A Day Well Spent with Leyla Kazim

Spending most of your day doing something you don’t actually want to do is the least intelligent thing a person can do.I know this because I did it for years. And I felt pretty dumb for it as a result.Over a decade ago, I parked my shiny blue BMW outside the office, turned off the engine and realised I couldn’t remember a thing about how I’d got there. 25 minutes of commandeering a massive machine down roads and through southwest London traffic lights, gone.I had driven the whole way on autopilot. This happened on more days than I would like to admit.A reader recently emailed me the perfect word for this: presenteeism. I was showing up for the sake of showing up because that is what I needed to do to keep being paid. My brain didn’t engage until at least a couple of hours later, if at all.In 2014, I walked out of that office for the last time. Since then, I’ve built a life around the things I love: food, writing, being outdoors. That lead to presenting on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme, becoming a critic on MasterChef, and a debut book that sold out in three weeks.Then last year, my husband and I moved to rural Portugal to live a life closer to the land, starting with building an eco-home.I tell you this because all of it began with what could be the most important question you will ever ask yourself: what do I actually want my life to look like?The definition of smart a Stanford lecturer swears byStanford lecturer Graham Weaver once heard a friend say something about intelligence that stopped him in his tracks: The truest form of intelligence is designing the life you want to live.Read that again.How many people do you know who are actually living their ideal life? I’ll wager not many. Which is why this form of intelligence is so true and so rare.We have always been taught that intelligence is measured with degrees, IQ, letters after your name, fancy job titles. These markers were supposed to automatically buy you a good life.They don’t.A review of 23 studies found that there is no link between a person’s IQ and how happy they are. 75% of top executives say they’re seriously considering quitting for a job that’s better for their wellbeing. And students in England are leaving university today with both a degree and an eye-watering debt of around £53,000, while graduate job adverts have nearly halved in the past year.But Weaver’s line skips a critical step. Because before you can design the life you want, you need to notice that something is wrong in the first place.Most people are sleepwalking through life. They’re on autopilot. They’re too distracted to see how absurd the default script we are all following is. (I would know, I couldn’t even remember getting to work.)Think of a rogue shopping trolley. No one’s behind it but it keeps rolling along the carpark tarmac until something stops it, usually the side of a car. This is inertia. Things will keep doing whatever they are already doing, whether that’s being still or moving, until a force acts on them.Our lives follow the same principle. The default script that gave us a push early on will remain the default we continue to trundle along for decades, unless something knocks us onto a more fulfilling path that doesn’t involve a wing mirror. That something can be you.So if you’ve never met the traditional markers of intelligence, this is for you. Because if you recognise yourself in the signs below, you are awake. Which means, you could already have the rarest kind of intelligence there is without even realising it. You just might not have started the designing bit yet.Here are signs you have this true and rare intelligence and a first micro-step for each to start designing the life you want to live.1. You are aware the default script is absurd.Most people are not satisfied. They’re grinding through the daily motions, no excitement, no zest for life, not working towards anything meaningful. And the insidious thing about that is, because everyone else is doing the same, it seems normal.‘This is just how life is! We all have to suck it up and carry on!’ people will say.Incorrect.Maybe you’ve felt it on a packed platform in the rain at 7.40am. Or when you realised you work five days a week only to see your kid for an hour in the evening and at weekends. Or when you wondered if there’s more to life than working all hours until you’re 65 and only then starting to enjoy it.If you’ve ever looked at a life and thought this is f*****g absurd, you are right. That thought is the intelligence. As a friend once said to me, ‘You don’t even realise you’re a sheep doing the same as everyone else until you finally see how unfulfilling the societal norm is.’Nothing changes until someone notices. And once you have, one of life’s best hacks is actually quite simple: do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. If most people aren’t satisfied, doing what they do will almost certainly lead to the same result.Try this: for the next week identify something you only do because everyone else does it. Eating lunch at your desk, scrolling on the sofa every evening, saying yes to the Friday drinks you dread. Do the opposite, observe how it feels and write this down.2. You resent needing to ask for permission.Let’s take a moment to acknowledge how absolutely wild it is that in the working world, you as an adult need permission to leave the building.To go to a doctor’s appointment. To take half a day for a school meeting. To go for a walk in the afternoon to think through a problem, even if you’ve already had