There was a time you thought once you’d done the hard bit, it would start getting easier. Here’s the truth: it doesn’t. Not at this stage. Between 50% and 75%, everything gets harder, the obstacles get bigger, and the finish line starts looking further away than it did at the start. You’re past the point…
Some people believe luck is a mystical force, a kind of invisible favour that gets distributed to the chosen few and withheld from everyone else. An explanation for why some people seem to have everything handed to them while you’re left grinding away with nothing to show for it. I understand the appeal of that…
Nothing in your life is 100% certain. Not your job. Not your health. Not your relationships. Not your plans for next week. You know this. You’ve always known this. But you spend an enormous amount of energy pretending it’s not true. My work as a GP puts me face to face with uncertainty every single…
Your network isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s infrastructure. Think about your phone. If you were the only person in the world with one, it would be worthless. Two phones and you can call each other, assuming you get along. Five phones and there are ten possible connections between them. Twenty phones and you’re looking at 190…
Everything is your fault. That’s what you tell yourself. The argument with your partner, your fault. Your colleague’s bad mood, your fault. Your friend’s disappointment, your fault. The weather’s ruined the party, somehow, also your fault. You go through life saying sorry for things you didn’t do, taking responsibility for events you couldn’t control, and…
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you don’t find yourself, you create yourself, and that takes effort, direction, and time. Not just a summer, not just a sabbatical, it takes years of consistent, deliberate work pointed in a direction that matters to you. The person you want to become isn’t waiting to be discovered somewhere on a…
You want to change. You know you need to change. Maybe you’ve read the books, made the plans, set the goals. But when you try to actually do something different, your brain puts up a fight. Every single time. Often inconsistency-avoidance tendency is to blame, and it’s often the reason change feels so bloody difficult…
You have a limited number of good decisions in you each day. After that, the quality of your decisions starts to suffer, and the dangerous thing is you won’t always notice it happening until after you’ve already made those bad choices. That’s the nature of decision fatigue: it degrades your thinking precisely when your thinking…
Give someone a little extra and often they barely notice, but try to take something away and you’ll fight like your life depends on it to get it back. That’s deprival super-reaction, and it’s probably controlling more of your decisions than you realise. We don’t react the same way to loss and gain. Have a…
Have you ever asked yourself if your stress is a real thing? I’ve been a doctor for over 30 years, and I’ve never seen stress appear on a blood test or under a microscope because it has no physical form. You can’t weigh it, scan it, or generally prescribe something to take it away. Stress…