Job hopping is the only reliable pay rise and companies have nobody to blame but themselves. Three percent internally, twenty percent to leave, every year, forever.

Remote work did not fail. Managers who could only manage by looking at people failed, and remote work is what made that visible. Four years on, the teams that kept it are the ones that already wrote things down, and the teams that abandoned it are mostly the ones that never did.

Half the arguments I have with my partner are about the same four things and we have never once finished one. I am not sure that is a problem, which is new.

The best thing about going to a match is the twenty minutes before anything happens, and no broadcast has ever worked out how to show it.

The state of the roads is the most politically radicalising thing in this country and nobody in national politics has noticed.

Everybody says they want politicians to admit mistakes and everybody punishes the ones who do, and I include myself in that.

Voting for the least bad option is not cynicism, it is the entire mechanism working as designed, and I have got tired of being told otherwise.

Football fans do not want their club to be successful, they want it to be theirs. That is why every ownership row goes the way it does.

I have started saying "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.

The best decisions get made quickly. The ones that drag on for months usually dragged because nobody wanted to say the obvious thing out loud.

Most people would be happier with fewer options. Ask anyone who has spent forty minutes scrolling and then rewatched something they had already seen twice.

Sat down and added up the subscriptions. Seventy one pounds a month, and I could name four of them.

Cities keep building cycle lanes that stop. Just end, mid-road, and you are in traffic. What is the point of ninety percent of a cycle lane?

Nuclear is the safest energy we have per unit generated, and thirty years of being squeamish about it is a large part of why we are still burning gas.

Every complaint about immigration in my town is actually a complaint about not being able to get a GP appointment, and both parties have found it easier to argue about the first one.

Sport is the only place left where we are collectively fine with someone being obviously, measurably better than everyone else, and I find it interesting that we cannot tolerate that anywhere else.

Everyone in this country has a story about a builder and I have started to think they are all the same story. Someone comes, quotes low, starts, disappears for eleven days, returns, discovers something behind a wall, revises the price upward by forty percent, and finishes to a standard you would describe as fine. You pay it. You tell the story at dinner parties as a comedy. Nothing happens to the builder. The reason it keeps happening is not that builders are dishonest. It is that almost nobody commissions building work often enough to get good at it. You will do this twice in your life. He does it every week. The information is entirely on one side, and no amount of getting three quotes fixes that, because you cannot evaluate the three quotes either. Which is why every piece of advice you get is useless. Get it in writing, agree a schedule of works, hold back a retention — all sound, all assume you know what should be in the writing. The one thing that would actually help is having done it before, and by the time you have, you are finished.

Every few years somebody announces that we have cured a thing in mice, and nobody ever writes the follow-up where it did not work in people.

Public transport should be judged on whether it is usable by someone with a pram, a suitcase and a bad knee — not on its top speed. Every network that passes that test turns out to be pleasant for everyone else too, and almost every network that fails it was designed around a commuter who is twenty-eight and carrying a laptop.

Live music is the one thing that has actually got better, and it is because everything else got worse. Nobody can make money from a recording any more so they all have to be able to play.

My handwriting has become genuinely illegible and I only found out because I had to fill in a form in front of somebody.

Most productivity advice is survivorship bias with a system bolted on. Setting the system up feels like work, which is the whole appeal.

Every job I have had contained about four hours of real work a day and an enormous amount of theatre around it.

Nobody has ever explained to me why we accept that a phone lasts three years.

We know more about the surface of Mars than the floor of our own ocean and that is a genuinely strange set of priorities.