by Dave Hayward | May 10, 2025 | Psychology, Creativity, Personal stories, Productivity, Strategy
On decision fatigue: “Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there. It’s a state that fluctuates.” Roy Baumeister One late Spring in the 90s, my cousin Trish and I had exams. We had plenty of time and a...
by Dave Hayward | Apr 26, 2025 | Creativity, Art, Life and work, Personal stories, Podcast, Productivity, Psychology, Strategy
How to make peace with arbitrary choices and create meaning anyway “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less travelled by,And that has made all the difference.” It’s hard to beat the final lines of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. It’s also, famously,...
by Dave Hayward | Mar 18, 2025 | AI, Life and work, Productivity, Psychology, Sales
Persuasion and perseverance One of the hardest jobs I ever had was selling coffee in London. In my twenties, I started at a brand new company with no established customer base. Armed with a London A to Z street map, a newly bought suit, and some business cards, I...
by Dave Hayward | Feb 3, 2025 | Creativity, Art, Content, Copywriting, Productivity, Psychology, Strategy
The tension between structure and magic makes successful creative You may not know this about me, but I trained as an artist and am a painter (although I don’t get to practice much these days). One of my sketches is the header image of this article (no AI here!)....
by Dave Hayward | Nov 30, 2024 | AI, Creativity, Productivity, Strategy
Imagine producing work that is 40% higher quality. In his visit to New Zealand earlier in the year, Section’s Greg Shove described the concept of “AI personas”: a way of thinking about how AI works and what kind of use cases it can be applied to....
by Dave Hayward | Nov 20, 2024 | AI, Conference, product, Product marketing, Productivity, Public speaking
Some of the brightest brains in tech are not AI experts yet. I left Spark Accelerate last week with my head hurting from trying to retain all the information generated by the incredible speakers and content. One of the standouts was Edmundo Ortega’s keynote, “An...
