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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.