I was scrolling the YouTube subscriptions feed recently and I saw a clip from the upcoming Modern Wisdom podcast episode with Tim Ferriss (I think the full episode is coming tomorrow, not entirely sure though). In it, Tim was explaining what he does to avoid periods of bad mood. The strategy made a lot of sense and related to another idea that I’ve heard before, so I wanted to share it with you here… ...

What came first, the chicken or the egg? This is a cliché question and also not applicable to self-development in any way. So I’m going to ask a different (similar) question which is more important in context, giving my own experiences to answer it… “What to build first - the body or the mind?” Let me explain why this is an important question to ask… It’s clear that improving mental and physical health involves a positive feedback loop in correlation with each other - you improve one and the other likely gets better too. ...

Last week I announced for the first time ​fundamentalised.com​ - my new WordPress website for all my writing on the internet. I’ve been working to add my past content onto the site, but it’s a drag. So I’m breaking it down into uploading ~10 pieces of content per day so that I have time for other things too (I still have university deadlines to meet). Keep checking the website though because there will be new stuff up there to read daily. I’m starting with all my old content too, so if you’re someone who’s discovered my work only recently then you can check it out to see how I used to write back when I first started publishing online. ...

I’ve been almost completely silent on the internet since you last heard from me. That’s for a couple of reasons… I came back to university for an intense, 1-week module where I and a small group of others wrote, shot and produced a science film in five days. So that took up the daytime during the week. I’ve been spending the nights and other spare time building probably the biggest update to Fundamentalised since I started writing the newsletter. This upgrade is a brand-new, WordPress-based website for all of my content across the internet! ...

When I first started writing this newsletter, I thought it would be all about productivity and creativity. Even now, that’s how I describe it in the plugs at the bottom of articles, and in any other places that I share it. But I looked through all 44 (and counting) pieces that I’ve written so far for this newsletter and it turned out that I’d been covering many more topics than just the standard productivity and creativity. ...

I love writing for the sake of sharing ideas, not for the sake of getting better at writing. Maybe that will come back to bite me in the future, but for now, it’s the truth. Unfortunately for me, this means I have a hard time being intentional with improving my work. I’ll explain… When I sit down to write, the only planning I do is a short outline of the content. After that, I go for it. ...

Note - it took me longer than expected to get this issue out. I’ll explain at the end of the scheduled post as to why… Hi again, I’m writing this on the coach heading back from uni in Sheffield to my family in Bristol for the Easter holidays. It’s a four-hour journey, so I’ve got plenty of time to get this issue sorted, which is a good thing because I’ve got a bit of news to share this week. ...

I give too much of my time to the near future and the recent past. Walking past the lake on the way to the gym the other day, I stopped. I had been thinking about what I was going to do once I got to the gym. Not only that, I’d just finished thinking about what I’d been doing before I set off to the gym. My mind was everywhere, processing everything. Everything that is, except what was around me. ...

Perusing the Substack app a short while ago, I came across an eerily accurate Note from Tim Denning… ‘Your biggest writing competition is the writer you were 12 months ago.’ And that hit home. Because 12 months ago (there or thereabouts), I was just starting to ramp up pace in my online writing journey. The initial awkwardness related to the first few times you press ‘publish’ online had gone, and I was brimming with ideas that I really wanted to share with people. ...

My content ruined my art. If you, by pure chance, have read Lawrence Yeo’s piece Make Classics, Not Content then you might understand what I’m trying to say here. Creating art, or ‘classics’, isn’t something that’s very well dictated to by an external cadence, the same way that content is. Thus, as one needs to write content to sustain business, the art gets lost. It’s simply not produced because of the time investment that’s required to write tweets, articles and newsletter issues, not to mention all the other commitments a life normally contains. ...