Art isn’t just about nice moments, drama, and dopamine hits; that’s the entertainment industry. An artist’s job, really, is to help us see. To become conscious of what we’re rushing past, and that which is getting lost in the tide of mindless living. To be an antidote to autopilot. The Thoughts of Others “It’s always time to question what has become standard and established.” – David Bowie

Insecurities feed on a steady diet of reassurance. The Thoughts of Others “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” – Doris Lessing

My memory has never served me very well, but I do remember the time you carved my face beautifully into a pear. We had recently been to visit Michelangelo’s David and were both of the opinion that the bicep vein was superb, but the hair was a little rushed. It was a surprise to see my face carved into a pear, but then again, it was also strange to be alive. If you can’t be fascinated at waking up every morning, why on earth would you be so bowled over by a marble man? It’s a fair question, although one… Read more: Fiction – The Day I Became Ernest Hemingway

In Ray Davies’s Americana autobiography, he relays the story of a woman who wanted to join him on the road to see how he ‘does it’ – ‘it’ mainly relating to his writing of songs. In an attempt to discourage, he had to explain how boring that would be for her in reality. It’s likely that what we call genius is the result of those who turned up so frequently and obsessively in a specific area – and who were willing to fail so many times that outlier results eventually emerged. If that’s a fair characterisation, genius is likely pretty… Read more: Living Like a Genius

We’re in a culture that has conditioned us to steal attention. One of our fundamental responsibilities as artists is to avoid the bear trap. Easier said than done. Last weekend I shared my blog on my Instagram and Facebook accounts for the very first time since I started it a year and half ago. Of course, it didn’t translate into a single new subscriber. In a similar vein, I heard a story the other day – and it’s not an anomaly – of a person whose reel went viral, amassing 8 million views. How many followers did it translate to?… Read more: On Having Been Conditioned

“I’m not showing up with a Co-Op wine.” “They won’t know it’s a Co-Op wine,” he replied. He was frustrated and trailed sadly in her wake. “I won’t have it,” she insisted. “Why?” he said, following her into the Co-Op like a weathered dog. “I wouldn’t be seen dead with a Co-Op wine.” “That makes no sense,” he said. “We’re in the Co-Op.” “Yes, John, we are in the Co-Op. Well done on the astute observation.” She started clapping in that sardonic way that made him feel like a felled tree or a recently deceased tuna fish. “I wish you… Read more: Fiction – Plushing the Wine

On a creative front, there are few things more debilitating than the notion of a ‘perfect launch’. Resisting the idea that everything must be flawless from the get-go not only allows us to get out of heads, but it gives us permission to evolve. Here are three examples of some successful things that weren’t perfect on ‘day one’… David Bowie – www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SQdBxVjZx4 iPhone – wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation) The Office – youtu.be/K6RFwnujWdc?feature=shared&t=90 Perhaps the modern world has forged a stifling sense of personal omnipresence. If every action feels documented and permanent, maybe we’re less willing to iterate in public and in real time. But, creatively at least, we need… Read more: No Perfect Launch

My eyes opened. It was a new day. Or was it? Ever since the age of seventeen I had awoken feeling more tired than the moment at which I had fallen asleep. That was a long stretch of time to wake up feeling knackered. Indeed, forty-seven years had passed since I could truly relate to the sensation of feeling fresh-faced. I rolled over onto my aching back. Why had I insisted on trying to play Sisyphus with a bag of giant potatoes yesterday? Better get up, I thought. Then, I said it. “Better get up.” But why? I hesitated under… Read more: Fiction – A Microclimate of Delusions

Harry Belafonte said, “It is the artists who reveal a society to itself.” The problem is, the more we’re focused on ourselves and our own PR – whether that be in the form of social media posts or simply second guessing how our work will be received – the less likely an artist is to conduct Belafonte’s mission effectively. This also relates to the Vivienne Westwood quote I shared on the blog last year: “Art should not be popular. During the 20th century, artists and intellectuals abdicated their responsibility. Their responsibility is to the truth of things. See the world… Read more: The Popularity Seeking Complex

An orderly queue was forming to enter my bungalow. This was not the sort of thing I was accustomed to. Who were all of these people and why were they queuing at my door? I peered through the blinds. Just a few moments prior, life had been quite normal – no queue and dinner was in the microwave. When the microwave pinged I was all set to eat my food and binge-watch noughties episodes of QVC on the YouTube. I liked my life to be simple and predictable and it generally was ever since I took the easy decision to… Read more: Fiction – The Steady Dismantling of Pleasure

