Many people have been drunk on Bill Gates conspiracy theories over the last twelve months.

I am fascinated by conspiracy theories because, it may surprise you to know, I was a full-time conspiracist from 2001–2006. I spread the rumor that rapper Tupac wasn’t dead. I would spend hours every day in internet forums talking about it. I then got hooked on the 911 terrorist attack conspiracies. I’d tell people the planes had bombs strapped to them and it was ‘a setup.’ I had no idea what I was talking about. It was all unsubstantiated nonsense.

Shortly after, a hippie friend from music school, who ate magic mushrooms every weekend, got me hooked on the secret society of the Illuminati. All it took was Tom Hanks’s role in the movie “Angels and Demons” to send my conspiracy mind into overdrive. I’m a recovered conspiracist now. My mind has healed from their devastating effects. Here’s how to keep your mind safe. …

Censorship on social media is a huge problem.

I have experienced it multiple times over the last seven years as a writer on a variety of different platforms. When your content gets taken down, you feel terrible. You feel like you’ve been silenced. You feel like your opinion doesn’t matter. You feel stupid. You feel life is unfair.

When I got banned from one social media platform (accidentally) during the U.S. election, it hurt. I posted one sentence about the leader I hoped would win the U.S. election. Minutes later, I was banned.

There was automation in place to prevent people from manipulating the election results, and I’d been caught in its fiery path. Thankfully, I got my account back quickly with a genuine apology. It taught me to be extremely careful of commenting on elections in the future. …

A friend asked me recently to comment on American politics. I hate politics. My thoughts are not helpful, so I choose to silence them.

My response to my friend was this: “Not every situation requires my awesome commentary.” (I used the word awesome to make fun of myself.) I posted this quote on Twitter. It seemed many people had an “I-feel-like-that-too” moment. I knew there’d be a powerful lesson in it.

Social Media Has Given Us a Voice. That Doesn’t Mean We Always Need To Use It

That’s the problem with social media. It has become loud.

People feel the need to comment on everything. I am guilty of this too. I feel the need to comment on everything. I feel the need to turn a conversation into a piece of content. …

When I don’t have control of my life I get upset.

Writer, Thomas Oppong, unexpectedly sent me into contemplation mode:

No matter how much you love work, if you lose total control of your time and freedom to express yourself creatively, you will end up miserable.

This is how it feels to be a writer. You want to express yourself creatively, but you can’t always when you are renting an audience you don’t own. Owning your creativity is one of the best feelings you can access.

As a writer, building an email list is one way I’ve found to get back my creative freedom. The next step is to build a newsletter you own. The final step is to set up a group chat, where the content is consumed based on a person’s curiosity, not an algorithm. …

Artificial intelligence can write wisdom for a living. You don’t need to necessarily pay a freelancer for written content.

Software engineer, Ethan Roberts, forced an AI to read 80 of my written articles, and write brand new articles from them as if they were me. The AI ended up writing bizarrely insightful quotes instead.

These quotes will help you unlock higher-level thinking because they were written by a machine pretending to be a real human.

“Keep the fear of being”

AI me started out with this deep thought. You fear just being. …

I always believed creativity was a superpower.

I learned how to be creative by spending a lot of time in recording studios. Recently, creativity has become ugly. Emily Sinclair Montague said it best:

“Creative brains are annoying as shit. I love ’em, of course, but they cannot, will not, RELAX. There is always something to analyze, unravel, spin into a narrative, or picture in painfully vivid detail at 4 a.m. Creative minds have no brakes.”

This is how I feel as a writer.

A conversation becomes content.
A book you read becomes content.
A disappointment becomes content.
A romantic relationship becomes content.
A huge frustration becomes content.
A random email becomes content. …

The calculation of inflation is the greatest thing keeping you poor or just over broke. It’s harsh. But it’s obvious when you trawl through the public data.

Inflation just means the decline of your purchasing power over time. Simplified: What does $20 in 2015 buy you compared to $20 in 2021?

I see people obsess over how much money they earn from their job. Even more ridiculous, I see people beg for menial pay rises.

Purchasing power leaves pay rises and bonuses for dead when you understand it. Instead of asking yourself “how can I make more money?” …

I check the bitcoin price more than 30 times a day. Clearly, I have a problem.

A self-help writer shouldn’t admit this fact. It destroys the bulletproof mindset readers think we have (we don’t, by the way). The bitcoin price exploding is supposed to be good for us.

There are tremendous downsides. Financially, bitcoin’s performance is great. Mentally, bitcoin’s performance is terrible for you.

Analyzing the downsides of your financial psychology makes you stronger with your personal finances in the long-term. Let’s dissect what’s going on so you can avoid being taken over by the euphoria.

Euphoria Is Coming

We haven’t seen euphoria yet with bitcoin. We’re about to. Right now most of the bitcoin purchases are coming from large scale institutions. Retail investors are about to join the euphoria. …