Every day, people around the world spend a collective 3.3 billion hours watching short-form videos on TikTok. And no doubt many of you reading this will have contributed to that staggering statistic… I know I certainly have. This figure isn’t a happy accident or viral luck, but the product of some of the most sophisticated, deliberately engineered user experience design in the history of technology. For a long time, I’ve been fascinated with how social media content – from st

Most people have this backwards. They think complexity signals intelligence, and that difficult words, layered sentences, and industry jargon demonstrate mastery of a subject. In reality, it usually signals the opposite. It shows you understand something well enough to repeat it, but not well enough to explain it. The people who truly understand something can make you feel like you understood it all along. They can explain a concept in the simplest of terms that you can under

I was once speaking to a friend who said she was feeling in a rut. Part of my advice was to be more creative, to spend some time each day drawing or writing or whatever takes her fancy, to express what she was feeling and how she sees the world. What I found interesting was the knee-jerk reaction she had. Almost instantly, she replied “I can’t do that, I’m not creative.” It wasn’t until later, thinking back on the conversation, that I realise most people think they already th

A few years ago, my days were an utter mess. Not in a dramatic way. On the surface, things were getting done and I was hitting all the deadlines I needed to hit. But underneath the calm waters of seeming productive output, I knew the truth. Every single thing felt reactive, as though I was always slightly behind on every project, always catching up, always ending the week with a list of things that were supposed to happen but didn't. To be honest, I put it down to not having

Thinking about the connection between Brand (with the capital B) and the content it publishes, the main thing I see is people treating the two as separate entities. Brand over here, content over there, with each doing its own thing independent of one another. That's the wrong approach. Brand isn't something that can be an afterthought when it comes to marketing. Brand is the layer underneath everything that, when it’s done right, influences every touchpoint, every message, an

What if the Self never actually disappears? A look at terminal lucidity, the unexplained return of memory and clarity in the final hours before death.

Recently, our local council moved the regular weekly bin collection to once every two weeks, and then introduced a weekly food waste collection. Many people were befuddled at this choice, angry at the idea of this causing their bins to overflow by the time the fortnightly collection was made. I, too, was a little confused, as the reduction of the weekly connections — and then the addition of another — seemed totally counterintuitive. And right there a failure in how we think

You have to make bad stuff before you can make good stuff. Everyone who has ever made anything (written, designed, built, recorded, filmed, whatever) went through a period where what they were making was genuinely not good. Not just a little rough around the edges or “almost there.” Bad. Like stinking, awful bad. That period of being bad wasn't a little detour from the path of progression… it was the path. I learned how to use Photoshop — and learned graphic design in general

In last week’s atomic essay, I wrote about storytelling in marketing and how to actually define it. As I said in that essay, “storytelling in marketing,” has become a trendy buzz-phrase that plenty of people will bring out when they want to sound like they know what they’re doing. But many of these same people, if you were to press them, wouldn’t be able to define what it actually means. And that makes sense, too. With it becoming just a thing that people say, the actual mean

As marketers and content creators, we can sometimes overthink storytelling. “Storytelling” has become a buzzword that gets thrown around all the time, with the true meaning of the word being lost in a sea of jargon-heavy Slack updates and meetings that could be emails. When a client says their marketing “needs more storytelling,” they're not asking you to write a book. Instead, they want the message behind their brand to make their target audience feel something, guiding them