Hi, it’s Shoo here. The Certain Way is a book and philosophy born from a lifetime of making, thinking, and starting over. There are no promises – just the quiet discipline of focused thought and steady direction. It’s worked for me. It might work for you. Start here…
After my last post about the problem of abundance, I made a video talking about the same subject. I mentioned that I’d been taught scripture as a child at boarding school by the late Archbishop Tutu, who was then the curate at the local church in England. I had a comment on the video this morning from @Stan_sprinkle who wrote: “As the Tim Minchin lyric goes, “I’d rather break bread with Dawkins than Desmond Tutu, to be honest””
That set me thinking. The word that first comes to mind when thinking about Richard Dawkins is selfish, that’s because he wrote The Selfish Gene. His idea, as I understood it, was that we are the creation and playthings of genes – material that crept out of the primordial soup and has been clinging onto existence ever since. It’s a pretty bleak idea if you base your philosophy of life on it.
I guess I did break bread with Tutu. He joined us at mealtimes and must have been head of my table at least once – that’s how we did it in those days.
It would be interesting to break bread with Richard Dawkins – though he might take issue with the religious inference in the term, breaking bread.
Dawkins has tried hard to clarify the meanig of the selfish gene. Some have taken it as an excuse to behave selfishly and badly
The Gene, through evolutionary adaptation and survival, does all it can to create systems to replicate itself, to explore and prosper in new environments. It could be argued that humans are the pinnacle of that system – though AI seems likely to supplant that position.
All the individual genes that go to make us up, are co-operating to create the human body that we exist in, creating a vessel that allows the genetic material to survive and prosper. We are mere playthings – machines – vehicles for the continuation of genetic information.
Society is a neat trick that the gene evolved to bring us together. Co-operative humans go beyond the body to create new stuff that ensures the future of the gene. So, we humans are the servants of the genetic material that created us.
In the same book, Dawkins promoted the idea of memes – ideas that work well and go viral. It’s as if the information in the genetic code had escaped and populated a different, non-physical field. It’s a field that we humans resonate within. We receive the ideas and manifest them, turning them into spades and ploughshares, spears and guns, mud huts and skyscrapers, books and the internet. Books allowed memes to travel and be sustained. The internet is like a home that we built for memes – an interface maybe?
If the meme is an evolutionary advance of the gene, are we now the servants of the meme?
Either way human co-operation is vital, both from the meme and gene’s point of view and from the human point of view – we need humans to co-operate to survive.
We’ve been trying out systems of co-operation since time immemorial, now living under a mix of Capitalism and Socialism. Both are memes.
Capitalism is all about selfishness, driven by the profit motive. Capitalism works incredibly well. It brings stuff to our doorstep with just one click – though it brings it at a cost that is usually hidden and easily ignored. In a capitalist society, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The environment is reduced and polluted.
Socialism has brought us rights and clean air and safety in numbers through welfare. But Socialism has proved problematic too. It becomes too legalistic, sclerotic, often dictatorial. In a socialist system the individual becomes swallowed up in the interests of the state. Ideas – memes – are stifled and nothing gets done.
So what if we broke bread with the late Archbishop Tutu? well, for one thing, I think there would be a lot of laughter. He was a light-hearted, funny man. But also a deep and serious thinker.
Tim Minchin is a vocal atheist, so let’s think about what Desmond Tutu, the man, is famous for beyond his religious life.
It was he that ran the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa at the end of apartheid. His leadership of the commission, it can be argued, prevented a bloodbath of revenge. (We must also take into account the extraordinary philosophy and leadership of Nelson Mandela.)
Tutu was a man of the cloth, but he was also imbibed with the meme of Ubuntu, and it was that philosophy that drove the TRC. It led to admissions of guilt, forgiveness, a coming together, understanding and revealed, literally, where the bodies were hidden.
Ubuntu is an understanding that society is made up from individuals who all have their talents and foibles. It’s not “I am the same as we are,” but “I am because we are.” in Ubuntu, you need your own distinct identity to contribute your part to the whole.
