Secrecy

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my […]

You’re still a rat

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat. Lily Tomlin

Mess with the ratios at your peril

Nicholas Bate

You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling

Be Careful What You Write

Fuck That Shit Drawing

The busy trap

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day…. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact […]

Flying under the radar

I love simplicity. I love it when something is so understated it fly’s below the radar. Nobody is drawn to it. It doesn’t get talked about much. It is just there. But it is, you know, right. And it endures. It doesn’t seek attention. It doesn’t shout. But there isn’t anything you want to change. […]

A&E

Everyone should walk through an Emergency Room at least once in their lives, because it makes you realise what your priorities are; it’s not the rush, rush, rush and the money, money, money, its the people you love and the fact that one minute they might be there, and one minute they might be gone.

Trees in winter

I realise there’s something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they’re experts at letting things go. Jeffrey McDaniel

Not all men dream equally

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible. This i did. T. […]

Moths and Success

Imagine if every business were a lightbulb and that for each lightbulb the primary goal was to attract the most moths possible. Now what if you learned that 49% of the reason moths were attracted to the bulb was for the quality of its light (brightness being the task of the bulb) and that 51% […]

The paradox of our time

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but […]

Perspective

If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend they […]

Suspicious Minds

As Elvis once said, ‘caught in a trap’…

Read slowly

The digital world offers us many advantages, but if we yield to that world too completely we may lose the privacy we need to develop a self. Activities that require time and careful attention, like serious reading, are at risk; we read less and skim more as the Internet occupies more of our lives. And […]

Bullshit Man

QR Codes

We’re bombarded by more information than ever before. With the rise of all this information comes a rise of the amount of bullshit we’re exposed to. Enter QR codes. Pointless.

Who defines you?

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be? Danielle LaPorte

The Labrynth

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

Being tough on critics

I say they’re just fucking wankers. I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to do anything in their lives. It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit, rather than get off their arses […]

David Bailey on Fame

I saw David Bailey being interviewed at his show at The National Portrait Gallery. The interviewer gestured around the portrait section. He said “You really have shot a remarkable number of celebrities.” Bailey said “Nah, I don’t shoot celebrities.” The interviewer said “But these are all famous people: Michael Caine, Andy Warhol, […]

Bus to Abilene

I so often witness a failure to distinguish between good presentation skills and true leadership ability. I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they’re good talkers, but they don’t have good ideas. It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy […]

Don’t worry, he’s a dick.

Political correctness is the oppression of our intellectual movement so no one says anything anymore just in case anyone else get’s offended. What happens if you say that and someone gets offended? Well they can be offended, can’t they? What’s wrong with being offended? When did stick and stones may break my bones stop being […]

Life goals?

Work until you no longer have to introduce yourself.

Wisdom looks like…

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do. Andrew Carnegie

Drainpipes

You know the ones. People who invite you around for dinner and you seriously contemplate that prospect for a long time before saying ‘Yes’. Likelihood is you’ll leave feeling worse than when you arrived. They zap your energy, take the fun out of life and make you become like them. Drainpipes. Toxic people. Complainers. Whatever […]

Each to their own

I do my thing and you do yours. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, then it is beautiful. If not, it can’t […]

They’re just ideas

I just don’t trust any of it. Every time I read something about how there’s been another ridiculous climb of the Dow Jones, there’s a part of me that goes, “This can’t be good.” None of this is real money. You know what I mean? It’s not like there’s actually more of anything. It’s just […]

The importance of walking

Above all do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday I walk myself into a state of well being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. Thus if one keeps on walking everything […]

Lessons from a sidewalk sign

Real Knowledge