When I opened my emails today, I thought I was the butt of some kind of sick joke.

People are often emailing to tell me I’ve won things, and my trusting heart has been broken one too many times by unscrupulous individuals telling me a wealthy stranger has left me large sums of money. Fool me six times, shame on both of us.

Once I realized it was a genuine email, my initial thoughts were: Here we go — hundreds of articles from people who’ve also got the bonus, talking about how surprised they are.

My next thoughts were: How…

Self-Helpless

Ah, procrastination. I’m no stranger to its embrace. Its siren song lures me to another day of mediocrity and underachievement.

What’s that, you feel the same? Worry not, for I have walked a mile in your shoes. Now that I’m a mile away and have your shoes, I’d like to impart some expert advice as a way of saying thank you.

Just let me make a coffee and rearrange my porcelain bird collection and I’ll be right with you.

Tip 1: Get an Early Start

Yes, I know — you’re a night owl, just like so many other tortured geniuses. You’ve looked at the studies and…

Look at that face, but don’t let it deceive you — that doggo’s innocent gaze belies a canine cunning.

On that fateful day, Brian the dog defeated me in a battle of wits, and my mental fortitude has never recovered.

The date? December 2019. A simpler time. A better time.

I was in an Airbnb in Tasmania, Australia, celebrating Christmas and New Year with my girlfriend. We’d just been for a long hike on Christmas Eve, up Hartz Peak. It was a warm and sunny day and the climb was quite taxing.

When we returned, I extricated my feet from…

I’m the first to admit I don’t have in-depth knowledge of investing. My grandpa did at least (attempt to) teach me some of the basics and got me started early, for which I’ll always be grateful.

As he recently passed away, I’m on my own when it comes to advice, so I’ve been forced to take a much more active interest in, err, interest.

I know my limitations, so I opt for the hands-off, low-fee method of investing in mostly Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) and investment trusts within my (UK-based) stocks and shares ISA, where I can put up to £20k…

Gerbils, Mostly

What’s the freelance writing dream?

If you said “working less and earning more” then congratulations — your prize is my free You’ve Just Answered a Question Correctly Course. Give me your email address, passport number, and a professional headshot of your gerbil, and it’s yours.

Where was I? Oh yes. I was about to teach you how to earn more money while working fewer hours.

If you’ve been keeping up with my work, you’ll realize this is merely the culmination of many steps towards complete financial freedom. Here’s my freelance writing advice back catalog, in chronological order:

• How I write…

Please help the man pictured above find meaning in life. He appears to have lost his sense of purpose and drifts through his days in a state of wistful melancholy.

He might have retreated deep into the darkest crevices of his mind, where he ponders such questions as “what is the point?” and “is there more to life?” or perhaps even “why do I keep writing such garbage that nobody will read anyway?”

This man’s joie de vivre is also mysteriously absent and has not been seen in quite some time. …

Can a dinosaur change?

That’s the question on everyone’s lips as shocking tweets have emerged, casting everyone’s favorite pack hunter in a new, disturbing light.

Many of the platform’s most famous male velociraptors have a clearly misogynistic worldview, at odds with their ‘progressive predator’ image in Hollywood.

Dino equality activists dug through tweets going back almost a decade. They found several incriminating comments that prove toxic dinosaur masculinity hasn’t gone anywhere in the last 65 million years.

Last week, I fulfilled a modest ambition — reaching a rating of 1500 in online bullet chess in a little under a year.

But at what cost? My humanity.

OK, that’s dramatic. But I closed my account on Chess.com, and I think it was for the best.

Online chess taught me a lot of things about myself — mostly that I’m an asshole, a hypocrite, and have the attention span of a hummingbird on crack. The only thing I became a Grandmaster in was procrastination.

Here’s a brief history of my descent into madness.

I Blame Quora

I started playing chess back before…