Essays

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

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned over the last few years is that not having an opinion on something is a perfectly valid option. In a world where we’re constantly bombarded with news and media from all over the world, it can be very easy to get yourself worked up about every little thing. From serious issues like social injustice to pointless things like a celebrity’s favourite brand of cereal, we’re constantly told to have an opinion on anything and everything.

Working in marketing, you get to dip your toes into a whole bunch of different industries. And a core part of that is learning . Each industry has its own turns of phrase, jargon, acronyms, writing styles, and so much more. Once you’ve got to grips with all this, it can be very tempting to start applying all your new knowledge everywhere. If you work for a finance brand, for example, you might want to use all those fancy acronyms - like ROI, A2A, BCPP, etc - in every piece of

Everyone needs to take breaks. You’re not a robot who can work for hours and hours with no respite. The problem with how a lot of us take breaks, though, is what we do during them. A (Very) Quick Guide to Dopamine Dopamine is the “reward chemical” that our brains release when we achieve something. It’s the thing that makes us feel good when we get a job done. That little boost when you cross something off your to-do list? That’s dopamine. But the modern world has heavily mess

Recently, I was exploring Substack to see what it could do, and I found something pretty cool. When you’ve scheduled a post, you’re able to export a graphic version of it (either the whole post or the headline) in a variety of different layouts and designs. This graphic can then be used to promote your article on social media, newsletters, etc. This kind of thing is exactly what brands should be doing. Often, when we think of branding, we think of a logo, or perhaps we might

The first time I heard “nothing means anything” was in a meeting. We were sitting around a table, discussing methods and techniques for dealing with stress in the workplace. (I work in marketing, and with it being a fast-paced industry, there’s naturally a heightened chance of stress.) The chat moved around the room, going person to person, until it came to Bob. Bob is not his real name, but we can use it for the sake of clarity. Bob told the room that he “doesn’t feel stress

Motivation won’t save you, discipline will. Have you ever had a goal, but never felt that it was the right time to work toward it? There’s a pervasive idea that to make progress on something, we have to wait for motivation to hit us. We think that without it, we cannot do anything. The problem is that motivation doesn’t come all that often. So, you’re going to have to rely on something else. And that something else is discipline. Habits Over Goals Say you have the goal of wri

Perfectionism is a hell of a thing. It’s a thing that all too often stops good ideas from flourishing into something amazing because we’re too scared to just get started. We tell ourselves that I’m not good at this thing, and if it’s not perfect, then it’s not worth making . But that’s not true. Imagine if the Rolling Stones recorded their first song and thought oof, that sucks . They would have dropped the guitars and that’d be the end of it. They wouldn’t have gone on to cr

For the whole of 2025, I wanted to write more. And, for the most part, I achieved this. But the thing about writing is that once it’s written, if you don’t have anywhere to publish it, the project you spent so much time on can just sit on a hard drive, gathering digital dust. This is why, in 2026, I’m challenging myself to write one Atomic Essay per week and publish them on LinkedIn and my blog – as well as Substack. Plus, on Substack , the goal is to publish one full-length

I went into A Complete Unknown  knowing absolutely nothing about Bob Dylan, his life, or really even his music. I think if you’d have put...

Right now, I’m sitting on my bed with a pillow and blanket pressed down onto my ankle. On top of this mound of bed accessories sits the...