lunch. Without someone thinking you’re slacking. I often hear offices referred to as day care for adults; it’s not wrong.Traditional corporate life defines the hours within which you must achieve the agreed deliverables, instead of treating employees like adults and just letting them decide when to do the work themselves.Then there’s the commute. Spending money and time moving your entire self across town during the same small window as millions of others. For a job that can more often than not be done from home.Someone make it make sense.A University of Birmingham study of 20,000 employees found that people with more control over their tasks and schedule reported better wellbeing and job satisfaction. It also found that many managers still won’t hand that control over because, as the researchers put it, the role of managers remains one of ‘control and effort extraction’.Control. And extraction. Jesus.One of my biggest luxuries is deciding at 2pm that I’m going to work out. I don’t have to ask anyone. I don’t have to skip the cooldown to be ‘back at my desk’ in time. I don’t have to rush through the whole thing (god I hate being rushed). This is modern day luxury.Try this: pick one thing you would normally ask permission for, and stop asking. Put a walk in your calendar and just go. If anyone says anything, tell them to do one.3. You know spending most of your life doing what you don’t want to do makes no sense.People who design the lives they want to live spend the majority of their time doing what they want to be doing. I don’t mean 52% of the time. I mean the vast majority of their time.They quite simply refuse to do things they don’t want to do. They aren’t sitting at a desk all day doing a job they hate, because this is madness.For example right now, I’m working longer hours than I have in years because I’m building something new that helps people. It has lit a fire in me and it’s exactly what I want to be doing.Office work, raising families, long hours — any aspect of life — is all fine, if you have actively chosen it. It’s when these lives are being lived by default, or only to meet the expectations of others, that problems start to arise.Try this: tomorrow, write down how you spend your day, hour by hour. Put a tick next to every hour where you actually wanted to be doing the thing. The number of ticks shows you how much of that day was yours. Then, this week, turn one hour without a tick into one with a tick.4… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leylakazim.substack.com/subscribe

Every time you can’t wait, a billionaire gets richer.You make a Thursday 9pm impulse buy. Why not, it’s basically the weekend. It’s been a tough week. You deserve it. Five minutes pass and you’ve refreshed the tracker twice. It tells you it’s arriving in two days.You could put the phone down and get on with your evening. Instead, it slips out.‘Two days..? For f***s sake.’You catch yourself and wonder, what you have become.Welcome to what I call the Death of Patience i.e. the point in your life where you realise you need everything now, from deliveries to results. Not in two days. In an hour, max.You might think you’re just an impatient person. Or spoilt. Or one of those people who just can’t sit still.This is all false. What has in fact happened is your brain has been conditioned. And thank god for that, because conditioning can be reversed.The bizarre brain science of why 2 days feels like foreverLet’s start with the science because none of this is about your character. Any brain will do this when you feed it speed all day.Your brain’s reward system has been working overtime. It runs on dopamine and the neuroscientist Kent Berridge says it’s about wanting the thing more than it is about enjoying the thing.All waiting is the gap between desire and getting. And in today’s world, this gap has shrunk to near non-existence.The psychiatrist Anna Lembke wrote Dopamine Nation and she says pleasure and pain work like a seesaw.When you get something you enjoy, like a mini Mars from a Celebrations tin, the seesaw tips towards pleasure. Then your brain pushes it back down the other side to level things out.It’s the push the other way that is the craving for another hit, when you say ‘oh, I want a second mini Mars — right now’.If you ignore the immediate craving, the seesaw will settle by itself. In Lembke’s words, ‘if I wait long enough, that feeling passes.’But if you satisfy a desire the moment one arises, the seesaw never gets the chance to balance itself out. Lembke says that over time, it stays tipped towards the pain side. So you feel more irritable and anxious and you need more Celebrations just to feel normal.This is what never waiting does to us. It leaves us with a shorter fuse.Why most of us lose our patience in 25 secondsThink about how many gaps between wanting and getting you unconsciously minimise in a standard day.Stopping the microwave with three seconds to go. Jabbing ‘close doors’ in the lift. Switching queues. Skipping the intro. Paying extra for next-day delivery. Buying the plant already in flower. I’ve done, and still do, many of these things.In a survey of 2,000 British people, a red traffic light started to agitate after just 25 seconds.There’s a concept in behavioural economics called hyperbolic discounting, where you choose the smaller reward now over a bigger win later. It’s fine to sometimes do this. But what we don’t talk about enough is a world where every reward is now.After a million moments where our modern world has made it easier than ever to close the gap between desire and