When we moved into our apartment in Chiang Mai last year, we noticed that there was only one knife. “Gosh, that will be inconvenient,” we thought. “Better buy another one as soon as we can.” We kept forgetting about it, until a week later we spotted a knife being sold in the 7-11 for under $1. And we were about to grab it when we realised… hey, without even consciously drawing up a rota for who gets to buy street food that needs cutting and who needs to have slurpy…

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When I’m invited to give a commencement speech and pushed to give the graduating class one piece of advice for the future, it won’t be to wear sunscreen: it will be to make sure that every night, they make a to-do list for the following day. There’s no other way you can invest just two minutes and give yourself such a monumental productivity boost for the following 24 hours. (Although by that point they’ll probably have walked out in protest after I quoted some James Altucher at them.) Making a…

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If Mish and I had met at a speed-dating event rather than at university, there’s approximately zero chance that we would have ended up together: “Hi! I’m Mish – I enjoy going for daily six-mile walks, reading about urban planning and traffic systems, and correcting people on their grammar.” “I’m Rob – I can’t get enough of the Ancient Romans, investments and labradoodles.” A veeeery long two minutes pass. Luckily, as we had the chance to discover over a much longer period of time, it’s our shared outlook on life that’s…

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The upside of spending last week driving hundreds of miles around England was having plenty of time to listen to my favourite podcast, Philosophize This. And as it turns out, there’s nothing like poking around on the council estates (projects) of Hull – once voted the “crappest town” in the UK” – to get you questioning the meaning of life. Although the philosophers of antiquity had some pretty wacky ideas, it’s astonishing how totally relevant many observations from a couple of thousand years ago still are today. Plutarch’s essay on…

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