How many of the activities that we indulge, as well as paths we pursue, are driven by what we find ourselves nostalgic for? If we don’t guard against the seductions of nostalgia, we risk letting our decisions get directed by a desire to re-create feelings that were the product of a unique and non-repeatable experience. One doesn’t necessarily create future nostalgia by tugging at the roots of a present nostalgia. The Thoughts of Others “What we learn from the past is to maximise the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience.” – Daniel Kahneman

They referred to me as their ‘dog in the manger’. It was their polite way of saying that their first born was a real pain in the lower intestine. Not many parents compare having children to having IBS, but mine did. “Get off the fucking fridge,” was a common refrain, at least until I started to mature around twenty-eight. Other common refrains under my parent’s roof were, “turn the fucking expletives down” and “stop wrapping your fucking underpants over the neighbour’s satellite dish. They’re trying to watch the Simon Cowbell and you’re ruining Amanda Holding for them.” In response, I… Read more: Fiction – Dog in the Manger

Conciseness requires effort. Effort up front to filter out the extraneous. To separate signal from noise. If done well, it may become as much a service to others as it is a benefit to oneself. Every word beyond the core information increases the chances that we’ll be misunderstood. It also increases the amount of cognitive effort required by the listener to make sense of us. Rambling is often the sound of someone trying to figure something out in real time. Sometimes, we need the freedom to ramble – much like journaling or free-writing, it might help us refine our thinking.… Read more: In Pursuit of Conciseness

One does not simply write, just as one does not simply arrive at greatness. We emerge into it with both a mixture of wariness and boldness, not unlike an Italian roundabout. And, thus, I find myself arriving at a topic of focus that I never considered could wholly consume four years of my life. The eyebrow. How I arrived here is not important; as I once told my mother: life is a continuum, so don’t meddle with it too much. If I want a cookie, don’t intervene. Who knows what the cookie will lead to. She says diabetes, I say… Read more: Fiction – A Thorough Analysis of the Eyebrow

Pacing implies control, and it applies to more than running or racing. Perhaps not quite its opposite, but certainly an ugly relative, is rushing. Rushing implies a lack of control. Being at the mercy of the environment, so that we see the world with less clarity and expose ourselves to risk. When we’re rushing, even benevolent forces start to feel like they’re against us and adding friction to our experience. After all, unless they’re an arsehole, no one who is well-paced would feel compelled to jump a traffic light or berate an old person who is taking a while to… Read more: The Art of Pacing

It wouldn’t be fair for me to tell you the full story of how I came to be the most famous postman in the world and, yet, I care not for fairness. In the city where I had grown up, my appetite was well known. They referred to me as the ‘orphan son who likes his bread and his butter and his Victoria Sponge’. I had eaten a Victoria Sponge every day for twenty-something years and, being a man of habit, I had no desire to stop. If that makes me predictable, sue me. I’m sure it’s all starting to… Read more: Fiction – I, Who Brings Down Empires

The day John Lennon sat down to write Strawberry Fields Forever, there’s a very high chance he didn’t expect to write what would be considered one of the best songs of all time, even if his ambition was to be regarded as one of the best songwriters of all time. He was just writing a song, again. Whatever the domain, if we need the grand vision to manifest in the short-term, we’re simply raising the odds that we’ll end up demoralised and exit the pool. Worse, we’re depriving ourselves of a chance to evolve. After all, the bad songs that… Read more: Trudging Towards Strawberry Fields

Merv Moorman was basking in the shine again. It was a grand shine. One of those shines that made a two-legged such as he seriously mull over the big picture. “God! It ain’t half basking down on me. I guess I earned it. I guess I earned this tan,” he muttered with a certain conviction that wasn’t easy to put your finger on. Similarly, you could never accuse him of resembling an athlete. For many hours he lay prostrate in the shine, wondering. He had been toeing the finest of lines; between golden beauty and being toasted to a crispy… Read more: Fiction – Howling at the Shine

People and systems put us in boxes. Too often it’s convenient and in their interests, making their lives easier and allowing systems to operate with less friction. After all, it’s cognitively tiring to re-evaluate people and our own biased judgements time and time again.  But people are complex, diverse, and transcend the simplistic categorisations we gravitate towards using for them.  Boxes can undoubtedly be useful, but if you notice pressures to neatly define and categorise elements of your life, at least ask who is actually being served by it before you get in and let them tape it shut.  What’s… Read more: Who’s in the Box?

