True Stories & Reflections

Have you met this person? They can grab a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, spill it onto the floor, and place all the pieces perfectly. No. Because that’s not how puzzles work. With experience and some luck, we can get faster, but we still have to go through the cognitive…

On weekends, The City of London is ripe for socially distanced strolling. On a typical workday, the population swells to half a million people before the tide goes out and the commuters flow back down ‘The Drain’ to return home, leaving a residue of 9,500 residences….

The request was in Italian, so we let our inquisitive smiles hang while our friend listened and translated the lady’s words into English. She was asking if we could repeat our performance from the top, so she could film it. The triad was born in 2016 in the seaside…

As a child, hearing the call of nature during the middle of the night felt life threatening. My imagination had decided that vampires were lurking in the dark, and not the sparkling sort that would have boys and girls swooning come the twilight of the new millennium,…

Jamie Miles’ message to TEDxKazimierz 2016 is to ask whether lessons, wisdom and principles in our culture – from Plato to Pokémon – can inspire people to tackle one’s ambitions. Transcript Hello, during my time at Oxford, working at Google and running my YouTube…

The lady in the supermarché handed me my groceries. I beamed a smiled, ‘Arigatou gozaimasu’. She stared at me, leaving me blushing as I made my exit. I was in Paris for work, and on my way to see some friends for the evening. I was picking up a few things from the…

There’s a fine line between creepy and compassionate. Turning up at your best friend’s house confessing your love for their partner is a bit much. Though on this occasion, that’s not what I did. I was on a train from Hiroshima to Tokyo. In the Friday rush to get home…

We all love the thrill of a good bit of vacuuming. It sits at the seductive intersection of being productive and offering instant gratification. Though I discovered that the admission of vacuuming as a hobby crosses some sort of social line. ‘How’s your lockdown…

Location Sydney, Australia 2017. Jamie has returned from his trip to the city centre. His backpack is swung over his shoulder, and he’s dressed in swim shorts and a t-shirt. Jamie: Hey – are you awake?I have a quandaryI’m locked out of my friend’s flat in SydneyAnd…

Nowadays, why I cry is upside down. Like most children, sad things would move me to tears. I assume it’s because when we’re young, we’ve not grown accustomed to the world’s misfortune. Growing older, my settings have changed. Expecting the unfortunate, it can no…

I can pinpoint the exact moment that I learned to hate reading fiction. I was six years old and sitting in class, happy as a lamb inhaling the book I’d picked up. ‘Oh dear, what was this doing in there? You shouldn’t be reading this.’ My teacher lifted the book away…

One moment you’re making shapes on the dance floor. The next the police are escorting you outside. It was 2016, the year of ‘Pokemon Go’. New Year’s Eve had rolled around and my friend suggested we spend it at Europe’s best fancy dress party. The suggestion seeded…

My colleagues walked in with their coffees, and I had my bag of frozen peas. It was an autumn day, so the peas were still nice and cold when I popped them on my desk. Yesterday I had thought it just a bruise, but I was wrong. The bone had cracked. My suspicions were…

I went to a performing arts school, which meant everyone had to take at least one performing arts class. Think Drama, Music, Dance, Expressive Arts, and the like. Most people hated this. I was most people. The performing arts wasn’t what I disliked, but standing…

Setup the tools in your life to enrich, not subtract. Most tools will stay in their drawer, but modern tools are needier. Especially our phones. By default, they don’t want to live peacefully in our pockets. They want to be picked up, played with, and will whine with…

You’ve found my journal, and decide to flick through it. May 2016 stands out. It’s longer than the other entries, and there’s a quotation written in large letters with three underlines. You realise that the quotation was from a lady that I had met that month. You…

Reject competition. Embrace collaboration. There’s a joke at Oxford University that ‘Imposter Syndrome’ started here. It’s easy to believe. This syndrome is the belief that you don’t belong somewhere, despite having all the required skills. You feel like an imposter….

Working remotely has created a subtle shift in power. Before, those that shouted the loudest shaped the agenda. Now it’s those that write the clearest, and this will only become more true with time. Writing well is the art of copying an idea from your brain to someone…

I wrote my first book aged four. It sits in the drawer of broken dreams at home, dusted with time, its potential wasted. I wondered if things could have been different, the stars aligning a few degrees to the left, and unlocking a world where lucky readers would care…

Sushi trains have much to teach us about procrastination. Unlike today, sushi trains had yet to make a dent in 2012 London, so my first experience was in Tokyo while completing an internship. For the uninitiated, a sushi train involves plates of sushi being placed on…

“We’re all watering cans really”. “Watering cans?” “Aye, think about it. We wake up each day fresh and full, and then we start watering the parts of our lives we want to go well: we brush our teeth, fill our bellies, kiss our loved ones good morning. The sorts of…

‘The Cupcake Theory’ was my cure. We’ve all been frustrated working in a team. Some people do all the work, others are all ideas and no action, and some teams seem to just hang around wasting oxygen. When the expectations you had for a team haven’t met reality, you…

Giving away my blood had always been on my list. The list, one that I maintain to this day, was the product of asking myself the question, ‘What would the man I want to be do?’, and, in this instance, the enthusiastic voice in my head replied, ‘Give away your blood’….

The day had started well but by its end, I would be homeless for the night. During my internship in Japan, I’d managed to sneak in some backpacking with two of my fellow interns, and today we were exploring the beauty of Kyoto in the summer. It was only after I had…