I’ve known for some time that since the pandemic began, my mind has been struggling. I’ve seen physical gains for 18 months, and that’s great. But it doesn’t hide the impact on my mental performance. Even where I’ve made some improvements, in memory for example, that has simply been a result of the low starting base.

This month has seen the 25th staging of the Mind Sports Olympiad. …

I learned at an early age that empty space is never just empty space.

When I was 8, my primary school took us on a trip to the Tate Gallery in London and I encountered the giant beckoning voids of Rothko’s canvases. Seeing them again as an adult, I am always struck by the sheer scale of these paintings. As a small kid, they were quite overwhelming. …

I’m more than half way into training for One Day Like This, a challenge that brings together six different disciplines, each of which requires its own training. While my progress feels mixed, what I hadn’t anticipated is the amount I have learned from the experience of training for something like this. Specifically, when organizing training across so many disciplines, it is simply not possible to train flat out for everything, all the time. …

Last weekend I did something it’s really hard to do in Oxford. I ran a kilometre (1053m to be precise) of vertical gain. I say really hard because Oxford is not a place you really associate with hills. My route took 35 kilometres of horizontal distance, and at its heart were 18 repeats of the 600 metre stretch of road going to the top of Shotover Hill.

You learn a lot from an experience like that.

I was taking part in Running Up For Air, a global event organised by Patagonia to raise funds for charities campaigning for clean air…

It’s the first rule of achieving your goals. Visualise the thing you want. Write it down, think about it, set your mind on it — and use that mental picture of you achieving your goal like a grappling hook. Attach a rope to it and pull on that rope for all you are worth and eventually you will get there. Without that vision, without anchoring the rope to a specific point, you are just wandering aimlessly.

But for many of our most important goals, most of the time, that’s wrong. Let me explain why.

There is a very simple reason…

Learning how to learn is one of the most fundamental skills you can develop.

At the heart of improving how you learn is understanding how to relate new knowledge to existing knowledge so that everything you learn enables yo to have the maximum impact possible.

This requires a high level of self-awareness. The first thing you need to do is honestly reflect on your existing mental models of the world, the lenses through which you see the world, its events and information about it. And you need to understand how those models drive both your ideas and your action.

New…

One of the most important skills you can develop in order to flourish in the decades ahead is flexibility. By this, I mean the ability to change direction completely. In a rapidly changing world, it is inevitable that many of the things we pursue will go through familiar-seeming cycles of promise, reward, and diminishing returns. If we are to continue to flourish, that may mean having the flexibility to change or start over in order to keep on the right side of that cycle.

Of course, there are many reasons why being flexible to this degree is hard. I would…

In my last post I posed the question of what success looked like. Was it a single high point, like getting to a certain weight, winning a medal, getting a promotion? Or was it more complicated, more like finding a way of being?

I ant to look a little at what it means if we see success as a way of being that lasts a lifetime. Because that’s the thing I come back to again and again. Whenever I see adverts for tools to improve yourself, the goal seems to be very immediate or very one-dimensional. …