The most productive two minutes of your day

When I’m invited to give a commencement speech and pushed to give the graduating class one piece of advice for the future, it won’t be to wear sunscreen: it will be to make sure that every night, they make a to-do list for the following day. There’s no other way you can invest just two minutes and give yourself such a monumental productivity boost for the following 24 hours. (Although by that point they’ll probably have walked out in protest after I quoted some James Altucher at them.) Making a…

Read More

0

How to REALLY make friends

If Mish and I had met at a speed-dating event rather than at university, there’s approximately zero chance that we would have ended up together: “Hi! I’m Mish – I enjoy going for daily six-mile walks, reading about urban planning and traffic systems, and correcting people on their grammar.” “I’m Rob – I can’t get enough of the Ancient Romans, investments and labradoodles.” A veeeery long two minutes pass. Luckily, as we had the chance to discover over a much longer period of time, it’s our shared outlook on life that’s…

Read More

0

What does your dream year look like?

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do” – said someone who’s clearly better with words than he is at singing (Bob Dylan).  We love this quote. We take the following points from it (even if Mr Dylan didn’t necessarily intend for us to do so):  “Success” isn’t necessarily about lots of money; it’s simply about having the resources and time to do what we want to do every day….

Read More

0

You can’t control it, so let it go

The upside of spending last week driving hundreds of miles around England was having plenty of time to listen to my favourite podcast, Philosophize This. And as it turns out, there’s nothing like poking around on the council estates (projects) of Hull – once voted the “crappest town” in the UK” – to get you questioning the meaning of life. Although the philosophers of antiquity had some pretty wacky ideas, it’s astonishing how totally relevant many observations from a couple of thousand years ago still are today. Plutarch’s essay on…

Read More

0

Lessons from a minor breakdown

A couple of years ago, we experienced something of a minor breakdown. For many weeks, we had daily bouts of hiccupy sobs, bad headaches and an unbearable feeling of failure. During a particularly bad episode, Rob snot-cried his way through an entire toilet roll in two hours while I downed paracetamol like it was M&Ms. Looking back, the situation wasn’t actually that bad. We’d been working with extremely difficult and demanding clients for Mortified Cow, who seemed to hate us and need us (night and day) in equal measure. But…

Read More

0