She fell down the stairs in that perturbing and very particular way of hers. Some might even call it patriotic, although that may be laying it on a bit slavish. You could count on her to look like a German slab of meat. Her name was Cod, like the fish, but it was a matter of debate in the family. “She’s so clever,” they would say over deep jars of cabbage. “I don’t know where she gets her ideas from.” “Are you talking about Cod again?” “Is that her name?” “That’s what Papa Grand Master insisted we call her before… Read more: Fiction – Our Cod is Quite Normal

It’s easy to have strong opinions and loose principles, but the aim is to achieve the opposite.  The Thoughts of Others “I don’t have to believe everything I think. I don’t have to internalise every emotion I feel. When I start to form an opinion, that’s just a hypothesis. Let me go out into the world, run some experiments, observe, talk to people and test the hypothesis. I should then be surrounding myself with people who don’t just agree with my conclusions, but actually challenge my thought process. The goal of that is to break us free of overconfident cycles, where… Read more: Aphorism 29

Just five minutes prior to this absolute disaster of a situation I had regarded these people with the typical sort of contempt that had dictated my perception of human beings ever since that very famous day when I turned three. These days, I was forty-seven and little had really changed, other than the scale of my chin and nose and the gravity of my financial responsibilities. What’s more, people now referred to me in passing as a ‘man’, but that wasn’t so noteworthy. When I was a kid, they used to say I was ‘old beyond my years’ and, though… Read more: Fiction – Fools in a Ditch

No contradictions. What an absurd expectation to place upon a person or oneself. The desire to show up in the world free of contradiction can be paralysing, and it shelters us from mistakes and failures that may enlighten.  It’s up to an artist to take stances, and then, if we’re open-minded enough, people and experiences will provide us with the feedback to help iron out contradictions across time. But shedding contradictions is a journey, not a state of being. The Thoughts of Others “Ask questions. Stay curious. It’s much more important to stay interested than to be interesting.” – Jane… Read more: No Contradictions

“Yodel and burfff,” she yelled, wolfing sidewad out the car boot. “How fookin’ hell I get in thar?” She said, stooping for perspective. “That’s a car boot alri. That’s a car boot.” Finally standing up on all fives, she lobbed back and there it was! A big plant pot gliding eerily towards her from the other end of the street. It had a look in its eyes. It had that awful advancing plant pot look. “Arrghhh,” she squabbed, and started to run for mercy in a very straight line. She had a bachelor’s degree and feared The Gobs, but then,… Read more: Fiction – The Onion Prince

Hoarding strikes me as being related to indecisiveness. Or, the very least, it’s tied up with an unwillingness and, in some cases, a chronic inability to decide.  To avoid deciding now, I’ll take all I can and decide later. But, of course, it’s the negative side effects that make what seems like a good idea in the moment so pernicious. For one; an impingement on space, both physically and mentally – a sense that the walls are continually closing in due to an endless multiplication of assets.  In some respects, this is where our culture has landed. Content, information, and… Read more: Hoarding Culture

By then we knew the drill. Towels down before breakfast to secure the good sun loungers. Coffee, refined carbs, then back to it. Idling. The only difference on this day was the new blood. They’d arrived the night before. We wondered how they’d fare, and more importantly, if they’d be good at keeping out of our business. By noon, we’d found out.  “I’m not proud of it,” she said. We could just about make out what she was saying. Her spindly legs were dangling in the pool and she was clutching a Long Island Iced Tea in a plastic beaker.… Read more: Fiction – Poolside Manners

For a lot of artists when we start out, the gravitational pull is often getting better at the craft itself. We work to write a better class of song, draw a better painting, tell a more compelling story, and take a photograph that has emotional resonance  But as we take our work to the world and seek an audience, we suddenly come into contact with a range of systems, each of which has its own gravitational centre that attempts to drag us in and abide by its rules.  Social media, press, the gig industry; to name a few.  These are… Read more: Pulled into the Wrong Orbit

He was not a liked man. Numerous folks would not stoop so low as to utter his name. Many simply called him “the bastard”. The man I hereby refer to was their local bailiff. By ‘their’, I mean a collection of humans who didn’t like to be asked to return money that they had been accused of borrowing. And who could blame them? Half of them had been desperate, the other half had been swindled. But the debt collector didn’t care. He had learnt the art of dispassionate disassociation, which was a fine skill in his line of work, albeit… Read more: Fiction – My Heart for Some Ashes

I wrote the following last year but forgot to post it at the time. Having stumbled across it the other day, I realised that it was still relevant to me – a helpful reminder, actually – and, therefore, probably worth sharing. ———— Last week, as the sun emerged and big events descended on Cardiff, I found time to get out with my Nikon F for a decent stretch of time. The usual initial resistance was there. It’s funny, every time I set out with my camera in a familiar location, for the first couple of minutes I usually find myself… Read more: Leaning into Resistance

Some would say they were unreasonably intent on seeing their son drink milk. The problem was, he didn’t like it and he was nearly twenty-eight now. Father came clambering down the stairs, nearly taking the banister with him and stammering about everything that had changed in the world. They couldn’t really understand him, but they knew that he was against progress. Mother was doing her pull ups on the pull up bar that had been placed in the doorway, which was a pain for everyone because they often knocked their heads on it. The son was called The King to… Read more: Fiction – A Crisis of Milk

