How to Ensure You Play the Long Game — “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” — Winston Churchill I’m indebted…

Write first, then decide — By age 20, it is likely you will have already made many decisions within the most important areas of your life and some of these will be irreversible in their making. Typically, those decisions will involve education, career, relationships, and or finance. Of course, there is a stream of advice…

There Is a Simple Upside to Being Intentional That No One Should Forget — “Go on, take a drag” James encouraged. He waved the cigarette towards me as his mate stood smoking next to him. I was thirteen and offered no resistance to his encouragement to become a smoker. Twenty years later I was in a hospital with breathing difficulties. Smoking, combined with the…

Beware of the metagame — On the 9th of August 1940, Winston Churchill issued a memo to the government. Its title was a simple one and featured one word; brevity. Winston explains the war cabinet has to read a mass of papers. Nearly all were far too long. He highlighted the time it wasted, and…

It is where real opportunities lie — We tend to skip over the fundamentals. Few of us go out of our way to find them and try and understand them. Driven by a perception of busyness, we accept how the world works to make our lives easier. We don’t question, we accept. When it comes to decision-making…

Making Decisions from First Principles — “‎With adulthood comes responsibility.” ―Mary Lydon Simonsen Nothing defines adulthood more than making decisions. Yes, you will have made choices as a child, but it is only when you become an adult that the seriousness of decision-making becomes clear. The consequences fall upon our shoulders in a way most of…

Ben Franklin had a great life, and as I discussed last week, he possessed a trait often not mentioned. His tidiness. I used the example of Ben’s schedule to highlight how effective he was with his time. …

Is Ben Franklin’s Tidiness A Trick to a Better Life One You’re Missing? — It’s a description you don’t hear very often about Ben Franklin. He was tidy. Very tidy in fact. A look at his schedule reveals tidiness in every area. He even made time to tidy his desk. But it is more than a tidy desk, as it defined his ground-up approach…

They Are Your Safety Net — Jim Collins understood. Stephen Covey did too. It was his standard operating system — a “Windows” — for personal effectiveness. The 7 habits were a first. A framework to live a better life neatly distilled in a way we could take and use them. As Jim says: “The ideas embedded…