, we have precious little insight into what’s going through the minds of those crabs, but let’s assume they are indeed playing zero-sum games.

The image is compelling because it’s something we see frequently in day to day life. It can be found within the English class system, where the expression “if it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for you” can lead families to hinder their own social mobility. It can also be seen in the managers who overwork their teams because they themselves were once overworked.

It won’t surprise you to learn that I find this way of being in the world deeply unhelpful. At the end of the day, all the crabs remain in the bucket and people continue to overwork, whether through external or internal authoritarianism.

But what if we lived in a world where the crabs helped each other out of the bucket? What would that be like?

The words that come to mind for me are nourishing, earnest and trusting. Nourishing, because this would be a world that validates our desires and helps us to meet them, should their pursuit not bring harm to others. Earnest, because we would feel free to explore and express those things that most bring us to life. Trusting, because to do all this means we could reasonably be our true authentic selves without fear of judgement or attack.

Worlds like this often seem like naive utopias doomed to fail the moment a hostile agent enters them. And, indeed, it seems likely that a perfect utopia such as this can’t exist, but that doesn’t imply that a world more like this than not can’t exist in a stable equilibrium. It can be true that most crabs help each other out of the bucket most of the time.

To stretch the metaphor even further, I sometimes find myself reflecting on how I might behave to help the other crabs out of the bucket. Here are three things I’ve settled on as being good things.

First, I reward earnestness with validation, support and my own earnestness. Earnestness is a precious expression of our authentic selves, the person we are when we’re not trying to be anyone in particular. I believe we are at our best when we are in that mode, so I want to see a world that encourages this.

Second, I support people on their creative journeys. When someone is taking their first tentative steps into making something that I might like or pursuing an independent life, I lean towards giving them money for that thing. Where possible I tend to give generously, should it feel appropriate to do so. By doing this I am not only helping this particular crab out of the bucket, but improving their capacity to do the same for other crabs down the line.

And finally, for this note anyway, I try to connect people who share this perspective to each other. I’m not great at this at the moment as it’s not a longstanding habit, but I’m getting better and better at it. If there is a community of people, or crabs, that have a culture of helping each other out, then each new member of that community increases the capacity of that community to effect change and help more people, or crabs.

We’ll never reach a perfect utopia, and that’s probably a good thing, but we can create a cultural pressure that creates ever larger communities that are nourishing, earnest and trusting. And all it takes is for each of us, individually, to make choices, over and over, to help the other crabs out of the bucket rather than to pull them back into it.

Who knows, maybe once they escape they’ll give us a hand, or claw, as well.

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Getting my business to nudge me towards behaviours I want

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:00:00 CET

The main way that my business makes money right now is through the sale of my Alexander Technique online course. There’s also some 1:1 coaching, but I don’t do much of that so it generates less than $1k a month.

Until now I’ve sold the course through a series of launches, where I would make it available for a few days and then close it. Without a doubt this was a wise approach as I was getting started and I would do it again. It led lots of people to buy the course, because scarcity, then talk about it online, because hype, and all this drove more sales in later launches.

I didn’t do the launches to create scarcity. I did them to help focus my attention on building the course, but that’s the effect it had, regardless of whether it was intentional or not.

Now, since my personal income is entirely derived from my business, I am massively, some might even say foolishly exposed to how many people buy the course. So you’d think I’d spend most of my time thinking about it, improving it and marketing it… right?

Right?

Doesn’t look that way. In fact, It looks like the launches created a perverse incentive, one that I’ve decided to unwind.

Instead of remaining engaged with course development, some part of my mind knew I had recently made several months’ worth of personal income, which led me to just leave the course alone, even though I wanted to build it. Not only that, but the weeks leading up to each launch are always an intense period of thinking and filming videos, so I suspect there was a kind of mini-burnout cycle appearing,

Ultimately all this led to a kind of on/off, stop/start approach to engaging with ideas that matter a lot to me. This is not how I want to behave, now or over the years to come.

I’ve discussed elsewhere that I want to build my kind of lifestyle business, which in the context of that note meant ‘not working too hard’:

For now I shall build my business around the lifestyle I want, one where I can spend my days reading, thinking, writing, travelling, talking to people and, yes obviously, also working. To me, today, the sense of freedom and flexibility I get is worth sacrificing more money.

But there’s another angle to this. I want to build a lifestyle business that actively encourages me to read, think, write and talk to people, always, and not one that just allows time for those things.

Rather than chastise myself for not working with the appropriate focus, intensity and consistency, I’ve decided to change the incentive structure. No more launches. The course is now available for purchase at any time.

It’s the end of a launch. Get it? Because they’re landing? You get it
Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash.

I actually made this change a few days ago. Do you know what happened the moment I made the course available for purchase? Absolutely nothing. I didn’t make any money. This is the point.

The only way people will buy the course is if they know it exists and that it can give them what they want. For these to be true I need to talk about the course and the ideas within it a lot, i.e. to write consistently. I need to do my own R&D to move more deeply into the subject matter so I can build more and better stuff. And I need to figure out what people really want and explore new ways to give them that.

Actually doing all this requires much more consistent engagement from me than doing a launch every few months and hoping for the best, which has been my current strategy until now, even if it was implicit.

I want to keep this design approach firmly in mind as my business grows. If ever I find myself behaving in ways that are counter to what I and my business need, I will explore ways to change the structures around me so that my behaviour naturally aligns with what I and my business need.

As long as I keep certain principles in mind: that I don’t want to create a burden for myself and that I want to pay myself properly, this should lead to outcomes that feel good.

It’s an experiment, anyway. Let’s see what happens.

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Writing gives you access to the online game

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 00:00:00 CET

There is an online game being played around you.

In this game people are making new friends, meeting up around the world, working on exciting projects and generally creating opportunities to change their lives radically, should they so wish. There is no central story line; it’s all side quests based on curiosity and relationships.

While everyone can observe the online game for free, participation has a cost. This cost isn’t financial, although a little money is required for access and tools. No, the online game uses ideas and attention as currency.

In business, though interestingly not in poker, the term ‘table stakes’ refers to the minimum requirements needed to participate in any arrangement, i.e. to play a game. When it comes to the online game, the table stakes are some thoughtful published work, usually written.

When someone reaches out to me online, the first thing I do is look for their personal website.

When I come across someone saying interesting things on Twitter, I check their bio, look for a personal website and scroll their feed for evidence of thoughtful tweets. Without one of those things I’m unlikely to follow.

When (online) friends mention or introduce me to a new person, they send me a link to their website or Twitter profile, both of which act as a kind of modern-day business card.

I spoke to someone yesterday who reached out to me via Twitter DM. She has no following, no website and just a few interesting tweets, but something about her vibe felt good. I happened to be in an open mood when I saw the DM, so we Zoomed.

But this move on her part, while audacious and successful on this occasion, is more likely than not to be met with radio silence. I have ignored many such requests. In this case I know from 45 minutes of discussion that she has great ideas and that she would be a fantastic player in the online game, but neither that truth nor my word are enough to give her a seat at the table.

She needs to make, publish and share. That’s level 1, which gives gives access to level 2 (make new online friends), which eventually unlocks level 3 (do fun things with online friends).

If you’re currently a non-player character of the online game, someone who reads and watches, and you want to become an active player, this is your next step: write sincerely, write earnestly, write prolifically.

And most importantly, share your writing to let the others find you.

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Striving for the good qualia

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 CET

I have become one of those people who eats a weird diet.

Right now I am doing strict keto, which means I eat less than 20g of carbohydrate per day. I also exclude all nuts, cow dairy, alcohol and caffeine. Not only does this make ordering any drink at a pub difficult (“I’ll have an overpriced sparkling water, please”), it also requires a lot of thought, planning and not allowing myself to have things I enjoy.

So why do I do it? I do it because I just really, finally want to feel consistently good.

It took me a long time to realise that many people feel the same most of the time. They wake up and go “hmm, yes, these are indeed my qualia, off we go then.”

This is not how things are for me. It seems like my moods, energy levels, ability to focus, emotions and even the contents of my thoughts are highly sensitive to environmental and internal conditions in one way or another. They all bounce around a lot.

When I drink even a single shot of coffee I get a 20 minute rush of euphoria and hyper focus, then I get sweaty and scattered, then comes the crushing anxiety and then I get a few hours of low-mood fatigue. For alcohol, the ‘feel good’ curve now seems to come after the ‘feel bad’ curve, so I just feel tired, sick and withdrawn before I get any of the fun stuff that alcohol promises.

In the winter here in the UK we don’t get many daylight hours, and those that we do get are often hidden behind thick grey clouds for weeks on end. I’m sensitive to this and experience what I assume is Seasonal Affective Disorder. My life is reliably most subjectively terrible around January and February, but if I fly south to somewhere sunny then my entire life outlook shifts within 24 hours.

And, finally, even when I eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly and sleep at sensible times, there seem to be random days when things are great and random days when they are not. I assume nutrition and sunlight are implicated here, but I’m still experimenting.

These sensitivities have actually increased with age, but I think they were always there and my youth just hid them somewhat. All this means is that I have developed a strong tendency to tinker with my environment, with what I put into and with what I do with my body.

Keto is annoying, restrictive and means I have to deny myself certain pleasures (like cake). But is it more annoying than seeing my life drift by in a distant, anxious, low-energy haze? No it is not.

I am extremely aware of my qualia and I know that my qualia are malleable. My belief is that the default qualia mode should be clear, happy, exploratory and energetic; if it’s not then there is some kind of dysfunction in the system. If that dysfunction can be resolved, say by eating a nutritious, non-harmful diet, by moving a lot, by being in the sun a lot, by sleeping consistently well, then those qualia will emerge.

I confess that having to do so much work to notice, decipher and resolve the dysfunction is frustrating, but it is what it is. I shall keep going. I want those good qualia.

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Why I love Anjunabeats

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 00:00:00 CET

Anjunabeats is a record label that, according to Wikipedia, specialises in electronic, trance, progressive trance and progressive house music.

I listen to an enormous amount of Anjunabeats. I have been to at least 20 club nights, concerts and events put on by their artists and have introduced many of my friends to them. Literally two days ago I went to the live event for their 450th weekly radio show (needless proof).

So it’s probably about time that I explain why I love them.

Their music just works for me.

Sometimes you hear a piece of music for the first time and it just clicks. You realise that this is what you’ve been longing for, that this is what was missing from your life.

This was my experience when I discovered Above & Beyond, the band that created the Anjunabeats label, at Glastonbury festival in 2014. I hadn’t heard of them, but was convinced to go by a new friend, and I’ll be forever grateful to him for that (thanks, Kev).

Above & Beyond were the last official set of the festival, at something like 10pm on day five — the Sunday — and I was ruined. Absolutely, thoroughly used up and totally worn out, although not quite ready to loudly proclaim “Wow! What a Ride!”" (with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson).

I had been dancing until dawn the previous Thursday, Friday and Saturday (well, Sunday morning). Since Glastonbury is always the week after the summer solstice, and since the UK is surprisingly far north, it got dark around 10.30pm and light at 4.30am. I was not sleeping much or well.

And that was a rainy year, so my 200k+ fellow revellers and I had turned Worthy Farm into a swamp with sticky mud inches deep. The only place that it was ever possible to sit down was inside my own tent, and I wasn’t there much.

I thought it worth stressing all that to give you a sense of just how broken I was. And yet, when Above & Beyond came on and I heard their music, all the pain and tiredness went away. Charles Darwin, of all people, captures it well:

“Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement" — Charles Darwin

It’s been seven years since I first felt that stupefied amazement and I still experience it regularly when I listen to their music. It just makes me feel so good.

The song that really grabbed me was “Hello”. You can watch the video here). I love that the energy of the video matches how the track makes me feel. The way to listen to these tracks is to let them take you to where they want to go. See what associations come up in your mind, notice what feelings emerge, and let them get more powerful.

They treat their music like art.

Listening to someone wax lyrical about why their favourite music is the best music is unlikely to be convincing, so I’ll give a concrete example that supports my argument here.

Consider their regular Anjunabeats Volume X albums, where X is a number. You know how most albums are a sequential list of tracks that are generally disconnected from each other? Well, all the tracks on the Anjunabeats Volumes are mixed together, flowing seamlessly from one to the next. You can tell how much an electronic music artist cares about their music by the quality of their transitions, and these are always… hmm, sublime is the only word I’m willing to settle for.

Not only that, but these albums are shaped. Each one is a journey. They start softly, perhaps even a little melancholically, and then surge unapologetically towards euphoria.

If you want to see what I mean, I recommend Volume 11, which is where I started. It’s in two parts on YouTube for some reason, or it’s all on Spotify. Listen in order!

YouTube Part 1

YouTube Part 2

Spotify album

They are prolific.

Sometimes you discover a new artist, get all excited, go look up their other works and realise they have maybe one other album. Sadness ensues.

Not so with Anjunabeats. Because it’s a well-curated label with dozens of talented artists that share a specific set of vibes, there is an essentially endless amount of music to fall into.

I’m currently enjoying and playing with the idea of an online oasis, a place on the Internet that you can discover and take refuge in from the noise outside. Well, that’s what discovering Anjunabeats was like for me. A musical oasis with many gardens and paths, some well sign-posted, others more hidden, and almost all leading somewhere delightful.

They sign a large number of talented artists.

Related to their prolificness, the label accommodates a vast list of artists, of course some very well known within the scene who date back to the early years of the label, but many new ones as well.

It strikes me that they are always on the lookout for up and coming names and giving them opportunities to rise through the ranks, so to speak. This suggests a collaborative sentiment and willingness to innovate, both of which are important to me. It also means that I get to be delighted more often and experience the joy of discovering someone new I really like.

They spread a positive message of love, appreciation and connection.

Above & Beyond have a weekly ‘radio’ show called Above & Beyond Group Therapy, based on an album by the same name.

GROUP THERAPY.

That might give you a hint as to the general vibe of their music. If you want to feel feels, if you want to do some emotional processing in an environment that validates that your feelings are okay, go to an Above & Beyond concert.

It’s common for them to write messages up on a screen behind them, where everyone can see.:

“Life is made of small moments like this”
“Our current mood is gratitude”
“You are not alone”
“Never forget about the ones who love you back”

I took this picture.

It’s a huge relief to enter such a space. While the music can be heavy and intense, it’s never aggressive. If someone bumps into you while dancing they apologise and maybe give you a hug. The fans are generally lovely people, although of course some bad eggs are always present at events like these.

Going to an Anjunabeats event can often feel like finding the others. In fact, so many people seem to make friends through Anjunabeats that there’s a name for the people you know who are also very into Anjunabeats: Anjunafamily.

Is it cheesy? Hell yes. Is it also awesome? Hell yes.

All this and more is why I love Anjunabeats.

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All at once or not at all

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:00:00 CET

This is how I seem to work.

I can write a note like this, with 500 - 1000 words, in about 45 minutes and then it’s done. I mean, done enough that I can publish and feel satisfied.

It’s both a blessing and a curse that my first drafts are largely immediately publishable. A blessing, because that means I have sufficient writing skill to be able to do that, and a curse, because it means I’m stuck at a local maximum of never editing my work.

If I look around my life more broadly, this is not just constrained to my writing of little notes. It seems the phenomenon of “I can either do it all at once or not at all” shows up in quite a few places, so I tend to struggle with bigger, more complex projects. It’s common for me to start many things and make good progress on them. Yay, great. But then I stop, put my work somewhere and experience aversion whenever it occurs to me that I could go back to it.

I know what you’re probably thinking. “Hmm, Michael, I don’t know much about ADHD, but this sounds suspiciously like ADHD”. Maybe, I don’t know. I often think there’s something, but I’ve also never really resonated enough with the image I have in my head of what ADHD is.

Have you noticed how the last five paragraphs started with the letter I? Neither had I until just now. That’s the kind of thing one might otherwise edit out if they were fond of editing, but no, I shall leave it.

Whether it’s ADHD or something else, it’s there, and I’m keen to find ways to navigate through or around it. All at once or not at all is surprisingly effective in many circumstances, but it relies on being able to capture a spark of creativity in the moment and make a thing with it. I would like to be able to chip away effectively, relentlessly, and patiently at something until one day a vast and epic creation appears before my eyes.

Writing is a good playground for this. I know I can put decent words on a page without much difficulty, but I struggle with longer form writing. Anything that requires planning, structuring, restructuring, writing, rewriting, editing and polishing, that’s where my existing methods break down, so that’s where I need to go.

Write of Passage is coming up. It’s a little embarrassing, as an alumni mentor, to admit that I suck at this crucial aspect of writing. I’m going to lean into it though and use Write of Passage to give myself permission to write longer pieces.

Perhaps a way forward is this. I won’t allow myself to publish my first draft of anything that I intend to be an essay. It’s fine for notes — these are designed to be high velocity anyway — but essays are where the craft and art of my writing will be cultivated.

Then, once I’ve proven to myself that I can maintain focus on a single project over time, I can expand my ambition. I’d like to be able to spend a few weeks really diving into a topic and then compile my explorations into a solid essay. And then to repeat that, over and over again. If I could become that person, wow, that would be exciting.

And to close, I remind myself that the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona has been under construction since 1882 and is still not finished. It’s a masterpiece, though, and I’m grateful for the people who have worked on it consistently for so long. I take inspiration from them, their vision and their persistence.

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

We must be able to talk about taboos

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 CET

I started my career, way back in 2010, as an intern at the Royal Society, which is the UK’s national science academy.

It was an incredible experience for many reasons. We interns were shown various treasures in the library, like the manuscript copy of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, I organised a conference where I met Naomi Klein, among others, and I swam in the choppy waters of a topic that even today is controversial: solar geoengineering.

Let me start with some science before I turn to the more important matter of what’s allowed in public discourse.

Solar geoengineering is the intentional reflection of sunlight into space to moderate some effects of global warming. At the sci-fi end of the options is the deployment of tens of thousands of tiny mirrors into space between the Earth and the Sun. But that’s expensive and probably silly.

More sensibly, we could do it by increasing the Earth’s surface albedo (reflectivity), say by painting buildings white, by covering dark landscapes with a light-coloured material or by making marine clouds brighter with special ships that turn seawater into a fine mist.

We could also inject aerosols into the stratosphere with planes or high-altitude balloons to replicate the global dimming effect of volcanic eruptions. Did you know that when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, the 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide it released reduced global temperatures by 0.5ºC for two years? It could be worse; when Krakatoa exploded in 1883 the material it released reduced global temperatures by 1.2ºC and had a century-long impact on ocean temperatures.

Lithograph of Krakatoa exploding in 1883

All this to say, we know how it works and that it works. It would also be quite cheap, all things considered, maybe $18 billion per year per ºC of cooling. Given this, let’s assume that when people say solar geoengineering they mean stratospheric aerosol injection.

Now the obvious question: if stratospheric aerosols can definitely reduce global temperatures for cheap, why aren’t we doing it or even planning to do it. Ah yes, the downsides.

First up, it does absolutely nothing to change the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which would continue to rise if we don’t reduce emissions. So while average global temperatures may be held down, other effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, like ocean acidification, would continue.

It’s likely that solar geoengineering would disrupt global weather patterns. We’re talking droughts in some places, flooding in others, crop failures and the like. Oh, and injecting aerosols into the stratosphere could turn the sky white.

It would also disproportionately affect developing countries, which are least responsible for the emissions that have driven global warming, are least able to invest in their own resilience and have the least influence on the global stage. But this is a complex area. If you’re a small island state facing obliteration from rising sea levels, you might support measures that promise to keep sea levels down.

Finally, there’s the risk of moral hazard. Do you drive a fully insured rental car as carefully as you drive your own? Similarly, if you know you can just turn the sun down a bit, are you as motivated to decarbonise our civilisation as fast as possible? This is the risk I see talked about most often and, as you’ll see below, I think often unhelpfully.

Fundamentally, solar geoengineering is a terrible idea that we shouldn’t have to even vaguely consider. Yet it seems that the impacts of global warming may actually be worse than solar geoengineering, so here we are. To let that sink in, I’ll quote my friend Andy Parker, who was my manager at the Royal Society, who is now Project Director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, and who, disclaimer, has not read or ‘approved’ of anything in this note:

“We live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”

I think in most places this is quoted as “deliberately dimming the expletive sun”, but I have it on good authority that said expletive was fucking. You’re welcome.

Alright, enough of that. Solar geoengineering is a stupid thing to do that may look quite sensible if we continue on the lacklustre path we’re currently on. Let’s turn to the actual point of this note, which is about the vital need to be able to talk about this topic, and others like it, in a sensible way.

You may have heard the terms climate mitigation and climate adaptation. Mitigation means all the things we can do to reduce new emissions into the atmosphere. This means renewable energy, reducing energy demand, flying and driving less, all that stuff. Mitigation is probably 95% of what you think of when you think about fixing global warming.

Adaptation means accepting that we are committed to some level of impact from global warming, let’s say new droughts, flooding or sea level rise, and then doing something about those impacts. This might mean building stronger coastal defences for low-lying regions or investing in more sophisticated irrigation systems. It might mean creating new insurance products for farmers, developing extreme weather warning systems or even non-coercively relocating entire communities.

Being able to talk about adaptation means being able to tolerate the paradox implied in the moral hazard. Yes, we are talking about building flood defences, but that doesn’t mean we have to invest less in mitigation efforts like renewables and energy efficiency. You can choose to sail your leaking boat back to shore while also bailing water out of it.

I mean, in theory, anyway. In practice, talking about adaptation was frowned upon, even in academic circles. Even in 2013, there are references in the scientific literature highlighting that discussion of adaptation was, until recently taboo:

Until recently, adaptation — a process by which societies address the consequences of climate change — was a taboo subject in the discussion of global climate policy, where it was viewed as undermining efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (see Pielke, Prins, Rayner, & Sarewitz, 2007). However, the realization that, even in the best-case scenario, emissions reductions can have little effect on social vulnerability to climate impacts over the next several decades has prompted a resurgence of interest in adaptation” — Stephanie Amaru, Netra B. Chhetri

Climate adaption is now considered mainstream, although all that means is that the truth of how significant global warming impacts have already become is now unambiguous and unavoidable. You might reasonably argue that if adaptation hadn’t been taboo for so long, we’d have talked about it more and earlier, and so benefited the millions of people around the world who now need to, you know, adapt.

