Two cool concepts for intellectual humility
If there’s one thing all the world’s ancient wisdom traditions agree on – from the Bible to the Tao Te Ching – it is the power of intellectual humility. Meekly embracing the limitations of your understanding is, paradoxically, what grants true understanding. Surrendering your certainty takes you further than clinging on to it. This is […]
Can a person have a strategy like a business?
One of my favourite concepts is the difference between expertise and strategic ability: Expertise = knowing things Strategic ability = knowing how things interact You can be extremely knowledgable and yet useless strategically because you can’t grasp the dynamics that lie between the things you know; and conversely you can be totally ignorant and yet strategically insightful, […]
How to be truly rebellious
In 2022, there’s nothing more conformist than being revolutionary. I’ve written about this before, but I still think it bears repeating that it can be quite hard now to find brands who don’t present themselves as being in some way maverick, rebellious, and counter-cultural – even (or especially) amongst corporate giants. They all stand with […]
Is there such thing as a strategic personality?
My party trick is to guess people’s star signs. This is a bit weird, not just because it’s odd on the face of it, but moreover because I don’t really know anything about astrology, and nor do I put much stock into horoscopes. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t even tell you which birthdays […]
The indispensable art of cartography
In the West, we are living through well documented crisis of meaning. There’s no need to for me to elaborate on this too much here, I think we all get it – the mental health epidemic, the rise in use of anti-depressants, opioid addiction, the prevailing mood of rudderlessness, confusion, and anxiety. It’s easy to […]
The polymath advantage: should we be specialists or generalists?
The debate between specialism and generalism, between depth and breadth, is quite fascinating. Generally speaking I’m inclined to think the average Western person lacks depth, at least in terms of their lifestyle. We flit from job to job, place to place, acquaintance to acquaintance, without ever truly becoming party of the fabric of something. Without […]
How to move beyond knowing to understanding
My friend Greg, a strategy director in Paris, has been compiling a series of words which have the power to make you see the world differently. One of these in particular jumped out at me, so I thought I’d share it here: the word “chaunaissance”. Roughly translated this means something like “driver’s knowledge”, and it […]
How I grew my business
When I did the AMA a couple of weeks ago, I was hoping a couple of questions would come through which would make for good posts. Some people asked me how I manage to keep churning these things out week after week, and as I told them, dredging up inspiration from sources like this is […]
Cultural imprinting: how ads really work?
Ever notice how much better it is when your favourite song comes on the radio compared to when you listen to it on Spotify? It’s weird isn’t it. You’re driving along, radio humming away as background noise, and then you hear those first couple of beats and suddenly it’s volume up, windows down, hand beating […]
The disappearance of the original mind
By the time he was 22, Jack London, author of The Call of the Wildand White Fang, had variously: Worked in a cannery, electrical plant, and laundry Taught himself to sail and become an oyster pirate Lived as a tramp and spend a month in jail for vagrancy Travelled the pacific on a seal hunting schooner […]