obtaining, something in your reward system gives.Your tolerance for any wait starts to collapse, because your brain was never built to have every want and whim met immediately, often with with zero effort.Don’t worry, your brain is fine. It has simply adapted to a world where there’s no waiting anymore.The forgotten joy of waiting a week for your holiday snapsEveryone’s capacity to wait is dissolving. But those of us who remember when all good things took time often feel the loss more acutely. And there’s a reason for this.I’m old enough to remember taking a film of holiday snaps to Boots and having to wait a week to pick them up. You had no idea what any of them looked like until you opened the envelope, usually on the pavement because you couldn’t wait another second, and at least 1 in 10 had your Dad’s thumb covering part of the lens.But it didn’t matter. Because opening that envelope was one of the best parts of the holiday. Waiting was built into normal life and the rewards were all the better for it.By the time you’re a fully fledged adult, you’ve had decades of this need-for-speed conditioning:* ‘Don’t miss out’ (translation: don’t take the time to decide)* ’Don’t cook tonight’ (translation: don’t spend an hour on a nourishing meal)* ‘Don’t put your plans on hold’ (translation: don’t wait until you can afford it)* ‘Don’t go anywhere’ (translation: don’t wait for the next one, it’s already starting)You’ve been living at the modern world’s breakneck speed for so long that it’s become the default. And you’re not even aware it’s happening.Until one day you wake up and suddenly realise, you’ve completely run out of patience.4 sneaky ways modern life made waiting feel unbearableSeveral shifts in modern life have come together to make waiting for anything feel unbearable.Shortcuts everywhere. Everything now has a faster or easier version. My Gmail keeps trying to get AI to ‘correct’ my emails. Supermarkets sell pre-chopped onions. When there’s always a quicker option available, the slower one starts to feel like it’s broken. Even when it’s better.Results on demand. We expect to see results instantly. We work out twice then give up because the bingo wings are still there. I once tweeted about how cool I thought it was that I could have a fresh sourdough loaf within 48 hours of deciding to make it, and someone replied: ‘I could never wait that long for bread.’ I remember wondering if they were being serious or not. Two days was apparently too long for something slow-fermented, handmade and more delicious and nutritious because of it.Reward on tap. Likes, notifications, episode drops, express parcels on your doorstep. These arrive all day every day. So the slow rewards (fermenting bread, knitting a jumper, growing a fruit tree, reading the entire book) struggle to compete. Not exactly a fair fight.No more seasons. Who are these people buying strawberries in December? Asparagus is now available all year. We used to wait months for the first of anything in season and it tasted better for the wait. Now nothing feels like a treat because nothing ever runs out. Imagine knowing we would all live forever. Life would be dull as f**k.Why wanting to wait makes you seem strange (and who profits from this)The thing that makes clawing your patience back uncomfortable is that other people will find it weird.When you choose the slow, more effortful way, you’re stepping out of a system that profits from none of us waiting. And instead of asking why that system needs us all in such a hurry, it’s easier for people to instead question you.So you can be accused of:* ‘Living in the past’* ‘Having too much time on your hands’* ‘Having the wrong priorities’If someone trains 18 months to run a marathon, they’re seen as dedicated. But spend a week waiting for a jar of pickles to perfectly sour, and you’re seen as a bit odd.People still ask me, ‘What’s the point in learning how to make sourdough that takes two days, when you can just buy sourdough?’ and ‘What’s the point in growing a tomato plant for six months, when you can just buy the tomatoes?’ These questions come straight out of the system, because why do anything for yourself when you can just pay to skip that part?It’s not your job to fix the discomfort of others. It simply illustrates how well the system works. Waiting has been made to feel so unbearable that most of us will happily pay to never have to do it again. And this is by design.The 4 fears that keep you paying for the quick fixBut there is a complication. Which is that waiting feels risky.You’ve been sold the instant version of everything for much of your life. Same-day. Express. Ready in minutes.It creates a positive feedback loop. You want something, you get it immediately, you bask in the dopamine hit, and next time you want it even sooner. It’s a powerful loop and you’re about to break the f****r.So, you might be afraid that:* You’ll fall behind (e… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leylakazim.substack.com/subscribe