It’s easier than ever to collect information, but at what point do we decide to stop collecting and start to apply it in a meaningful way? The stream of self-help content, for example, will never run out, but that doesn’t necessarily make it helpful. Central to this problem is the art of decisiveness, which we can easily forget is a skill in and of itself. Wisdom is largely in knowing what to take on board and what to ignore; to be able to tell the difference between signal and noise. The very best artists are often doing a similar dance.… Read more: The Art of Deciding

Nowadays, they refer to it as the Papal Meltdown. I call it The Day My Life Was Ruined. The year was 2043. I ran a PR outfit. I was good at what I did. Respected. I was the guy they called in when shit hit the fan. Worst-case scenarios. Deciding on collateral damages. Reputation management. Make-a-person-go-away. If you had problems, I was your puppy. At 08:34 on the seventh of January, a picture emerged of Pope Trump down on all fours, affecting the movements of a hen. The inevitable questions followed; had he finally lost his mind? Was it divine… Read more: Fiction – The Papal Meltdown

The people who refuse to consume culture passively are the ones who drive it forward. Culture isn’t something we should let happen to us, we should direct it. The Thoughts of Others “You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win.” – Steve Jobs

The vigour with which Mr Pugnacious was mowing his lawn suggested that he was very deeply caught in the jaws of a tremendous debt. The debt (mostly to a woman named Dreardrie) had him by the ankles and he knew it. To be dominated by the physical weight of Dreardrie had been great. To be dominated by the weight of her debt? Well, that was not so satisfying. As he mowed, his eyes couldn’t help but wander to the lawn of his neighbours, The Filfogs. Why did they always have the good lawn? It was a thing of beauty. He… Read more: Fiction – Age Finds You Old and Mowing

It’s easy to focus on the fact that many creatives can find themselves stifled by a fear of putting their ideas into the world. Things like trying to perfect projects for too long and sitting on ideas without ever taking the plunge are a few that I’ve succumbed to from time to time. But there’s a similar dynamic that affects the consumer: a hesitancy in sharing that which one enjoys or admires for fear they will be judged for their tastes. If we want our ideas to spread, we have to find a way to connect them with the people… Read more: Fearless Fans

I come to you humbled. I am but a humbled man. There was a time when I was celebrated. We all have our time. Or maybe we don’t, but the stories of my work still percolate. Whether you know it or not, the true nighthawks will likely have been acquainted with my work. I am too old and too wise to take my lack of fame to heart. We are, after all, at the mercy of gravity and precise mixer measurements. I didn’t make the rules but, when I was at my best, I broke them with daring and panache.… Read more: Fiction – The Lost Welsh Mixologist

A sense of scarcity narrows our focus and compels us to act with unusual intentionality. Take a simple example: you’re driving along and suddenly notice that you’re hitting red on your petrol gauge. In fact, you’ve been particularly lax and it’s worse; you’re right at the bottom of the lower bound of the petrol gauge. If you’re lucky, you figure you have two or three miles before the car leaves you hanging. Suddenly, you’re more conscious of what gear you’re in, how fast you’re driving, and you’re weighing up possible routes to the nearest petrol station at the same time.… Read more: Leveraging Scarcity

The weather came out and Bryrtle was ready to change the world. It always happened the same way. Sunshine. Dreams. Sunshine. Dreams. This time? Gin was the answer. He bought a distilling kit. Anyone can buy one. He set up shop in his grandmother’s outdoor lavatory. “What’s going on in there?” Shouted the old mother master, waving her stick erratically in the air. “Shut your webs and go back to knitting,” shouted the mottled dreamer. Once he got going, you couldn’t stop him. Two days later he emerged with five bottles of gin and a very grave hangover. He looked… Read more: Fiction – The Gin Wizard Boy

To deepen relationships, solve problems and engage in challenging tasks together. To weaken relationships, focus on the trivial.  The Thoughts of Others “Greatness and near-sightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing towards the horizon.” – Daniel Pink

Across the course of many hedonistic years, I had amassed the reputation of a crude reductionist. I’d heard about the achievements of physics, but I’d always countered them with what I considered to be a nimble argument: life is too much fun to spend on things that don’t bring about a sugar rush. And so I went forth, trundling through life and stopping only for treats. Then, one night, I was visited by Einstein’s ghost in the middle of a ten-minute fasting window. He rapped at my window and scared the big bowl of popcorn out of my arms. I’d… Read more: Fiction – Reductionist Cabbage

