I started run­ning around 4 months ago. I was imme­di­ately entranced by it and even blogged about my expe­ri­ence, extolling the virtues of run com­mut­ing and the dra­matic ben­e­fit I received from the activity.

I was par­tic­u­larly smit­ten in my last post, hav­ing man­aged to run over 5 km on the road with­out a rest in just 27 min­utes and 38 sec­onds. I gushed about how each and every run made me feel great about myself, and enthu­si­as­ti­cally announced my goal to begin run­ning at least 15 km per week (ide­ally over 20 km).

Given my sub­se­quent silence, you might sus­pect that my run­ning activ­i­ties grad­u­ally faded out. But sur­pris­ingly, this is one exer­cise fad which hasn’t fallen off with time. This fad has become rather more than just a phase; it’s become a lifestyle.

The week after my blog post in June I hit my tar­get and ran just over 20 km. The week after that I ran my first ever 10 km route. Dur­ing the month fol­low­ing my post, I ran an aver­age of over 15 km per week, hit­ting my tar­get. I kept that up right through July.

In the lat­ter half of July I ran my first ever non-stop 10km, and the week after that I ran a non-stop 16 km out-and-back route. In August I ran a total of 66 km, even though I was away at a fes­ti­val for four days.

Sep­tem­ber was expected to suf­fer from slow progress: I was going away on hol­i­day for an all inclu­sive week of binge eat­ing and loung­ing in the sun. Despite that, I ran 10 km non-stop, 13 km non-stop and 16 km non-stop. I even ran 5 km three times dur­ing my hol­i­day in Tener­ife! The hard work paid off, because I ended up run­ning 84 km (aver­ag­ing almost 20km a week). If keep that up for a year, I’ll have run over 1,000 km!

Octo­ber con­tin­ued the trend, and it has been a very good month. In 31 days, I’ve run over 125 km. I ran a 36 km week, a 20 km week, a 42 km week and a 27 km week. I ran my fastest ever 5 km route (24 min­utes and 19 sec­onds), my fastest ever 10 km route (51 min­utes and 10 sec­onds) and my first ever half marathon (a self-imposed race which took me 2 hours and 9 minutes).

I’ve achieved a lot. But what are the results? To quote from my last post:

Aside from the imme­di­ate boosts fol­low­ing the activ­ity, I really do feel bet­ter over­all. I have more energy. I feel more pro­duc­tive. My mind is more active. I need less cof­fee. My mus­cles feel stronger, my lungs strain less, my body feels less flabby and I’m grad­u­ally los­ing weight.

It’s all still true. I feel com­fort­able in my skin. I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been—mentally as well as phys­i­cally. I’m fit, I’m happy, and I’m healthy. My BMI is now rapidly approach­ing 25, and I’m about to hit “nor­mal weight” for the first time since I reached adulthood.

When I feel tired, I run to perk myself up. When I feel ener­getic, I run to let myself go. When I feel stressed, I run to clear my head. When I feel peace­ful, I run to enjoy the rhythm of my feet.

For me, run­ning has been life chang­ing. I can’t rec­om­mend it enough.

There are plenty of arti­cles online that tell us that work­ing out makes us bet­ter entre­pre­neurs, makes us more suc­cess­ful, keeps us awake, and so on. Exer­cise is reg­u­larly billed as being an excel­lent way to improve your gen­eral alert­ness, pro­duc­tiv­ity and lifestyle while get­ting fit­ter and adding years to your life in the process. No sur­prises there, then.

Well, I recently decided that it was time to start lis­ten­ing to this wealth of med­ical advice. I’ve been over­weight since my sixth-form col­lege years (around 17–18, for the non-British read­ers). I haven’t been a full-on fatty, but I’ve been larger than I’d like to be. A BMI between 20–25 is con­sid­ered nor­mal, 25–30 is con­sid­ered over­weight, and 30+ is con­sid­ered obese. I moved gen­tly but con­sis­tently from a BMI of around 24 in 2005 to a BMI of 31 in 2009. Yes, by 2009 I was tech­ni­cally con­sid­ered obese.

I’d like to stress here that real­is­ti­cally I was by no means obese, but I was cer­tainly over­weight and—more importantly—I was unhappy with my body shape. I was unfit, eas­ily caught out of breath and flab­bier than I was happy with. Sev­eral times over the course of my degree I’d attempted to break this cycle through exer­cise, and I repeat­edly failed.