Aging causes problems.But one of the positive things about getting older is we also get wiser. This is the case for me. I even have a Staff of Wisdom stick I like to grasp during my moments of clarity.I’ve experienced my own fair share of bumps in the road – running away from home, failing my first year at uni, victim of fraud, a tragic family accident, rejected job applications, having my phone snatched (then chasing the guy through London’s Soho), existential crisis, rejected property bids, drops in income, quitting corporate with no plan, etc.I’m not special but these experiences have given me some important lessons to share with anyone approaching, or in, midlife (feel free to forward it to them as well).1. When you turn 35 you’ll see the difference between those who did uncomfortable things and those who didn’t.How old you feel comes down to how much discomfort you seek out.Being comfortable means you don’t grow and this ages you faster. You live decade after decade exactly the same until you arrive at your later years and realise you never met yourself at your full potential.This is the ultimate modern day tragedy.If you’re reading this and not making yourself intentionally uncomfortable multiple times a day, wake up. Stay in the ice cold lake long enough to find out what’s on the other side of the shock.2. Working for yourself isn’t the end of financial security, it’s the beginning. The freedom will fuel your future.People told me at 20 that working for yourself was a bad idea.‘You will never be financially secure! You will stress about money all the time!’B******t.Not having a boss and being responsible for your own income is hard. I spend most of my time working on my shop window so people can actually see what I do, often late into the evenings.But it’s also unbelievably liberating. I could never go back. I’m also never going to fire myself.Being responsible for my own income and funnelling my energy into my own growth makes me feel empowered and excited.Sure, I get stressed. But working harder and more hours on the thing I’m meant to be doing is far less exhausting than grinding the 9-5. Don’t rule out this option without thinking it through.Nothing worth doing was ever easy. Choose your hard.3. Doing more for yourself is the fastest way to become fearless.I’ve felt a bit down recently.After interacting with hundreds of people online, I’m beginning to lose hope in society. It feels like everyone is drowning in fear.* They complain* Think narrowly* Don’t invest in their future* Stay stuck* Have a short-term outlook* Don’t learn new skills* Get sucked into a victim mindset* See effort as grind culture and convenience as their birth right* Chase a life with no frictionBut mostly I am noticing their mindset is just out of whack. It’s skewed to feeling powerless over many aspects of their life and future. I can make these honest observations because I’ve experienced each of them.The truth is, if you don’t figure this stuff out it will hold you back and keep you stuck. Which no one will care about. But it means you’ll feel like you never have enough time and have no say over your life.The only solution I’ve found is to go from being clueless about a lot of stuff to learning new skills at every opportunity. Which means doing as much as possible for myself.Worship the act of upskilling. It saved me and can save anyone.I believe that one of the main factors contributing to the sense of panic that often sets in... is the realisation that we no longer have many of the basic skills our grandparents took for granted... Very often in modern society people feel disempowered, such that even changing an incandescent light bulb for a low-energy one is too much effort. Your Great Reskilling should give people a sense of the power of solving problems, of practically doing things rather than just talking about them, and of the sense of belonging that comes from working alongside other people. Above all it should be fun. – Rob Hopkins4. Raise your vibrational energy so high people assume you’ve joined a cult. Stuff being low vibe.When you reject being low vibe, people assume you’ve joined a cult.This is a coping mechanism. It helps them feel better about their day to day life. People tell themselves convincing excuses for not changing their situation and instead settling for the default. The bad news is the mind is highly skilled at deluding you.When you raise your vibrational energy the universe conspires to work in your favour.You are lead to doors and they open before you. Low vibe habits quickly become undesirable. So there’s little requirement to buy stuff you don’t need, count down to Friday and sit around waiting for life to just happen to you.As long as you commit to higher than normal vibrational energy, the positive side effects are guaranteed and they are major. More clarity, time, agency, energy, direction, purpose and fulfilment.5. Never follow the default script. It’s full of unrealised potential and has the most monotony.Go to uni, fall into a job you don’t care about, get into debt, get married, have kids, work until you’re 65 before you can start enjoying your freedom.This is the default script.The way I discovered I was following this script was when I realised I was not fulfilling my potential. Time at my desk warped in both directions. City life felt stifling. I didn’t have the space to nurture my dreams.I would get mildly excited about a work conference because one night in a s**t Holiday Inn at least meant something slightly different to a typical Tuesday. It added a bit of variety (which infuriated me).The key is to resist the story we sell ourselves that the default path handed to us by societal conditioning, is always the right one. For a lot of people, it is not.6. One of the truest forms of intelligence is designing the life that you want to live.We’ve been getting intelligence all wrong (me included).Fancy degree. High IQ. Letters after your name. This is what we’ve always been told smart looks like.But some of the traditionally cleverest people I know are climbing ladders they couldn’t care less about. Waking up and just going through the motions. Meeting