It’s common advice to ‘just be yourself’. And yet, the fact it’s commonly peddled as advice implies that’s it’s not easy to pull off. But maybe it’s too easy to pull off… Isn’t ‘yourself’ simply the most frequent version of you that shows up in the world? More likely, we’re being ourselves all the time, and the hard part is actually becoming the version of ourselves that we imagine ourselves to be. The yourself who stands for something against the crowd. The yourself who writes every day. The yourself who hits the gym regularly. The yourself who doesn’t get arsey… Read more: On Not Being Yourself

Of all the things that had ever happened to me, this was perhaps the most peculiar. I’ll get to it, but let me say this before I tell you that. There is something maddening about this urge to bake that I find emanating from every fibre of my being. I find myself desperate to bake a good sponge. A very good sponge. The desire is suffocating. Is this normal? Moreover, is the existential dread associated with an edible sponge to be expected as one grows out of one’s twenties? You tell me. One more thing. There are many nights when… Read more: Fiction – But for the Filth of Our Hopes

People are more interested in your art when it makes them feel important. The Thoughts of Others “If you just try to make good things, you’ll inevitably do it in a distinctive way. Michelangelo was not trying to paint like Michelangelo. He was just trying to paint well; he couldn’t help painting like Michelangelo.” – Paul Graham

My search for the Holy Grail was going poorly. And yet, I was in denial. I sat at a table in Popeye’s, alone. One more chicken sandwich meal then I’d get serious. There was something terribly Hegelian about the whole thing. You know what I mean? I felt like I was in Plato’s cave, but instead of shadows, chicken burgers. Yes, you know what I mean. Once, when I was a kid, I had done some very good work on a school assignment, but they gave the monthly ‘Good Work’ certificate to a boy whose mum fed the teacher with… Read more: Fiction – Chicken or Greatness

Doubt has negative connotations, but what would we be without it? At the very least, it is a sign that we are not inert. It goes hand in hand with adventure. As far as I can tell, those who try to exorcise all doubt are the ones who end up stranded.  Which made me wonder; could an AI truly doubt?  Perhaps, to embrace doubt is to be truly alive.  The Thoughts of Others “Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.” – Richard Feynman

It was true, there were flies on my wall. They’d been arriving one by one, day by day. It had been going on for months now, possibly years. I’d even started to name them. The first fly to arrive I had christened Salamander, and I was starting to become attached. He’d observed so much of my life in this little room and, oftentimes, he would perch on my shoulder as I stared into the computer screen. Then his friends started to join him. Now it was becoming a veritable pain. Too many flies on your wall. It’s not an uncommon… Read more: Fiction – Flies on Your Wall

I recently started making a running list of lessons derived from my six year and counting flirtation with photography. Lessons which I feel also translate to other domains and areas of life. After all, when one is out and about photographing, is it that different to hunter-gatherer behaviour? The Thoughts of Others “To get unusual results, work fast and work cheap, because there’s more of a chance that you’ll get somewhere that nobody else did. Nearly always, the effect of spending a lot of money is to make things more normal.” – Brian Eno

The deluge of information available in today’s world not only tempts us to seek perfection, but makes it seem achievable, to the point that one can easily end up in a limbo of seeking. But progress is rarely about being perfect. It’s got more to do with having the courage to adopt an imperfect stance, and giving that stance a reasonable amount of time to either break or evolve into something meaningful. The Thoughts of Others “He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.” Jean-Luc Godard

Largely unknown artists often forsake the benefits & leverage that come with being small. Agility. Optionality. Less accountability to power. It’s easy to waste these edges by trying to mould ourselves to the demands and standards of industry – the world of scale and other people’s rules. We dream of elephants, seduced by the notion that size and visibility is what matters most. I guess we’ve been trained by an industrialised world to look up to scale. To admire it. To desire it. To chase it. Too often, it feels like the goal. But we forget that with size comes… Read more: Dreaming of Elephants

It’s not a true bond until you’ve fallen out with the person in an unfamiliar city. The Thoughts of Others “The best leaders have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their characters. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolise it.” – David Ogilvy

I noticed an absurdity in my behaviour. In seeking to block off a perfect three hours a day with the sole purpose of writing songs, I’d end up writing less frequently than if I just committed to a relatively easy half an hour a day. This is the fundamental problem with an ‘all or nothing approach’; it skews heavily towards the ‘nothing’. Largely by nature of the fact it requires so much time, willpower, organisational discipline, and doesn’t allow much scope for the inevitable volatilities of life (which, of course, are cruelly conspiring against all artists). Undoubtedly, it feels good… Read more: ‘All or Nothing’ is Usually ‘Nothing’