And had we talked about mitigation properly earlier, we may not have needed to talk about adaptation. If we don’t talk about solar geoengineering now, we risk having to do it blind. And if it does turn out that we need to do solar geoengineering, I would prefer the science and governance implications around it to be as good as they can possibly be, because if we do have to turn down the fucking sun, I want it done as carefully as possible.

Whenever I see someone call for more climate action while also denouncing discussion of certain options, I become suspicious of their motives. “We must do everything we can, the world is on fire! Oh, but not that.” Perhaps solving climate change isn’t your top priority after all, then?

If the goal is to avoid dangerous global warming and its impacts then we need all options to be on the table. This is a both/and emergency, not an either/or emergency. Solar geoengineering is the most extreme example of this, but the principle applies as much to such things as carbon removal, carbon capture and storage and even nuclear power.

Being able to have hard conversations about hard choices means we’re more likely to have the conversations early on and thus make navigating the hard choices easier. We need to get better at talking about things that are considered, at least by some, to be taboo. The risks of not talking about something are vastly greater than the perceived fears of that thing happening if we do.

“What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.” — Eugene Gendlin

Building my kind of lifestyle business

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00:00 CET

When people think of a startup they often imagine something that needs investors who believe in a vision before there’s a product or people to sell it to. Since it has no revenue it may need to exist for several months before it generates revenues, let alone a profit. And because it has investors, the expectation is that it scales quickly and to a high summit so the investors and founders can sell and make their money and sweat back.

Photo by S Migaj on Unsplash

While on paper a lifestyle business may do all the same things as a startup — selling things to people who want them while paying its people, taxes and expenses — it doesn’t share the traits above. A lifestyle business can be profitable from day one (mine was), it doesn’t need outside investment, and it can grow slowly.

Because a lifestyle business is under the complete control of its owners, which in the case of my business is 100% me, its activities can be intentionally designed to operate however the owners want, as long it can still make money, of course.

But the word lifestyle can mean a lot of things. What kind of lifestyle?

It’s possible to build a lifestyle business in which you work 60 hour weeks with no holidays and where your services need you to be working at the time. Coaching is a good example of this. You get paid per coaching session, but if you’re the coach then you need to be at the session.

It’s also possible to build a lifestyle business where you work fewer than ten hours a week, where those ten hours can happen whenever you want them to, and where your products sell regardless of whether or not you’re working. This is the kind of lifestyle business I want to build.

This all sounds great and obvious — very Tim Ferriss circa 2007 — so why am I talking about it? Because I need to keep renewing this commitment over and over again in the face of every opportunity that comes my way. If I’m not careful, I’ll end up building that other kind of lifestyle business.

Most of my revenue comes from the sale of my Alexander Technique course. At the moment this is basically fully self-paced for students. All I have to do is answer questions in the forum, do research and make new materials. I do plan to develop more synchronous workshops and office hours, though.

It could so easily be different.

All those shiny cohort-based courses that sell for a few thousand $ a pop. So alluring. Much prestige. Having been a mentor for two of the big ones (Write of Passage and the Part Time YouTuber Academy), I have seen how much work is involved in those. You need a proper business, the kind with employees! You need team meetings, Slack channels and, I don’t know, internal policies, or something.

That sounds a lot like a job to me. Sure, a fun, creative, fulfilling, exciting and wholly-owned job, but a job nonetheless. I did that for ten years and I want a break.

Maybe I’ll want that one day. Actually, I probably will want that one day. But today is not that day. That’s why, whenever I encounter the siren call of much more money, I tie myself to the mast of but I don’t want to work that hard.

For now I shall build my business around the lifestyle I want, one where I can spend my days reading, thinking, writing, travelling, talking to people and, yes obviously, also working. To me, today, the sense of freedom and flexibility I get is worth sacrificing more money.

And, to be honest, I have a suspicion this approach will still lead to plenty of money, just indirectly. Money will happen serendipitously from the quiet reflection, the adventures and the new friends I’ll be able to make in all that space and time.

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Quitting my job was a no-regrets move

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 00:00:00 CET

I want to share a mental reframe I made that gave me the push I needed to quit my job and head out on my own. In September 2020 I was toying with the idea of making an online Alexander Technique course. I pre-sold 50 spaces to test interest, before I had made anything, and when 50 people bought it I became more confident that there was something there. I was further comforted when they seemed to like what I ended up making.

But there’s an enormous difference between making $5k on the side and quitting your well-paid job to build and scale an online course and, hopefully, make some decent money from it. Such an enormous difference, in fact, that I grappled with whether or not I should quit for two torturous months.

Emotionally I felt ready to quit. I wasn’t enjoying my job and I was excited by the prospect of a new life, yes, but I couldn’t rationalise it. My intellect and my body were pulling in different directions.

This resolved almost miraculously when I went through Tim Ferriss’ Fear-Setting exercise, based on the Stoic practice of negative visualisation (premeditatio malorum). The exercise goes as follows:

Page 1 - mitigate the downside

Make three lists, with 10–20 entries each.

Define — What are the worst things could happen?‍
Prevent — How do I prevent each from happening?‍
Repair — If the worst happens, how can i fix it?

Page 2 - explore the benefits of action

Make a list of the possible benefits if successful or partially successful.

Page 3 - cost of inaction

Make three lists of the costs of your inaction. In other words, if I avoid doing this thing what might I miss out on?

6 months
1 year
3 years

All of this was useful and I’d recommend the exercise to anyone considering a big decision.

One of my possible benefits of even partial success was that I would end up with some kind of online Alexander Technique course for which some people would want to pay some amount of money.

I’ve written that nebulously on purpose — who knows what it would look like or how much they would pay? It doesn’t matter, I had already proven that there was some value and some people were willing to pay something pay for it. It stood to reason that I could build something, an asset, that could be sold again and again.

Here’s the no-regrets part. There’s a scenario where I didn’t make enough money from the course to live comfortably and would have gone job hunting again. But I would still have had the course I made! The course that some people would want to buy for some amount of money! None of that would go away.

This means that I’d be returning to the job market in a different position from how I left it. Depending on the level of revenue the course could generate, I could go after different kinds of jobs! Perhaps a part time job, perhaps a comfortable 9-5pm job, perhaps an intense job at a non-profit that can’t pay high salaries.

Even within the the conventional world of work, an entirely new landscape of flexibility opens up by having a meaningful secondary income stream. This is why a failure to be able to survive entirely independently could still have life changing impact.

When I recognised this truth the decision was made and I resigned a few days later.

Incidentally the course has now made about $80,000 since that initial pre-launch in September 2020, most of which was generated in the six months since I actually left work. I’m calling this a success.

And the best thing is that the logic above still applies: I can still go and get a job if I really want to. But now I also have an asset that looks like it could generate $100k+ a year by itself. This is a nice place to be and it came from recognising that the leap I was about to take wasn’t actually as scary as it felt.

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Paying myself properly as a solopreneur

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 00:00:00 CET

I spent ten years working in a traditional employment structure, where I received a fixed amount of money in my bank account every month. This money was unambiguously mine, since tax is already removed in the UK, so all I had to do was allocate it to my various living costs, fun money and savings. The only levers I had over my money were to redistribute my costs, reduce my costs or increase my income.

Things are different now. My new business, which is entirely owned by me and yet is not me, generates its own revenues and has its own expenses. It has its own bank account and it needs to set aside a bunch of money to pay its own taxes. On top of that it also needs to pay me enough to live and hopefully enjoy my life.

It gets more complicated, though, because I now pay myself a mix of salary and dividends, because tax efficiency. The money my business gives me isn’t all mine; some of it belongs to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, and I need to set that aside.

Adding one final level of complexity, my business revenue has been extremely volatile, so far at least. Most of it has come from the sale of an online course, which happened in two time-limited ‘launches’ since the beginning of April. One day in August my business bank account balance was £5k. A week later it was £30k. I can’t generate £25k a month yet, so that money has to support both my business and me for a while, possibly months.

All of this is different from how it was and my mindset around paying myself was something like “I’ll take some amount of money out of the business occasionally when I feel like I need it and put aside a bit for tax”.

This is not a good idea. Do not do this. This is a recipe for stress and general business mismanagement. I ended up not paying myself much, living more off my savings than I really needed to, and I had a general sense of scarcity and insecurity.

The most important factor in the health of my business is me. It will do best when I feel happy, healthy and secure, so the question I should be asking is — how can I get my business to make me feel happy, healthy and secure?

The answer to that is for my business to lavish me with a large and known amount of money on a regular basis. Instead of taking what money happens to be left in the business when I feel low on cash, which feels bad, I’ve decided to set myself, gasp, a fixed and rising monthly salary, which feels fantastic.

My job as the only Director and employee of the business is then to make sure my business is able to keep doing this forever. If I’ve designed the business properly, me getting paid a lot means I’m consistently delivering great outcomes for my customers and clients, that my business is growing, and that I’ve kept expenses low.

And, fundamentally, if I can’t make a good living from my business then I have a bad business. Not paying myself properly is just a way to hide from this truth, since it makes the business look better on paper, while making my life worse. Paying myself properly will improve the health of my business just as much as it will my own.

Today happens to be my new pay day, so I’m thrilled to pay myself a princely £3000. That will be increasing to £4000 per month from October and £5000 per month from January, so I know I need to orient my business activities around those numbers. Doing business just became fun!

If this method sounds vaguely familiar to some people, it’s because it comes from the book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz, which is great. I’m sold on the method and will be writing about it a lot more in future.

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I've exercised a lot somehow

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 00:00:00 CET

Many things have changed since I left the world of work to set up as a solopreneur (I’m trying to get comfortable using that word unironically). I have shoulder-length hair, I struggle to introduce myself in a pithy way, and, I’m in the best physical condition of my life.

Since this is a bit of a novelty for me, it’s worth exploring how this happened, so here are two things that came together to get me fit.

One factor behind this change is time; I have more of it and it’s more flexible, just like me. This means I can exercise whenever I feel like it. And it turns out I often feel like exercising, it’s just that the times I happen to feel like exercising don’t align with the expectations of a conventional full-time office job.

Since I now have much more control over how I structure my days, I can go to the gym at 11am on a Monday, when it also happens to be empty, or I can go for a long walk at 3pm on a Wednesday. This is so much more appealing than trying to summon the motivation to go to the gym at 7.30pm on a weekday after a commute back from a day of sitting in an office, with everyone else who is similarly unhappy to be there.

There’s now a paradoxical sense of exercising because I want to, not because I feel I should. In fact, this was one of my biggest motivators for leaving the conventional work structure.

Exercise always felt like a thing I had to squeeze in around the edges of my life to mitigate some of the damage of a lots-of-sitting, high-cortisol lifestyle. Moving my body is now something I want to do as a form of self-love, to see how amazing I can look and feel, and to be able to live my life in glorious high definition.

But flexible time is not the only factor. I have a secret weapon, and that secret weapon is a Jeff. I never thought I needed a Jeff before, but, resources permitting, I would now recommend everyone get a Jeff.

Jeff is my physiotherapist. I have a history of unpleasant knee instability (more on that here) and I started working with Jeff after my latest knee surgery in early 2020. Jeff knows a lot about how the body is supposed to work, assessed all the ways in which my body didn’t work like that, and devised a programme that would let me improve. Even without seeing each other for months, because COVID, weekly Zoom sessions and an app meant I could do everything on my own.

I can’t stress enough how much of a difference this made, but it wasn’t because I was spending lots of money on Jeff. I’ve spent lots of money on other things that I didn’t commit to, after all.

No, it worked because Jeff coded all of my exercises into his app. Each day has something for me to do, all the sets and reps and whatever are already waiting for me. I just have to open the app and do what Jeff says.

Not only that, but Jeff clearly understands what I should and, more importantly, what I shouldn’t be doing. I’ve always been put off by the idea of working with ‘some personal trainer at the gym’, since they don’t know much about my injuries, and being yelled at to ‘get one more rep in’ is not remotely what I need.

Jeff on his own wasn’t enough, though. I started working with him before I left my job, and I did maybe half of the workouts he put in the app. I now spend maybe two hours most days just on various mobility routines, targeted stretches, gym sessions and a ‘bulletproof knees’ routine. Ain’t nobody got time for that when you have a job, particularly when you use your free time to build your escape route.

So that’s how I’ve managed to exercise a lot: change my lifestyle drastically to give me the time and space to prioritise my health and get ongoing help from a trusted expert. Not exactly an easy path, I know, but for me it was absolutely worth the struggle.

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Be original by not trying to be original

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 00:00:00 CET

In his TEDx talk Don’t do your best, Keith Johnstone, the world-renowned expert in theatre improvisation, advises improvisers to be average.

Photo by Gavin Allanwood on Unsplash

This is not because he wants average performances. He knows that improvisers want to be original, but when they try to be original their performances turn out mediocre.

He gives supporting evidence for this in the form of world record breaking athletes. When do you think they broke the records? When they weren’t trying to. When they were trying to break a record, they used too much muscle tension and their performance suffered. Johnstone references the book Maximum Performance for this claim, which I haven’t read, so let’s just assume it’s true.

To be original is to create something new, something that hasn’t been done before. A new connection, a new idea, a new way of looking at or interpreting the world.

By definition, anything we consider original was previously unknown to us. This means that originality must be accompanied by an experience of surprise.

I believe that true originality is possible. I don’t think this necessarily contradicts the widely-held view that everything is a remix. Actually, I think they fit together nicely, but I’ll talk about that some other time.

I agree with Johnstone that trying to be original interferes with any hope of creating anything original. Why? Because:

Trying is only emphasising the thing we already know. — F. M. Alexander

For something to be original means we didn’t already know it. Trying, no matter how effortful or ‘clever’, cannot create anything that surprises us. The original thing we want needs to arise, as if from somewhere else, in our awareness.

The way to be original, then, is not to try to be original.

That doesn’t mean not to participate in activities that might produce originality, but to change the goal. Instead of striving for some kind of original outcome, we can decide to engage in an activity wholeheartedly and non-judgementally. Playfully, some might say.

It’s only by ceasing any background commentary along the lines of “this isn’t original, that wasn’t original, need to be original” that anything resembling originality might actually show up.

But there’s a trap here. The harder you try not to think of a pink elephant, the more pink elephants traipse through your attention.

What you want to do is stop trying, but without trying to stop trying. And how do you do that?

I recommend you start here.

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In my oasis delightful gardens shall grow

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 00:00:00 CET

It’s astonishing how, when you find the right metaphor, what was once confusing and opaque suddenly becomes obvious and clear. This recently happened for me about gestures vaguely all this online stuff.

I was introduced to the idea of an online oasis by Rob Hardy, who I consider it my very good fortune to get to know over the last few months:

An oasis is a small patch of fertile ground in a desert. It’s a refuge from a hostile world. A place where one can let their guard down. Where they can finally, if only for a brief time, be themselves. The internet is just such a desert.

The idea of cultivating an oasis on the Internet in which people can take refuge, explore and perhaps get a little lost appealed to me immediately. At first my idea was for Expanding Awareness, my new Alexander Technique blog, to be its own oasis. That was a step in the right direction, but something still didn’t feel quite right.

But last night, while talking to Rob, it all came together: _everything_I publish is the oasis. All of it.

Going a level deeper, perhaps I am the oasis. That may sound a little self-aggrandising, but what I mean to point to is the perspective that everything I publish is building an interconnected little world of stories, ideas and adventures.

This has become increasingly clear as I’ve seen many people pop up across my different channels and engage with a broad range of topics I talk about, rather than sticking to specific ones. They’re wandering around and exploring my oasis.

The idea that it’s all one cohesive, continuous oasis is a powerful shift for me, but the metaphor is still slightly incomplete. It needs one small addition, which is that my oasis contains a number of gardens that I cultivate.

These gardens are unique. They have their own style and vibe, there are different types of trees. Some have water, some have projector screens and music, some have sculptures while some have mazes and playgrounds. Some have a fence around them, with keys to the gates available for purchase.

There are paths that lead from garden to garden, some obvious and signposted, others hidden and surprising. Different people may choose to gather in different gardens, guided by their own desires. They may follow different paths.

And I shall tend to the gardens, creating spaces where people can take refuge from the desert of the Internet, planting new seeds and laying down paths of interconnection.

What does this mean in practice? It means a couple of things.

It means behaving as if ‘the people in the oasis’ share that fact in common. While they may be in different gardens, they are still in the same oasis. No longer will I think of “YouTube subscribers”, “Thinking Out Loud subscribers” and “Twitter followers” as different groups. They are all already in the oasis, they just either haven’t discovered the other gardens, or they have and those gardens simply do not interest them, and this is fine. This is a non-coercive oasis.

One simple step bringing newsletter subscribers onto one master email list, segmented by garden, of course. At some point soon I will import Thinking Out Loud subscribers into ConvertKit. I have some hangups to work through here around ‘becoming or being seen to be Internet Marketing Guy’ (I am not that), but those are not dealbreakers and I can navigate my way through them. I will still do all this my way.

2024-07-19 update: I did this, then went back to Substack, since I wasn’t using ConvertKit enough to justify the cost.

And I will make all this clear so that people can opt out and leave whenever they want. My oasis is not the Hotel California; you can check out any time you like and you can always leave.

This shift also liberates me from worrying about the ‘scope’ for each garden. No, it’s all one oasis. Where it’s right for there to be a path from one garden to another, I will create that path. I will make the boundaries blurry, encouraging people to leave gardens and explore the others.

Finally, I want to focus on delighting visitors to my oasis (another of Rob’s ideas) at every opportunity. That feeling when you’re wandering along a hidden path and you discover that tiny, thoughtful sculpture that speaks directly to your heart. I want those experiences to be everywhere.

I think that’s all on this for now. It may not sound like much from the insight, but from the inside it clarifies so much and gives me permission to keep playing. I’m excited to see how this grows! Who knows, maybe one day, before too long, there’ll be gardens in the real world as well, and the digital and physical will blend together cohesively.

Stopping the habitual suppression of creative ideas

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 CET

I’ve noticed an interesting tendency in myself as I’ve once again picked up regular creative output of the ‘make something every day’ kind, where my intention is to publish a new YouTube video and/or a new notebook post every day.

This tendency is my mind’s habit of discounting potential video or notebook ideas almost as if they’re unworthy of consideration.

On the face of it this might seem sensible. I mean, not every idea is good and should be broadcast to the world, right?

I’m not sure.

My first objection to this tendency is that it seems to happen almost beneath the level of conscious awareness. I may be casually mind-wandering in the shower, have a classic shower thought on something I could write about, and immediately and almost imperceptibly suppress that idea by this “nah” process.

Well, hang on, many of the times when I catch these ideas for long enough to actually make something out of them, they’re often pretty good, or contain sufficient amounts of ‘good’ for me to then craft them into something worth developing further. That alone suggests that this tendency is in some way overpowered and is acting against my own interests.

My second objection is that this entire game of making things every day is to support my desire to prolific, and being prolific requires having a vast abundance of ideas to draw upon. Sitting down for half an hour every day trying to think of things to write notebook posts about is a bad strategy if I only want to spend half an hour every day writing notebook posts.

If there is a deeper, creative part of me that is gently feeding me ideas — and there must be, because I’m increasingly confident that ‘the I that thinks’ (left hemisphere?) is not capable of original thought; it can’t create things from nothing — then I want to cultivate the ability to turn down the other parts of me that habitually interfere with it. That was once hell of a sentence but let’s roll with it.

So in fact, this entire creative project is a frame that allows me to do that. Each time I consciously note the fact that I am having ideas that I am then almost automatically suppressing, I can assert that I welcome the idea, that I no longer wish to suppress ideas, and so change my habitual response. Bonus points, I guess, if I actually make things from those ideas.

And for completion, this post was brought to you by one of the ideas that I noticed myself almost suppressing in the shower. I welcome the ideas.

Greasing the creative groove

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 CET

Greasing the groove is an expression from the world of strength training, apparently coined by the god of kettlebell training Pavel Tsatsouline, which means to put in consistent regular practice around a specific exercise. For example, if you had a pull up bar in a doorway at home, doing one or two pull ups every time you walk past it would be greasing the groove. This gradual, consistent practice helps you put in a lot of volume (total number of pull ups) that you would struggle to do all at once, and it conditions you to become better at pull ups in general.

I’ve noticed a similar effect around my creative output.

If I’m in a period where I’m making and publishing something every day then making and publishing something every day feels easy. I have a sense of competence, I can see my skill improving, and the idea of sitting down to write an essay or record a YouTube video seems welcoming.

The inverse is also true.

If I take some time ‘off’ making things then it’s inevitable that getting back into the creative routine will feel excruciatingly difficult. Returning to the pull up analogy, going from zero to high volume all at once is difficult, will exhaust me very quickly and may even injure me. Doing one or two pull ups every couple of hours lets me do a lot of pull ups without breaking myself (although doing high volumes of only one movement may create its own wear and tear problems, so still make sure you have a well balanced training routine).

I think this is why ‘make 100 things’ is excellent advice for people getting started on a creative journey, because it sets up a volume-based frame that clearly can’t be done all at once. If you want to write 100 newsletters, you’ll need to do that regularly and consistently enough that it doesn’t feel like too much of a chore.

But this principle is also useful to bear in mind when returning from a creative break, whether intentional or not. I just spent a couple of weeks on holiday (well, my partner was on holiday and we went somewhere, but holidays take on a different meaning when there’s no job to holiday from). But even before that I was in a bit of a creative meh zone.

And that’s okay. Upon falling off a wagon, chastising oneself for not being on the wagon is possibly the least helpful thing that can be done. Certainly it’s useful to consider the conditions that led to falling off the wagon, but ultimately the point is to get back on it.

