I’ve got nothing to say; nothing to write about today. So this day passes without a word being written. Same thing tomorrow. And the day after. Before you know it, the year is over, and not a word is put down. No. That year’s not this year. Just 10 minutes […]
There’s a post on Seth Godin’s blog today called Do we value attention properly? In it, he argues that we need to be careful not to discount the attention we get from our audience, i.e. anyone who pauses to listen to us, because attention is valuable. He makes a good […]
I just watched a documentary on Niccolò Machiavelli. You may know him as that scheming, deceitful, and generally rotten guy who wrote the political bible The Prince. So infamous is he that his name has become an adjective synonymous with evil. Just see what Merriam-Webster has to stay about being “Machiavellian”: suggesting […]
“Please let me know if you have any questions,” wrote I in an email I was drafting. It has long been my signature email sign-off, but this time I was feeling a little reflective and reconsidered writing that line. What did it really mean? But try as I might I couldn’t […]
The last time I wrote I mentioned that I was reading the book Dedication – The Huawei Philosophy of Human Resource Management, by Huang Weiwei. Well, I’ve finished, and I must say that it was great. Just thought I’d pen down one more of the passages that I thought made great […]
Ah, it’s been a while since I last published anything here. Feel a little guilty, but thankfully not too much. Crazy work commitments in the months prior (man, I’ve been busy) followed by a two week holiday (to America!) meant I couldn’t devote as much time as I’d have liked […]
He looked at my screen, saw the first draft of an e-mail I’d been penning, and shook his head. It wasn’t pretty. It didn’t read well. The message that should have been communicated within the first line was placed below another eight lines of filler. And to think I’d been […]
Each time I complete writing a lengthy e-mail, I save it in my drafts and let it sit there for a while (sometimes, just a minute or two would do). Then, returning to it, I look at it through the eyes of my recipient, and imagine how I’d read it […]
Words excite me. Really, they do. The prospect of writing something good tantalises me like the prospect of having good sex. My pupils enlarge; my breathing gets shallower; my hands get all balmy. But as much as I love to write, I haven’t been writing lately. Probably because I’ve been […]
I’ve always felt that my best pieces of writing were written in times of melancholy, sadness, or anger — generally negative feelings you’d want to avoid. During the better times, those good but not great times, writing doesn’t come quite as readily. Perhaps it’s because life keeps you satiated with […]