In 2009 I fig­ured out there are two secrets to suc­cess for me.

1. Eat smaller por­tions. You’ll be full any­way, and you’ll con­sume sign­f­i­cantly fewer calories.
2. Find a way to inte­grate exer­cise into your daily rou­tine in such a way that it does not detract from your free time.

I used those meth­ods with vigour, and by 2010 I was down to a BMI of 27.5. Not tech­ni­cally a “nor­mal” mass, but out­wardly I appeared healthy enough, I’d reduced by waist size sig­nif­i­cantly from 38 inches to 34 inches, and I felt bet­ter about myself. I kept a bal­ance for the next 18 months, didn’t change much in terms of weight, and aside from the loss of some mus­cle mass I’d built up I remained in pretty good shape.

Fast for­ward to Spring 2011. I’m bit­ten by an over­whelm­ing urge to lower my cur­rent BMI of 28 and finally hit that “nor­mal weight” to which I’d always aspired. I had moved house to a new loca­tion around 5km from my place of work, yet despite cycling to work every day and eat­ing sen­si­bly I didn’t really seem to be able to lose any weight. But mov­ing house really opened up a new door for me: the real­is­tic prospect of “run commuting”.

Now, I’m no run­ner. Between 2005 and 2011 I prob­a­bly ran less than 100 km — and that includes a sum­mer dur­ing which I ran on a tread­mill almost daily! So why was I so keen to run to work? Well, run­ning has a quin­tes­sen­tial prop­erty which seems to be miss­ing from cycling: it feels like hard work.

You know what? It is. I threw myself in at the deep end and just decided I’d run to work — and if I couldn’t man­age it, I’d have to damn-well walk. So I did. And I ran fur­ther than expected. I had to stop reg­u­larly to walk, but it felt really good. I ached, but I felt as if my body was ener­gized all day. It might be my imag­i­na­tion, but I thought I could feel the increased metabolism.

It was great. So the next week I did it again — this time using Run­K­eeper and the accom­pa­ny­ing Android app to track my pace, loca­tion and dis­tance. And the next week, I did it again. Twice.

It’s now just over a month since I started run com­mut­ing, and in that time I’ve run over 55 km. This morn­ing I ran over 5km on the road with­out stop­ping for the first time in my life, and I did it in 27 min­utes and 38 sec­onds — a per­sonal best. Every time I run I feel great about myself, and every time I run I’m dri­ven to go fur­ther and faster than I did before. I now plan to start run­ning three times a week, with a min­i­mum dis­tance to cover of 15 km per week (ide­ally over 20 km).

What are the results? Aside from the imme­di­ate boosts fol­low­ing the activ­ity, I really do feel bet­ter over­all. I have more energy. I feel more pro­duc­tive. My mind is more active. I need less cof­fee. My mus­cles feel stronger, my lungs strain less, my body feels less flabby and I’m grad­u­ally los­ing weight — now sport­ing a BMI of around 27 (and falling).

Run com­mut­ing has been an unmit­i­gated suc­cess, and I would rec­om­mend it to any­one who lives less than 4 miles from work. Just try it, take walk­ing breaks as often as you need to, and soon enough you’ll be run­ning the whole dis­tance non-stop. It won’t be long before you’re fit­ter, hap­pier and more productive.

Even the most slovenly of brains are con­stantly solv­ing prob­lems. We look for ways to make our lives eas­ier, to make our­selves hap­pier, to make our­selves richer or even just to pass the time. We all solve prob­lems all day, every day. Our brains are churn­ing out novel solu­tions to every­day prob­lems in every wak­ing moment. For some of us,

There’s only one dif­fer­ence between entre­pre­neurs and the rest of the world. To sum it up in 10 words:
Entre­pre­neurs don’t just have ideas. They bring them to life.

Next time you won­der what the dif­fer­ence is between you and the next young mil­lion­aire (or bil­lion­aire), I want you to stop pre­tend­ing you don’t know the answer. It’s sim­ple: every­one has ideas, but entre­pre­neurs make their ideas into real­ity. Now stop read­ing Red­dit, stop watch­ing TV, stop play­ing games and get out there and build something.