That’s where greasing the creative groove comes back in. After a few weeks of not doing pull ups, doing pull ups again is hard. After a few weeks of not making things, making things again is hard. So grease the creative groove. Create a kind of re-start routine that reminds the nervous system (or whatever it is) how to make things again.

The flywheel analogy also works well here. Once spinning, the angular momentum of the flywheel will tend to keep it spinning. When stationary, the lack of angular momentum will tend to keep it stationary, and it takes a lot of energy to get it back up to speed.

When the flywheel is stationary, again, don’t yell at it for not spinning. Give it the consistent energy it needs to spin.

For me, greasing the creative groove looks like my single-take ad lib YouTube videos and posts. Activities like these help spin up my creative flywheel, the energy of which I need in order to make more challenging things, like long-form essays and online course materials.

Being self-directed is its own work

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 00:00:00 CET

This might be a little self-therapy, but whatever, it’s my blog and I can do what I want.

I just made a YouTube video on this subject, which is front of mind following a conversation with my friend Salman. I’m going the other way this time and doing some writing after having made the video

In short, the idea is that being self-directed is itself a kind of work, and one that I, at least, am not taking seriously. And by that I don’t mean “I’m not doing it”, although a compelling case could be made for that, but “I keep forgetting that this is a kind of work and as a result of this I’m being unkind to myself.”

For the entire time I was employed I was given some combination of tasks, projects, or objectives. These set the frame of my work and gave me a sense, to some degree of specificity, of what I should be doing with each day, a guide as to what was important and so where I should focus.

The important words there are “I was given”. This, on reflection, is an indication of work that needed to be done that I was not doing.

This becomes immediately clear to anyone who has been a manager (of people, not of projects, because amusingly those things don’t always go together). There are moments when your reports come to you asking what they should be doing or, if you’re a good manager, moments when you anticipate that your reports will at some point relatively soon come to you asking you what they should be doing.

And those moments do not represent easy, casual tasks that can be done with a slight hangover. These moments represent a wide situational awareness, detailed knowledge of what everyone is doing, a quick assessment of this person’s skills and inclinations, and a hundred other things. All of these things, in fact, are the true work of the manager and can easily fill up all of said manager’s time.

So when I quit my job to embark on this self-directed life, and from a management position no less, it’s remarkable that I completely forget this pretty salient piece of wisdom. Each day is now a wide open space of possibility… which is great, but also points to a pretty strong need to fill it in a useful way.

In the absence of a boss, I need to be the manager of my own life. And not only the manager, but every function of the company, too. That’s all on me now. Marketing, strategy, product, HR, finance, that exuberant external motivational speaker who comes in for away days and then is never seen again. All of them.

The point of this post is not for this to be an insightful addition to the world. It’s more like a reminder to myself, and perhaps people like me, that all of these things require focused attention. They are work. It’s not only okay to spend time on them, but vital.

After a career where I spent most of my time as the doer, or the manager of doers, I need to remember that a day reflecting on what I should be doing is probably not a wasted day. Sure, there are better and worse ways of doing this, but the point stands: if I’m tired at the end of the day and all I can point to is “well I wrote a few hundred words of something”, that’s almost certainly neglecting a couple of hours worth of ‘reflecting on the big picture, thinking about what I should be doing, worrying if I’m doing the right thing’ and so on.

And again, there are better and worse ways of doing THAT stuff as well, and I certainly intend to get better at it, because being bad at it is both exhausting and doesn’t get me anywhere.

But the larger point stands: that stuff does exist, it’s valid, and it needs to be brought back into scope of how I treat my days.

This is a stock photo of “Young Successful Manager Looking At Camera While His Colleagues Talking On The Background”, which made me laugh

An idea cannot exist out of context

Thu, 27 May 2021 00:00:00 CET

“The mere copying of quotes almost always changes their meaning by stripping them out of context, even though the words aren’t changed.” – Sönke Ahrens, How To Take Smart Notes

Picture the scene. You’re happily reading a book when all of a sudden there’s a moving, rising sensation in your solar plexus, which you interpret as “THIS IS IMPORTANT!”. So maybe you get out your trusty highlighter and make a sentence bright yellow.

Maybe you’re someone who loves some Second Brain action, so you faithfully take out your phone to use the Readwise app to OCR the text into Evernote (for everyone else, yes, this is a thing).

Then you carry on reading, safe in the knowledge that you have captured the idea that your solar plexus flagged for you.

Except… you haven’t, really. What you’ve done is take a string of words from the context that gave them meaning and put them into something that resembles, but isn’t entirely, a void.

An idea sits within a wider context: a sentence within a paragraph, a paragraph within a page, a page within a chapter, a chapter within a book, a book within a body of work, a body of work within a life of knowledge, experiences, memories and beliefs.

A life of knowledge, experiences, memories and beliefs with a civilisation, a civilisation within a biosphere.

These relationships matter. What would it mean to separate them, to strip an idea of its context? Such a thing cannot exist!

To explain why, I need to invoke a powerful idea that Alan Watts describes well. A bird is not just the physical bird, the bird is really the whole bird-environment process. When we say bird, the environment is implied, but we always seem to forget that and end up ‘categorising’ and isolating the bird from the world around it.

We’re the same, by the way. We’re not just people placed upon the Earth, separate of it. We are the result of the Earth doing what it does — ‘peopling’.

I’m getting carried away, so let’s get back to ideas and contexts.

Ideas need context in order to exist as ideas, because an idea is really an idea-environment process. It’s a both/and thing! And when we copy them verbatim, just like I did at the beginning of this little essay, we strip them of that.

But this cannot be, for exactly the same reason that a bird cannot exist outside of its environment! It’s an act of ‘conceptual violence’ akin to trying to force light to exist without dark, good without evil, or life without death. Both ‘sides’ of each one are the exact same process, just seen from different perspectives.

This all means that when we take an idea from another context we have to give it a new one. And how we do that is up to us. We can either leave an idea in a rather sterile context, sitting languishing alone in a notebook or computer file, or we can choose to fully integrate it into our context.

Our idea within our body of work, within our life of knowledge, experiences, memories and beliefs, within our perspectives on the civilisation and biosphere that we inhabit (and that we are).

To do this we need to restate what we think the author meant in our own words, which means bringing to bear everything that makes us who we are.

You might argue that this is a bad thing, that the aim in many instances should be to preserve the original idea as faithfully as possible, say in a line of academic inquiry.

But I would argue that this simply isn’t possible and it’s intellectually dangerous to believe that it is. Whatever we do, the idea cannot possibly stay the same, because the context has changed, and remember the idea is not ‘the idea’ but ‘the idea-context process’.

Going further, I would also argue that the only way we can truly understand an idea is to integrate it fully into our own context, because we cannot possibly have access to the totality of the author’s context, not least because much of this is embodied and wordless.

To truly understand an idea we have to let it sink into the core of our being, explore what it means to us and why it stood out to us. We have to allow it to transform us in some way.

Only then can we restate what we think the author meant, but in our own words. If ‘creativity is a remix’ means anything, this is surely what it must mean.

Here’s my crystallised restatement of what Sönke Ahrens said:

“It is vital to integrate an idea into my own context to avoid making it a meaningless fragment; this always changes the idea.”

If you contrast the two statements they may look very similar. But the second one is mine — and I have the notes to prove it. I think it’s close to what he means, but I can never really know for sure. No one can.

By the way, if anything about this image intrigues you, and you are or could be a Roam Research user, I encourage you to take part in the next Roam Book Club

I should stress that taking notes isn’t required for this internalisation process. As Andy Matuschak says: The most effective readers and thinkers I know don’t take notes when reading. No, but they still do the work somehow to integrate what they read into their own being. And this is probably best done by writing.

Fumbling for legibility in Alexander Technique

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 00:00:00 CET

I am frustrated.

It’s a familiar frustration though, because it’s the same one that comes up again and again when I try to communicate Alexander Technique to someone new. I enjoy talking about it, but it’s just so hard.

Here’s the problem. Alexander Technique is really hard to describe, in part because it is genuinely a complex thing and, perhaps more importantly, because I suspect it literally deals with the parts of our brains that don’t have language. I’m not sure of that, but I have a strong hunch. That means that any attempts to put language on it are always like fingers pointing towards the moon.

I really want to be able to describe and teach Alexander Technique well. I didn’t know this would end up becoming my thing, but I really I want to make Alexander Technique legible and to find ways to spread it far and wide. Given what Alexander Technique deals with (and this note is not about that), I can’t help but think that these ideas would be of great benefit to the world if more widely known, grokked and applied. Literally world shaping.

Maybe I’m frustrated because Alexander Technique seems inherently illegible. But, frankly, I’m also frustrated because as I look around the profession I don’t see much evidence of a collective intention of Alexander Technique teachers seeking to make it legible. Instead, the field appears to be collapsing further and further into obscurity.

Frustration aside, it’s clear that the work to make Alexander Technique legible has not been done. There is very little useful jargon I can use and few good resources I can point to.

Where does that leave me? It leaves me wanting knowledge of this vast and largely unexamined area of human experience to be legible, seeing that it is not, and realising that it’s up to me to make it that.

I guess this note is a public recommitment to that goal. I do not want to be exclusively “the Alexander Technique guy”, but I will affirm that this is going to be a big part of who I am and will influence how my life will unfold in the years to come.

I will achieve my goal of making Alexander Technique legible and accessible to vastly more people than today. It’s just that in order to do that I’ll need to keep fumbling in the dark, dive into this frustration and… come out the other side with a brilliant diamond to offer the world.

The paradox of an untroubled life

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 00:00:00 CET

”Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness… Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I read this quote in the book Building a Life Worth Living by Marsha Linehan, the developer of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, which is one of the most effective therapeutic modes of treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder. I say therapeutic because nutrition is strongly implicated.

I know that I tend towards the more vulnerable end of the spectrum in my writing and ‘content creation’. I’ve even mentioned on Twitter that I’ve had experience with depression, anxiety and yes, some mild to moderate traits of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

It’s funny, the first two of those seem fairly universal, as though everyone has either experienced them directly or know someone close to them who has. I have few qualms talking about these two.

BPD is different. At first I didn’t recognise myself in the list of traits, but worse than that were the horror stories of people who had an experience of BPD orders of magnitude worse than mine or who had been seriously hurt and made resentful by someone close to them with BPD.

2024-07-19 Update: For what it’s worth, I no longer identify with BPD and the traits are now much diminished.

That’s made me much more hesitant to share that side of things, but I’ve become much more comfortable with it as I accept that my experience is what it is and that’s okay.

So back to that Rilke quote.

It hits home because I have often been the guy that friends, family — and, increasingly, strangers — turn to for advice. I am good at seeing and navigating the inner worlds of others and, in turn, at helping them become their own navigators. This is partly why I was told I was a “high EQ manager” in the corporate world, what led me to become a coach and probably what makes me inclined to such things as Alexander Technique. There is a sensitivity there, which I have learned to contain, calibrate and direct usefully.

But it’s worth acknowledging the paradox of where that sensitivity comes from. No, I do not live untroubled among my simple and quiet words that sometimes do others good. Yes, my life has much difficulty and sadness. Were it otherwise, would I be able to find those words? I suspect not.

That paradox often gnaws at me.

How can I have the audacity to believe that I can help others while my own life is ‘not untroubled’? And, similarly, how can I be so selfish as not to help others by using the hard-earned capacities that have come from my experience?

I have learned that the best thing to do with paradoxes is to leave them unresolved — just leave them there and keep moving anyway. Trying to resolve paradoxes creates problems. Both sides can be true at once, and trying to insist that this is not the case is to miss the point, and value, of paradoxes.

Yes, my life has much difficulty and sadness. No, that does not disqualify me from helping others navigate theirs. But let me also expand on Rilke’s observation. My life is also filled with awe, love and hope. These capacities too are tools I can use for the benefit of others.

It’s not just about comfort — it’s just as much about reaching for the stars.

If you liked this, you might also like these:

Revenge Productivity — and navigating its absence

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 00:00:00 CET

You know that experience where you had a long day at work so you stay up way later than you probably should? It has a name — “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination”, based on the Chinese 報復性熬夜 (Bàofù xìng áoyè).

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination is an attempt to exert control over one part of life (the night) given the absence of control over another (the day).

I am coining its opposite: Revenge Productivity.

I have been a free agent for coming up on two months now. I didn’t know what to expect, but I certainly didn’t expect my motivation for creative output to plummet. I hoped that, given all my extra free time and headspace once liberated from the concerns of work, I would be much more creative.

Nope.

It’s taken me a while to figure out, but I think I get it now. I was creatively productive around the edges of a full time job that I didn’t enjoy all that much because I had so little time and headspace to commit to my own stuff.

I was so prolific and focused in the mornings, lunchtimes, evenings and weekends as a kind of ‘fuck you’ to the imposition of the job in my life. I was motivated by Revenge Productivity.

And then the job went away.

I didn’t realise that, even though I had a removed a major source of creative friction from my life, I had also lost a key source of motivation, however warped. What I’m navigating now is how to create new, more resilient and intrinsic sources of motivation.

I’m glad I’ve seen this. In retrospect this was inevitable — now I get to explore how to be creative in this new frame.

Different kinds of authority

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 00:00:00 CET

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about authority and, in particular, its relationship to a non-coercive way of being.

I plan to write a long and considered essay about this, but for that to happen I need to write lots of smaller chunks along the way. This is the first.

The way I see it, there are actually two kinds of authority that are often and unknowingly conflated. This conflation has huge implications for our relationship to authority, whether external (e.g. a boss) or internal (e.g. ourselves). It’s important to disentangle these if we want to make sense of how we and others feel and behave when interacting with authority.

Despite my interest in ‘non-coercion’, I don’t think that authority is inherently bad. At the same time, I have strong anti-authoritarian tendencies when it comes to abuses within systems of power. This is not a conflict, but evidences my attitudes towards these different kinds of authority.

The clearest way I can think of for now to explain these two kinds of authority is to frame them around ‘going along with’ and ‘resisting’ each authority.

So what might it mean to ‘go along with’ authority?

Well, you can go along with the contents of authority. The CEO sets out the strategic vision for the company and everyone says “yes, I agree, let’s go that way.” Some people might call this ‘object level authority’.

You can also go along with someone’s role as an authority. The CEO is selected by the board and the staff say “yes, you are the CEO and we agree that you shall lead us”. Some people might call this ‘meta level authority’.

These also become clear when we think about what it means not to go along with authority.

Again, you can not go along with the contents of authority. The CEO sets out the strategic vision for the company and some people say “meh, that doesn’t seem wise, don’t like it.”

You can also not go along with someone’s role as an authority. The CEO is selected by the board and some staff say “no, I disagree, I do not think you should be CEO.”

Okay, the scene is set. Future writings will build on this frame.

Where do words come from when writing?

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 CET

There’s something really peculiar about writing, which is that I have no idea where the words actually come from. Yes, even these ones. These ones too.

As I’m writing, I don’t find myself consciously crafting ideas or sentence . Instead, different options sort of just ‘show up’ in my awareness, I catch them and then I write them down. Once written down I seem to contrast the words against an internal felt sense, a sort of “how close is this to what you meant?” This process iterates until I have a finished draft in front of me.

I know what the other kind of writing is like, where each word is a painful, conscious slog. It’s like the difference between ‘overtaking’ and ‘mirror, signal, turn the steering wheel, change gear, accelerate, mirror, signal the other way, turn the steering wheel, stop signalling, slow down a bit.’

That second part was laborious wasn’t it? Exactly. That’s what it’s like to write when I’m not able to access this felt sense, which is usually when I’m forced to write about something I don’t intrinsically want to write about.

I use the term ‘felt sense’ intentionally, because of course I am referring to Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing , the self-inquiry method that gets one ‘conversing’ regularly with this internal felt sense. It very quickly becomes clear that there is a wisdom in the body that knows things outside of conscious awareness. Exploring the felt sense is something like “huh, now that I have realised what the felt sense was telling me, I sort of knew it, but I am surprised I hadn’t really seen it before. It now seems like new options are available to me.”

But this isn’t the time to talk about Gendlin. Instead I wanted to write down somewhere that yes, I do use the felt sense when I write. More than that, I think my writing is infinitely superior when I tap into the felt sense and allow ‘it’ (me? other me?) to take the reins. And even more than that, I suspect this approach is teachable.

I might play with this with my Write of Passage writing group. I’ll need to show them the felt sense and I’ll probably need to make the metaphors and language a little more accessible, but fundamentally it’s the same thing: “how to write using the felt sense”.

But diverging back to the more woo end of things… who is it that writes, if not ‘me’?

And as I write that, my felt sense smiles. Wild.

‍

When the void talks back

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 CET

When you first start publishing your thoughts and ideas online — particularly the more vulnerable ones — it can feel a lot like screaming into the void.

No one is listening to you. Even if people happen to chance upon you, they will see that no one else listens to you, and that encourages them to pass you by as well.

It’s a lonely experience and it’s the failure mode that causes so many to give up. In my case, I’m eternally grateful that, this time, I stuck with it and charted a safe course through those emotional doldrums.

Because, after some amount of time, consistency, and — dare I say — courageous expressions of authenticity and vulnerability, the void comes to life a little bit. It starts saying things.

“I hear you.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

Those quiet signs of life, the gentle flickers of light out there in the void, they give you the energy to carry on, to turn up the brightness of your own beacon within that void.

And it turns out that, the more you write and the more you share, the more the void calls back. You come to see that, instead of an endless, dark nothingness, there is a bright and glorious universe of light, heat and love.

It’s a vast and rich fullness of other awarenesses just like your own, looking for the others, longing to be vulnerable themselves and to hear those words.

“I hear you."

“Thank you for saying that”.

Making money online by teaching people how to make money online

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 00:00:00 CET

So you want to quit your job and make money online?

Oh, it looks like there are loads of people out there who want to make money online, why don’t I make products to teach them how! Buy my ebook teaching you how to teach people to teach people to teach people to…

Hmm.

I’m being unfair, of course — most people who make money online don’t do this. But it’s definitely an alluring trap if, at first, you’re short of other ideas.

I’m increasingly aware of the trap at the moment, because I’ve just done something that many people want to do: build a following online, create (at least one) scalable online product that people will pay for, and quit my corporate job.

Yay!

And in the process of doing all that, I have learned a great many things that others would benefit from knowing, whether it’s specific strategies and tactics for building those things around a job, or my own experiences in navigating tricky emotions and ‘general life stuff’. I even coach people who are doing this!

I certainly could teach many of the things I have learned — and, having done it and knowing how hard it is, I really want to — but at what point will people start accusing me of becoming someone who is caught up in that perpetual motion machine? Would it be a fair criticism, and what can I do to minimise it if it were?

Aside from repeatedly making clear that I have multiple other revenue streams that could support me on their own — that I wouldn’t have to make money like that, if I didn’t choose to — one powerful thing I can do is give away my knowledge for free. I’m already thinking about the kind of ‘content’ to put on my different ‘content channels’ (urgh). For example:

These notebook posts are high velocity, low fidelity idea prototypes. Probably they will get read by very few people, or by only the people most committed to seeing what it’s like inside my brain.
Thinking Out Loud, my main newsletter, is for sharing somewhat polished, but not necessarily complete, ideas that are usually based on my current experience, particularly those ideas that I think will be most valuable to others. Medium velocity and medium fidelity intermediate packets.
The essays on my website will be the most polished and refined elucidation of well-developed ideas that I can bring together in one piece of writing: “my ultimate guide to” style prose on intellectually sophisticated topics. This is because there is no audience here (no RSS feed, etc). People will find these essays if they go looking, and that is already a high bar. Low velocity, high fidelity finished products.
Then there is YouTube. Points 1-3 above are sort of a linear progression of idea refinement and testing, but YouTube doesn’t sit neatly in any of these. If I think about how I use YouTube, it’s often on in the background while I do other things, and it’s not that intellectually complex. As soon as something gets to the level of “I should probably take notes”, I switch to something else, because I’m rarely in a state of mind or context with YouTube were I would want to take notes (though of course I could dedicate time and attention for more sincere viewing of lectures).

Given all this, I would expect that YouTube would be a great place to do the “how to quit your job” style content. The ideas are easy to listen to in the background, they’re motivating, they can be repackaged and remixed easily, and they rarely require notes. It’s the kind of thing that can be absorbed over repeated viewing, and this is how I learn a great many things on YouTube — by osmosis.

The problem is that, long term, YouTube is likely to become my highest surface-area social platform. Once I get past 10k subscribers (this will probably happen some time in 2021, I am on 711 now), the algorithm will increasingly show me to new people who have never heard of me, and I’ll need to be increasingly legible to them. These people will not have been ‘onboarded’ into understanding who I am and what I’m about.

Also, pragmatically speaking, if I do want YouTube to become a meaningful revenue stream one day (and I do), then it makes sense to target the material there around topics that i) have a large and active audience on YouTube and ii) are valuable for advertisers.

The risk becomes that, for people who find me on YouTube, they won’t know that I also have an Alexander Technique course and do coaching and help run the Carbon Removal Centre and sell whatever else that isn’t “how to quit your job like I did” type content, and I will become easily stereotyped, and therefore ultimately misunderstood and easily dismissed.

I’m playing a long game here, and my long game is more to be heard saying important things than to make lots of money. At the same time, I will need to make enough money to remain enjoyably self-directed myself and — actually — getting more dissatisfied people out of jobs they are meh about and into a fully alive, self-directed state is also part of my long game (for reasons I will discuss another time).

Maybe, in writing this, my paradox has resolved itself.

I need to create a channel that isn’t just how to quit your job, but is actually / also how and why to create a life that unlocks within you your inherent creativity and playfulness, which I believe will lead to the best long term, shared outcomes. Seriously, this is how to fix climate change and a long list of social challenges. It’s the “golden age” stuff that Visa talks about.

Another way to phrase this is to transform Non-Player Characters into Player Characters. Which is not to say that everyone with a job is a NPC while everyone self-employed is a PC — it’s much more complex than that obviously, and this is a rich seam for further thinking.

