Did you know that life is supposed to be fun? I mean really fun. Enjoying our lives is not a bonus or something for a lucky few. Far from being the icing on the cake, it’s a central and essential part of a normal healthy existence. Right at the very core of who we are is a deep thirst for happiness that we spend our lives attempting to quench. In the food we choose to eat, the people we spend…
Do you ever have that feeling that you’re supposed to achieve something important in your lifetime; that you are destined to be the cause of something significant in the world? Maybe you feel a tug somewhere deep down that it’s your assignment to create a groundbreaking product, change the world for the poor, write a book, or help find a cure for some disease. Perhaps you have no idea what it is; you just feel that maybe you are here…
Yesterday we got home from a holiday in Poland. I love visiting; it’s a special country to me for a lot of reasons – mostly because it’s where I met Irina. I am always ambushed going back, by a flood of intoxicating memories of the endless, carefree summer in which we met, building fires on the beach where the trees met the sea, wandering in the woods and riding the battered train with the windows open wide and the wind…
Do you ever experience that nagging feeling that you’re supposed to be doing something, following your calling perhaps, but just can’t quite manage to get yourself to begin? Maybe it’s to start a new project, or develop a hobby into a meaningful source of income for your family. Whatever it is, the barrier which often prevents us from starting, is fear – the fear of failure. All kinds of thoughts invade our mind when we consider having a go. We…
I don’t like moving house. At all. The whole process has a way of reducing me to a small shrivelled wreck in no time at all. In fact the thought of it makes me feel a little queasy. I find it agonising seeing how much stuff we have that is pretty useless, yet don’t seem to be able to part with (I say ‘we’ for diplomacy – 95% of it belongs to Irina, and I would burn most of it…
Success is in your bones. That longing to be great at something comes naturally to you; you don’t have to muster it up. Whether you want to be a great parent, an incredible baker, a renowned writer, or phenomenal at earning money, I bet there is something that you would like to be exceptional at, even if only in your wildest dreams. If you don’t have any dreams, then probably you have squashed them away somewhere in fear that they…
I remember it well. Sitting on the floor opposite me, across a small sea of jumbled toys, Stef had made a plane from red and yellow stickle bricks. He was making it zoom through the air-space around him. ‘I want to fly planes when I’m grown up’, he said. We were 4 years old, and it must have been one of our first days at primary school. 21 years later, Stef is a pilot, flying for one of the world’s…
The greatest mistake you or I will ever make is… Actually, first I’ll tell you a story. There was, in a village by the sea an old man who built a boat. Like his previous projects, it was a small one. He spent many weeks in his workshop, designing and constructing before she was completed. He named her Layla, and she was finished to perfection. No detail was too fine to be attended to with immense precision and care. On…