Human nature
And I’m not saying that just to make you feel good. I was talking to a friend of mine I consider a hero and whose grit I deeply respect. This is a guy who's faced some pretty tough life challenges, including losing his father early, and at
Human nature
Taking sage advice from Hemingway A few people have asked me how I manage to write something everyday. To be honest, I wasn’t sure myself I’d be able to keep it up — which is why I started with the modest goal of writing throughout January. To be honest
Human nature
The problem of over-emphasising “being special” In both my mental health work and my volunteer mentoring of teenagers, there’s a way of thinking I’ve come to recognise as deadly when someone latches on to it. It is said in many way, with different words, and varying body language,
Human nature
A riff off of that Simon Sinek video So I just (finally!) watched this 15-minute Simon Sinek video on millennials [1], and what’s wrong with them. Sinek [2] makes a number of great points in the video, which overall is a critique of millennials and how we are disconnecting
Human nature
Our young people are being sold a lie “I’m an art/science/commerce student.” What?! It distresses me to hear this statement. And it distresses me not just because the statement is a lie (it is—more on that shortly), but especially because it’s a lie that becomes
Human nature
How I learned to come to terms with the dichotomy There’s a Switchfoot song whose lyrics, when I first heard them, felt like a telling of the story of my life. The Beautiful Letdown Those lines, for me, captured that epiphanic moment when you see something about yourself, and
Human nature
And I will never forget the first time I realised it. It was back in my third year of medical school, and we were on one of those ward rounds that seemed to go on forever. My mind kept wandering off, seeking something more interesting than the drone of the
Human nature
Or, How we help those leading us to handicap us There’s a very worrying way of thinking that’s pervasive in Nigeria (and maybe Africa), we take its normalcy for granted, when it’s really very deadly. * The child who turns out poorly is blamed by elders for being
Human nature
Here’s why — and my ideas for how. I taught myself to code as a kid. It was only in QBasic (this was in the late 90s and although Windows existed, MS-DOS and floppy disks were still a thing), but it was an amazing experience nonetheless. I’d been lucky
Human nature
The difference between understanding and justifying Just the other day I was trying to describe to a friend the process of someone becoming abusive. (I was trying to go into more detail on my piece on the process of abuse.) I’d barely gotten into my attempt when my friend