This is a much more compelling vision, and certainly one I can orient much of my emerging creative output around. Cool

How to get the most from Write of Passage

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 00:00:00 CET

You’re probably either considering purchasing, or are about to participate in, the online course Write Of Passage by David Perell.

If you’re about to take part, this article will tell you how to get the most from it. If you’re considering it, you’ll get a good understanding of what the course involves.

Putting yourself out there in the way that Write Of Passage demands is not at all easy, because it’s not just about writing, it’s about becoming someone who writes online. There are traps and emotional hurdles all over the place. Fundamentally, I think the world needs more people who are able to think and act independently. Write Of Passage is a transformative experience that is helping to make that happen.

This essay is about 4000 words long (c. 15 minutes to read). If you’re a current student and in a rush, here are some high level pieces of advice.

Write Of Passage is somewhere between a sprint and a marathon. The course itself lasts six weeks, but then you’ll be writing for years to come. Keep that long term ambition in mind and try not to burn yourself out in week 2.
Focus on completing the assignments and making friends. One of the best things about Write Of Passage is that there are hundreds of people going through the same thing you are. The frame is designed to get you writing a lot and to meet each other, so make sure you take advantage of that energy while it’s available to you.
Lean on your alumni mentors and writing groups. Hello! I am an alumni mentor, we are here to help you. If you get stuck, please reach out. Your course mates can also be a huge source of inspiration and help — there are amazing people in this cohort — don’t be afraid to ask them for peer support well.

Charlie Bleeker, lead alumni mentor for Write Of Passage Cohort 6, has written a great list of do’s and don’ts — read them!

My own experience with Write of Passage

I took Cohort 2 of Write Of Passage in August 2019, shortly after taking Building A Second Brain, that other well-known online course. Over the five weeks of the course I was winding down at one job and getting started at a new one, so I had some spare intellectual bandwidth, energy and time to devote to it.

Before Write Of Passage I had made a few feeble attempts at writing blogs, but I didn’t know what to say and I was inconsistent, so no one read them. I had also been feeling stuck in my career for years and I knew there was more available. Write Of Passage seemed to be offering a solution to all of this.

Fast forward a year and a half to the end of January 2021 — three weeks ago as I write this — and I was able to leave my consulting job and a ten year career in system innovation to pursue a self-directed independent lifestyle. I built an online course around a demanding full time job by following David’s audience-first products approach. I have a growing, engaged and nurturing audience on Twitter — and, more importantly, I am making real friends there. And, I have a number of coaching clients, all of whom reached out to me in response to my writing.

But it’s not just that I have more; I’ve become more. The journey I’ve been on since taking Write Of Passage has been profoundly transformational for me. I don’t know exactly what comes next (that’s largely the point) and I couldn’t have planned my way here. It happened through a series of serendipities facilitated by putting into practice the principles I learned during Write Of Passage.

So let’s talk about some of those principles, my experience with them, and my advice on how to navigate them, both during the course and outside of it.

I’ll frame my advice around the Write of Passage modules:

The Age of Leverage
Make Your Serendipity Vehicle
Create Your Online Home
Set Up Your Distribution System
Learn To Write Clearly & Persuasively
Connect With Anyone
Build Your Personal Monopoly

The Age Of Leverage

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. ” ― Archimedes

Most people are used to trading time for money. We go to work, we give our employer eight hours of our time, and we get paid for those eight hours. It’s an ‘un-leveraged’, one to one exchange. That frame easily leaks into other areas of life, so we end up associating our time with our ability to influence the world: when we’re not working, we have no influence.

The Internet gives us the power to invert that frame. Our words and ideas can work for us while we’re spending time with friends and family, adventuring or working on other things. As long as we have a system to capture the value that our published words create for us, we increase our capacity to connect with other people (for that’s all words do). We give ourselves leverage.

This may seem obvious, but it’s not until it actual happens to you that you internalise it as a truth. Until then it can seem like a fairytale, or something that just happens to other people.

If you’re early on this journey, I encourage you to have faith, keep writing and be playful. This is a long game, one where the results can’t be forced and take time and consistency before they show up. All you can do is choose to keep playing and see where the game takes you.

If you’re a Write of Passage student, it’s normal to have doubts and second guess yourself here. This is definitely something to bring up and explore with the mentors and your course mates. I’d also encourage you to reflect on this stuff on your own, perhaps in a journal, or you can even publish your thinking on this as you go through the course. You’ll be surprised how many people will appreciate it.

Make Your Serendipity Vehicle

Here’s a story of serendipity for you.

Not long after I started that new job, I was given the opportunity to write an article for the Ordnance Survey, the UK’s mapping agency, about the the role of geospatial data in the energy system transformation.

I wrote the article, shared it on LinkedIn and thought nothing more of it… until someone on LinkedIn,,who I had met perhaps once several years before, invited me to speak on that topic at a conference.

In South Korea. As a VIP. All expenses paid.

He had seen my article, liked it, and someone had just pulled out session he was organising.

And of course I said yes.

BIXPO2019 — Gwangju, South Korea. This happened because I wrote something online

This is the power of having a serendipity vehicle. In this case it was a ‘guest post’ and LinkedIn, but many other serendipities have happened via my website, my newsletters and Twitter. There is no one serendipity vehicle.

The thing about serendipities, though, is that there is a lot outside your control and knowledge; you don’t know when, where or how they will happen. You can’t force the right person with the right problem to read the right article at the right time and in the right frame of mind.

But there are some things you can control:

How much you write. You can write consistently and prolifically for a long time. Yes, you can! And doing this increases your ‘surface area’ for serendipities. The more of your stuff that’s out there, the more likely it is that those blessed combination of circumstances will come together to make magic happen.
What you write about. You can use your experience and curiosity to find topics that will resonate with the kind of people you want to attract. This is where developing your personal monopoly comes in (I’ll talk about this below).
Making friends. The future of the Internet will be built on friendship. Even very early in your journey, some people will notice you. Talk to them! Not only will people tell you what they like about you, but some of them might become good friends. This is a thing that really happens, but again, you can’t force it.

If you’re a Write Of Passage student, I would encourage you to focus on quantity over quality at first. Aim to publish 100 things before you even expect to see any benefits, though they’ll appear sooner than that. Remember, the probability that you’ll creating serendipity from something you don’t publish is 0.

Create Your Online Home

What’s an online home? Well, you’re in mine right now! Welcome, please make yourself comfortable and feel free to explore.

Your website is one of the first places people will look when they discover you. It’s where you tell your story and it’s where you put the ideas you want others to associate with you.

You’ll see a link above that says Start Here. That’s my chance to share with you who I am, what I like, what I’m interested in, what I’m working on, and whatever else I deem important. It answers the question “who is this person and are they worth me reading more?”

How’s this for a business card? This is my old website.

But it’s so much more than that. When I first started writing my online home I had a bit of (okay a lot of) an identity crisis. “Just write a bit about who you are”, Start Here invites. Okay… but who am I? Writing my Start Here page made me question and explore what I wanted to put on there. It turns out that I didn’t really know who I was or wanted to be.

And that, I strongly suspect, is normal. Write Of Passage, like Building A Second Brain, is a personal transformation experience disguised as an online writing course and it should be treated as such. That means it’s going to be difficult at times. It means you might have to go to some of the places you really don’t want to have to go. And it means it’s okay to ask for help and get support from your friends.

Remember that creating your online home is an iterative process, one that invites a bit of identity R&D. It lets you try on different versions of yourself to see which one fits. Chances are you’ll end up tweaking it a lot over the years to come, so don’t worry about getting it perfect up front — in fact, to do that would be to miss the point. Maybe it needs to feel uncomfortable for a while, maybe that’s what will drive you need to change it. Not just the words, but what lies behind them.

If you’re a Write Of Passage student, I’d encourage you to just get something published, even if it’s rough and you hate it. Go as personal as you feel safe going and then 1% further. Other people want to connect with you, so it’s worth sharing as much you as you can. And, if you have the resources I highly encourage you work with a coach while you’re getting started writing online, particularly in the way that Write Of Passage teaches.

Set Up Your Distribution System

That’s right, you’re going to become one of those people who has a newsletter. You’re going to write regularly to, at first, an extraordinarily tiny list of people, some of them well-meaning friends and family. Cringe, I know.

It can be hard to convince yourself that this is worth it, particularly at first when it feels like screaming into the void. But don’t worry. Stick with it long enough and the void talks back.

A newsletter is a mechanism by which people can get to know you, to build a relationship with you, to become invested in your success. Your newsletter is where you’ll find your 1000 true fans. It’s a place where you can test ideas and perspectives to see what resonates with people.

I shared my journey in leaving my job with hundreds of people on my main newsletter — Thinking Out Loud‍

Let’s stick with that resonance theme. A newsletter can be seen as a kind of ‘Resonance Engine’. Consider two kinds of resonance:

Interpersonal resonance. This is what happens when I write something that my readers like. My essay on Total Work in No. 24 has been hugely resonant with many people, so now I know that there’s appetite for more writing along these lines.
Intrapersonal resonance. This is what happens when I write something that I like. For example, I wrote in No. 8 about how a lifetime of recurrent knee dislocations has shaped my identity and so learned that I enjoy writing in this more raw, vulnerable style.

The Resonance Engine (newsletter) allowed me to discover these things, because it gave me a space to play around with new ideas and ways of being, and because doing it ‘out loud’ let people hit reply when they were moved to do so.

This is how my Alexander Technique ‘persona’ and ultimately the online course that let me quit my job came about. After a few editions where I wrote about it a lot — and found great interpersonal and intrapersonal resonance — I realised that I didn’t want Thinking Out Loud to become a newsletter about Alexander Technique. I decided to spin that out into Expanding Awareness, which was a second newsletter focused just on Alexander Technique, and is now its own website and I made an online course that has generated more than $80k in revenue.

Although I didn’t realise it at the time, that act of spinning something out of Thinking Out Loud crystallised its role for me. Thinking Out Loud is where I explore new ideas in a quest for both interpersonal and intrapersonal resonance. When I find it, I continue to write about it there. Then, if it gets too big, I take it somewhere else.

By repeating this process the Resonance Engine is free to continue its never-ending and insatiable quest for more resonance, staying lean and flexible to new ideas and perspectives. It also preserves the working with the garage door up mindset.

It’s fair to say that writing a regular newsletter changed not only my life, but my self. It will be hard at first, but trust me, it’s worth it.

If you’re a Write Of Passage student, you will probably find it tough to write a weekly newsletter at first. It’s hard to know what to write about and you probably don’t have particularly well-developed ‘writing muscles’. That’s fine, you have to start somewhere. They don’t have to be long or particularly insightful. If it helps, here are my first three: 1, 2, 3.

Learn To Write Clearly & Persuasively

Thanks to decades of school, university assignments and work reports, many of us believe that writing has to look and feel a certain way. Worse, associations like that might make us think that writing is something we can’t be good at or enjoy for its own sake.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While writing isn’t always sunshine and rainbows, it can also be much easier and more rewarding than you might think.

Writing doesn’t start from a blank sheet of paper or empty screen. It starts in the conversations you’re already having and in the daydreams you’re already having in the shower. Everything you write is assembled from idea fragments that happened somewhere else, and each piece of writing represents a new intermediate product in your idea refinery.

Here’s a dirty little secret for you: I have recycled loads of this essay from other things I’ve made: past newsletters, Twitter threads, a YouTube video I made, and countless conversations I’ve had. But you probably haven’t seen any of those, and even if you had, you haven’t seen them articulated like this. This essay is now something I can share as one discrete chunk and no doubt I’ll recycle material from this into something even more complex.

This is a good thing. It’s not that I’m short of ideas or that I’m in some way ripping myself off. No, each time I write something I get a clearer idea in my mind of what that thing is about. Getting it out of my head and onto ‘paper’ frees up my mind to do things with it and mix it with other ideas, whether my own or those of others.

Writing is the process of articulating fuzzy concepts until the point where they’re legible to ourselves and others. That’s why learning to write clearly and persuasively — as is taught in Write Of Passage — is so powerful. The more clearly you can write, the more clearly you can think. The more persuasively you can write, the better able you are to articulate your thoughts.

And all this comes from writing a lot and from getting useful feedback, whether it’s explicit feedback you asked for or implicit feedback from people responding to you via your newsletters or tweets. It’s all feedback.

My advice here is to:

read widely to get a sense of the styles that are possible and which ones you like
try writing with different styles, at different times of day, in different environments, with and without coffee, with and without music — change up as much as you can until you find things that work for you
focus on quantity over quality, at least at first, if you get stuck. Not everything will be good, and that’s okay, but things will tend to get better naturally the more you do as long as you get and pay attention to feedback.

If you’re a Write Of Passage student, I strongly encourage you to attend the Crossfit For Writing sessions that are run as part of the course. Fellow alumni mentor Roxine Kee has written a great summary of how these work. That, and make sure you give and ask for feedback as part of your writing groups.

Connect With Anyone

We’re entering a relationship-first model of the Internet, one where it’s becoming entirely normal to meet someone on, say, Twitter and then ‘jump on a Zoom call’.

Seriously, I must have Zoomed with at least 100 people from the Internet in the last year. Many of these people, I have no doubt, will turn out to be good friends for many years to come. You know, the kind of actual friends you would have in the actual world.

Three friends watching Foo Fighters together, each separated by eight timezones, and having never actually met each other.

This flips the conventional model of ‘networking’ on its head. When you share more of yourself online, you create more opportunities for other people to discover you and realise that you’d probably hit it off.

If you’re trying to connect with someone new, you can start by reading their writing and get to know them. You can strike up low-stakes conversations with them in the (privately owned) public squares of the Internet. When you reach out to them directly, they already know who you are, and maybe they’ve already read some of your work.

Even if you reach out to someone completely cold, you can still sprinkle relevant examples of your own writing that you know will be of interest to them as proof of work and sincerity. This isn’t something I have done much myself, but plenty of people have done it to me and I promise it works.

All of this is made possible by people sharing their ideas on the Internet. Start by sharing your own ideas and reading the ideas of people who respect and may want to talk to one day. Don’t be pushy about sharing things with them in public and don’t take it personally if they don’t read or respond, everyone is busy. But low-pressure, friendly persistence will likely pay off. Long games, remember.

If you’re a Write Of Passage student, I’d encourage you to play with this idea with your course mates, because they know the rules of this particular game. Follow them on Twitter, subscribe to their newsletters, exchange emails during live sessions and maybe suggest a call with them. I am still in contact with people who took Write Of Passage with me in 2019.

Build Your Personal Monopoly

Write Of Passage introduces the idea of the Personal Monopoly:

The ultimate goal of writing online is to build a Personal Monopoly. It’s your unique intersection of skills, interests, and personality traits where you can be known as the best thinker on a topic and open yourself up to the serendipity that makes writing online so special. - David Perell

This is the thing that will let you stand out from the crowd and carve out a name and a space for yourself. When I came across the idea I knew it would be helpful to have one of my own, but the way I interpreted it also got me stuck.

I suspect this is a common failure mode for online writing. Many people who want to write online trip over at the “what should I write about?” stage. There’s a belief in there that it’s important to know your personal monopoly before you start.

A useful metaphor I used to get around this lies in the difference in approach between Architects and Archeologists.

The Architect designs the building up front before construction can begin. The design may be adapted along the way as things come up during construction, but the frame is that the building follows the design.

The Archeologist, on the other hand, discovers something hidden underground, makes some guesses about what it might be, and then starts the process of uncovering it. Whenever the truth of what they find differs from their idea, they update their idea of what they’ve found.

This idea was so transformative for me that I even made a YouTube video out of it.

I realised I was seeing my creative journey through the lens of an architect rather than an archeologist, trying to design it rather than discover it. Now that I’ve made that reframe, I’m free to create, safe in the knowledge that the more I create, the more I’ll discover.

The fate I want to avoid as a creator is to force my way into a box that I hate living in. By letting my personal monopoly emerge — as ‘I’ emerge alongside it — it’s much more likely that I’ll enjoy both the journey and the destination.

So rather than aiming to write within a theme, write to be prolific. Abandon hopes to create structure from the top down and watch in surprise as structure emerges from the bottom up

Look at me, mum, I made it!

If you’re a Write Of Passage student, I invite you to keep the idea of the Personal Monopoly in your awareness and reflect regularly on your own. But don’t let not having one stop you from just making things. You’ll be amazed at what will show up if you just keep moving forwards.

Have fun!

With that, my final words of encouragement to you are to have fun with all this!

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will everything I’ve just talked about. Write Of Passage is the catalyst, the kindling that will start the fire. But the rest is up to you and I guarantee you’ll see more success if you approach it with a twinkle in your eye.

In the words of the immortal Ze Frank in his Invocation for Beginnings: “And God let me enjoy this. Life isn’t just a sequence of waiting for things to be done.”

Navigating the vulnerability hangover

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 00:00:00 CET

My style of writing seems to be to look at my own experiences and extract some kind of wisdom or generalisable principles that I can share usefully.

This often leads me to personal places, although I rarely feel that uncomfortable. I think I’ve been playing with my own fear dials for long enough that I know roughly where the line is.

Sometimes I move closer to “this might be too much” , but I sit with the feeling and I’ve never regretted writing and publishing what I find in that space (although I wouldn’t publish everything).

Yesterday I published a note and associated YouTube video on my burnout experience. Yes, that time I dissociated. As before, I sat with the discomfort and I don’t regret publishing them, but I do have a vulnerability hangover.

The vulnerability hangover is a consistent sensation that happens whenever I share emotionally raw topics, like during coach training, Alexander Technique teacher training, writing, making videos, and even talking to friends. There’s a tension that builds up as I’m about to share the thing, then I share it and there’s a relief. After that there is an energy crash and I sort of want to withdraw a bit and nap.

My sense is that it’s appropriate for this to happen and I’ve learned to watch and lean into it. It’s just my system recalibrating to the fact that it was probably okay to share that thing, actually, and perhaps my world is safer than I thought it was.

The immediate tiredness is probably a release of long-standing muscle tension associated with that held emotional and psychological pattern. Again, I think this is a good thing, because it leads to an ease and lightness as my body gets more and more relaxed.

“You translate everything, whether physical, mental or spiritual, into muscular tension.” – F.M.Alexander

Listening to the wisdom of the body and using that felt sense to navigate my inner and outer worlds really is a powerful way to be. The vulnerability hangover is just part of that process.

I wouldn't start from here — recovering from burnout

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 00:00:00 CET

There are a few variations of this apparently Irish joke, but for the sake of argument I’ll use this version from Wordreference.

A traveller stops to ask a farmer the way to a small village. The farmer thinks for a while and then says “If you want to go there I would not start from here.

This is why I quit my last job, because I realised I couldn’t get to where I wanted to go from where I was. I had to get somewhere else, somewhere that would allow me to start.

Basically, I burned out a couple of jobs ago. I had been working too much for too long.

And I don’t mean a slow and gradual loss of interest and capacity to perform well, although that also happened. No, one morning I woke up and, looking back, had a pretty severe dissociative episode.

I didn’t see emails to respond to when I looked at my laptop screen, I saw blurry shapes and colours. I seemed to have no meaningful theory of mind, either. Other people surely didn’t have their own subjective experience, they were Non-Player Characters — just like me.

There were a few things going on in my life at the time that contributed to this — and that I won’t go into — but my job was probably the primary factor that, at the very least, amplified the other issues.

I only took a week off and then I was back at work, but I was not okay.

Over the coming months I somehow managed to claw my way back to about 50-70% of my previous high capacity, but then stayed there. After a year and a half after the episode in that same job, and after trying and failing to get back to where I was, an opportunity came up for me to go somewhere else. So I did, hoping a change of scene would help.

It did not.

I mean, I was doing fine. The sort of fine that is okay for coasting and occasionally impressing people at the right moments. But that’s not what I wanted and it dawned on me: “I shouldn’t start from here”.

That’s why I quit not only my job, but the entire frame it represented. I built my escape route from that entire system on the side, because I knew I needed to explore an entirely new way of being.

That’s what I’m doing now.

And now I’m here, and you know what? I think I would start from here.

Not caring lets us perform better

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 00:00:00 CET

There’s a common trap that gets in the way of our natural abilities. That trap is to care too much about achieving an outcome.

This is something I experienced in my Alexander Technique lessons with Peter Nobes. He would throw me a ball and, like most humans who have ever played catch, it became important that I catch the ball. That led me to try to catch the ball, which looked like me coordinating myself somewhat awkwardly, probably dropping the ball, and looking sheepish and apologising when I did.

Contrast this to the other way I learned to catch a ball, which was to (i) have a clear intention that I wanted to catch the ball, (ii) not care if I did or didn’t, (iii) watch as my hand reached out perfectly accurately and effortlessly on its own such that the ball just landed in it.

The second way is probably familiar to most people, but as a sort of rare, chance and fleeting “wow, I was really in the zone” experience.

What’s happening here is captured well in the Inner Game series of books by W. Timothy Gallwey. He describes two ‘selves’ within each of us:

Self 1: the explicit, thinking part that tries to catch the ball
Self 2: the implicit, non-thinking part that actually catches the ball

The more Self 1 cares about achieving a goal, the more it interferes with the natural functioning of Self 2. This is why, counterintuitively, the less you care about something, the more easily, effortlessly and effectively it can be achieved.

This entire concept can be played with in all areas of life, and it’s interesting to see the areas where people are okay with it. Catching a ball with one other person, without an audience, in a non-competitive environment and as part of a training exercise seems to be fine. Not ‘caring’ about getting the girl of our dreams or delivering a great presentation at work, on the other and, can seem crazy, even though exactly the same principle applies.

Here I have to point out the difference between ‘not caring’ and ‘not intending’, because they are often conflated in day to day language.

Caring is as described above, and comes with a sense of the outcome being important, that it (or we) would bad if the outcome weren’t achieved. There is a physical tension associated with it.

Intending is the activation energy required to take a specific action. I can intend to catch the ball (or not) as it flies towards me, while not caring whether or not I actually catch it.

