Fix Bad Habits: Insights from a 7-Year Obsession

We all have lousy habits. Things we’d like to do, or know we should, but just don’t seem to happen: exercise, diet, productivity or flossing longer than a week after the visit to the dentist. In that sense, I’m like most people – still a work in progress.But, unlike most people, I’ve had on ongoing obsession with figuring out how to fix those lousy habits. I’ve spent thousands of hours being an experimental guinea pig, uncovering surprising findings, such as: Implementing a daily exercise plan is easier than exercising 3 times per weekChanging 10 meals will change 90% of your eating habitsLearning a new skill or language can be accomplished with 5 minutes a day I don’t expect most people to replicate my, perhaps unhealthy, obsession with self-experimentation. Why Bother Changing Habits? My obsession came from a simple idea: with the right conditioning, you could automatically do what you normally need willpower for. Many people make a commitment every January to start exercising. 1. 2. 3.

How to Create a Captivating Presentation “Creativity” isn’t the first word you’d associate with the average business presentation. The phrase “Death by PowerPoint” has been a cliché for years, but sadly the same clichés are being perpetuated day in day out – slides “designed” using hideous templates, crawling with bullet points and paragraphs in tiny fonts, which presenters then read out in a monotone (turning their backs to the audience), using interchangeable meaningless corporate jargon. But there is an alternative – and you hold the keys to it.Now, you may not consider yourself a natural presenter. Maybe, like many creatives, you are slightly shy by nature, at your most comfortable when seated at your desk or alone in the studio with your work. As an introverted poet, I can relate. But I managed to transform myself from someone who was terrified of standing up in front of an audience to an in-demand public speaker and workshop leader. Treat the presentation as a creative project in its own right. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The Art of Momentum: Why Your Ideas Need Speed In his wonderful book Musicophilia, neurologist Oliver Sacks describes Clive Wearing, a musician and musicologist whose memory was erased almost entirely after a severe brain infection. Post-trauma, Clive’s short-term memory lasted only a matter of seconds. Sacks writes, “He remembers almost nothing unless he is actually doing it, then it may come to him.” Yet Clive’s musical self, his performative self, remained almost completely intact. It just needed to be activated. We are perhaps not so different from Clive when it comes to creative projects. The minute that we lose momentum, we lose the thread. It’s just like Newton’s First Law of Motion: The tendency of a body in motion is to keep moving; the tendency of a body at rest is to sit still. If we can keep moving on our projects every day – stoking that creative fire regularly to keep the flames high – it’s infinitely easier to stay focused, make great strides, and blast through the roadblocks that inevitably come up. 1. 2. 3. 4.