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 […]
How Do We Create Something Beautiful
There is a school of thought that holds that beauty is subjective and unreal; merely the expression of one person’s preference over another. Whilst fashionable, this is contradicted by philosophy, science, and more importantly by the experience and good sense of ordinary people. Places, buildings, items, creatures; all of them are capable of holding this […]
Have you been taught the wrong way to think?
As some of you may have heard, humanities education is in something of a crisis. University enrolment in such subjects is in free fall, and many are now questioning what the point of studying literature, philosophy, history, etc. is, in comparison to practical STEM disciplines. This topic may seem outside of our purview here, but […]
The danger of knowing too much
Consider the following paradox: The more news you consume, the more ignorant you may become. How can this be true? After all, clearly the person who reads the paper regularly, watches a 24 hour news channel, devours current affairs podcasts, and spends hours on Twitter will end up knowing an awful lot of stuff. Certainly […]