In this frame, the ideal combination to minimise or remove self-interference is to have a strong and unambiguous intention while caring as little as possible. The worst combination for our performance is to have a weak and ambiguous intention while caring strongly about achieving a particular outcome.

Now I will bring in playfulness, which I define as an attitude whereby we engage in an activity for its own sake. That sounds a lot like having clear intentions while not caring about achieving specific outcomes. Even in competition, it’s possible to maintain a position of “I want to win, but I don’t mind if I don’t”. That mental posture often brings about a sense of ease and lightness that unlock greater levels of performance that actually make winning more likely.

There’s a trap here, of course.

Thinking “it is important that I not care so that I play better” is caring. This is the trap that most people are stuck in. They know they are stuck, but their most powerful and practiced tool is to care and try, but all they end up doing is care and try in the opposite direction. This is the same exact thing that they are trying to escape.

And I made a video from this

Starting a regular writing and publishing habit

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 00:00:00 CET

The more comfortable I get being an ‘online creator’, the more I appreciate the different stages of production that each bit of ‘content’ represents (I don’t like the word, but I’m not sure there is a better one yet).

I have a few channels for my writing now, and each one has a different vibe to it.

There are the two newsletters, where there are either c. 670 people or ~~c. 1025 people~~¹, depending on the newsletter. These people get the newsletters in their inbox, which feels like a bit of an intrusion and so I’m grateful to them for letting me in. This context also makes me write in a certain kind of way. While I’ve managed to strike quite a conversational and exploratory tone — which I like and my subscribers seem to appreciate — I still find myself wanting more of a ‘workshop’ feel.

I also have Twitter, which is great for rapid fire ideas with very little thought behind them, just to see what lands. It’s fun, and it is possible to go deep there, but it doesn’t lend itself to considered prose.

And I have the ‘essays’ section of this website (I’m not sure what I think of “essays” — I might change it to blog or articles, essays feels a bit much)². These are, in theory, highly polished pieces that are towards the end of my creative process, artefacts that try to capture and articulate the best of my thinking on a given topic. This is and should be a high bar.

As someone who aims to be a world class writer, I want to establish a consistent daily writing practice, where at the end of each session I have something that could in theory be shared, even if short and not completely thought through. These are the little things that will eventually become big things.

I could just do this in a private notebook, but there is something sensationally valuable about writing something with the intention of hitting publish and knowing that it could be read (hello). Having a place to put these things also encourages actually writing the things.

This is that place.

Hello world.

–

Oh, today I made and published a YouTube video. I’ve been getting stuck in thinking I need to make polished things, but I don’t, actually. The long game I need to play for now is to get my Alexander Technique course in a good place, so YouTube needs to be low effort for a while.

Now closed ↩︎
Now just called ‘writing’ ↩︎

Fall down; get up - cultivating an anti-fragile identity

Sat, 22 Aug 2020 00:00:00 CET

Note: this essay contains discussion of orthopaedic injury that some may find distressing.

I lay screaming on the floor of a conference centre in Gwangju, Korea, with dozens of concerned onlookers around me

Twenty-one hours later I gave a talk on ‘digital transformation in energy’ in front of 300 senior energy professionals.

In November 2019 I was invited to speak at a high profile conference hosted by the Korea Electric Power Corporation. (You can also read my ultimate guide to public speaking, which is based on my experience around this event.)

I arrived late on the Tuesday and then on Wednesday — on my way to lunch, no less — my left knee decided to dislocate itself. I hit the ground hard, smashed my phone, and found myself screaming in pain.

I say “found myself screaming”, because my awareness of the process was like a dream that ended when I hit the ground. Within seconds I had already grabbed my knee with both hands, forcibly straightened my leg and pushed inwards on my dislocated kneecap until the pain, and the panic, blessedly eased as my kneecap snapped back into place. Within five minutes I was limping away as the shock slowly subsided.

I looked back to where it happened and there was nothing that could have caused it. I can only assume that my shoe slipped ever so slightly on the polished floor and in just the wrong way. That’s it. No way to predict or avoid it.

As you might tell from my somewhat dispassionate tone and obvious experience in relocating my own kneecaps, this was not the first time. It’s a thing.

It happens rarely enough that my life is largely unaffected — I can do most of the things you can do — but often enough that it’s always on my mind as something that could happen. And when it does, it’s always a surprise, because it never happens when I’m being careful, which means I’m almost always being careful.

As such, the whole recurrent knee dislocation thing has become part of the structure of my psychology and identity. I’ve noticed two key psychological effects that are worth highlighting.

The first is hyper-vigilance, a way of being that is stuck in ‘scanning for possible dangers’ mode. Hyper-vigilance makes me notice the people playing football way across the park, the uneven road surface a few feet away and the kid jumping off a low wall.

The second is intrusive thoughts, where some content from the world creates sensory flashes in my imagination. Intrusive thoughts show me what would happen if one of those kids kicked the ball directly at my knees, if I were to step awkwardly on that uneven surface, or if I were to jump off that wall.

And it’s incessant. On a single bad day this might happen hundreds of times.

“What would it be like if that happened right now? How about now? And now? Oh, and now?” — the intrusive thoughts in my head.

While I’m grateful that my brain doesn’t recreate the feeling of pain itself (I suspect family sizes would be a lot smaller if brains did this), it can accurately recreate the feelings of ‘wrong’ associated with knee dislocation, so these intrusive sensory flashes are unnervingly realistic. They also seem to bypass the rational centres of my brain, so I respond physically, often flinching or reaching for support before ‘I’ am able to intervene.

As I’m sure you can imagine, this is a recipe for both chronic and acute anxiety, and I’ve had to develop various strategies to manage these on an ongoing basis. Ninety percent of the time you wouldn’t notice what’s going on in my head, but sometimes it gets too much to hide.

I’ve gone into some detail about how unpleasant all this is as a set up for the big reveal: a large part of me is grateful that I’ve had this experience. It has helped forge my identity. I’ve now reached the point where I’m not even sure if I’d trade places with ‘me with working knees’.

I’ve been falling down like this pretty regularly since I was 11 years old. When I was younger my kneecaps didn’t fully dislocate. They would wobble, I would fall over and scream in pain, but the kneecaps ultimately stayed in place. After a few minutes the pain and weakness would subside enough for me to get up and limp away.

I was bullied incessantly for this at school. It looked like I would just randomly fall down, make a bit if a scene, and then walk away. I sucked at sports, but it wasn’t clear why, so I just looked uncoordinated and lazy. More than once other kids actively kicked my knees in for laughs.

Doctors largely couldn’t help. My kneecaps were hyper-mobile, but there was little that could be done even with the surgeries I had, which meant I was on my own to live with it. There was a stage in my teenage years when my knees would give out like this every few weeks. Each time I would fall, it would hurt, I would feel angry and frustrated, and then I would have to get up and get on with my life.

At that’s the key: I got up, every single time.

At first it was difficult, but over time it became habitual. I would go through the same physical and emotional rollercoaster, but cultivated a kind of acceptance towards it. This is the one area of my life where I have never told myself I shouldn’t feel angry, or sad, or in pain.

Over time a kind of programme was coded into me: fall down; get up. Fall down; get up.

While I’m always in physical shock immediately after it happens, I notice myself quickly reassuring the concerned witnesses who moments earlier saw me yell, swear and writhe as if possessed by a demonic spirit. No, I don’t need an ambulance. Yes, I’ll be okay. Thank you for helping me. I even crack jokes, while still visibly shaking.

This programming extended to the rest of my life. I’ve fallen many times and in many domains and this response has always kicked in. I’ve never allowed the ‘fall down’ state to become the new default state. It’s part of my identity now: I am someone who falls down and then gets up.

I want to make clear that I’m grateful that I have always been able to get back up. I know there are many people who don’t have this luxury. None of this should be read as me having a tough love approach to navigating personal adversity. I’m aware that I have always had the necessary support and safety nets to help me recover. That doesn’t stop me valuing the agency I have developed, but it does put it into context.

In the days immediately after I dislocated my knee in Korea I travelled to Seoul for a pre-planned long weekend. My knee was hugely swollen, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from looking around (I make no comment about how sensible that was or wasn’t).

Over that weekend I wrote this:

As I once again go through this now familiar physical and emotional rollercoaster, I once again find solace in the fact that I have taken something positive from it.

I’m limping around Seoul, but I feel strangely anti-fragile, each painful step reinforcing my sense of self and resolve to keep exploring.

Seems ironic to call it ‘anti-fragile identity’ given how fragile I feel at times, but that’s part of the fun.

And at this point, I don’t think I’d trade it for anything.

The cognitive benefits of the ketogenic diet

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 CET

Note: I am not a doctor and don’t play one on the Internet. This article is about my own experience and what I’ve learned and doesn’t constitute medical advice.

For most of my life I’ve experienced a background level of tiredness, struggle to focus and ‘brain fog’. I used to hate waking up in the mornings and some days I would struggle to think so much I felt like I had lost 50 IQ points. It was a frustrating experience: I knew I had more mental capacity available, but it was just switched off a lot of the time.

My life has been an experiment in tinkering with ways to feel good, or as I grandly call it, ‘to improve the quality of my subjective experience’. Life is too short to live as if through a veil.

I have implemented various habits around exercise, consistent sleep patterns, quitting caffeine, reducing alcohol and meditating daily. They’re all useful, but what has worked the best for me is the very low-carbohydrate ketogenic (“keto”) diet.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE KETOGENIC DIET

I’ve been on keto for about a year with some short breaks. I tend to go a few months and then come off for the occasional weekend, either when I travel or for a particularly special, non-keto, meal that I don’t want to miss. It doesn’t take long before I start to feel uncomfortable again, so I get back on keto pretty quickly.

I’ve seen a lot of benefits since settling into it. My mood, energy and quality of attention are better and more stable. I feel smarter. I don’t feel hungry as much and it’s no problem to miss meals. I can do three day water-only fasts without much difficulty.

I’ve seen a real improvement in symptoms of anxiety and depression, which have been lifelong companions, fortunately mild compared to many. I handle stress better. I sleep better, need less of it and wake up easily with less grogginess. My performance in the gym has improved.

I’ve also found it to be an extremely satisfying and sustainable way of eating. I get to eat lots of green vegetables, high quality fats and I can eat cheese, meat and fish.

If you research keto online you’ll find mainly dramatic weight loss stories. That’s great for people who want it, but as a 186 cm (6’ 1”) and 72 kg (159 lbs) guy trying to gain weight, that’s not what I want. I’m in it for the cognitive benefits.

HOW THE KETOGENIC DIET WORKS

Keto is a very low carbohydrate, moderate protein, high fat diet. The most important factor to control is carbohydrate intake, which should be below about 20 g per day – not much – though that limit will vary by person.

Do this for a couple of days and interesting things start to happen. Your body uses up the glucose in your blood before moving on to a stored version of glucose, called glycogen, in your muscles and liver.

If you have eaten a traditional diet that includes carbohydrates all your life, and you have never done extended fasting, then this might be the first time this has happened to you since you were a newborn baby. There has always been plenty of glucose available, so your body has always used it for energy.

But when there’s no glucose around, your body switches to a secondary energy source: ketones. These are molecules created when your body breaks down fat and are where the term ketogenic comes from (‘ketone creating’).

People who follow the keto diet, or who do extended fasts, enter a metabolic state called nutritional ketosis, where ketone levels in the blood increase while blood glucose and insulin remain low. Some cells can only run on glucose, so your body creates all the glucose it needs from protein through a process called gluconeogenesis (‘new glucose creation’). This keeps your blood sugar at a stable, low level and shows that there is no metabolic need to consume glucose, since your body can make what it needs for itself.

Low insulin is why fat loss stories are so common with keto. Insulin is a storage hormone: its job is to move glucose into your cells for energy or to store it as glycogen or body fat. When insulin is elevated, and unless you’re exercising to burn off the glucose straight away, your body is creating more fat for long term storage. It’s only when insulin is low that the stored energy can flow out of fat cells. For the first time in their lives, people switching to keto for weight loss are creating the biochemical environment that’s actually required for fat loss, because their bodies start using the stored fat as their primary fuel.

This explains why it’s possible to carry a lot of body fat and still feel ravenously hungry every few hours. If your body is conditioned to run on glucose, then it isn’t adapted to creating and using ketones produced from body fat. As blood glucose and insulin drop, the body runs out of the glucose it uses for fuel, has nothing else to lean on, and signals that you’re hungry. You eat, elevate your blood glucose again, and never give your body the opportunity to adapt to accessing your own fat stores.

The first few days or weeks of keto can often suck, partly because your body needs to grow and modify mitochondria, the parts of cells that convert molecules like glucose and ketones into usable energy for your cells. This is known as ‘keto adaptation’ and until that happens you may have the ketones you need, but you don’t yet know how to use them.

Studies suggest that this can take about 12 weeks ¹, but once it’s done your body will be set up to run happily on dietary or body fat. Given that one kilogram of fat contains 9000 kcals (three to four days’ worth of energy), you can go a long time just on your own fat reserves, even if you don’t have that much body fat.

And because you’re adapted to using fat your cravings for carbohydrates will go away as well, so you won’t even want that slice of cake. I don’t really see starchy or sugary products as food anymore; they just don’t trigger any interest, aside from any lingering emotionally-based craving from time to time (feel sad; want sugar).

HOW THE KETOGENIC DIET MIGHT LEAD TO IMPROVED COGNITION

Looking at energy levels first, using ketones from fat for fuel means that there is a steady supply of energy, so you don’t experience huge swings in blood sugar before and after eating meals high in carbohydrates. That means no post lunch slump and no desire to eat every couple of hours.

The story of where the ketogenic diet came from is interesting to illustrate benefits for brain health. It was originally developed as a successful treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy in children, which shows that there is a link between keto and brain function ². And in terms of general mental health – for example anxiety, depression, quality of attention – there are a few mechanisms for how this could happen.

One is the difference between how glucose and ketones are metabolised in the brain, which constitutes about 20% of the body’s energy needs. The way the body generates useable energy is via a molecule called Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP). Both glucose and ketones can be used to generate ATP, but it turns out that ketones produce ATP more efficiently than glucose ³. This means that, once adapted to using ketones for fuel, the brain gets more energy from ketones than from glucose, which is great for such an energy-hungry organ.

The effect of this can be seen clearly in Alzheimer’s disease. One of the effects of the disease is to disrupt glucose metabolism in the brain, which reduces brain function as the brain is starved of energy. Supplementation of ketones and the use of the ketogenic diet has been shown to improve brain function in Alzheimer’s patients ⁴.

Another potential route to improved brain health is through reduction of inflammation, an immune response designed to protect the body from disease and injury, but which is damaging when chronic. Inflammation in the brain has been linked to anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s disease ⁵ ⁶. The ketogenic diet has been shown to reduce inflammation, which suggests it has therapeutic value for these and perhaps more mental illnesses.

Perhaps the most interesting way the ketogenic diet could improve cognition is through the role of two important neurotransmitters: glutamate and GABA. Neurotransmitters are the messenger chemicals that allow neurons in the brain to communicate with each other and influence how sensitive they are in responding to stimuli.

Glutamate and GABA are essentially opposites, which are maintained in a balance within the brain. Glutamate is excitatory, which means it makes neurons more likely to fire in response to a stimulus. Higher levels of glutamate are associated with a range of mental illnesses, including anxiety ⁷, depression ⁸, obsessive compulsive disorder ⁹ and potentially even personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) ¹⁰. As someone who has experienced anxiety, depression, and traits of BPD, it’s this mechanism that fascinates me the most. I know that when I go off keto, symptoms of all of these worsen and improve when I return to keto.

On the other hand, GABA is inhibitory, which reduces the sensitivity of neurones. Alcohol and benzodiazepines like Valium work by mimicking GABA, while nootropics like l-theanine (an amino acid) work by increasing GABA. All of these produce anxiety-reducing effects.

The ketogenic diet has been shown to change the balance between glutamate and GABA in the brain ¹¹. When in ketosis, glutamate is reduced through more efficient clearing of it from synapses (the space between neurons where neurotransmitters operate) and the synthesis of GABA from its precursor, glutamine, increases.

Given all of these potential mechanisms, I’m confident that the benefits I see in my cognitive performance are linked to my use of the ketogenic diet. Not only am I giving my brain a steady supply of a more efficient fuel, I’m also reducing damaging inflammation and changing a chemical balance in my brain that positively affects symptoms of anxiety, depression, and Borderline Personality Disorder, all of which interfere with my ability to think clearly.

HOW TO START THE KETOGENIC DIET

Having read that, you might be interested in how to experiment with a ketogenic diet yourself. There are plenty of resources out there you can refer to, which I’ll list below, but here are my quick start tips.

Eat fewer than 20 g of carbohydrates per day. This is on the extreme end of estimates out there, but will pretty much guarantee that you enter ketosis. This means you’ll be eating lots of green vegetables, healthy fats, fish, meat and some dairy. No starchy vegetables, fruit, grains, bread or anything sugary.

Weigh all of your food for a couple of weeks. You’ll be amazed how bad you are at assessing portion sizes and doing this will help recalibrate your intuition.

Use an app like Cronometer to track your food. Cronometer is great for keto because it includes calculation of ‘net carbs’, which is the number you want to track. This only applies to American users, where food labels mean you need to subtract fibre (which is undigested) from the total carbohydrate figure to get the number you want. In Europe you can just use the carbohydrate number on the label as fibre is already subtracted.

Avoid all processed foods. Anything that has a list of ingredients on it probably has added sugars. Best just to cook your own food for a while.

Supplement with electrolytes. It turns out that insulin causes your body to retain key electrolytes like sodium, magnesium and potassium. On keto, insulin stays low, so your body loses a lot of those electrolytes. That means you’ll lose a lot of water weight very quickly at first, as these electrolytes are bound with water, but you will need to supplement them.

Do it strictly for three months to let your body adapt. It takes time for your body to fully adapt to keto. If you really want to benefit, commit to doing it properly for about twelve weeks, which is how long evidence suggests it takes athletes who transition to keto to return to their previous performance [1].

Practicing Zen

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 CET

What image comes to mind when you hear the word Zen?

If you picture something calm and tranquil, I hope this article will surprise you. While it happens occasionally, my experience of Zen is generally neither calm nor tranquil. In fact, Zen has an uncanny way of making me feel more worked up. So why do I practice it?

Gentling the bull

Zen practice is like a loving, yet strict parent. This parent knows that while a child may hate broccoli, it’s good for them and they’ll probably grow to enjoy it. The parent encourages the child to eat it.

But what happens when you make a small child eat something as obviously abhorrent as broccoli? What if the child wants chocolate and you say no? You’ll learn that the child has a powerful energy inside them like a wild animal.

As we grow up we learn that some expressions of this energy – our emotions – are socially acceptable, while others are not. Some are good and some are bad. Other people don’t like it when we have tantrums, so we learn to suppress the energy that drives them. Over time we separate ourselves from emotion, which becomes something that happens to us rather than something that is us.

Zen suggests that suppressing this emotional energy isn’t the way to go. Instead, we should see our emotions like a wild bull that, while powerful, is neither good nor bad. Rather than remain ignorant of the bull, we look for it and aim to tame it.

The bull is nowhere to be seen.

There’s a wonderful series of ten paintings and poems that shows the steps of the herdsman (‘us’) gentling the bull. This is the Zen journey towards enlightenment.

The first four show the journey from almost total ignorance to when we truly face this emotional energy. Going back to the broccoli: how might a child respond when you make her eat broccoli, something she really doesn’t want to do?

At first, she has no awareness of herself as being separate from her anger. She’s being a little ball of fury. The bull is nowhere to be seen, hiding in plain sight.

With a little more awareness she notices broccoli on the floor and tears in her eyes: evidence of the bull.

With more awareness she sees herself throwing broccoli at her parents as her anger subsides. Have you ever caught yourself yelling at a loved one, knowing that you’re being unreasonable, but still unable to stop? A glimpse of the bull, though it got away this time.

One day, when confronted with broccoli, she sees how her entire body twists and contorts inside. She feels hot and her heart races. She struggles with this energy, longing to let it overwhelm her and to push the broccoli away again. But this time is different: she stays with the energy, experiencing it fully without reacting. It reaches a peak, shifts and subsides.

This is what it’s like to catch the bull.

Catching the bull.

We emerge from such a bull encounter a different person. When we engage with that raw emotional energy we let its power transform us. And since the energy is what we truly are, before we separated ‘it’ from ‘us’, we are transformed by it in a way that takes us closer to our true nature.

If all this sounds uncomfortable, that’s because it is. To practice Zen is to fully experience your emotions without pushing them away or being swept away by them. The trick is to stay still even when stormy inside. Especially then. That’s where the Daily Life Practice comes in.

The Daily Life Practice

In sitting meditation you hold a particular posture and must not move, no matter what comes up inside. You have to eat your broccoli with a smile.

The Daily Life Practice is similar, making you meditate for one hour every day, follow a daily schedule around sleep, meditation and meals, and give yourself wholeheartedly to everything you do.

A typical day might look like this.

The alarm goes off at 6.00 am. There’s an inner sense of urgh as you turn it off. I don’t want to get up. You’re on the meditation cushion at 6.20 am, but in a bad mood after the whole alarm thing. The prospect of sitting quietly for an hour counting your breaths doesn’t appeal. Maybe just 30 minutes?

You do the full hour then have to iron a shirt for work. This is boring, I’ll put on a podcast. Not so fast, chides the Daily Life Practice. You need to iron wholeheartedly, remember? This inner monologue continues as you pay close attention to your senses while you iron: the radiant heat, the easy slide of the iron, the smell of damp cotton, the sound of the high-pressure steam. Having grappled with the bull, you may feel calm. But stay vigilant! it’s not tame yet.

Like a child made to eat broccoli, we naturally resist this kind of rigid, imposed structure. The genius of the Daily Life Practice is that the structure that triggers emotions also forces us to stay with the energy of the emotions.

What’s on the other side?

I’ve only had glimpses of what’s available, but one experience stands out.

