Use your pencil with caution. Don't let it tempt you to edit things in search of perfect. In the time it took you to erase and re-write that sentence, making it 'perfect', you could have written out another idea. Perfect doesn't exist, but more ideas can help you get closer to it. Pencils are excellent […]

Everyone who lives has an impact on the world in one way or another. Every life has a meaning, and every meaningful life that affects the world affects every other meaningful life. So, the question is, how is your life being meaningful to other lives? It’s a question we should be asking ourselves every day. […]

In yesterday's blog post, I mentioned the need to focus on the cultural aspects of learning language more to help with student motivation. What I didn't do, was describe which cultural aspects should be focused on. I think the answer to this question is really any cultural aspect that has relevance to the students' lives, […]

It's the same thing. It took me a while to realise this, but learning English in Japan is the same as learning Maori in New Zealand. When people in Japan talk about learning the language, they only talk about the actual learning of the language, the vocabulary and grammar mainly. Likewise, New Zealanders only see […]

I've talked before about the downside to stoic philosophy being how it can affect other people who see you as cold, well there's a flipside to that too; when you know that you should be stoic and accept a situation, but you just can't for whatever reason. When you're on the receiving end of a […]

It's not about doing things well, it's about doing things. This morning the pool was being used for aqua-aerobics, so there weren't any spare lanes when I got there. One lane had an old man who often spends a long time slowly swimming backstroke up and down the pool. So I hopped in the other […]

Conan O'Brien used to have an hour-long show. Over time, he realised that he was just creating content to fill time, just using interviews with people he wasn't really interested in to make the show an hour long, rather than filling it with stuff that people wanted to watch and he was interested in. So […]