As I tweeted yes­ter­day morn­ing, I have only one res­o­lu­tion for 2011: work hard, and get rewarded. Per­haps it sounds more like a mantra than a goal, but I think it has a lot of value.

Through­out our lives, we work. We work for sat­is­fac­tion, for pay­ment, for food and for shel­ter. Some of us work for some­thing to do. Most of us work because we have to. Very few of us stay at home and do noth­ing all day; even after retire­ment, plenty of peo­ple con­tinue to work in one form or another. Our lives are bound up in work. It can be joy­ous or crush­ing. It can make the rest of our lives easy, or leave us liv­ing from pay­check to paycheck.

The key to work, and to life, is to throw your­self into it and to get rewarded for doing so. Ide­al­is­tic? Sure. But I believe that it’s true, too.

When I talk about rewards, I don’t just mean cash. Sure, I want to make a few extra quid as much as any­one else; in fact, one of my goals this year is to orga­nize my finances and get started in the world of invest­ment. But rewards come in many guises, not least of which is job sat­is­fac­tion. There’s lit­tle bet­ter than com­ing home from a long day with the feel­ing of a job well done, of value, of worth, of know­ing that your boss appre­ci­ates your work—and so do you. I want both kinds of reward: finan­cial and emotional.

But how can the desire to be rewarded fit in to the cat­e­gory of “New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion”? We have some mea­sure of con­trol over our job sat­is­fac­tion, but surely the level of finan­cial reward is a deci­sion for our employ­ers alone to make? I couldn’t dis­agree more.

First of all, never for­get that your job and your salary are not for­ever fixed. A hard worker is valu­able to their employer, what­ever cat­e­gory they fall into, and you should always make sure that you’re paid what you’re worth. That said, this of course requires that you are a hard worker. But beyond this, if you stay with your cur­rent job then think about find­ing ways to take on more respon­si­bil­ity. Be more involved. Be more impor­tant. Work harder, be appre­ci­ated, and when the salary review comes around you’ve got a great bar­gain­ing chip to get your­self a raise.

If your job doesn’t inter­est you, that’s fine: do some­thing on the side! You can work hard at any­thing from a side busi­ness to a stu­dent soci­ety. You can vol­un­teer some time for a local char­ity or a non-profit organ­i­sa­tion. You can start a blog, or become an ama­teur pho­tog­ra­pher. There pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less, and impor­tantly, each one has the poten­tial for both emo­tional and finan­cial reward. I’m not the first to talk about mak­ing more money from side projects and I won’t be the last.

So what’s the plan? I’ve writ­ten myself three key messages.

1. Work hard in your day job, and get a good raise at your annual salary review.
   This will keep me focused, keep my job sat­is­fac­tion at a high level, help me progress through the com­pany, and will ulti­mately make my daily life more reward­ing. To boot, any increase I can get when the salary review comes around will ulti­mately stand me in good stead for the future: raises have resid­ual ben­e­fits and will boost your income for many years to come.
2. Stop being lazy when it comes to per­sonal finance.
   Last year I let my sav­ings sit in a 0% inter­est account because I didn’t get around to start­ing a new one. I let a Cred­i­t­Ex­pert trial run on for months after I’d checked my score because I couldn’t be both­ered to can­cel it, wast­ing almost £50. No more. This year, I’m going to just get on with the small finance tasks—and I expect that doing so will make me hun­dreds of pounds in inter­est and saved fees over the course of the year.
3. Don’t stop when you achieve your goals. Don’t stop when you fail. Per­se­vere.
   I’ve got a slew of projects—some of which have been rum­bling on for years, some of which are still cooking—and any num­ber of them could be mak­ing me money on the side. They’re not. Why? Either because I suc­ceed, stopped and let them dwin­dle, or because I never found a way to suc­ceed in mon­e­tiz­ing them and I gave up try­ing. Nei­ther is a good course of action. If I pick a project with poten­tial and work hard on it, I’ll reap the benefits.

I’m sure that these three mes­sages could ben­e­fit plenty of peo­ple beyond my desk. And though they’re sim­ple, they have the poten­tial to make a real dif­fer­ence. It all comes down to my sin­gle New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion for 2011, and one I intend to keep: work hard,  get rewarded.