In any community there are people who are irritating, annoying, different. But if we can begin with the truth – Yes, I am irritating, I have these ideas and do these things, perhaps there can be reconciliation – Okay, you do make the best Pizza in the world, so we will try to accept your ways and maybe you can have a think about the impact your ways have on others and soften them or change them?
It’s a live and let live kind of way of thinking, but also one of service – providing what you have for the betterment of the community.
In 1919 Wallace Wattles wrote his influential book, The Science of Getting Rich, which distilled many philosophical ideas into a practical way of living a prosperous life.
The book had a huge effect on me – so much so that I rewrote it for the 21st Century – it’s called The Certain Way
Wattles’ way is somewhere in the middle of all three philosophies – Capitalism, Socialism and Ubuntu. His main recipe for prosperity is service – to give more in use value than the cash value asked for it.
That sounds capitalistic, but the emphasis is not on profit but on service. Profit is built in – the riches come as a by-product. The desire and lust for wealth is not the driving force – service comes first. Wealth appears – if it is needed to fund bigger and greater projects – to fill the destiny-shaped hole that surrounds us all. Some have big dreams, ideas and a sense of destiny. You need wealth to manifest big dreams.
Most of us just want to get by with a car and a TV and food on the table. If we had wealth, we wouldn’t know what to do with it – that’s why lottery winners so often end up broke.
I’d have liked to break bread with Dawkins and Tutu at the same time. Maybe a whole new viral meme would have emerged from the conversation?
We could have discussed the irony of Dawkins greatest idea – the Meme – being redefined as a cat video. The Meme going viral to devalue the brilliance of it’s origin. And we could discuss if the most successful thing those genes ever created was the human capacity for radical forgiveness and cooperation (as Tutu lived). The logic meeting the heart.
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Is gratitude still possible when we are drowning in abundance?
Can we have too much of anything or everything – are we being suffocated by stuff we never asked for in the first place?
I’m indebted to the Andrew Keen Podcast – which featured an interview with Brink Lindsey talking about his new book The Permanent Problem – for setting my mind thinking.
The famous economist, Maynard Keynes, warned us of the problems of prosperity back in the 1930’s – while still in the depths of the Great Depression – a time when Wattles’ book, The Science of Getting Rich, had a huge underground influence on righting the economy and bringing prosperity to those who followed his teachings.
What do we do when we don’t have to struggle anymore? How do we lead meaningful lives and feel grateful when we are drowning in stuff we never really wanted?
It’s a first world problem. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a serious or wounding problem. The pain is felt inside – in the heart – in the soul. A slow weakening of our resolve and If we feel we haven’t earned it, our lives feel meaningless.
The problem accelerated with Covid.
Stuck at home with nothing to do and extra cash to spend, people turned to Amazon and had stuff delivered.
Without spending the hard cash we had earned, we were divorced from the concepts of value and need.
Point, click, deliver next day. Effortless consumerism. I wonder how much of the stuff bought during covid now lies rotting in waste sites.
Having moved recently, I’ve been amazed at how little value is placed on old stuff. We couldn’t give our sofas away, either through indifference, or a preference for new stuff on credit or because charities are bound by regulation and require the correct labels before they can accept anything.
When we set up home we were grateful for anything we were given. China, tools, carpets, beds, you name it. We couldn’t afford stuff. We had fun at auctions, repurposing other people’s stuff.
Today, new home owners can’t afford to buy stuff either, but they have ridiculously easy credit thrust at them and are subject to an advertising industry that makes them feel lesser people for not having new.
Some of the tools I have in my garage are 100 years old. They belonged to my Great Uncle Percy, a bit of a DIYer in his time, I never met him, but I think about him every time I pick up the tools I inherited from him.
I use my dad’s hammer. He was so pleased the day he bought it. I can still hear him say with pride, “That’s a hickory handle.”
I just inherited my late father-in-law’s woodworking bench and loads of screws and bits and bobs – all filed away in his funny and idiosyncratic ways. They make me smile and think of him as I search the little drawers for the right screw or nut or bolt.
And those can be moments of gratitude. Gratitude for his life, the lessons I learned from him, for his daughter whom I married, for his funny, idiosyncratic ways – some of which I’ve adopted into my own way of thinking and working.
