What do you need? A pen or pencil. A big scruffy pad of paper (more on this below). Somewhere comfortable to write. Some way of timing yourself. No distractions – from people or devices – during that time.

Similes, such as ‘Life is like a box of chocolates,’ are a particular type of metaphor – they explicitly state that there’s a similarity, rather than saying ‘Life IS a box of chocolates.’ An analogy is a metaphor that’s being used for a purpose: to explain something in terms of something else

The If Only/At Least Flip. This is a quick thought experiment that supports mental resilience and can be used on the fly every day as necessary. It works best for low-level regrets, but can be used, with caution, for the bigger-ticket items too. Take one of your ‘If only’ statements and flip it to find a complementary downward counterfactual. For

As Walt Whitman so insouciantly put it: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes).’7

Morning Pages are a key practice in The Artist’s Way, her 12-week course aimed at awakening creativity. But if you’re using freewriting as a tool for business thinking rather than as a purely creative exercise, it can be more helpful to start with a prompt.

When it comes to communicating your ideas to other people, being able to show them what you mean visually is massively more impactful and effective than trying to describe it in words. And if you can create a distinctive model that you can copyright and share, and which other people use and share with a nod to you, you have developed a distinctive

And since (as hockey star Wayne Gretzky famously pointed out) you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,

Draw the spine of a fish as above, but rather than making its head a problem that needs understanding and fixing, instead try putting a desired outcome there and then work backwards to see what might contribute to it. Imagine for example that in the diagram above, the text above the head of the fish had read: ‘timely delivery of project’. Then set

I think the reason I don’t know the answer to this is…