What’s your plan for 2011? How would you work towards achiev­ing my res­o­lu­tion? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Pic­ture this: you’re sat, note­book in hand, and you’ve begun to write, to draw, to cre­ate. You wisely decided to go ana­logue in order to get your cre­ative process started. Now you find your­self with the fuzzy out­line of an idea, some frac­tured con­tent, and a frame on which to hang a real and valu­able piece of work.

This hap­pens when brain­storm­ing for all man­ner of tasks, as var­ied as blog post­ing, writ­ing a Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion, plan­ning a pho­to­graph or writ­ing a quick Android app. The com­mon theme is that your work has some quan­tity, but no qual­ity. So what’s the next step?

The key to a good piece of work—be it aca­d­e­mic, pro­fes­sional, cre­ative or otherwise—is a cohe­sive, acces­si­ble, com­pre­hen­si­ble mes­sage. In a word, the key to a good piece of work is sim­plic­ity. Per­haps not in terms of sub­ject mat­ter, or in terms of style, but in terms of mes­sage. It is crit­i­cal that your audi­ence leaves with an under­stand­ing of the idea that you are try­ing to communicate.

How do we get from quan­tity to qual­ity; from com­plex­ity to simplicity?

Some mea­sure of sim­plic­ity can only be achieved through clear and con­cise lan­guage and a flair for design, but I believe that a great deal of com­plex­ity is caused by a sin­gle flaw: the cre­ator didn’t have a clear mes­sage in her own mind. Before you can com­mu­ni­cate effec­tively, you need to first get a firm grasp of the mes­sage on which you are focused.

How do you do that? Well, let’s say you’ve started with an ana­logue brain dump and you’re faced with a messy page to get you started. The first step is to look over the scrawl and see what con­nec­tions you can make. Look for pat­terns, com­mon themes, inter-related points. Start to join things up—numbering them, per­haps, or draw­ing con­nect­ing lines. Spot the patterns.

As you begin to find these links, this com­mon ground in your work, you will find your­self begin­ning to realise what the con­nec­tions really are. Focus on a par­tic­u­lar few points, and try to dis­cern how they gel together. The inter­est­ing thing is not the con­tent you already have on the page, but the com­mon theme run­ning through it. Once you fig­ure out the core mes­sage or idea beneath a group, then you can think about what addi­tional con­tent you might want to add to it. What else might be rel­e­vant or inter­est­ing? What might rein­force the theme or even explain it?

As you con­tinue down this path, you may find your­self able to link up not just con­tent, but also the var­i­ous emerg­ing themes that are form­ing on your page. With a lit­tle extra thought and a few extra scrib­blings, the themes will begin to come together to form a cohe­sive move­ment. Per­haps one fol­lows into another; or per­haps one core theme runs through the rest of them. Either out­come is good: you now have a cen­tral focus on which every aspect of your work can reflect.

As you begin to cre­ate your product—be it blog post, slides, or otherwise—keep refer­ring back to your core theme. Are you being true to the mes­sage? Are you being con­cise and clear? Are you going off on a tan­gent? If in doubt, split your work up into mul­ti­ple parts. If you have two con­flict­ing mes­sages, why try to com­mu­ni­cate them both in the same breath?

This tech­nique has worked par­tic­u­larly well for me on busi­ness presentations—even intim­i­dat­ing ones to senior man­age­ment teams. It really helps me find hard-hitting mes­sages with­out get­ting bogged down in content-heavy slides.

I hope you find suc­cess with this method. If in doubt, keep it simple!

Do you have your own strat­egy for stay­ing on topic, find­ing clear mes­sages and com­mu­ni­cat­ing clearly? Have you used sim­i­lar tech­niques? Do you have any feed­back or sug­ges­tions on my method? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Travel can be wasted time, but it can also be a fruit­ful ses­sion that is hid­den amidst an oth­er­wise dreary part of the day. Some use it for work, some use it to read or to lis­ten to music.  I like to use it to set aside the time to let my mind wan­der, pull out my trusty note­book, and dump my thoughts onto the page.

Let me tell you: noth­ing that you can use with a key­board, mouse, touch­screen or oth­er­wise will com­pare to the sheer cre­ative force of a pen and paper.