There was a time when a large percentage of the population said morning and evening prayers. Really, they were formal moments of gratitude.
There was a time when people said Grace before a meal. Grace is really a formal moment of gratitude.
Those moments of gratitude add up to the world that evolved – their future – that we now inhabit.
We seem to have no time for those moments anymore. The digital world screams at us for our attention – the noise is deafening. It disorientates us. It says, “don’t look there, look here where we can control what you choose to think.
We are addicted to scrolling and clicking. There is no time left for gratitude – a new digital link is always demanding our attention.
So what can we do?
Well, that’s what this site, My YouTube Channel and my book, The Certain Way, are about. I’m trying to figure it out and sharing my thoughts along the way.
If you feel awkward talking about prayer or grace – try a formal moment of gratitude. Not while you are brushing your teeth or doing something else. Forget about productivity systems. Gratitude is the most important thing you can work on to change the course of your life. Take time for it and it only – do not be distracted.
Gratitude is like gravity. It’s a force that appears weak, but it has extraordinary power that extends through the universe, entangling particles into a new order.
Certainty in your aims, needs, wants and wishes, create a movement towards a new reality that we call the future. With gratitude and certainty, the thought becomes the future that aligns with you and your purpose.
So you could say, that those moments of gratitude are the most important moments of your day.
In a world of noise how do you find a quiet time or place for a moment of gratitude.
You start by making the choice.
You could slow down your thinking and find a moment to read my book, The Certain Way It’s based on Wallace Wattles famous book, which I’ve updated it for the 21st century. Wattles helped me understand the world and my place in it and I hope it can do the same for others.
The Certain Way: A Tool for the 21st Century
We live in a world of “Point, Click, Deliver”. Everything is available, yet many of us feel a “wounding” sense of meaninglessness because we have been divorced from the concepts of value and earned reward.
In the 1900s, Wallace Wattles wrote a masterpiece called The Science of Getting Rich. It wasn’t just about money – it was about a specific mental and physical approach to creation. I have rewritten this classic for our modern age of digital noise and unasked-for abundance.
This book is your “Hickory Handled Hammer”.
Why this book? Why now?
Abundance has accelerated, but our happiness hasn’t. The Certain Way provides the structural foundation for a life of purpose. It is the manual for those who want to stop being “users” of the world and start being “makers” within it.
After two and a half years of waiting, planning, and more than a few weeks living like students on a mattress and in holiday rentals, we are finally in our new home.
It has been a long saga, but looking back through the lens of The Certain Way, it’s clear how things align when you have a definite purpose. Our move wasn’t just about a change of scenery; it was about being close to family. The universe seemingly took its time to ensure that when we finally landed, we ended up just two miles down the road from our daughter and granddaughter.
The View from the Spare Room Currently, I’m broadcasting from a temporary studio in what will eventually be my granddaughter’s bedroom. It’s a far cry from my old garden studio, but a core part of my philosophy is that there is no excuse to stop. You don’t need the perfect lights or a soundproof booth to share a message—you just need to “get on with the show.”
What’s Next? While I spend my days stripping bathroom tiles and digging out stubborn tree stumps to make way for a new permanent garden studio, my mind is firmly on my “second career.” I’m diving deep into:
Join the Conversation I’m curious—what is troubling you at the moment? Whether it’s about life, the universe, or the struggle of being a creator today, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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I was alive before the pocket calculator was invented! Those were the days of mechanical adding machines – like the one on the left. Occasionally, we had lessons with them at school, to introduce us to the marvel of mechanical accounting.
It was wonderfully satisfying to turn the handle and stamp the answer on the paper roll. The mechanical clunk was reward in itself – as addictive as the one-arm bandits you found in pubs and seaside attractions back then.
Then came the pocket calculator. It did amazing things like adding, subtraction, division and multiplication! It had cool light-up, numbers that glowed red for danger. If you typed in 59008 and turned it upside down, it would spell the word: Boobs – what not to like for teenage boys falling asleep at the back of the maths class – (British maths – not math)
However, using either machine, I could never make anything add up correctly. I still have trouble making sums add up today. But, the maths, rather than the arithmetic, did interest me. Maths is more philosophical than the boring computation of arithmetic.