other people’s expectations.Stanford lecturer Graham Weaver once heard a friend say the truest form of intelligence is designing the life you want to live. He calls it the truest thing he’s ever heard about intelligence.Agreed.7. As you get older you’ll want to leave the city behind. It’s normal.When you’re young you want to be in the thick of the action.So you choose to live in Zone 3 and no more than a 15 minute walk from a London Underground station. Later in life, you don’t give a toss about getting the night tube home, so where you want to live changes.When I lived in the city I could get public transport all the way to the airport and hear the neighbour three houses away blowing his nose in the shower. But at 41 with a desire to be surrounded by nature literally all of the time, this type of location is now undesirable.The environment you want to be in changes in each phase of life. Still choosing your postcode based on its distance to a bakery selling £6 cardamom buns is one step away from re-mortgaging the house.It’s OK to move to a different location. It doesn’t mean you’ll never visit again. And you’ll often appreciate it more.8. The more failures you survive the more unstoppable you become.I’ve had my fair share of failures.I failed my first year at uni. In my first year working for myself I earned £8,376. We spent years failing to buy land in the UK.I had always seen failures as bad. Now I see them for the valuable assets they are, data points to help you determine what to try next. These failures forced me to develop the tool of positive reframing and acquire skills most didn’t have.Being able to shrug off a failure with an ‘oh well’ and still get on with your life feels a bit like a superpower. What’s worse is not even trying in the first place (the def… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leylakazim.substack.com/subscribe

I make my own laundry detergent out of conkers I forage from the park. I do this because every time I learn to make, do or grow something myself, I feel high.Like flying all the way to Jupiter high.It started with a tomato. The day I grew my first was the day I stopped trying to control the future.I’m on the balcony of an apartment I’m sharing with a friend in southwest London. It’s 2008. I notice a tiny green ball has appeared where a small yellow flower had been days before. It’s my first ever tomato and I’ve grown the damn thing entirely by myself. It feels huge, at a primal level.It made me feel like I had more control over my wellbeing and my future.That I was better equipped to provide for myself and my community.It made me feel less fragile.That cherry unleashed something I’ve been unable to put back in its cage since. A slow burn obsession to find out how much of my own life can I actually look after, myself. Because increased self-reliance is one of the most empowering feelings that exists and getting that first hit changed my life forever.(fair warning: it’s addictive)And it’s a feeling people are desperately searching for right now.The things you can’t control are stealing the things you canI may be crucified for saying this but your actions are never going to:* fix the economy* end war* pull the planet's climate out of the toilet* make governments accountableAccepting that is strangely freeing. Letting go of the huge things you can't affect is the only sane move because they are not yours to fix.If you don't do this, a problem will form. You'll be left trying to blindly feel your way out of a thick cloud of helplessness. And like the iodine dye injected before a CT scan, this feeling floods the entire body. It spreads to every other part of your life and the most dangerous place it infiltrates are the small things within your sphere of influence that you can actually affect.The result is you adopt a victim mindset and become paralysed by the 'it's all out of my hands!' rhetoric, shovelling ice cream while binging Netflix instead of doing one small thing actually within your power.So I'm here to convince you of something that's embarrassingly small, something you could do this exact week to claw back a bit of control while everything else seems to spiral.I want to convince you to grow a fruit tree. Even with no garden. And that doing so is a radical act and a more serious answer to all. the. dread. than it may first seem.The thing almost everyone is getting backwardsWhen the future feels uncertain, the instinct is to make yourself more useful to the system. Work harder, get more qualifications, stay employable, climb to higher ground. Basically make it more difficult for someone to ‘let you go’. Which means you get yourself tangled even tighter into the system's web as a defence mechanism.This is the complete wrong direction to go in. Because the most effective way to future proof yourself is to depend less on the system in the first place.I'm not talking about cutting yourself off from the outside world and surviving in a desert island bunker and fashioning your shoes out of tree bark levels of self-sufficient.I'm talking about self-reliance. Which is depending a bit less on the systems that don't really serve you and a bit more on yourself. Building what I like to call pockets of self-reliance, small corners of your life that answer to the self-directed actions of you only and no one else.Empty supermarket shelves were a warning, not a one-offThere's a principle from how systems are built that explains why depending less on them actually makes you stronger.You can tune a system for efficiency or you can build it for resilience. More