When he arrived at the cafe, DeLeo refused medical treatment. It was more urgent to get a rescue team to search for his two passengers. He boarded a plane and led searchers back to the wreck. But it was too late – his friends were dead. What kept DeLeo alive on his trek to find help, while his two passengers perished where they waited? This is the

How can we force ourselves to reject the offers that we don’t realistically have time for? My favourite idea comes from the writer and musician Derek Sivers, which he calls ‘hell yeah or no’. His advice is as follows: when you find yourself weighing up whether to take on a new project or commitment, you’ve got two options – either ‘hell yeah’ or

So I can make a start, even if it’s a shaky one. I don’t need to feel like a Schwarzenegger-style bodybuilder to work out for an hour. I don’t need my first crack at my business strategy to be a work of visionary corporate genius. And I definitely don’t need the first draft of my book to be a masterpiece. When you’re trying something new, the idea

Ask yourself: ‘If I was to make the 12-month celebration a reality, what would I need to do over the next year to get there? And what is the first action step: joining that gym down the road? Polishing up my CV? Putting a weekly chat with my mum in the diary? Suddenly, your values are no longer about the distant future. They’re about your steps in

So what does work in the age-old fight against procrastination? That’s where our third approach comes in. I call it the ‘unblock method’.

So far, we’ve examined how to work out our overall purpose – by asking the ‘why’ – and identifying specific end-goals and tasks – by asking the ‘what’. But there’s one more question we haven’t answered. If you don’t know when you’re doing something, chances are you won’t do it.

Values affirmations make our most abstract ideals real. And they boost our confidence along the way. So values affirmations make our most abstract ideals real. And they boost our confidence along the way. The only question is how to find these values – and how to use them.

So, the first way to harness the potential of play is to integrate adventure into our lives. But how? Well, with the right tools we can still find the excitement we once got from racing through those malls and swinging from those branches.

By adding a side quest to your day, you create space for curiosity, exploration and playfulness – and could discover something amazing and totally unexpected along the way.