Its gonna happen sooner or later. You can follow all the rules, keep your head down and work hard but you're still going to get shafted. Whether it's forced redundancy, a bank collapsing and wiping out your savings, somebody getting promoted above you because they're better at playing 'the game', the decline of your vitality as you give endless hours to a job you hate or petty regulations stopp...

WARNING: This post is NOT going to motivate you. Finish reading it and you won't be jumping out of your seat ready to take on the world or reaching into your wallet giving up your bank details in exchange for the latest online course that guarantees to make you internet famous (I DON'T EVEN HAVE ONE - I do have a book though. Contains just as much information at about one tenth of the price). ...

"Think Positive""Believe in Yourself" "There's no such thing as failure"Three cliched statements you'll read or hear on any personal development blog, school or thousand dollar seminar.Not here.You see while each statement has value, they've become so overused and misunderstood that people generally have no clue what they're talking about when saying them. After all, what does 'think ...

Have you ever noticed how life is all topsy turvey?  It's crazy. Deceit and dishonesty seem to be rewarded. Good people get taken advantage of and the ones who deserve a lucky break never get it. Hard work doesn't equate to success and doing your best often isn't good enough. Then there's society as a whole. To quote Howard Zinn from his 1970 speech on civil disobedience, 'Things are all wron...

LUKE: I don't believe it! YODA: That is why you fail.  Cast your mind back to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. In this film, a young warrior is sent to a wise master in order to develop his skills so that he can fulfil his destiny. The most important lesson that the master (Yoda) teaches his apprentice (Luke) concerns The Power of Belief. He wants him to learn that life isn't governed by t...

The Matrix is real! I knew it when I walked out of the cinema over 14 years ago and my subsequent experiences only confirmed my initial suspicion.  Not that I believe we're human batteries plugged into a computer mainframe, but the metaphor is very real. A whole planet fed a false version of reality built on the lie that we're limited, unable to govern our lives and that the material is more i...

Is your life dull? Are you weighed down by the day to day stresses of paying the bills, commuting to work and dealing with people you dislike?  Do you sometimes wish you could be another person?  If your answer to any of these questions is 'yes' then we've got the solution for you. Or more accurately, Tyler Durden does. His ingenious life philosophy is the antidote to modern living. In fac...

My grandma is 96 years old and she's still deeply concerned by the cost of a loaf of bread. Despite being a danger to herself and other road users, she's only just stopped driving because she didn't want to pay a nominal taxi fee for the 5 minute journey into town for her weekly grocery shop. She treble checks bills, worries about the hot water being left on too long and nags my mum over insign...

Our outlooks are all skewed. We live in a system where the amount of money we earn and the status we attain is prized more highly than our levels of happiness and the good we do. It may sound crazy, but you'll be held in higher regard if you're the CEO of a colossal company, making decisions that wreck the lives of thousands and cause untold damage to the environment, than if you're a char...

I'm no fan of '30 things you must do before you reach 30' type lists. The idea that there is some universal standard of achievement and experience is too conformist for me.  So, I've come up with an alternative. It's not based on visiting a country on every continent of the world, learning to play a musical instrument or any number of equally interesting yet useless (unless you need a topic ...