The year after my GCSE O’levels – when I was about 17, they trialed the use of calculators in exams. Well… we were appalled! It was as if the sky had fallen in. We hadn’t been allowed them, so why should younger upstarts have the benefit?
There was serious concern nationwide. Was this was the end of maths, or even civilisation itself? If children didn’t learn their arithmetic and times tables, the world would surely grind to a halt. They’d not understand how maths worked. You need to know what’s going on under the hood to know which buttons to press.
Do we still have concerns about pocket calculators – or home computers, which were the next panic to come along? No. But wait… doesn’t this story sound the same as the concern we are having about AI today?
We question ourselves as creators. What is the point of learning to write, draw, paint and create if AI can do the work in seconds? Why invest in all that heartache and stress, building and improving creative skills, when you don’t need them anymore?
The heartache and stress are the point – that’s what makes us human. That’s where the emotion and insight come from.
Evolution, resulting in human intelligence, developed by mitigating pain and hardship. We learn though trial, error, risk and overcoming failure.
AI intelligence is statistical. The next word choice probably makes sense to us in the context.
Human intelligence is existential. The next word is chosen through lived experience and shared context. The next idea emerges from the cross-fertilisation of a lifetime of experiences.
AI knows what tends to happen.
Humans know what it costs to make wrong decisions.
AI is like a pocket calculator. If all you do is push the buttons, you become a button pusher.
If you know why you are pushing the buttons in a particular order, then you are a mathematician. You are looking for new ways to combine numbers and functions to solve human problems.
As an artist, you know why that particular line should be thinner, or why it should be a different shade of orange. Creativity comes from a lifetime of learning and experience. Humans don’t throw up images that are likely to be correct in context/ they work them out – they do the maths,as it were.
Artists working with AI are asking AI to manifest the images they have already created in their imagination.
AI can’t do it alone. It needs the prompt. Without precise prompts, AI can only hash up an amalgam of already extant art.
It is your individual experience that makes the creation worthwhile. It’s the skill, life story, knowledge, emotions, wins and setbacks, loves won and lost, friendships and enemies that count. All these things go to make you the individual you are. AI can only begin its work when you ask it – when you have already had the idea. AI output comes after it has ingested your ideas into its database and mixed them with with everything that has gone before.
AI is a tool, just like the pocket calculator. The calculator doesn’t do maths, but it can do the boring task of repetitive arithmetic. Adding columns of numbers is boring, so why not outsource the drudgery and use your brain for the real stuff… the maths – the original thinking.
Same with creativity and AI. Some parts of creativity are tedious and repetitive, like the planning of backgrounds or working out perspectives. AI can do that in a snap.
So, either become a brilliant prompter or learn to draw. Drawing gets the idea out of your head and gives AI a starting point. Show it your workings and it will know better what it is you want. After all, a picture says a thousand words.
But to get the finished article, the one you really want – do it yourself. It’s Human intelligence that will become the premium product. And you are only going to achieve that through pain, hardship, hard work, talent and a little luck.
I moved house at last – it has been a bit of a struggle, but we are her with no furniture fir two and a half weeks!
I left my old house last week and the studio in which I made all the videos on my youtube channels and where I also wrote and illustrated over 100 children’s books.
The second half of the video sees me in Derbyshire having moved, staying in a holiday cottage for a month, recovering before we move into our new house where I can begin to build a new studio!
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This week the Web changed forever with the introduction of AI browsers liker ChatGPT Atlas and Chrome with AI. Soon you will not search or browse the internet, you will ask a question and they will answer.
Very soon you will become so accustomed to the process that you will not know, or care, whether the answer is correct or even based on verifiable data. It’s the classic Silicon Valley boiling frogs strategy.
Is the is the end for independent creators?
Actually, I think this might be the beginning of something new.
I’m old enough to remember punk. Back then rock music had become so pompous and boring, the big rock bands seemed to have it all tied up.
In my teenage bedroom, I was frustrated by The Rolling Stones, Genesis, Pink Floyd and their like. In my teenage bedroom, I came up with “UgRock” – my vision of a blend of fast rock, and reggae – but I couldn’t quite enthuse any friends to join me in the experiment.
