The wisdom of counterintuitive success — Nintendo and Apple are surprisingly similar. I’ve had the connection on my mind for a while but feared I might be overthinking it. Then I listened to a deep dive into Nintendo’s history, and the more I learned, the more I was reminded of the famous fruit-named company. …

One way to resolve the creative paradox — What if the secret to creativity is… …humility? Bear with me, I’m going somewhere. It’s well known that it’s hard to be creative when our inner critic is in full force. Ideas are fragile things, especially when they’re new or still forming, and they don’t long withstand the withering gaze…

A reflection on shame and vulnerability — Being vulnerable is risky. I think about that a lot in my work, which frequently has me exploring with people the less-pleasant aspects of themselves. And then while recently watching the new season of Shadow and Bone on Netflix (a fantasy series based on a set of YA novels —…

How I came to join Mark Ellis’ Medium Academy — I signed up to Mark Ellis’ Medium Academy because I need help. This is my story. I’ve written online for years, including on Medium, and while I’ve grown in my writing I’ve also struggled to share it more widely. It’s the perennial creative paradox of longing for your work to…

Or, reflections on the cycle of life — I only learned to ride a bicycle last year, after turning 40, and in the process, learned a more than just cycling. I’ve wanted to learn to cycle since I was a child, so I’m really a few decades late here. (There was that one time when I’d tried a…

Funny, isn’t it, how “average” is somehow a bad word? — You wouldn’t consider it a compliment if someone called a project you worked on or a meal you made average. You certainly wouldn’t take it very kindly to have our work called average, or our lives, and God help you if you dared to say that to a parent about…

And the risks at each layer — When I create, I feel both most alive and most at risk. That’s one half of the creative paradox. You know what I mean, don’t you? And by creation and art, I don’t just mean drawing and painting, writing and music, and whatever other classic arts come to mind. I…

But handles are not doors — It’s my job to label people. That’s not how I like to think about it, but that’s how patients sometimes see the diagnoses doctors give them: like we’ve slapped a sticker on them that says, “Dangerous! Don’t touch!” And I get that. There’s been great progress in the public perception…

How I came to rethink what it means to be confident Many people who know me think of me as confident. I can see why: it’s in how I talk, the way I socialise, maybe even what I wear. Underneath all that, though, those who get a bit closer quickly learn that I’m actually wracked with self-doubt and uncertainty and can…