What have I missed all those times I chose not to venture out and take photographs? What once in a lifetime scene did I fail to document and freeze in time? The same goes for writing – every day I don’t write, what have I forgone? It’s obvious but easy to forget that so much of the creative process hinges on simply exposing oneself to serendipity and not getting disheartened when it doesn’t fall in our favour. Craft gives us the means to straddle it when it does. Give yourself more chances to get lucky. The Thoughts of Others “Iron… Read more: Chasing Serendipity

Complexity can save us from getting bored, but the basics can save us from getting nowhere. The Thoughts of Others “Art is in what you leave out.” – Kevin Kelly

The problem is rarely too little information. Rather, it’s having too much information and no idea what to do with it. The Thoughts of Others “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain

It’s easy to forget how arbitrary many of the standards and expectations we measure ourselves against actually are. So many of them were put in place for other people’s reasons, in different contexts to our own, and for purposes that are no longer relevant or sufficient. But path dependency takes over, and before we know it, we’re measuring ourselves against standards we had no say in. Standards we inherited. Standards that aren’t our own. And, of course, it’s usually easier to keep going than to find a new way and create one’s own standards. The path of least resistance seduces… Read more: Whose Standards?

I come to you this Thursday with my first aphorism of 2025, and news that the second Red Telephone album, ‘Delay the New Day’, hits digital shelves from midnight. To violently wean you onto it, here’s a surrealist music video that we filmed for the song ‘Faithful’. Fighting, masks, religiosity, dancing. The human experience in under five minutes. A pretentious observer might call it Kafkaesque, and that’s absolutely fine by me. Aphorism 22 “Culture isn’t some abstract force that we should just let happen to us, but something we should purposefully direct through a mix of resistance and bold contributions.”… Read more: Aphorism 22 & ‘Delay the New Day’

No, I haven’t had an in-person altercation with the great boxer Mike Tyson. But I did see a video of him telling a young interviewer that he doesn’t care about legacy, because, in his view, legacy is all about ego. I don’t know why I carried this with me for any longer than the 20 seconds it took me to watch the Instagram reel, but later in the day, I found myself disagreeing with his sentiment. Being conscious of legacy doesn’t have to be all about ego. And not caring about legacy can just as easily be egotistical. It’s selfish… Read more: Disagreeing With Mike Tyson

More often than we care to acknowledge we might not be facing a tangible barrier, but an unwillingness to engage with an uncomfortable situation. And while it’s almost automatic to think of discomfort in the negative, it’s also often a natural companion of progress and growth. The Thoughts of Others Today’s ‘thoughts of others’ are from David Lynch, seeing as he just passed away and undoubtedly had a big influence on my creative attraction to the absurd and surreal. If anyone can really be called a ‘true artist’ – which for me constitutes a bold, brave, and persistent commitment to… Read more: Embracing Discomfort

Stop trying to be a genius and start being a writer. A writer writes, just as a runner runs. Just as a child builds sandcastles and Lego structures in ignorance of Gaudí. Create without pretence. Without expectation. Without lofty desires. With an indifference to results. And if you’re lucky, some genius may emerge. The Thoughts of Others

As it’s the first non-fiction post of 2025, I thought I’d begin the year with a collection of quotes and aphorisms I picked up over the course of 2024; things I intend to keep top of mind when venturing through the year ahead. As I see it, a good quote is something like a compass. Little gems that condense the vast and complex terrain of big ideas into miniature maps. After all, the biggest challenge isn’t always dealing with the relentless minutiae of the day-to-day, but making sure each decision keeps us moving in the right direction. Hopefully some of… Read more: Compasses for 2025

The very best artists don’t just entertain and bring pleasure with their work, they also embolden people. They fire up a creative spirit in others. They inspire people to speak in a less homogenised voice. They lead people by showing it’s possible to step outside their cautious selves and reach into the ether. A great artist is a risk taker. They step out from the herd so that others feel less scared doing so. The Thoughts of Others “Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.” – Haruki Murakami

It’s a rare thing that you get to meet a person who is both master of their craft and an influence on you, let alone spend three hours sitting in their kitchen having a chinwag over (excellent) coffee. The 3rd of December was one of those rare occasions, when I went to visit the legendary Welsh photographer David Hurn at his cottage. As much as I admire David’s photography, it was his manner and perspective in a few interviews I’d recently watched, as well as his micro-essays on Instagram, which left me especially interested in him as a person. My friend… Read more: Coffee With David Hurn

If you don’t want to look at the numbers, they’re probably telling you something. If you do want to look at the numbers, they’re probably misleading you.

When we find ourselves rushing out the front door and we ask someone close to us what they think of what we’re wearing, are we asking for their reassurance or their contribution? The same question applies to art and projects. The preceding hours before we’re set to release something doesn’t allow much scope for the making of improvements. So, if we suddenly start asking people around us what they think of it, perhaps what we’re really after is reassurance, rather than a genuine contribution in service of improvement. It’s worth knowing the difference, so that we can gauge if it’s… Read more: Reassurance or Contribution?

