500 views.

That’s how many views I’d expect to see in an average week on my 127 (ish) articles. Yep, 500. A modest number. A respectable, slow-burning, but a none-the-less encouraging number. Yet, in the last 7 days, I’ve had 134,000 views. No, I’ve not accidentally added an extra zero to that number. It’s a 22,000% increase.

So I thought, as I more frequently do these days, ‘this would make a good story’…

‘Viral’ is a word we are all far too familiar with. Luckily for me, this was the good sense of viral, this was the sense of virality…

It was a normal Wednesday afternoon when the postman knocked on the door. These days you don’t actually greet anyone at the door so once I’d made it to the door the postman was already on his way to his next house. Pandemic or no pandemic, I get it, the guy has got a lot of houses to go to.

So I picked up the post as I usually would and sifted through the rubbish. Let’s be honest, most of us don’t pay attention to letters these days. …

It’s so funny. An article I wrote in 30 minutes ended up getting 289,000 views. It makes me laugh thinking about the absurd nature of this thing. It’s funny in an ‘if-I-don’t-laugh-I’ll-cry’ kind of way.

Everyone tells you to plan your content. Plan your posts. Plan, plan, plan. The key to good writing is a plan. Well, it seems that every time I went outside my plan things got interesting.

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” — Warren Buffett

But also I’d argue that someone else planted a tree at some…

At 8 years old I was playing out with my friends. Making money was even on the radar. I was too busy building dens, playing football and doing kid things. Now it feels like I’ve missed the boat. This 8-year-old has just become the youngest pro-Fortnite player in the world and I fear it’s about to add more fuel to the unsuccessful fire of your twenties.

Your 20s are hard. The shackles of structure and routine are out the window and you face a world of choices, a world of freedom. The air smells good and you feel a sense…

We’re obsessed with success.

We idolise success, we like Instagram posts, eyeball YouTube videos and pine for a lifelike our favourite success story. We say things like ‘thanks so much for replying to me when someone with more than us does us the courtesy of writing back to us.

We treat a like back, a follow back or any acknowledgement whatsoever as a sign that we are lucky to be spoken to. When did humanity get so fractious? Why does a like from someone successful mean x100 more than a like from someone not so successful? …

Why does it always take you forever to get here? It’s that place where you finally sit your butt down in the chair and get to work. To the point where you’ve ignored all the emails, LinkedIn notifications and YouTube videos. The point where you sit down and actually start working on that thing you said you would.

And despite the internal conversations, it happens most days.

You get distracted by making a coffee, some light browsing on your phone, then you remember you need to buy that thing so you turn to some more light browsing on Amazon. …

Interesting hard to answer I guess with the power of hindsight but I always think of it as expectation vs. reality. Expectation is you'll be working on your own thing loving life and living by your own rules, reality is that is often an absolute grind!

Wishing you all the best in your non-9-5 success!

In the moments leading up to a slam dunk, do you think the basketball player stops the think about the likelihood that they will make the shot? My guess is they are thinking about precision, mastery, confidence and self-fulfiling prophecies. Or they’re just thinking about hitting the ball.

This is an important moment for anyone, this is the moment, the time to shine. At this moment they have to get it right. The combination of balance, angle, height and confidence has to be just right. You don’t want to be overconfident. You might then under prepare and miss the shot…