The Ship of Theseus is an ancient Greek thought experiment that asks: If you replaced a ship’s parts one-by-one as they expired until every plank, bolt, and beam was replaced, is it still the same ship?

There’s no easy answer. (It gets even more complicated if you consider the possibility of storing the original parts and using them to build a replica ship.)

In a way, we are like Theseus’ ship. Human cells regularly regenerate and replace themselves. Within seven years, every cell currently in your body will no longer exist, having been replaced by a newer replica.

But more…

As we all know, the pandemic has significantly changed many people’s working arrangements, with millions of people working from home for the last year.

There’s been endless discussion about the implications of this shift to home working. A common argument is that not being in a shared workspace with colleagues has created a sense of isolation and lost connection. But my experience doesn’t reflect this. I have been working from home for over a year now and have never felt more connected to my professional contacts.

In the work environment, we tend to play a role rather than be 100%…

My wife and I have always kept our car keys in separate places. This was never an issue until we had a baby, and we both started using my car because it had the baby seat in it. Though we were now sharing a set of car keys, each of us would still leave them in our own preferred place. This went on for a few weeks and became a bit of a thing.

We couldn’t settle on the best place to leave them because we were both so ingrained in our habits. To solve the issue, we came up…

I have worked with lots of product suppliers over the years, but two stand out to me.

One was an app developer who gave a fantastic pitch. They wowed us with talk of augmented reality overlays and all kinds of cool features they could build on top of the core functionality we requested. They won the contract. Then began a year of what can only be described as “developer hell”. Despite all their grandiose promises, they couldn’t even build the basic features we wanted to a satisfactory standard.

After months of frustration, we scrapped the project and dropped the company.

…

Back in the day, I used to play online poker. I got into it to make money but came away with a lot more.

I made a four-figure profit in the three years I played, but the lessons I learned beyond poker were more valuable than my winnings.

Poker is a microcosm of life. You must make decisions based on incomplete information, account for other people’s behaviour, and keep your emotions in check. It also involves a blend of luck and skill. …

I still remember buying my first car in my early twenties. I was excited to exercise my newfound freedom, so to satisfy my sense of adventure, I took a pin and stuck it in a map of England. I decided I would take a weekend road trip to wherever the pin landed.

As luck would have it, I had stuck the pin in a scenic part of the countryside, near to a stone circle. I called up my girlfriend and asked her, “Do you want to visit a stone circle this weekend?” She said to count her in.

So we…

I grew up in the nineties, a time I remember both vividly and fondly. When I think back to it, it seems like a different world to now. The internet wasn’t really a thing. Most people didn’t have mobile phones, let alone smartphones.

That probably sounds unimaginable by today’s standards, but it had its charm. Nobody seemed rushed. There was time for everything. There was even time to be bored.

Boredom may not seem desirable, but it allows your mind to wander. That wandering is valuable because it gives you space to think, explore ideas and see where they take…

I used to live in a residential area with narrow, double-parked streets crisscrossing one another. Most roads could only handle traffic from a single direction, as there wasn’t room for two vehicles to pass side-by-side.

Meeting a car coming the other way at a crossroads was an interesting experience. It would often lead to a stand-off, with nobody wanting to give way to the other drivers. It was like a local sport to see who would blink first.

This wasn’t an occasional scenario; it was a daily occurrence. I found it baffling. I couldn’t understand why people were so resistant…