Walking to work one day – no music, no podcast – I gave myself fully to what was happening. The bull was craving entertainment, but I left it to rage as I denied it any distraction. As it settled down, it transformed into something quite different.

As I paid attention, I thought I could feel my body moving, hear the birds singing and see the trees swaying. But that was just it: thought. I realised I wasn’t experiencing them directly, instead I was listening to my thoughts describe them. And I couldn’t stop it. My thoughts were happening by themselves and seemed like external objects, no different from how I would experience seeing a car.

With that awareness came a cascade of knowing. I saw that my thoughts were made of the same stuff as the feeling of my body moving, the sound of the birds and the swaying of the trees. Everything inverted as my mind expanded outside my head and the world came rushing in. The idea of any difference between inside and outside made no sense and it was plainly obvious that any notion that ‘I’ exist separately of ‘all that’ was a ludicrous illusion.

While this experience was blissful, although a very ordinary kind of bliss, I quickly returned to my habitual way of being. While I love these moments when they happen, I don’t go after them. These things cannot be aimed at directly. The only way to go forward is to continue the same way I arrived: meditate for an hour every day, set and follow a daily schedule, and give myself wholeheartedly to everything I do.

My ultimate guide to public speaking

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 CET

When I was around seven years old, my mum offered me an opportunity: “you can have an ice cream if you go and buy it yourself”. But I was too scared to ask.

A few months ago I spoke at a conference in Korea in front of 300 senior energy industry professionals from around the world. I didn’t have a script, I was horribly jet-lagged and I had dislocated my left knee the day before (really).

And the result? The talk went well and I enjoyed myself.

My session at BIXPO 2019 in Gwangju, Republic of Korea

I think public speaking is one of the most important skills that anyone can develop. It’s a superpower, a professional and personal cheat code, that can raise your profile, create luck, help you learn and just generally make you an all-round more competent human.

In this article I share the strategies I’ve learned on how to do it well – from the perspective of someone who would once have done absolutely anything to avoid it.

Now, I am no TED speaker. I still get nervous, I tend to talk too fast and I trip over my words sometimes. That’s okay, we’re all on a journey here. I hope that being an intermediate-level public speaker makes my experience more accessible.

And if you’re someone who is currently terrified of public speaking then have no fear. All of this is within your reach. My first manager advised me to take every opportunity to speak that presented itself. I promise that the fear you feel now will go away. Just keep trying and use the system here to help you.

Public speaking is a superpower

The best thing about public speaking is that most people are terrified of it. That gives a huge competitive advantage to anyone who chooses not to avoid it, since more of the benefits accrue to a smaller set of people willing to play the game. It’s a cheat code, just like writing online.

Why? Just look at the benefits.

Raise your profile

Let’s get this out of the way. As icky as it can seem, in modern life there’s nothing inherently vain or narcissistic about wanting to raise your profile, and nothing says “I’m worth your attention” like being on stage.

It also gives you credibility. As far as the audience is concerned, the fact that you’re there at all means someone thought you should be. You’ve already been through some form of quality control and deemed worthy.

Really understand your material

One of the best ways to learn anything is to practice active recall, where you review some material, hide it, and then see what you can remember. Preparing and giving a talk – just like writing an article – is the same process, but on a larger, more emotionally charged scale.

There’s real value in being forced to structure your thoughts into a coherent narrative. Compelling stories make a talk more interesting, more memorable and have a bigger impact on the audience. That same sense-making process is going on inside you as you prepare your talk.

Build transferable skills

Public speaking is not a single skill, but a diverse array of skills that are highly transferable between jobs and areas of life. As an arena to practice and hone these skills, speaking in public is unrivalled. To give a good talk, you need to:

have and refine valuable ideas that are worth talking about
organise these ideas into a coherent and interesting narrative
understand the importance of pace and timing
create visually appealing materials that help others understand your ideas
speak in an engaging way to keep the audience’s attention
build your confidence and learn to overcome your fear of being seen

Create your own serendipity

Events are a very different experience when you’re a speaker. As an attendee you have to make an effort to ’network’, but being a speaker means people make efforts to find you. This gives you access to higher profile attendees and other speakers at the event.

This effect continues once the event is finished. You’re more likely to get people contacting you with more opportunities, and the more events you do, the more this happens. The first time I spoke at a conference (in Denver) the invitation made its way to me through my employer. The second time (in San Francisco) I was invited to speak on almost exactly the same topic, except the invitation came directly to me as a result of my talk in Denver.

Plus, because work paid for it and I took a week off, I got to explore SF for cheap and, by even more luck, I even managed to catch my favourite band (Above & Beyond) who just happened to be playing there the day after my talk. Serendipity in action.

Seeing Above and Beyond by chance in San Francisco will be on my life highlight reel.

An emotionally resonant public speaking system

This all sounds good in theory, but it’s scary, right? However much we tell ourselves that it’s something we should do, the thought of speaking in front of an audience – especially a large one – can put us off. I remember having to give a talk at a company away day where I was so nervous I had to put down my notes because the paper was shaking visibly.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Over the years I’ve come up with a system that I use whenever I have to speak in public. This system works with the natural cadence and tendencies of my emotions, rather than against them. Let’s take a look.

Follow the steps

You find out that you’re giving a talk at some point in the future. Now what?

This is a scary moment! It’s easy to become overwhelmed and put off thinking about it, but be strong! Like any other project there’s a step by step process you can follow with different goals to achieve and skills to practice.

I break this down based on my state of mind with respect to the talk – how my body responds when I think about it. I’ve identified seven distinct phases:

Long before the talk (weeks and months)
Soon before the talk (hours and days)
Immediately before the talk (seconds and minutes)
During the talk
Immediately after the talk (seconds and minutes)
Soon after the talk (hours and days)
Long after the talk (weeks and months)

So with that frame introduced, let’s dive in.

Long before the talk (weeks and months)

When you first say yes to giving a talk in the distant future, you may feel a wave of anxiety, but it passes quickly. At this point, the talk is far enough away that it probably won’t trigger a sustained emotional response, so you feel pretty calm. This low-fear state lasts a while and is the ideal opportunity to think and reflect.

It’s also a great time to promote yourself. You know those people who post things like “It’s a privilege to have been invited to speak at x on the topic of y – who will I see there?” on LinkedIn? You don’t need to be that, but some form of self-promotion will create more serendipity for you down the line. Sharing the fact that you’re giving a talk is also a great way to turn up your fear dials, which will help you grow.

Since this phase generally feels pretty safe, there’s a high risk of procrastination. If you do find yourself putting off starting then it can be helpful to imagine it’s the day of the event – just to give you a little kick of adrenaline. Just don’t work yourself up so much that the anxiety puts you off even more.

Instead, just follow these steps to create an interesting, engaging and polished talk that you’ll enjoy giving.

Consider your audience. Some number of people will be giving you their attention. What are they like? What do they care about? How could you surprise them? Just bring them to mind and let the idea that you’ll be connecting with living, breathing humans float in your mind.

Gather your ideas. It’s possible that all you have to work with right now is the title of your talk, so spend some time getting ideas out of your head and your reference systems and onto paper. How are you going to fill ten, twenty, or thirty minutes of content? This is a time for volume, not for quality. Get it all out.

Build a compelling story. Once you have all your ideas on a page, just look at them. Maybe go for a long walk, let your diffuse mode play around, then see if you can weave what you have into a story. It doesn’t need to be perfect and it’s fine for there to be holes. The aim is to get a sense for the shape of your talk.

Nail the transitions between ideas. One of the most valuable things to focus on is how you’ll move elegantly from idea to idea. You might know this topic well, so you’re likely to assume, even unconsciously, that your audience will be able to follow you easily. This is probably not the case. Even if you’re presenting to an expert audience, your particular framing will be unique, so you’ll need to hold their hand a little.

Test your story on people. Once you have your story, practice it on real people. It doesn’t need to be anything formal, just talk them through the key points. You’ll find out very quickly which parts you don’t understand yet and you’ll see from their reactions and questions where they get lost. Do this as many times as you can.

To take this to the next level, you can even just test idea fragments. You can have conversations around a single idea, you can write a short essay about one of the key arguments, or you can even tweet your ideas in different ways to see what resonates the most with people. This kind of thing can give you much faster feedback in a much more accessible way.

Cut what you don’t need. You’ve iterated a few times and you have an interesting story that others can follow easily. Now is the time to whittle it down to the core ideas that you really want your audience to remember and talk about later. Which parts of your story are gold and which are just filler? Kill the filler.

Design your presentation. It’s rare these days for a talk to come without slides of some kind. You’ll be tempted to start the whole exercise by opening PowerPoint (other software also available), but it’s really helpful to already know what you want to say before you start fiddling with your slides.

There are lots of approaches to making slides, but the one I recommend now is to go heavy on images and light on words. Aim to read very little off your slides. Instead, your slides should serve two purposes: to add greater resolution so that your audience feels more immersed in your story and to remind you of what your key points are in case you get nervous.

Don’t be afraid of slides made entirely of pictures. I get mine mainly from Unsplash and Pixabay.

I used this approach for my talk in Korea, where the slides I made were essentially an exercise in design fiction. While I talked through the way an electric car driver might change where, when or how they recharged their car based on updates from their navigation system, my slides showed graphical mock-ups of what that system might look like.

By doing this, I made my audience a part of the story. First they took on the perspective of the electric car driver (left), then the perspective of the electricity network operator (right).

Anyone interested in dynamic electric vehicle charging? Just me?

‍Test again. By this point you have prepared a full presentation, congratulations! Now it’s time to see if it all hangs together by – you guessed it – walking through it with someone in full.

I know, it seems tedious to do this again. But, honestly, it’s the only way to find out if something doesn’t work, particularly now that you have slides. And each run through you do will give you more confidence that you have strong material and that you know it well.

Learn your story thoroughly. You know that your presentation works. Now you want to make it as automatic as possible. I don’t mean in the sense that you’ll talk like a robot, but that you’ll know it so well that your mental resources will be freed up for other things, like smiling, connecting with your audience, and even cracking a joke or two. Remember, the more you rehearse, the less rehearsed you’ll seem. Practice, practice, practice.

Close to the talk (hours and days)

Not long to go now and you’re probably shifting modes from rational to emotional. Notice the shifts in your body as the big day approaches, because it’s important to change how you treat yourself from now on. I usually feel a combination of anxiety and excitement, two emotions that feel almost exactly the same in my body except for the way I judge it.

It was easy to be tough on yourself while your emotions were calm, but now you need to be more and more kind towards yourself.

Practice, but gently. It’s still a good idea to keep running through your talk in your mind, but do it softly. Ponder it in the shower, during your commute or as you get changed for bed. Keep it fresh in your mind, but don’t stress. You should be beyond learning it by this stage.

Visit the room. If you can, say if you’re speaking at a conference, go and see the room you’ll be speaking in. It’s a good idea to make it seem a little bit familiar so that it’s less of a surprise when you’re the one presenting in it. This is particularly valuable if it’s a big or imposing room, which is more likely to shock you if you’re not mentally prepared for it.

I’m glad I did this in Korea, which was by far the biggest and highest production event I’ve ever spoken at, and I would not have wanted to walk into this hall to see this stage for the first time just before giving my presentation. I even found out that I would be simultaneously translated into Korean, which meant I slowed down and added pauses to let the translators keep up.

Simultaneous Korean translators not shown.

Stop preparing. I find this absolutely crucial for managing my nerves before a talk and allowing myself to enjoy it. There comes a point where I just have to be done getting ready.

Let’s say it’s the morning of the talk. You might take a quick flick through your notes, but at this point your goal is just to relax and enjoy yourself. Let yourself off the hook and trust the work that you’ve put in up to this point.

Immediately before the talk (seconds and minutes)

I’ve done enough public speaking now to know how this ride goes, emotionally. I walk into the room and get a wave of, “woaah, this is real now”. Then I sit where I’m meant to sit, watch the other speakers and wait, until…the speaker before me is done, leaves the stage, and I’m introduced. It’s time to stand up, walk up on stage and go.

There’s an incredible change in perception when that transition happens, when the talk shifts from theoretical future event to holy crap I’m standing on stage holding a microphone. It’s an intense experience, which is why I have only one tip here.

Manage yourself, kindly. Recognise that you’re in a situation that is as scary as it is thrilling. Everyone – and I mean everyone – is emotionally turbulent at this stage and that’s fine. As you sit there waiting for your name to be called, be still, be quiet and pay attention to what’s going on inside your mind and body. Are you being kind to yourself? Could you breathe a little more slowly and deeply? Could you remind yourself that, not only are you in no actual danger, but that you wanted to be here?

At this point in Korea I was saying nice things to myself, intentionally slowing my breathing and reminding myself to let go and have fun. I have found my Zen practice to be really helpful here.

During the talk

One of the most wonderful things I’ve learned from saying yes to lots of speaking opportunities is that anxiety and fear peak immediately before giving a talk. Once I’m actually on stage and looking out at the audience, my anxiety levels drop by at least an order of magnitude and what’s left is feelings of exhilaration and playfulness. Here’s what I recommend doing with those feelings.

Have fun. It took me a long time to learn this, but public speaking can be seriously fun. It doesn’t have to be something to get through as quickly as possible. It can be something you can sink into and enjoy deeply. And if your current perspective won’t let you believe that’s true just yet, what would it take to change it?

Ignore your mistakes. Unless you’re a world expert, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll stumble at some point. You’ll mumble something, you may accidentally forget which slide is coming up next or you’ll say something in the wrong order. That’s all totally fine. Just notice the mistake, pause, correct yourself, and carry on. Audiences are far more forgiving than it may feel when they’re watching you.

Connect with your audience. It’s so easy to stay in your own little bubble on stage and forget that the audience is there. This might even be a defence mechanism, but resist! The more you can project yourself out into the room, the more engaged your audience will be and the more you’ll enjoy yourself.

Make and hold eye contact with lots of different individuals. Expand your spatial awareness out to the size and shape of the room, the way a great theatre actor would. At the very least, don’t just look at slides, your notes, or your shoes.

I always start by taking a couple of seconds to just stand there and look out at the audience. There’s no need to start talking immediately, and this moment gives me the space and time I need to connect.

Avoid ‘public speaking mode’. Beginner singers often get told to sing using their speaking voice, rather than going into what they think a singing voice is. The speaking voice is much more powerful, natural and totally appropriate for high quality singing. The same is true for public speaking.

It’s a common habit when giving a talk to go into a special mode. It’s one thing to speak more clearly and passionately, but it’s quite another to act like you’re someone else. I’ve found that the most natural way to give a talk is to do it conversationally, in exactly the same way as I would chat with someone before or after I go up on stage.

If it feels like you’re putting on some kind of ‘public speaking costume’ as you walk onto the stage then pay attention to this habit and see if you really need it.

Soon after the talk (minutes and hours)

From the moment you say “thank you” and the audience applaud, your entire psychological and physiological states change. This is another wonderfully physical change as all that adrenaline lets go. Here’s how to make the most of it.

Enjoy the moment. I always take a moment to offer myself some hearty congratulations – you did it! All that preparation paid off and any anxiety associated with the talk can now dissolve. Ride the wave of dopamine for a while, because you’ve earned it.

Talk to people. You may find an inclination to rush off after your talk, but try to hang around near the stage for at least a couple of minutes before you do and see what happens. It’s usual for at least a couple of people to come over, introduce themselves and ask a couple of interesting follow up questions.

What’s crazy is that these can often be quite senior people, who you would have had no chance of meeting if you’d been trying to ‘network’ with them. Remember that you’re the expert on that topic right now, so enjoy the chat.

Avoid intense self-evaluation. I’ve noticed a tendency in myself to immediately start critiquing my performance. “That was terrible, you really fouled up that part, you spoke too fast, how could you forget that important point?” And so on.

While it’s useful to be aware of how the talk went, I tend to put a moratorium on self-evaluation until at least a few hours later or the next morning. If my body and mind are still pumped up then I’m liable to get an inaccurate perspective on my performance one way or the other.

The only exception I make to this is some kind of non-judgemental journalling of the event. This is where the only things I’m allowed to write down are factual, objective observations – things a video camera would have seen. So I may write down “I forgot to mention the role of rapid electric vehicle chargers” rather than allow my mind to spiral into “I’m such an idiot for forgetting to mention the role of rapid electric vehicle chargers.” This can be useful later as a prompt for what happened.

Don’t plan difficult activities. While it doesn’t happen every time, I often find myself absolutely exhausted after giving a big talk. I always try to avoid making big plans that need me to be switched on for the couple of hours after the talk, though if I do end up having energy then I’m happy to use it.

In Korea I was horribly jet-lagged and had to caffeinate myself to survive the talk (which I don’t recommend). I was hoping to crash afterwards, but then found out I had to give an interview for my host organisation’s in-house TV channel. Let’s just say this was not ideal timing and I don’t remember much of it, which is probably a good thing.

Long after the talk (days and weeks)

You’ve been back home for a couple of days and everything is calm again. You might even be thinking ahead to another talk you have in the diary. The cycle is complete.

But if you’re interested in continuous improvement then now is the time. It needn’t take a lot of effort, so here are some final tips to squeeze all the remaining value out of your experience.

Reflect on your performance. Now that it’s easier to be dispassionate, you can evaluate yourself critically. What went well? What sucked? What areas would you like to work on for next time? I’m working on being more ‘natural’ on stage, more at ease, so I pay particular attention to triggers that cause me to speak in a more wooden or awkward way.

Consider why you’ll accept next time. I care about growing my public speaking skills, so I always want to be making things just a little harder for myself each time. That doesn’t just mean bigger audiences or longer talks, but exploring a whole range of different aspects of public speaking that I still find challenging. I find the idea of playing with my fear dials very helpful here.

For example, while I’ve done big, well-prepared conference talks, I’m still quite scared of speaking in front of smaller, more intimate discussion groups. I suppose it’s because the audience feels closer and I can feel their attention more keenly. To me it feels harder to hide in front of a small group than in front of a larger one.

Since accepting public speaking opportunities can be a massive time sink, I find it valuable to consider what skills I want to work on so that I can focus on the opportunities that let me practice those skills. I’ve done a few big conference talks now and want to practice the more casual style for a while.

Promote yourself again and share something of value. This is your last charge to prime that serendipity engine. Do you have any photos from the event? Any great insights or lessons that you learned? Don’t be afraid to share them publicly again. Who knows, they might one day turn into a 4000+ word essay on public speaking.

Looking ahead

I want to wrap up by reflecting on that nervous child I used to be, the one who gave up an ice cream rather than go and ask for it. He was too scared to use his voice and be seen. I’ve done all this for him.

For a long time I believed that public speaking was simply impossible for me. I thought my body just wouldn’t let me do it. After a few occasions where my notes would shake visibly in front of a small group, I avoided giving talks for a long time. I was the guy who would keep his eyes down in team meetings, who would never volunteer to ‘report back to the group’.

I hated the fact that I was so constrained and I hated myself for allowing it to happen. That’s why I’m so proud to be where I am now. I looked at my fear and decided to start walking towards it. Turns out that the closer I got, the more it dissolved. If any of that sounds familiar then believe me when I say that you can do it, because If I can then you certainly can too.

I knew I had beaten this thing when I was asked to speak at a “fireside chat” at the Canadian High Commission here in London with less than a week’s notice. I said yes without any hesitation, because I knew it would be fine. Now I’m excited for the future, with one less fear holding me back.

Mind-wandering and the dark side of productivity

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 CET

My Zen practice asks me to give myself wholeheartedly to everything I do in each moment. When ironing, iron. When walking, walk. When eating, eat.

This is insanely difficult. When I have nothing to focus my attention, I can feel my mind start to wander. I get an urge to do something, like listening to a podcast. The opposite is also true though. When my attention is fully absorbed it’s like there’s no room for mind-wandering.

In fact, this is exactly how the mind works.

There are three brain networks involved in attention: the Default Mode Network, the Central Executive Network and the Salience Network.

Image adapted from [1]

The Central Executive Network is associated with narrow focus, self-control, problem solving, and rational decision making. When we’re reading or trying to solve a maths problem, we’re using the Central Executive Network.

The Default Mode Network is associated with diffuse attention, mind-wandering and spontaneous, often autobiographical thoughts. When we’re out for a walk and our thoughts start drifting into the past or future, that’s the Default Mode Network.

These two networks are ‘anticorrelated’ ¹. We can use one or the other, but not both at once, though the switch between them is fast. On completing a focused task, the Default Mode Network switches on in less than half a second ². This could explain why mind-wandering can start so quickly at work. As soon as our attention slips off task the Default Mode Network carries us away.

The Salience Network is there to filter information based on importance and type of content. It then influences whether it’s the Central Executive Network or the Default Mode Network in charge.

HOW AND WHY WE INTERRUPT MIND-WANDERING

When we start mind-wandering, either because we have nothing to focus on or because we have Poor Attentional Control, our thoughts and feelings go to either good or bad places. Technically, we engage in Positive-Constructive daydreaming – “playful, wishful and constructive imagery” – or Guilty-Dysphoric daydreaming – “obsessive, anguished fantasies”³.

I’m interested in what happens when our minds start wandering to the unpleasant, Guilty-Dysphoric places. If you’re anything like me a familiar feeling of discomfort drives you to do something to focus your attention away from difficult thoughts.

A good example is reaching for our phones in every little gap in the day. When we do this we’re essentially tricking our Salience Network, giving it information that seems important. This forces the focused Central Executive Network on and suppresses the mind-wandering Default Mode Network.

I’m sure you’ll agree from experience that this works, but I wonder if we should be using this superpower with a little more care.

THE PROBLEM WITH BLOCKING NEGATIVE MIND-WANDERING

Why, though? If our minds start reliving unpleasant, cringeworthy memories that make us feel bad, why not overwrite them with external content? There are at least two reasons that I can see.

First, because it’s only a temporary fix. Those thoughts and feelings will inevitably come back. In fact, I have a suspicion that the more we block negative thoughts, the more strongly they come back when we inevitably let our guard down. It becomes a vicious circle.

