Ever been disappointed? Yeah, me too. Been disappointed recently? Yeah, same. Welcome to being human. Disappointment doesn’t feel good. But here are ways to soothe your upset, and transform it into renewed energy: 1. See how it’s not a big deal Things are a ‘big deal’ because we apply meaning to them. We say: ‘oh jeez, that was…

Growing any kind of business can be bloody hard. You will make mistakes, doubt yourself and experience setbacks. I’ve seen all of this on the front line as an illustrator trying to make a living at it. But I’m still here to tell the tale. If there’s one vital trait…

Spending a large portion of my life in my head and nervous around people, it’s taken me a long time to understand others. The more I learned about human nature, and the more interest I took in others, the less self-conscious I became. Now I’m far more attuned. This has…

Here are five ideas I always return to whenever I experience the human sense of doubt. Internalising these helps me take on life’s challenges from a healthy, confident state… 1. Doubt is human. For many of us, it can feel isolating when we have doubts about our capabilities. One of the worst things you…

Did you ever say something regretfully dumb when angry? That’s our malleable intelligence at play. I’ve always argued that intelligence is changeable. There are different kinds of intelligence, too — from social, to verbal, to spatial and linguistic. Here, we’re focusing on our general ability to take in and interpret…

Just do what makes you happy. If everyone followed this advice, we’d all be continually happy, all the time. But are we? The reason many of us are not is that we make the honest mistake of thinking that ‘happiness’ is a ‘thing.’ I struggled recently in a group meeting…

It’s tough to make an impact with your creations these days. It always was, but these days especially. You are a tiny grey dot in a sea of dots. You work hard to create something fresh. You share it. It might get some interest and a few likes. Big whoop. …

I once lived in Tokyo for a few months, and I’d arranged to meet an English-speaking local via the Couchsurfing community online. Let’s call him Akira. It helped me meet new people while allowing locals to improve their English. We met for a tour of some of the temples on…

Ask an inexperienced writer about the game of writing online, and many will describe it as an intellectual pursuit. Years of writing have shown me that this is, for the most part, not the case. The best writers know that conventionally understood forms of intelligence are NOT required to write…