We’re so used to convenience that we mistake it for inconvenience.

In many ways, it’s choosing to take a stance in and of itself that is what matters most. That’s where the power is. Standing for something and being willing to put your neck on the line in the form of some clearly stated principles and backing them with action. After all, whatever your stance and whatever your manifesto, it’s always going to appeal to some and turn others off in varying degrees. It’s easy to talk yourself out of standing for something; worrying that what you say or do will be found to have holes in it. We can sit… Read more: Imperfect Stances

It’s difficult to be corrupted if you’re not keeping score.

Age brings many things, good and bad, but one of its worst aspects might be a decline of an experimental spirit. Biological factors aside, I suspect that one of reasons adults develop skills at a slower rate than children is because children have less resistance to experimentation and play – behaviours that deliver fast feedback and, in turn, the opportunity to iterate rapidly. Adults, on the other hand, gravitate towards thinking and introspection, which delivers limited actionable feedback from the real world. Adults get trapped in thought, and you can’t think your way into riding a bike. A child innocently… Read more: The Dying Experimenter

To predict the worst case scenario makes you a genius, to prepare for it makes you a nut.

Consistency is hard to compete with. Unless, of course, you’re consistent in the wrong direction. After all, a gambling addict is consistent, and it consistently leads them into the swamp. The same applies to discipline. Being highly disciplined can obviously be a huge competitive advantage, but only if it’s applied to the right things. As strength-trainer Pavel Tsatsouline warns, it’s dangerous to build fitness on poor form. The Thoughts of Others “No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back.” – Turkish proverb

The current project is often the safest place to be. Someone asks you, what are you up to? You point to the current project. Problem is, after a certain point, the current project lets us off the hook. It coddles us, letting us delay the risky challenge of having to venture back into the void and create something new out of nothing. Hang on to the current project for too long – chipping away at details that don’t really move the needle – and it becomes a crutch; the creative equivalent of a diet heavy on refined-sugar. That is, lots… Read more: Current Project Addiction

More weaknesses are revealed through attempts to hide them than by weakness alone.

Plan for the sake of direction, but with an indifference to destination.

We notice posture. When it’s good, we look to posture. For right or wrong, we take cues from an assured posture. Ideas don’t necessarily have a posture, but how we carry them does. Brands have a posture. Movements have posture. How we wake up has a posture. How we order a Guinness has a posture. What we do with regularity is, in and of itself, a posture. And perhaps more importantly than anything else, how far someone is willing to travel with us depends on their perception of our posture. The Thoughts of Others

Presume that success yet to be tested by volatility rests on uncertain foundations.

The basics don’t just work well because they’re closely tied to the fundamentals. They work because going back to basics means, by extension, an absence of the complex. Complexity can be a place to learn, but it can also be a place of endlessly spawning, subtle temptations. It’s treacherous, because indulging complexity feels like hard work, giving off the illusion that we’re doing something important. Sometimes it is, but a lot of the time it’s a convenient place to get lost, distracted, and delay making the big moves. Of course, the better you become in a certain area, the more… Read more: Saved by the Basics

To slowly drown your spirit, seek to please a cynic.

It’s easy to forget that rationality is often relative; defined by the times and environments we find ourselves occupying. After all, there was a world not so long ago when it would have been irrational to travel towards the horizon for fear that you’d fall off the edge of it. So, if you want to do interesting things, being rational all the time might be overrated. Indulging a decent slab of irrationality though; that may be an invaluable tool for discovering the future. The Devil’s Advocate The Thoughts of Others

A lot of the time, we’re just getting the autopilot response. It happens in most areas of life, but it’s especially prevalent in the arts. After all, it’s a domain where people really, really want to know what ‘works’. How to get an agent? How to get streams? How many singles before an album? Social media ads? No social media ads? In a complex world of emotions and incomprehensible randomness, it shouldn’t be embarrassing to admit that some questions we face don’t have catch-all answers. But, sadly, it’s these type of advice-centric questions in the arts that really seem to… Read more: Autopilot Response

Most people who appear to ignore you never noticed you in the first place, and that’s the real tragedy.