When­ever I’m feel­ing cre­ative, or when­ever I would like to be feel­ing cre­ative, noth­ing spurs me on like a crisp, blank page stretched out before me. Open a note­book, take a pen in your hand, and wait. When I see that yawn­ing expanse of empti­ness and know that I alone am expected to fill it, it flicks a switch in my mind. It some­how reaches inside me, draw­ing my cre­ative energy into my fin­gers, through my pen and out into the world.

If it all sounds too sim­ple, too easy—or even beau­ti­ful, somehow—then let me assure you that it is most cer­tainly not. When that inky wave of energy hits the page, hurl­ing itself against the white, narrow-ruled cliffs, it is noth­ing but flot­sam and jet­sam. All that lies before you is a tan­gle of half-formed ideas: themes that have yet to become a symphony.

But the themes are present.

Start with an idea, sketch it out, and begin to brain­storm. Don’t worry about struc­tures or links; get the frag­ments onto the page in whichever way you see fit. If you find your­self group­ing thoughts together, going back up the page to add new ideas, draw­ing lines or even scrib­bling things out, then go with it. Let your ideas flow, but don’t try to line them up too neatly. Elab­o­rate on the ini­tial thoughts when you can think of some­thing clever, but move on to new pas­tures if you can’t.

Before you know it, you’ll have a bur­geon­ing mess of ideas. Some will be good, some will not. Some will drive you from one page to the next. Some will prompt you to rush off on a tan­gent or push you in a direc­tion you hadn’t con­sid­ered. Oth­ers will stop dead and be left hang­ing in the air like an awk­ward silence. It doesn’t mat­ter: another thought will soon take their place and fill the page with easy­go­ing chatter.

Later on, the next time you sit down to work on some­thing seri­ously, you will find your­self fore­armed with a slew of thought-provoking prompts to help you out. You already have a way around the writ­ers’ block, a hint for when you run out of steam, or a gen­tle push towards your next great piece of work.

Pen and paper have helped me to achieve a great many things over the years. White­boards have done the same. With­out ink, I wouldn’t have thought up British­Bonus or Surely Not!, projects which ended up pay­ing for my degree. With­out a note­book, I wouldn’t have come up with the killer slo­gans and core mes­sages behind the War­wick Athe­ists soci­ety. With­out a white­board, I wouldn’t have passed any of my final year exams.

Get­ting offline and using our hands inspires some­thing pri­mal, some­thing cre­ative that has existed since we made our first tools and painted our first caves. Try it: you’ll be pleas­antly surprised.

I have to con­fess that I’ve tried my hand at blog­ging before.

First time, I jumped in head first with­out a plan nor a goal. I had been work­ing on my own web­site (a pre­cur­sor to this one) in order to improve my web–design skills. As part of the process I hand–coded a CMS in PHP. It began as noth­ing more than a learn­ing exer­cise, but before I knew it the code had some­how mor­phed into a fledg­ling blog.

So it began. I had a web­site, I had a blog. What else was I to do but start post­ing content?

With­out direc­tion I began to con­coct arti­cles regard­ing any and all top­ics on which I could throw together 500 words. I jumped from posts on web design, a topic about which I know very lit­tle, to ill–conceived attempts to pro­mul­gate my opin­ion on the supe­ri­or­ity of Linux over Windows.

In due course my enthu­si­asm for the blog failed and the site became stale. So ended by first attempt at blogging.

Sev­eral years later I found myself inspired by the work of a friend and decided that I should have another crack at blog­ging.  The same site was treated to a redesign, this time using Word­Press and a cus­tomised ver­sion of the won­der­ful Hem­ing­way theme as a basis for the style, and I put together a post­ing plan to keep my efforts on track.

This worked well for me and my posts con­tin­ued to arrive at a daily pace for a month or so. The fre­quency at which con­tent appeared slowed in month two, and again in month three. By the fourth month I found myself unin­spired and unin­ter­ested. Yet again the site grew stale and even­tu­ally died a quiet death. In the words of T. S. Eliot:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Behind me I have two failed attempts at blog­ging— one of which was entered into with my eyes open— so why then am I try­ing to write a blog for a third time? This is but one of the ques­tions that I intend to explore in the com­ing weeks.

For now, this post is my under­stated return to the blo­gos­phere. As much as I hate the word, I’m excited to be back. Again. (Again again.)

All feed­back and thoughts on any aspect of the site would be grate­fully received. In the mean­time, I’ll try and work on writ­ing some­thing that is worth talk­ing about.