Have you ever walked into a shop and seen a product that’s NOW ON SALE? When this happens, you’ll also see the Before and After price. It’s satisfying to see the Before price crossed out, with the After price below it in big, bold letters, isn’t it? And because you’ve seen how high the Before price was, it looks like an absolute steal in comparison, right? This is the Anchoring Bias at work. How It Works Our brains are associative in nature. This means we link things to other

Working with a client is a two-way street. They come to you for your expertise and your ideas. Yet many creatives forget that. Many will stop suggesting ideas and concepts, stop pushing back on bad ideas or things they don’t think will work. This doesn’t happen all at once, though. They’ll explain ideas. They’ll show other options. They’ll try to improve the original idea. But when these ideas aren’t actioned or taken on by the client, creatives can feel disheartened. All too

There’s this idea that you can’t call yourself something (Writer, Painter, Singer, etc) if it isn’t your job . For some reason, many of us think that unless we’re being paid for something, we just don’t have the right  to refer to ourselves as someone who does those things. “Yeah I like to write sometimes, but I’m not a writer .” Bullshit. You don't need permission to call yourself a writer. You don't need permission to call yourself a singer. You don't need permission to cal

Like most people, the first time I realised just how small we are, I was a kid. It’s a vivid memory, one that’s burnt into my brain. I must have been about ten years old, lying on my bed and staring up through the window at the night sky. Of course, living in Britain, the sky was mostly covered with clouds, but every so often the wind would sweep them aside, and I’d be treated to a clear, unobstructed view of the sky above. The stars were fascinating. Those little pinpricks o

Starting is the hardest part. When you want to start a new project, you can give yourself any number of reasons why you shouldn’t . These reasons can be a fear of trying something new, of being laughed at, because we’re too scared, because we don’t want to put effort in, or a million other things. The result is that at the end of the year, we’ve not completed what we said we were going to do, and we’re all upset and pissed off with ourselves. Yet there’s any easy way of fixin

At the start of 2026, I set myself a list of goals. Various things I wanted to do, which included writing more, walking more, reading more, a whole lot “mores.” Yet when it got to January, I realised there wasn’t some magical switch that got flipped at the turn of the new year which suddenly made me a hardcore, ultra-disciplined robot. By 5th January, I was still doing the same stuff as I was in 2025. Things needed to change. Enter the Streaks Tracker Inspired by Dominic Hart

Did you know that our brains don’t read letter-by-letter, or even word-by-word? Instead, we look for patterns in what we’re reading, and fill in the gaps. It’s why those images you see your auntie share Facebook work so well: 7H15 M3554G3 53RV35 7O PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5! We’re not reading the words themselves, but instead recognising patterns and filling the gaps in real-time. The same can be said for words like “and,” “said,” and more. Our brains skip the

If you’re waking up and scrolling on your phone, you’re making the day harder than it needs to be. You can divide everything we do each day into two groups: Easy Dopamine and Hard Dopamine. Things like scrolling on your phone, eating junk food, watching Netflix, and more fall into the Easy Dopamine category. But to our brains, dopamine is dopamine. Dopamine is…? Put simply, dopamine is the chemical your brain releases when you complete a task or achieve a goal. It gives us a

I can still remember watching my dad make them on the computer. When I was younger – long before the days of TVs that let you pause a live broadcast or watch something on demand – if you wanted to watch something later, you had to record it on a physical VHS. Nowadays, there are YouTube channels that archive almost every show known to man. This wasn’t so back when I was a wee lad. And before we go any further, for anyone below the age of thirty, a VHS was a big tape you’d put

You can’t move on social media for posts speaking about “The 10 Signs of AI-Generated Content,” and invariably, each of them will mention the humble emdash. They all scream and shout from the rooftops that the harmless little line — the staple of grammar for centuries — is a warning sign that this or that piece of content has been written by AI. There’s truth to this, of course. Emdash usage has surged in recent years , conveniently aligning with the rise of large language mo