Contemporary self-improvement advice suggests that everyone has an Aladdin’s lamp inside them that can grant them an unlimited number of wishes. Self love, then, amounts to rubbing your Aladdin’s lamp to your heart’s content and making ALL your dreams come true. The sky’s the limit…

Saving money doesn’t need to be rocket science, spreadsheets and budget calculators – sometimes financial prudence is borne out of common sense, like this: Get more Basic Instructions here.

Sharing your birthday with someone (in)famous, or anyone else, only matters if you believe that people born on the same day share certain personality traits. (If you’re skeptical, my extended family is living proof of astrology – you can spot a Cancerian a mile away). So when I found out that Antonio Cassano was born [...]

How do you alleviate suffering on a local and global scale? How do improve conditions – security, living standards, health care, education, economy – in your country and in other countries? A fundamental principle of human society is our responsibility to our fellow man – to aid, collaborate and generally work together for the betterment of society [...]

From another book I was browsing through today: (more…)

From a book I’m reading: Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows that it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows that it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a [...]

Mohammed Bello is 84 years old. He’s a maulvi. He has 86 wives, 170 children and lives in Bida, Nigeria. Apparently his neighbours are a little upset with his lifestyle. They’ve painted it as a religious issue but surely the sociological and psychological aspects are far more fascinating? Anyone? (more…)

It really is… The ignorance we’re familiar with is the kind where YOU not knowing something allows you to be happier than if you had that knowledge. It holds true in a variety of cases, like how you’re happier the second before you’re told your parents left everything to your sister and nothing for you in [...]