Second, mind wandering is valuable. The Default Mode Network is involved in so many positive human attributes it’s almost hard to believe.

It lets us tell stories about ourselves and conceptualise who we are in relation to others. It lets us re-experience memories and imagine the future. It even lets us simulate each other’s internal mental states so we can empathise and cooperate⁴.

It activates when we reflect on “personal preferences, beliefs, values, feelings, abilities, and physical attributes as well as engage in personal moral dilemmas”. It’s involved in how we then use these traits to guide and motivate our future behaviour. That means it’s crucial in giving us our sense of self and agency⁴.

It’s involved in learning, letting us make connections between concepts and see the bigger picture. Learning is more effective if we let our minds wander around periods of focus, giving our new knowledge a chance to latch onto our existing maps of the world⁵.

It’s also crucial for creativity. Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison used it to come up with new ideas. They would sit holding something heavy in their hands and start to nap. Their Default Mode Network engaged and they would drop the object before they fell asleep. This would wake them up in time to capture what their wandering mind showed them. Creativity on demand.⁵

THE DARK SIDE OF ALWAYS-ON PRODUCTIVITY

The ease with which we can block mind-wandering might also reveal a dark side of today’s culture of productivity, particularly if we are prone to Guilty-Dysphoric fantasies. We can block mind-wandering any way we like – scrolling through facebook works fine – but now we can do it productively.

As someone who has always done ‘all the things’, I know exactly what it feels like to want each moment to be productive. I recently started a new job in consulting, I am co-founding a ‘Carbon Removal Centre’, I am a life coach with private clients and I’m putting out a new article and newsletter every week. That’s not to mention spending time with my girlfriend and friends, exercising, reading and so on.

Given all that, my life can quickly become over-optimised. Reading a paragraph or two of an article on Instapaper while waiting for the self-checkout. Listening to a podcast while cooking. Watching YouTube lectures while eating.

But by doing this, am I missing out on the upsides of mind-wandering?

MIND-WANDERING IS VALUABLE

On the one hand, by building a system of productivity habits that we also use to block those Guilty-Dysphoric thoughts, we unknowingly blocking all the benefits of the Positive-Constructive daydreaming. And ironically, it’s these benefits that might actually make us more productive.

On the other hand, what if those Guilty-Dysphoric fantasies are valuable in themselves, even if they sometimes feel bad? By letting us re-experience past events, simulate how others feel, explore our values, and engage in learning, maybe the Default Mode Network goes to those places because it needs to.

A cringeworthy memory may help us resolve problems linked to our identity and relationships with others. While we may want to actively avoid feeling that cringe, it might be useful information: don’t behave that way again. The fact that our minds keep wandering back to those places suggests we haven’t learned our lesson yet.

And given how much we suppress our mind-wandering Default Mode Network, I also wonder if there is a kind of backlog of processing that we just need to work through. Maybe Guilty-Dysphoric thoughts can be such a problem because we don’t know how to deal with emotions that we deem ‘negative’. I’ve found that when I stop running from those emotions and experience them non-judgementally, they often tend to go away, or at least get a little less intense.

I think we should invite our Default Mode Network out to play more often, but learn to be more skilful with it. Rather than design our lives to push it away, and missing out on a long list of benefits, we can make friends with it and fully integrate it into our lives.

Let the others find you

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 CET

You’re seeing your favourite band live. The music is unbelievable. You look around to see your closest friends dancing and smiling. On a giant screen you see the words: “Life is made of small moments like this.”

Above and Beyond at the O2 Arena in London

And it feels right. Life is made of small moments like this, moments shared with the most incredible people. People who were once complete strangers. These are the ones we need to find.

The depth of connections we form with each other defines the quality of our lives. Creating and exploring that depth is the process of creating closeness as we move from stranger to friend.

Getting closer to others can be scary. Perhaps we tried to connect as children, but were rejected and over time learned to stop trying. We might develop a belief that other people hurt us or consider us unworthy. Or maybe, despite our efforts, we just struggle to find people we click with. We might develop a belief that other people aren’t worth connecting with. We’re not like them.

These beliefs hold us back, preventing us from getting to know others who might become close friends. Either way, we miss out on those small moments that make life worth living.

If we’re not careful we can find ourselves in a vicious circle of alienation, craving connection but not knowing how to find it. Instead of seeing future friends around us, we see strangers to avoid. The more we see others as causes of pain or as unworthy of our attention, the less we reach out.

Imagine if everyone felt and acted this way. If you behave like everyone else then everyone else will think you’re just like everyone else. We would all congregate at interpersonal local minima set by our culture, never daring to venture out in search of something higher.

This mindset twists our individuality from something special into a reason to hide. If we believe that sharing who we are leads to either rejection or boredom then we’ll never share enough to form deep connections. Even worse, if we spend less and less time celebrating and exploring our individuality, we disconnect ourselves from the qualities that really bring us to life, that make us who we are.

There is a way out of this trap. Whatever context we’re in, we can remember that we are there too. We, with our rich emotional lives, surprising and varied interests, grand hopes and quiet fears, are in this place just like all those strangers. We can continue to believe that we’re not like them, or we can consider that there might be others who feel just like us.

I’m not suggesting we should try to connect deeply with absolutely everyone. What I am suggesting is that in any situation there could be others who could become close friends.

Timothy Leary exhorted us to “find the others”, the ones with whom deep connection is possible. I fully agree, but I want to make one small, yet important tactical change: let the others find you.

How? By being vulnerable and by going first. See your unique and weird individuality as the means whereby connection actually happens.

To be vulnerable is to show others the deeper parts of ourselves. We have no control over what happens next – that’s why it can be so scary. We can only hope that we won’t get hurt, but we might, and the more we do it, the more likely we are to get hurt. But there’s no other way to turn that vicious circle into a virtuous one.

Think about the closest people in your life. The ones you could phone in an emergency at three in the morning. The ones you hug during that concert. You got there because one of you opened a door to deeper levels of connection, and because the other chose to step through it.

The worst that can happen is rejection. That’s fine. At least we’re still connecting with the parts of us that make us who we are. A rejection is just someone telling us that they don’t want to be part of our tribe. But when someone embraces and reciprocates our vulnerability? Life is made of small moments like that.

Someone needs to go first. It may as well be us. Let the others find you.

How to use fear as a tool for growth

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 CET

I’m scared.

I’m scared that I’m not good enough. I’m scared that you’ll judge me. And I’m scared that if I put myself out there I’ll feel shame, not pride. But my biggest fear is, and has always been, feeling too comfortable, hiding from risks and missing out on growth.

This website is bringing me face to face with my fears. I plan to write about the playfulness of the universe, the value and cultivation of awe and the intrinsic value of humanity. It’s appropriate for me to be scared, because I’m talking about real things that matter to me.

I want to attract people who can challenge and turbocharge my thinking. The vibrancy of these ideas matters to me more than any claim I may feel I have to them. Rather than hiding in my room and publishing only when I feel safe, I want everything I write to be pushing up against the limits of my abilities.

This article is about how I can find those limits, avoid the comfort trap, and make sure I never stop growing.

WE NEED THE RIGHT LEVEL OF CHALLENGE TO GROW

Consider weight lifting. Lifting weights that are too light won’t build muscle, but weights that are too heavy can cause injury. You have to stay in a place that is just difficult enough to trigger growth.

Milo of Croton, an ancient Greek wrestler, was said to have carried a young calf on his shoulders every day. As the calf grew bigger, Milo grew stronger, until one day he was carrying a bull.

I love this approach. It means that even though I increase the weight I lift over time, my workouts generally feel the same. It’s always difficult, but it’s always the same difficult. As long as I stay in a place that feels difficult, yet achievable, I know I’m getting stronger.

I believe this principle also applies to my fears. Consistently and regularly experiencing the right amount of fear will make me grow. Right now, the idea of sending my newsletter to 1,000 people is crippling – it just seems too large – but one day I want to be able to do it. I need a way to get from here to there: transformation happens during the journey, not on arrival at the destination.

Milo had the right idea, but weight training is a special case as it’s easily quantified and tracked. I know exactly how many times I lift something and I know exactly how much it weighs. All I have to do is look at the numbers from my last session and add a bit.

Fear is more nebulous. The feeling of fear isn’t part of an objective reality, should such a thing exist, and there are no numbers I can write down. I know that fear goes away as I get comfortable and that I need to maintain my feelings of fear to keep growing, so how can I systematically increase my fear to stay in that growth zone?

THE FEAR DIALS AND FEAR GAUGE

For me, the fear is influenced by three factors: the size of my audience, the type of people in my audience, and how personal my message is. I imagine these as dials.

These are personal to me, so your dials might be different. You might feel more comfortable talking about yourself than about facts, for example, but the principle is the same: moving the dials affects fear.

This isn’t rocket science and you almost certainly have a natural sense for it. Making it more explicit helps to understand some of the mechanics behind the scenes and how they can be used to our advantage.

Writing on a technical subject that I know well for a small, engaged audience is not scary for me. I’ve done it for years professionally, it’s familiar and I enjoy it. The dials are set low and my fear gauge registers a calm, unchallenging green. While I enjoy it, I suspect there isn’t much growth here.

This website and my newsletter are different. This is all new, so for now not many people are reading and the people who are reading are on my side. But I am slowly ramping up how much of myself I’m putting out there and being more vulnerable. My fear gauge is registering a healthy and growth-triggering amber.

The point is not to eliminate fear, but to harness it. Giving a great best man’s speech isn’t about being polished or smooth, it’s about being sincere and genuine. Letting the audience feel your fear connects you to them far more than being slick and aloof.

That said, you also don’t want to be so scared that you can’t give the speech at all. Right now the idea of writing a vulnerable article and sharing it on LinkedIn is too scary, because it’s a very large audience of people who see me only as an energy innovation professional. That means I can tell myself the (as yet untested) story that they won’t be receptive to this kind of content from me.

In fact, I can already feel my body recoiling at the thought of it, and If I experience too much of that strong aversion to writing and publishing, it might derail the project entirely. I’m not ready yet. The weight is too heavy to lift for now: I need to get stronger.

USING THE BODY AS A GUIDE

That recoiling feeling is important and gives me everything I need. The body is an incredible source of information, one that I have learned to trust over time.

It was my body that told me to pursue training in the Alexander Technique and coaching. It was my body that told me to sign up for the online courses that led to this website. And it has always been my body that has told me when to move on from jobs, people and places.

I have come to believe that we have an inner guidance system and that the best results come from following it. That’s not to say that I disregard rational and critical thought, but that I have learned to expand my awareness to include both my thinking brain and my feeling body.

While this may sound spiritual, it doesn’t have to be. Psychologists are increasingly exploring the role of the body in cognition. The thinking parts of our brains evolved very recently in the context of evolutionary time and to disregard the value of emotions and the internal ‘felt sense’ seems naïve.

Where I described the three dials above, there are actually countless factors that affect how much fear I feel. Where my thinking brain can only consider a small number of them, my feeling body can look at all of them at once. If I know what an ‘amber fear gauge’ feels like, and I know I want to be there, I can ask my body where to go next.

I can do this simply by looking at my list of ideas for articles. With each one I can l feel my body shift and respond. If I just listen I get all the answers I need. Here are the first ten colour coded against my internal fear gauge – the way each article idea feels when I think about publishing it here.

This colourful list immediately gives me three useful choices.

The amber ones are the articles that I’m ready to write now. They’re just the right amount of scary.

The red ones are mostly too scary for now. For these I can either wait until I’ve grown enough so that my fear decreases, or I can do them now by turning down some of the dials. I could write an article on ‘shame as a compass’ and send it privately to a few trusted friends. That’s less scary than publishing here and it keeps me moving forwards.

The green ones aren’t scary enough, but that doesn’t mean I should ignore them. Instead, I can use the dials to turn the fear up. I can write an article on starting a blog in 2019 and publish it on LinkedIn. That would push the fear back into the amber, and again, keep me moving forwards.

It’s the moving forward that matters. This blog, and all the background work that goes into it, is an exercise in extended cognition. It lets me massively enhance the quality of my thoughts and store them outside my head, where they can be shared and further upgraded – by you. And I can write more articles with new ideas that reference and build on old ones, liberating my mind from having to hold on to everything.

Tapping into the wisdom of my body also gives me access to my embodied cognition, where I can understand things without having to know how I understand them. This is a completely different, but just as essential way of gaining insight. Listening to how my body responds to what I share here, in my extended brain, will let me find and stay in that growth zone.

By combining the two I can get the best of both worlds. I can stay just scared enough to grow, sharing ideas that resonate with readers like you. And I just can’t wait to find out what’s possible from there.

How to be Superman

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 CET

First of all, I ask that you watch this one-minute video. None of this will make any sense if you don’t.

What was that like?

When most people see this for the first time, they go ‘wow’. Why? What makes this clip so powerful?

There’s something about Reeve’s way of being that makes him captivating – so captivating that you can’t help but pay attention. It’s not his deeper voice. It’s not his more upright posture. There’s something else going on.

Where Clark seems to use muscles to pull himself down, Superman floats up to his full height effortlessly.

Where Clark takes up less space – the way you might when you don’t want to be noticed – Superman is naturally self-confident and comfortable with being seen.

Where Clark narrows his awareness forwards and down, Superman is aware of the entire space around him.

Dropping the Clark Kent disguise and becoming Superman looks effortless, right? That’s because it is effortless: it’s literally the absence of effort. What remains is an elegant, confident and compelling poise. It’s almost a relief when he transforms, as if this is the way things are really meant to be. And that’s exactly it – this is the way things are meant to be.

It’s a lot like the moment when Keanu Reeves transforms from Mr Anderson into Neo his final fight scene with Agent Smith in The Matrix is a masterclass in effortlessness.

These two performances have something in common. Both Christopher Reeve and Keanu Reeves studied something called Alexander Technique. This is how Clark Kent becomes Superman and how Mr Anderson becomes The One.

Although many people who have heard of Alexander Technique think it’s just about improving posture and reducing back pain, it goes so much deeper than that. At its core, Alexander Technique is about learning to decondition yourself from habitual patterns, to unlearn ways of thinking and being that no longer serve you. To be without trying.

Alexander Technique lets you tap into something you’ve already experienced, but inconsistently. It’s the sublime moment when you throw something effortlessly – without thinking at all – and it lands precisely where you wanted. You didn’t think through everything you’re going to do. You didn’t consciously move yourself like your body is a puppet and you’re the puppeteer. Throwing just happened and it happened flawlessly.

It’s also the same experience as beginner’s luck, when you don’t have any expectations that you should know what you’re doing. You don’t believe you need to get anything right and it just works.

But then you try to do it again, you start to care about getting it right, and the part of you that thinks starts interfering. The harder you try to replicate that beginner’s luck, the worse it gets, because whatever you try is not what you actually did the first time when it just worked.

“Trying is only emphasising the thing we know already,” said Frederick Matthias Alexander, the originator of the Technique. You have no idea how you landed that shot so well, so all your trying is just emphasising the wrong thing.

The same problem shows up in other places in life too. Notice how when you try to think, you tense your eyes and furrow your brow – but none of that helps with thinking. When you try to listen, you tense around your ears, cock your head and move a bit closer. None of that helps with listening. Like your understanding of these words right in this moment, these things happen by themselves.

Alexander Technique contradicts our society’s cult of trying. Our default narrative is, “Try really really hard and you’ll get good results. No pain, no gain. People who don’t try are lazy.”

But what I’m saying is that you can try less hard while achieving even better results. I’m not talking about doing nothing at all. I’m talking about not wasting energy on things that not only don’t contribute to the full living of your life, but can actively harm it.

Because trying comes so naturally to us, we don’t realise we’re doing it, and we don’t know how to stop. It’s hard to stop trying because anything you try is still trying!

Alexander captured the way out of this trap: “When you stop doing the wrong thing, the right thing does itself.” Don’t try to think. Instead, learn to stop doing the things that get in the way of thinking and just let thinking happen by itself.

Alexander Technique, then, is about learning how to stop doing the wrong things and to access and trust the part of you that knows what the right thing is. Sounds amazing, right? “Michael, you simply must tell me how I can learn this amazing skill!”, I hear you cry.

In the past, if you talked to me about this and wanted to learn more, I would have suggested going to see a teacher (like me) in person. Alexander Technique is traditionally taught in person and through touch. But that’s not always accessible and – as you may have noticed – there’s a pandemic right now.

Since I love being contrarian, I believe it’s possible to teach this online. Alexander himself didn’t have a teacher. He figured it out himself using nothing but mirrors, patience and the scientific method.

I’ve been playing with different ways of presenting the key ideas online, connecting them to other relevant disciplines and listening carefully to what resonates with people.

I want to figure this out because I believe that widespread knowledge and application of the Alexander Technique could unlock our individual and collective potential.

Viktor Frankl said it well (actually he didn’t):

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

Alexander Technique gives us the tools to notice, expand, and ultimately live in that space between stimulus and response. It unlocks our growth and our freedom.

I want everyone to have access to that.

Want to follow along as I figure out how to do this? Read more over on Expanding Awareness.

How should we think about carbon removal?

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 CET

It’s 2119 and the tide has turned for global warming. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is returning to safe thresholds on its downward trend towards pre-industrial levels.

Nations came together to almost fully decarbonise the now buoyant world economy, supported regions that bore the brunt of global warming and invested in programmes to restore the Earth’s biosphere. The global effort far exceeded the ambition, scale and optimism of the Apollo lunar missions.

Hundreds of billions of trees were planted. Billions of square miles of marginal land were rewilded. Global infrastructure scrubbed carbon dioxide from the air, safely storing it or using it as a feedstock for chemical processes, advanced fuels and building materials.

From this vantage point, the people of 2119 look around, smile, and ask: “what’s next?”

Now let’s rewind 100 years to today. How do we make this happen?

Carbon removal is removing carbon from the atmosphere to reverse global warming.

Since the industrial revolution, we have lifted billions out of poverty and created time for pursuits beyond immediate survival, like thinking, exploring and creating. We wrapped our planet in communication, transportation and information technologies, compressing time and space from the unimaginable to the mundane. We left our planet and looked down with feelings of awe and humility long forgotten.

In the process, we have been increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, mainly though pollution and land use change. This is amplifying the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect, trapping more of the sun’s energy and driving unnatural global warming.

The damage this is causing is real, serious and needs urgent action. Left unchecked, global warming will create a world very much unlike the one we currently enjoy, which allowed our civilisation to rise and flourish. It threatens the progress we have made and risks future generations being ever worse off.

I have been following carbon removal for the last ten years (and I am now a co-founder and Non Executive Director of the Carbon Removal Centre to advance constructive discourse around it). I believe it is an idea whose time has come. The prospect of removing carbon from the atmosphere is fascinating, because it places two perspectives on how to respond to global warming into stark contrast.

On one side we have those who seem to have adopted a view that humans are a blight on the Earth, that we are morally obliged to undo progress and modernity themselves. Their discussions around solving global warming often contain ideological motivation like bringing down capitalism, deindustrialisation and an implicit yearning for a simpler time. And with moral obligation comes moral judgement: you are simply a bad person if you disagree.

On the other side are the techno-optimists, who seem to believe that if we can just innovate quickly enough then we can stay one step ahead of global warming. Progress and modernity are placed on pedestals higher than all others, including the health of the biosphere that gives us life. Implicit in this is the idea that there is no real need to change how we live, because technology will save the day. Where the de-industrialisation crowd says “you simply must stop flying”, the techno-optimistists say “No worries! There’ll be hydrogen planes and hyperloops.”

I do not advocate returning to some romantic idea of what pre-industrial life was like. Global warming is not a sign of some moral failing. We have not misbehaved in trying to better ourselves. I would rather be alive now than at any point in history and it is my hope that each generation hence will look back and say the same.

That said, neither do I believe that technology alone can be a climate panacea. Global warming is an undeniable feedback mechanism telling us in no uncertain terms to adjust our course dramatically and quickly. And we should both keep moving forwards and change course. How we do that and what role carbon removal plays are the real questions.

Carbon removal sits in an emerging third pillar of climate action: restoration. So far we have focussed on mitigation, like reducing emissions through renewable energy and saying we fly less, and adaptation, like building flood defences or inventing new insurance products.

Restoration, though, is about how we can undo the damage to and ultimately enhance our environment**.** It is the next step in accepting the power we have and taking responsibility for it.

There are many ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere and a full treatment deserves its own article. But to give you a flavour, we can do it by changing existing carbon flows between air, earth, sea and life. We can plant more trees, which absorb carbon as they grow. When we burn plants for fuel, we can capture and store the carbon dioxide they release. We can even build “artificial trees”, machines that capture carbon directly from the air. The potential for these is limited only by the energy we need to run them.

Carbon removal is a dream to the techno-optimists. Nothing needs to change, and prescient innovators and investors will find a way to make money out of it. Why not use this new technology to compensate for all those flights?

But of course, this is a nightmare to the de-industrialists. When you drive an insured rental car, are you as careful as you are with your own? And if you can convince people, rightly or wrongly, that you can suck carbon out of the air, are you motivated to reduce your own emissions?

There is a middle way between these two ideological extremes and how we move forwards is crucial. We are at a critical moment in history, where carbon removal is just below the radar for most people, but not for much longer. What was once on the fringe of crazy is becoming a serious option.

We can choose to stay in the relative comfort and simplicity of our ideological extremes, pointing our fingers and blame at each other while our life support systems fail around us. Or we can choose to walk that middle way together, moving hopefully towards a bright and welcoming future, asking ourselves what’s next. I made my choice.

Exploring who we are through awe

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 00:00:00 CET

One of my favourite places in London is the Natural History Museum. I love the exhibitions and the elevation of the natural world, but that’s not why I keep going back. I go for the awe I feel as I step inside. Take a look…

Image credit: Gene Krasko

In a quiet corner of this vast atrium is a small, unremarkable notice, which says:

Taking inspiration from the collections it was to house, the building was designed to be richly decorated with a diversity of extinct and extant species. It was to be a cathedral to nature.