And then came the magical summer of 77. The Police came out with their blend of rock and reggae and the Sex Pistols added the outrage that set fire to the whole music scene, making it raw and exciting again.
Later, I had the same feeling at the start of the Web. Anything was possible. Write a bit of HTML and you were away – your own publisher!
There was a second wave in 97 when MP3.com began. Load up your music and start your own station – fantastic! I began a children’s story channel called Picture Book Radio. It was such fun, but so ahead of its time – there was no audience back then.
Then came YouTube – a wild-west show if ever there was one. Google took control eventually and it became a grind – all data driven algorithms – all the fun taken out of it.
I guess I was a bit of an early adopter geeky type.
Neither Facebook, Instagram or TikTok had the same grass roots excitement – they were controlled by algorithms from the start.
And now agentic AI browsers are closing everything down… or are they?
I spent a little while feeling downhearted. Where would views and clicks come from now? How would anyone ever find me or any other real human creator (Human Intelligence?) on a web of AI slop and untrustworthy answers?
Then an idea came back to me from the early 1990s
– The WEBRING.
Early search engines like Altavista and Yahoo! were quite slow and not easy to navigate, Like-minded Web Masters – as we liked to be called back then – could join a themed webring to help them be found. If you had a site all about knitting, you could add a knitting webring badge to your page. The badge had a next site button, that would take you on to the next site in the themed ring, and so you would get to sample all there was to be had on the web about knitting.
WordPress, the blogging software, is sort of there already with Jetpack plugins and enhancements – It’s only this morning that I’ve understood the potential of the WordPress Showcase – It’s a start, but it needs a lot of work and expansion.
WordPress is a wonderful way for creators to stay Sovereign – to own the farm, be the farmer and sell from the farm gate. To do what they like and never mind the algorithms.
The Showcase page or a webring plugin would bring the sites together in interest groups to be found, appreciated and, more importantly, supported.
Jetpack allows you to add funding buttons to pages, a bit like SubStack, but you can make the page all your own and not subject to the boring SubStack design. Independence is the thing.
Then we have Cloudflare, who are set up to defend creator’s sites from attack and now, more importantly from stealing content for training.
It looks to me like a punk revolution waiting to happen.
The more that AI slop drowns the web and the more that real people realise they are not being served properly or honestly by AI or algorithms, the more they will start searching for real human intelligence.
Let’s be there, ready and waiting for them.
Are you ready for it? Let me know.
In this personal response to Chapter 6 of The Certain Way, I reflect on my own creative journey — from being a frustrated illustrator to finding the path that actually worked.
You’ll hear about the lessons I learned buying a watch, launching a YouTube channel, and selling a piece of software at a car boot sale — and how each moment reinforced the same truth: riches don’t come from wishing. They come when you act, when you open up the channels, and when you become useful.
This chapter is the turning point. It’s where vision becomes action. Watch the video, read the chapter, and then take your next step.
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Not by magic. Not by luck. Not by taking from others.
In this chapter 6 response of The Certain Way, I explain the real mechanism behind wealth: giving more in use value than you take in payment – and aligning your intention with nature’s own drive for fuller expression.
You’ll learn why asking for more is not greedy, but essential… and why nature wants you to live richly, fully, and creatively. There’s a story in here – about a man who asked for a rug and a stove and ended up with his dream home. It might just change how you ask, too.
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Chapter 4 of The Certain Way tackles one of the most ancient questions of all: where does everything come from? Not just wealth or success but the very fabric of life itself.
In this chapter, we explore the idea that everything begins with thought, and that thought, when focused and held with certainty, impresses itself into the formless substance that underlies all things. This isn’t mysticism. It’s a principle of nature – the way life grows, evolves, and brings new forms into being.
You are not separate from this process. You’re a part of it. Your mind is not just a receiver – it’s a creative agent in a larger intelligent field. Learning to think clearly, consistently, and with purpose is the first step in creating real, lasting wealth – not through hustle, but through alignment with natural law.
This chapter marks a turning point in the book, from understanding why to learning how.
Read it slowly. Come back to it often. Let it shape the way you think.
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