An article has appeared today in The Guardian which talks about the many ways in which our everyday environments have been built to encourage us to consume fatty, sugary, junk food, and that we need to see some policy interventions from the government to change aspects of our daily environment in order to address the
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Skills for living
Communication is power. In the modern world, one of the most effective tools used by the powerful to build and exercise their power is communication. More specifically, it’s the ability to understand how human beings think and behave and then use this knowledge to influence people – both individually and in massive numbers. This power
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I’ve just completed a booklet for Life Squared that has turned into a book! It’s a piece of work that I’ve been putting off for years as I knew it would be large and complex, but I’m delighted to have finished it as I think it’s a critical issue, yet one that hasn’t been exposed
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What is the meaning of life? How should we live? What happens when we die? This weekend Humanists UK has published a new guide I’ve written for them on these and some of the other big questions of life. You can download it (for free) here. Over the last two thousand years we’ve been led
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It’s been a while since I posted on this blog, and that’s mainly because I’ve had my head down working on a load of different projects, as well as in running my agency ChangeStar. The good news is that these projects – including a video on ‘The problem with consumerism’, a new Life Squared guide
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I like what the School of Life is trying to do – bringing philosophy, wisdom and broader thought into our daily lives. Indeed, Life Squared shares a similar aim in much of its work. Where we differ (apart from size, finances etc!) is that Life Squared is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to offer its
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I went to an interesting talk at the RSA today by James Wallman who has just published a book called ‘Stuffocation’. His basic argument was that in the society of scarcity of around a generation ago, what mattered in life was having more stuff – i.e. in a society of scarcity, materialism is not a
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I had a much-needed day off recently and decided to visit a few places in London – like the London Library (wonderful) and Westminster Abbey (claustrophobic in its conservativism). I ended up at the Westfield shopping centre at Shepherd’s Bush to meet a friend for dinner before going to a gig, and I had to
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I’m now a couple of weeks into my new time management regime (as are one or two others who are trying it out) and I’m quite pleased with how it’s going! A few caveats have occurred to me over the last few days on the advice in the previous post though: It’s all about discipline
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One of the most challenging things to deal with in my work life is the number of things there are to do – from the mundane but important stuff to the meaty, interesting and fulfilling stuff. It can be a real challenge to make sure that I’m getting to do a bit of the interesting
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