Greatest Hits

These are the posts that I’m most proud of having written, or those that people have engaged with the most. I think the newer ones are better; my pride in the older ones is mostly due to my not wholly disowning them, rather than because I think you ought to read them.

Career

• What I've Got Wrong and Right In My Career

  2024
  I've made some huge mistakes in my career so far - things that have cost me learning opportunities, promotions, and sometimes my mental health. Fortunately I've also got many important things right - some deliberately and some accidentally.

• On Productivity

  2024
  I'm not the most productive person I know, but I have improved my productivity a lot, particularly in the last year. This post is going to outline some of the ways that I've done that.

• What I Learned From Applying To 100 Programming Jobs

  2022
  Many people do not treat the job market like a market. You are trying to sell your labour, and in order to get the best possible price, you have to offer your goods to as many potential buyers as possible.

Effective Altruism

• Giving What I Can

  2023
  I've read several LinkedIn posts on why people chose to take the Giving What We Can Pledge. Many of them include something along the lines of "I'm not posting this to seem smug and morally superior." They then proceed to seem smug and morally superior. I'm probably going to fail, but at least I'm not going to bullshit you about that.

Mental Health

• On 30

  2024
  I've spent most of my life assuming I'd die before 30, but, improbably enough, today is my 30th birthday. It's a very odd feeling to not be dead - whenever I had thought about the future, it never occurred to me to think this far ahead.

• Eating

  2022
  My relationship with food is not good. I don't think it's ever been good, but it became especially apparent to me just how not good it was when I moved to London last May.

• The Happiness Project

  2021
  A lot of people have written about their version of a happiness project, and in a way, shouldn't our whole lives be a personal happiness project? If we, like Kid Cudi, are on the pursuit of happiness, I think a lot of us tend to overcomplicate it.

• Pretending II

  2020
  I have put off writing this post for several months now, probably since November. I've done so for a number of reasons, which we'll get into in a little bit, but given that the current global pandemic has us all sitting inside, feeling alone and sorry for ourselves, I guess now seems like a good time.

• My Black Dog

  2017
  The sadness is like a blanket now. It's as if it's raining outside, and I am underneath the blanket, away from the world, dry and relatively warm. But it's never going to stop raining.

• Looking in the mirror

  2017
  I've been overweight my whole life, bar a few months here and there when my eating habits were less than advisable. Healthy eating was never a focus during my childhood, but now it's my own responsibility to not only make good choices with regards to food, but also re-evaluate my relationship with food, my weight and how I look.

• Crying, cutting myself, and writing depressing poetry

  2017
  Looking back, I've probably displayed symptoms of depression in some way for the last ten years, since I was 12. And for the first five years of that, I didn't talk to anyone about how I felt.

Running

• The Arc

  2024
  I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to say about this race before I even got to the start line. The Arc of Attrition is different to the races I've done before; not only does it have a particularly scary-sounding name, it's held in January.

• Eiger Ultra Trail

  2022
  About four years ago, my then-housemate suggested that I watch The Race That Eats Its Young, a documentary about the legendary Barkley Marathons. I'd just taken up running and had expressed an interest in aiming for longer distances at slower paces.

Life

• The Slightly More Planned Year So Far

  2019
  Well, it's been a very long time since I wrote anything in this blog, and I think an update long overdue at this point. In December things were bleak, I was in a very dark place and had struggled for months.

• The Unplanned Year

  2018
  It's fair to say that looking back at 2018, it was a radical departure from the plan. At the start of the year, I had been rudely awakened from the fever dream of 'professional' poker.

Poker

• Poker, Balance, and Mental Health

  2017
  This month I have been thinking a lot about poker, and how it fits into my life as a whole. It's been a somewhat eventful month. I signed up for a 6 day silent meditation retreat, and bailed after the first morning.

• Clicking Buttons

  2017
  Two months ago I made the decision to quit my job to play online poker full time. I moved back in with my parents to live in their metaphorical basement, click buttons all day and general remove myself from the outside world.

• Joe Ingram's GTO Club Review

  2017
  In August last year, I reached out to Joey to ask him for more details about his new 'GTO Club'. One short Skype call later and I was convinced it was exactly what I needed at that point in my life.