Being judged is inevitable, so better to be judged for being bold rather than mild. The Devil’s Advocate The Thoughts of Others

We generally follow the path of least resistance because it spares us feelings of uncertainty and discomfort. But before blindly following it again, stop to think of all the great ideas, successes, pleasures and discoveries that await you lining the path of most resistance. Imagine all those things that you’re forgoing by remaining where it’s comfortable. The chances are, you won’t be able to imagine them all, and that’s as good a reason as any to venture off the beaten path. The Devil’s Advocate The Thoughts of Others

Getting the blog off the ground this year has undoubtedly been a positive challenge. Having to meet the self-imposed demands of its regularity prevents me from hiding behind a tempting pursuit of perfection and, perhaps more importantly, it’s got me writing way more prose and non-fiction than I would have otherwise. That doesn’t take away from the fact that the majority of my 2024 has been spent working on the next Red Telephone album. We started chipping away at it late last year, but two weeks before our recording sessions in March, we realised that we were a fair way… Read more: Self-Imposed Demands

A problem is an opportunity masquerading as inconvenience. The Devil’s Advocate The Thoughts of Others

I did promise that, along with fiction and non-fiction pieces, I would share news of projects from time to time. I am pleased to say that today is one of those occasions, as Docu Magazine have kindly chosen to publish a collection of my photos in a special edition of their mag. The issue is available to buy here: https://docu-magazine.com/vol-1/declan-andrews/ You can also delve into my photography further at https://declanandrews.co.uk/photography/ I’ve also decided (on a sun-induced whim) to add two features to Thursday’s non-fiction posts, which will accompany the main piece going forward. Firstly, say buongiorno to ‘The Devil’s Advocate’… Read more: Docu Magazine & New Blog Features

What’s the talking-to-action ratio when we’re working on a project? It’s fun and seductive to talk about what we’re working on. Talking often leans into the drama so, raising adrenaline above its base level, it can easily be passed off as work and progress. After a point though, the talking is mainly indulgence. I’m all for a good amount of indulgence but, when seeking to move the needle, it’s worth being honest with ourselves about what we’re actually up to. Are we talking because we can’t actually take action until we’ve had the chat? Or are we talking because it’s… Read more: Too Easy to Talk

Most mistakes come from either an impatience to act or an inability to act.

It takes motion for stars to align.

As far back as 1997 an IBM computer beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. He went on to say that, “Today, the chess app on your phone is stronger than me.” Yet, chess is a big market. The most famous player in the world as of 2024, Magnus Carlsen, has a net worth of around $50 million. The global chess market is currently estimated to be worth around $2191.51m. I’m tempted to derive that people don’t care very much that machines can do chess better than people. Or maybe, it’s that ‘better’ is simply subjective. If we’re using efficiency as the… Read more: Losing to Machines

Few things reveal character as quickly as a sudden and unexpected violation of convenience.

Little waves of criticism might knock an artist off balance, but it’s an ocean of indifference that drowns them.

Beware those who flaunt their moral compass, for they may delight in using it to ruin you.

A quote that jumped out at me in the TV series House of Cards: “Public opinion doesn’t have a law degree.” When we think about the cascade of information that circulates about ourselves as individuals, as well as the ensuing analysis of it, it’s tempting to believe that people who encounter it will – with at least some degree of effort – seek to discern the facts and extract a reasonable conclusion from them. Instead (and what I think the above quote succinctly captures), nearly all information that travels through the public domain does so emotionally. It gets passed from… Read more: The Public Opinion of You & Me

Before you speak remember to shut your mouth.

Some people worry that AI will make artists obsolete. After all, it can already generate songs and images and poems, among other things. I have doubts (or you may call them hopes). A large part of what makes great art so alluring, I believe, is that a flawed human, just like you and me, could come up with something so special. The infallibility of the creator matters as much as the art itself. My experience of John Lennon’s music is so much richer because across his life, navigating the chaos of the world, he was: a creative genius, a dick… Read more: AI vs Flawed Artist

To bond quickly with a person, discover who it is that you are both happy to disparage.

Don’t commit to things too freely when you’re having a great time. You will most likely have to fulfil them when you aren’t.

Genuine humility as a counter to the excesses of ego and hubris is undoubtedly a positive thing. But there’s a different type. Maybe a more pernicious one. Perhaps it’s not humility at all, but just appears like it. That is, fear masquerading as humility. Just as there can be excesses of ego, there can be excesses of humility – when you end up in a state of subtly undermining everything you do and not expressing yourself with any real conviction. It’s easy to excuse ourselves when we do this. After all, we’re just being humble; being the good guy. I… Read more: Humble or Scared?

The path where there is resistance is the path where there is discovery.

If you must be serious, have a sense of humour about it. ….. Umberto Eco said: “There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.” I say Umberto was overthinking things; they’re pithy antidotes to rambling. If I could, I would only speak in aphorisms, but then I’d have no friends so I’ll keep them mainly to the blog and hope you’ll find some of them useful. At the very least, I believe they’re a good way to condense ideas and organise thoughts. I’m an optimist with a soft spot for pessimism so some may be cynical, but the… Read more: Aphorism 1