A cathedral to nature. It sends a shiver down my spine. This cathedral wasn’t built for the glory of any god, but to inspire awe in the glory of nature.

Awe is one of my favourite emotions. For me it’s stepping into the atrium of the Natural History Museum, looking down at the city of La Paz in Bolivia, or watching Apollo 11 on a big screen. For you it will be something else, but you know what I’m talking about.

As I step into this atrium, for a single expansive moment my brain drops its perceptual filters, I step through a veil and all I can do is stare. Time slows down and my thoughts vanish. I’m no longer just an observer, I’m an integral part of the fabric of existence in front of me. It’s a nourishing, replenishing experience.

I describe a similar experience of walking through a park in London as part of my Zen practice.

Everything inverted as my mind expanded outside my head and the world came rushing in. The idea of any difference between inside and outside made no sense and it was plainly obvious that any notion that ‘I’ exist separately of ‘all that’ was a ludicrous illusion.

That these two experiences can be described in such similar language points to something interesting. Both come from a special kind of present-focused attention, both involve a feeling of oneness with the world and both occur spontaneously. I’m sure we all know that feeling when something catches us by surprise and – BANG! We “turn off the conditioning and experience afresh the hardly bearable ecstasy of direct energy exploding on our nerve endings” ¹.

How we use our attention is the common factor. Charles Darwin said “Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement” ². Those moments of awe, where we feel fully absorbed in the moment, must contain within them something so worthwhile as to capture our attention fully and temporarily switch off our thinking minds.

This points to something tangible that we can use in our day to day lives: the conditions under which we experience awe contain valuable information. We can use awe to explore our inner worlds and understand who we are and what matters to us.

One of the techniques I learned as part of my coaching training is to identify a client’s guiding values by exploring their peak experiences, those moments of complete absorption that make the client come to life. Most people have only a vague sense of their values, so one role of the coach is to help identify them and bring them into conscious awareness.

As a client describes a peak experience, I might interject with “it sounds like you really value x?”, to which the client might respond with “yes, you’re right!”. Their tone is almost always a kind of familiar surprise. I don’t tell them anything they didn’t already know at some level, but aim to give them greater awareness of and access to their own inner wisdom.

Here’s what I’ve learned from exploring my own sense of awe. I feel it most frequently when my attention is captured by nature or by some impressive expression of human civilisation. This tells me that these things are connected to each other and I to them. Carl Sagan captured this connection when he said “the cosmos is also within us, we’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” ³ This has become one of my personal axioms.

We are not separate from the universe, we are it. As we learn, understand and experience more of the universe, the universe learns, understands and experiences more of itself. This perspective is partly why I find human experience so interesting and why feeling awe in the Natural History Museum is so powerful. As a cathedral to nature it’s a cathedral to the universe.

In a brief moment of awe – as the walls between the isolated ‘me in my head’ and the ‘universe out there’ come crashing down – it’s all just one thing. I am that. And in that moment the universe is awestruck by its own majesty, seen through my eyes.

That perspective moves me. It guides my belief that advancing human progress across vast timescales is worthwhile. It means we should seek to grow through existential threats like climate change. It means we should one day explore beyond our solar system. And it means we should be curious about the nature of our own subjective awareness. Our continued growth is after all how the universe will get to know itself even better.

So I invite you to reflect on those moments when you feel awe. What connects them? What do they say about what matters to you? And what might happen if you share them with others?

And not referenced directly, but Jason Silva’s video ‘Awe’ has been a huge inspiration for this article and for my appreciation of awe more generally.

Timothy Leary, though he was talking about psychedelics ↩︎
Charles Darwin (1872). “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals”, p.278 ↩︎
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage – The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean [Episode 1] ↩︎

Awakening to — and escaping from — Total Work through non-doing

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 00:00:00 CET

This was originally published on my newsletter.

Have you ever had a realisation that shook the foundations of what you thought was real?

I don’t mean the “oh yeah, that – good reminder, but I already sort of knew” kind of realisation, but the “well, damn, I think the floor just fell out from underneath me” kind.

I had one of those recently as I’ve explored the idea of Total Work. Come with me on a journey, because if you’re the kind of person who reads a newsletter like this (and we both know you are), then you’ll want to see where this goes.

Total Work, a term coined by philosopher Joseph Pieper, is state of being where work is the central and defining focus of life. In his excellent TEDx talk on the subject, Andrew Taggart highlights the five conditions of Total Work:

When work is the centre around which all of human life turns
When everything else in human life is not only put in the service of, but is made to be subservient to, work
When leisure, play and festivity slowly – perhaps imperceptibly – are turned into work
When we come to believe that we were born to work
When all other ways of living – those that existed well before work took over the world – fall away from cultural memory

Or, as Maria Popova puts it: "

Under the tyranny of total work, the human being is reduced to a functionary and her work becomes the be-all-end-all of existence.

There’s a belief at the heart of Total Work that asserts that work is the highest good. Doing work is worthy. Not doing work is shameful, unless done in the service of work. Total Work says it’s absolutely fine to nap, meditate, exercise, eat well, and sleep, because those things will make you more productive for work.

This idea made me uncomfortable as it sank in. Since my teens I’ve been involved in the whole ‘personal development’ thing, with a view to improving myself. Improving myself for what? To be more productive, to achieve, to create, to do. To make the most of my life. I’ve done all the self-optimisation things you can think of: online courses, Wim Hof breathing, GTD, even the ketogenic diet, which I started (and continue) for the cognitive benefits.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this. These are all fantastic tools for improving my subjective experience of the world and my life. They just get tricky and fall within the domain of Total Work when they are done in the service of work, which for me they at least partly were and are.

Still, I thought I had a get out of jail free card. “I can’t be a Total Worker,” I told myself to ease the discomfort. “I don’t work 80 weeks for one employer like those people who are definitely Total Workers do!”

But as I sat with the third criterion of Total Work above – when leisure, play and festivity are turned into work – I realised the depths of my own self-deception.

It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting at my laptop typing this article. Given that we’re in lockdown and I’ve been working from home for weeks, the only indication that today is any different from other days is that I’m using a different laptop.

Twas ever thus. My ’leisure’ has long consisted of either planned self-improvement (exercise, meditation and reading) or sitting at a laptop building something (like websites and newsletters).

If I dig a little deeper I do indeed find a kind of moral imperative that drives my thoughts, emotions and actions. At first glance it seems to be a search for meaning, as though all this activity is some kind of spiritual practice. After all, with the decline of religiosity, what else is left but work?

But as I dig deeper I see that it’s actually quite the reverse. Total Work is an elaborate and sophisticated ruse that allows me to avoid the very thing that spiritual practice is really about: just being with what is.

Pieper himself highlighted this in his thoughts on what constitutes leisure (via Maria Popova):

Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity … there is leisure as“non-activity” — an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet.

In leisure, there is … something of the serenity of “not-being-able-to-grasp,” of the recognition of the mysterious character of the world, and the confidence of blind faith, which can let things go as they will.

True leisure is not the opportunity to do things that aren’t work, but the freedom – and the ability – not to do at all. But how difficult this is! In the words of Blaise Pascal:

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

You know what he means: it’s the discomfort that kicks in within seconds of removing task-focused attention, when our mind-wandering Default Mode Network kicks in and we drift to bigger topics: getting the things we want, avoiding the things we don’t want, the shortness of life.

Total Work takes advantage of this existential discomfort by distracting us with an endless cascade of activity. It then cunningly adds that moral imperative – “it’s right to be distracted” to prevent us from looking too closely at the whole game.

Is it fair to say that I use activity to avoid this discomfort? Sometimes, yes. Am I in fact a Total Worker? Not completely, but I’m much closer to it than I’d like. I know that feeling of discomfort very well from my Zen practice, which makes it all the more ironic that I’m still caught up in Total Work.

So what’s the way out? How do I reclaim my ability to experience true leisure?

When all this dawned on me, I decided to opt out of Total Work for an hour and just read on the sofa. But at that moment I also saw the brilliant deviousness of Total Work: there is nothing anyone can do to get out without getting trapped by the first criterion: when work is the centre around which all of human life turns.

To decide to take an hour off from work is to assert that life is defined by work. This tweet from James Mulholland captures perfectly how Total Work binds us:

What if all your relaxation techniques are actually disguised methods of continuing with the same optimisation mindset you have in your work life?
— James Mulholland (@mulholo) April 2, 2020

I have good news though, which is that escape is possible, and it comes from Daoism.

In The Watercourse Way, Alan Watts tells us that the Dao – the natural, effortless way of things – is that with which you cannot try to accord.

“Chao-Chou asked, “What is the Dao?” The master replied, “Your ordinary consciousness is the Dao.” “How can one return into accord with it?” “By intending to accord you immediately deviate.

In this way, Total Work is like the Dao, only the other way around: by intending to deviate you immediately accord.

So how do we actually accord with the Dao? How can we actually deviate from Total Work? By not trying to. Just notice that it’s there and don’t try to change anything.

As I’ve learned from Alexander Technique – which I increasingly believe is actually a kind of applied Daoism – the ability to stop trying is a transformative, learnable and highly necessary skill if we are to escape traps like Total Work. It’s the same sentiment echoed by the The Inner Game of Work, which says so clearly that “non-judgemental awareness is curative”.

If you suspect that you too are caught up in Total Work then don’t worry, it’s enough just to notice it. Decide that you don’t want to be and then be aware that you are. Total Work, like quicksand, will only pull you in deeper if you struggle.

Integrating non-doing with global systemic change

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:00:00 CET

I’m torn. There seem to be two elements of me that are constantly fighting with each other.

The first is my belief that humanity is at a crossroads with respect to global systemic change, particularly around global warming and the associated need to restructure our civilisation. If we don’t adjust our course dramatically and quickly then we will find ourselves in a world very much unlike the one that has allowed human civilisations to rise and flourish.

The energy I channel here is Carl Sagan’s, particularly his child-like wonder as he looked up at the stars and saw humanity’s future exploring them.

“The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos Episode 7

The second is my belief that the best outcomes flow from a state of ‘non-doing’, which is something I’ve picked up from Alexander Technique and my Zen practice.

Forcefully trying to achieve something with an excess of effort, particularly in the context of our minds and bodies, just interferes with the natural functioning of our system. Trying to catch a ball is harder and less effective than just letting it happen (you’ll just have to take my word for it if that doesn’t make sense).

The energy I channel here is more like the Buddha’s: no clinging, no grasping, no attachment. The heart of being is emptiness – a full, vibrant and always transforming emptiness – and expecting it to be otherwise only creates suffering:

“Embrace nothing:
If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.
If you meet your father, kill your father.
Only live your life as it is,
Not bound to anything.”
― Gautama Siddharta (Buddha)

These perspectives are both very alive in me, yet it feels like they also set up a contradiction. Reversing climate change, exploring the stars and evolving down a path of enlightened high technology feels like ‘doing’. Meanwhile, letting go of any craving for things to be any particular way feels like ‘non-doing’.

Which of these feelings is correct? Well, every fibre of my being is telling me that non-doing is correct. It is nature – that thing the Daoists call Ziran (自然) – “so of itself”.

On the other hand, it’s clear that I – and I think most of us – see ideas like reversing climate change and exploring the stars as a kind of doing, as things that require trying and effort. There’s an implicit belief at play here that human nature is, at its core, bad and must be fought against for fear of regressing to some debauched state that is what we really are. “If we stop trying then entropy will knock us back to where we belong.”

It boils down to the paradox at the heart of all endeavours in self-improvement, which is captured perfectly by Alan Watts:

“Human beings are largely engaged in wasting enormous amounts of psychic energy in attempting to do things that are quite impossible. You know—as the proverb says—you can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. But recently, I’ve heard a lot of references in just general reading and listening where people say, “We’ve got to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps!” And you can’t! And you can struggle, and tug, and pull until you’re blue in the face, and nothing happens except that you’ve exhausted yourself.”
[…]
“But the thing is that you can’t do it for one very simple reason—which, I think, most of you are by now familiar with—is that the part of you which is supposed to improve you is exactly the same as that part of you which needs to be improved.” – Alan Watts, Veil of Thoughts – Pt. 2

This is where Alan would go off and talk about the self being an illusion, that the part of us that wants to improve (the self) can’t do anything to improve because it doesn’t exist. I won’t go there (much). Instead, I’ll ask a question that this line of thought implies: how, then, do we make things better?

Alan talks about this paradox at the societal scale in his excellent Conversation With Myself (well worth watching in full), where he describes a meeting of famous people exploring what to do about environmental degradation. The conclusion they reached was that the best approach would be to leave the world alone and return the direction of nature to nature, since it knows a lot more about how it works than we do.

To leave the world alone suggests, to me, a kind of civilisational non-doing. As a teacher of the Alexander Technique, which explores the cessation of doing at its core, I know the value of non-doing and can now begin to recognise my mistake in thinking of exploring the stars as a kind of ‘doing’.

The felt sense of non-doing – what the Daoists call wu-wei – is not the same as doing nothing. Doing and doing nothing are two sides of the same coin, while non-doing – the absence of doing or doing nothing – is something else entirely.

When you peel back all the layers of effort that you do habitually, what you find is just you, authentically and naturally you. It’s your own, personal Ziran (nature that is “so of itself”). This is what remains when the illusion of the self goes away. It’s not some void of nothingness – quite the opposite. It’s what it’s like to be fully alive, switched on and one with your environment. It’s the world turned up to 11.

I get excited here, because I know that our non-doing selves are so much more powerful, creative and competent than our habitual, doing selves. Rather than using the thinking part of my brain to move my body to catch a ball, I can just watch as my body does it on its own, much better than ‘I’ could have done. Rather than trying to fall asleep, which only keeps me awake, I can decide to stop doing the things that are keeping me awake and just watch as I fall asleep.

This is what it means to return the direction of nature to nature, but it requires some acts of faith that, in my experience working on myself and with others, can be difficult.

First, it’s difficult because it requires letting go of control and trusting that something else knows what it’s doing. When I catch that ball effortlessly or fall asleep, I don’t know how I did that. There’s something else doing it and it isn’t ‘me’.

Second, it’s difficult because it requires believing that letting go of control and trusting this other system is a good thing. In fact, this point is somewhat moot for the same reason that it’s impossible to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Transformation is the nature of all things and it happens by allowing it, not by forcing or fighting it, whether you believe it or not. The challenge for us here is about accepting that. Both fighting and forcing interfere with the process and cause us suffering.

Let’s bring this back to such grand things as reversing climate change and one day exploring the stars. The process by which we’ll get to wherever we’re going can be reached without forcing it, if you believe that we are part of nature and that nature is always transforming and evolving. In fact, to try to force it in any particular direction just interferes with the transformation that is always going on.

I believe that reversing climate change and exploring the stars are part of our transformational journey – a natural part of where we’re going as a species. We don’t need to force it, we just need to not interfere with it. Thus, what I am talking about is neither trying to create a new space age (‘doing’), nor de-industrialising completely (‘doing nothing’). I wrote about these opposing views in my article on carbon removal and in fact now believe them to be two sides of the same doing coin.

One of the principles of non-doing is to be able to stop doing. We know there are plenty of things we shouldn’t be doing that we could stop if we so wanted. We’re on the path to this with decarbonisation, but at the moment I fear that we are trying half-heartedly to assert a new system while still strongly asserting the old one, like investing in renewables while subsidising fossil fuels. This is self-interference.

We have now reached the edge of my awareness, though. I’m at a stage where I know there is something important here, but I don’t yet know what it is. It will unfold, I just need to not force it.**

Work With Me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 CET

Alexander Technique

I am a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique. I have built a self-paced online course that introduces many of the fundamentals of Alexander Technique using an awareness-based teaching model. More than 1700 people have taken it and many of them have had strong results.

‍You can check it out here.‍

Advice & guidance

If you want my advice and guidance on something I can help you with, you can book me for one-off calls by the hour. These calls are intended more for problem-solving type discussions than for ongoing coaching.

Choose a price that fits your circumstances:

Coaching

I am a coach drawing on the Aletheia model of Integral Unfoldment. I’m currently taking a break from coaching to have and recover from surgery.

Reading

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Currently reading

Creative Thinking – J. G. Bennett (reread)
Transformation - J. G. Bennett
Freedom to Change – Frank Pierce Jones (reread)

December

Completed:

A System for Writing — Bob Doto (reread)
Case Study – Anatomy of a $10m online education business — Olly Richards
Your Music and People — Derek Sivers

September 2025

Completed:

Good Omens — Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

June 2025

Completed

Moral Ambition — Rutger Bregman

Abandoned:

The Extinction of Experience — Christine Rosen

May 2025

Completed

Fluent Forever — Gabriel Wyner

March 2025

Had a baby, reading became difficult

Completed:

The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula Le Guin
Ina May’s Guide To Childbirth – Ina May Gaskin
Cry When The Baby Cries – Becky Barnicoat

Abandoned:

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – Amy Chua
Second Act – Henry Oliver

February 2025

Completed:

The Tree of Yoga — B. K. S. Iyengar
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula Le Guin
Cherish the First 6 Weeks – Helen Moon
Wind, Sand and Stars – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Abandoned:

The Soul of Money — Lynne Twist

January 2025

Completed:

The Dispossessed — Ursula Le Guin
Orbital – Samantha Harvey

December 2024

Completed:

The Notebook — Roland Allen

Projects

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These aren’t all of my projects, but a subset of the longer term ones that I want to share that I’m working on, as well as curating notes and resources that I think may have wider value.

Alexander Technique book

I’ve decided to write a book for two reasons:

As a forcing function to help me cohere my thoughts in a more stuctured, narrative way, and to help my find the gaps in my own understanding.
As something I can point people towards when they ask “what is the Alexander Technique?”, beacuse I know my existing public writing is spread all over the place, disjointed and not adequately comprehensive.

more to come

Now

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 CET

2026-03-11 Wednesday

I just had my second knee surgery (left knee this time) and recovering at home. Fortunately it seems that the recovery is going to be easier this time, which is a huge relief, because I was exhausted for months last time.

My son is about to turn a year old, and I can’t quite believe that it’s been so long already. He remains delightful.

Before the surgery, I was able to record nearly 30 lessons for a complete rebuild of my online course. All I have to do now is to write all the accompanying lesson text, and then I can release it to all the existing students. This feels wonderful.

2025-09-30

London

My son is a little over six months old and things are going splendidly. He’s healthy and seems happy, and I am grateful. We just moved him into his room and I already feel like he’s growing up astonishingly fast.

I’m having surgery on my right knee on Friday 3 October, which is the first of three major surgeries I’ll be having in the next nine months or so, but hopefully when they’re done, my body will work a lot better and I can focus on long term health and strength.

I’m working on an upgrade to my Alexander Technique online course which, although it keeps getting delayed by life circumstances like baby and health, I am excited to build and share.

2025-03-07

London

Early days of fatherhood

At the time of writing (7th March), my son isn’t here yet, but he will be soon, I’m winding down and preparing for whatever comes.

Learning to be a better coach

I’m about to start level 3 of Aletheia’s Advanced Coaching Program. I’m reading a lot of materials relating to this, and thinking about how I will be able to launch a more sincere coaching practice when I have appropriate spaciousness for it.

Writing

Writing seems to come in seasons for me, and I’m feeling the transition to a more fertile one coming. I’m gently working on an essay collection, because I want to organise my ideas into a coherent narrative and fill in the connective tissue that until now has been merely implied.

Healing my right hip

I have an impinged right hip, which causes pain and gets in the way of a lot of daily activities (like sitting down). I’m doing a lot of targeted corrective exercise and mobility work to try to resolve this.

My Principles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 CET

1. Live in integrity

What it is:

Doing what I say I will do, even when I feel resistance
Accepting and saying things that are true for me, even if it might cause conflict and pain
Leaning into conflict when necessary, standing up for myself

What it isn’t:

Imposing my way on others or ‘do-gooding
Believing that my way is the only way or the correct way
Creating conflict carelessly when there are more skilful routes available

2. Do hard things and enjoy the difficulty

What it is

Enjoying the challenge and difficulty of working hard and taking on projects above my skill level in service of contribution and growth
Throwing myself fully into my life and taking all the opportunities it gives to me
Cultivating delight in the process, the journey and placing less emphasis on the destination itself

What it isn’t:

Refusing to quit the wrong path when I realise I’ve gone the wrong way, made a mistake or the thing might cause harm
Doing things just because they are hard, pursuing a path that isn’t actually important to me
Damaging myself (again) by not listening to my inner guidance

3. Aliveness is my north star

What it is:

Embracing intensity, recognising that even ‘unpleasant’ emotions are an expression of aliveness. Read more.
Trusting the wisdom of my body to guide me in the right direction
Taking risks, allowing myself to own my wants and pursue big dream; being willing to burn things down when they aren’t serving me

What it isn’t:

Settling for the saccharin taste of fake aliveness from substances, addictions and short-term pleasure at the cost of the long term
Causing others pain carelessly by becoming too self-focused
Sacrificing other principles for the sake of aliveness - the ‘how’ is more important than the ‘what’

4. Connection is life

What it is:

Prioritising deep connection with people who matter to me and who bring aliveness to my life
Never abandoning myself
Saying the scary thing to invite deeper connection

What it isn’t:

Seeking the rush of new connections to the exclusion of existing ones that matter deeply to me
Losing discernment about who I choose to connect with or how
Getting lost in the high of connection to the exclusion of my other goals and principles

5. Healthy, vital bodymind: energy is the currency of life

What it is:

Making healthy choices as an expression of self-love
Acting in service of my future self, my family and friends
Staying fully conscious so that I ‘use myself’ well

What it isn’t:

Being so overly strict and restrictive that I miss out on connection and aliveness
Pushing myself so hard that I injure myself or create other counterproductive outcomes
Judging myself when I inevitably fail to make perfectly healthy choices

Links

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The full list of places Where you can find me across the internet.

Twitter

Bluesky

Elsewhere

Colophon

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Hosted on Github.
Published with Netlify (free tier).
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Coaching

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 CET