If you’d rather listen to this newsletter, click here. This week we’re talking deep stuff that few of us will acknowledge, even to ourselves, but most of us have experienced: fear of failure. That paralysing conviction that you’ll never be able to do this, whatever “this” is. You’ll never understand calculus, or the Middle English poem you have … 11 May 2026 – Fear of Failure

If you’d rather listen to this newsletter, click here. We hear about misinformation and fake news every day. People lose money to scammers. It seems like you cannot trust anything or anybody. How can you know what to believe? How do you evaluate information? It may sound weird, but the first step is to trust yourself. Trust your common sense. … 04 May 2026 – Handling Information: Staying Safe Online

If you’d rather listen to this newsletter, click here. If you have been using the section on study methods in GRAD, you will have come across the name of Dr Barbara Oakley. She’s the one who failed Mathematics in high school and yet became a professor of Engineering after she upgraded her Maths using knowledge from brain science … 27 April 2026 – Working with AI to Study more Effectively

If you’d rather listen to this newsletter, click here. We’re well into the academic year. Even those of you who had never met a computer before coming to university, know that computers and the digital world are an essential, very rich part of this new journey. Use it. Always try and learn more. As you get used to Excel … 20 April 2026 – Handling Information 2: Digital Literacy using AI

If you’d rather listen to this newsletter, click here. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll talk about information in all shapes and sizes. We’ll talk about digital literacy. We’ll talk about AI and how to use it to advance your studies. We’ll talk about staying safe online. It’s a big subject and there’s a lot to think … 13 April 2026 – Handling Information 1: The Basics

If you’d rather listen to this newsletter, click here. Wendy Selebi is a financial coach, an author and a podcaster. Do read her book that she’s holding in the picture: I wish someone had told me. She used to work at one of the big banks, with a big job and a big salary. At 50, … 06 April 2026 – Managing Money 4: Build a Happy Retirement from Day 1

If you’d rather listen to this newsletter, click here. I know, I know, you see the heading above and you say to yourself, “I’m barely making ends meet and they want me to SAVE? Really?” Please keep reading. Let’s see if we can shift your view just a little bit. There are three levels of saving, or three … 30 March 2026 – Managing Money 3: Saving as the Key to Self-empowerment

If you’d rather listen to this newsletter, click here. How are you getting on with drawing up your budget and keeping track of expenses? I have an excel file on my computer named “My money”. It now runs from July 2014 till this month! (Before 2014 we didn’t have cloud storage, so those files are lost.) … 23 March 2026 – Managing Money 2: Good Debt, Bad Dept

If you’d rather listen to this newsletter, click here. You probably think you have so little, there’s no point in thinking about “managing” it. Only rich people do that, right? Wrong. Smart money principles will help you to stretch your money now, and if you manage it well, you will enter the working world without unmanageable debt, ready … 16 March 2026 – Managing Money 1: Make a Budget

If you’d rather listen to this newsletter, click here. In these first newsletters of the year, we are discussing the basic building blocks for finding order in your life, for the rest of your life. This is worth thinking through – it will make your life much easier and less stressful, so that you don’t end … 09 March 2026 – What to do First