of one means less of the other. Tuning for efficiency strips out every bit of slack and buffer. It means no back up and no spare parts. But what you do have is something extremely lean, cheap and it runs beautifully.Until it doesn't.A good example of a system tuned for efficiency is our globalised food system. When conditions are optimal it's extremely impressive and few people ever stop to think about how it works. Huge supermarkets are always piled high with food from all corners of the planet. The logistics are wild. We take it for granted.But chuck a spanner in the works – pandemic, war, extreme weather event – and the system's lack of resilience is laid bare.It runs 'just in time' meaning every lorry and warehouse is tuned to carry the precise amount of food exactly when it's needed. And nothing more. The UK imports 80% of its fruit and almost half of all its vegetables, much of it from countries more exposed to climate change than we are.– The Food Foundation (2026), drawing on Defra and HMRC data.A small wobble in how people behaved during the pandemic was enough to empty the shelves and make headlines. If you build in some reserve from the start, the system bends instead of breaking. It costs more, but it also survives more.Growing some of your own food is putting a small piece of slack back into your own life. Obviously, you’re not going to be replacing Tesco anytime soon. But you will be slightly less dependent on a system you can neither control nor fix.Skills are the new currencyFor most of our lifetimes the safest and most secure work was the kind detached from the physical world. The person with a spreadsheet and immaculate mani was considered higher status to the one with a weather beaten brow working in the fields who could actually grow, build and fix. They were also better paid.I think this is going to flip. The robots are now terrifyingly good at abstract work like analysing, coding, summarising, writing. Entire careers that were built around sitting in front of a screen are starting to buckle.The skills that will be most highly valued in the future are those rooted in a real body and in a real place. And once you learn a skill, it cannot be taken from you. No one can fire you from knowing how to grow food. No one can replace your knowledge with a younger and cheaper model, or restructure the wisdom out of your brain, or decide on a random Friday at 3pm that it's been automated and you're no longer needed.Skills are capabilities and they live within you.‘The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.’— B.B. KingEven if the machines do end up doing 99% of what we currently do, the person who knows how to meet even a few of their own basic needs is in a fundamentally different starting block from the person who doesn't.And this is largely psychological. Because there is a deep and grounding power in knowing you are not completely reliant on a tangle of complex, inter-dependent and brittle systems to keep you alive. That you can step out of them, at least to some extent. That some small but essential part of being responsible for yourself answers to you only and not an algorithm or an employer or a supply chain.This is a seismic psychological shift and more valuable than a handful of cherry tomatoes and three radishes.You have fewer excuses than you thinkWhen I first got my small London garden one of my dreams was to be able to pick fresh raspberries on a summer morning to add to my granola. I couldn’t think of anything more amazing. It was a life goal. So I bought a handful of canes and shoved them in the ground in different spots to see what would happen.I watered them. I talked to them. Three quarters of the canes died.I was kind of devastated. I thought about filing this under ‘cannot grow raspberries’ and sulking in a corner for the reast of the growing season.But one spot survived. An east facing corner by the house that stayed cool and never dried out, which turned into a patch that bestowed upon me literal kilos of perfect raspberries year after year, fed on nothing more than used coffee grounds. I didn’t even water it.That scrappy patch was part of the reason a BBC Gardeners’ World crew came to film my postage stamp of a wildflower meadow, wildlife… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leylakazim.substack.com/subscribe

On Wednesday 25th March, JP Watson, founder of independent publishers The Pound Project, interviewed myself and Natalie Lue about our powerful titles from 2025: Pathways and Let Go. We discussed the origins of our books, how a pitch and idea became a reality, our writing process and where our ideas are taking us next. And in case you missed either of our limited edition books when they were on sale, JP is kindly re-opening the chance to purchase copies again — which is a real treat. Because they are otherwise totally unavailable to buy anymore. Just drop him an email at [email protected] if you’d like a copy.All three of us would love to hear what you thought about this conversation!For those who are new around hereLet me tell you a bit about my two-part debut book Pathways, that sold out in just three weeks back in June 2025.After spending my entire life living in London — the only city I had ever called home — I began to feel the pull towards a radically different life. Modern living makes us anxious, exhausted and physically unwell. I craved something my bones knew deeply: to grow my own food, to live in harmony with Nature, and to be guided by the sun and seasons. As opposed to strip lighting and spreadsheets. So, my husband and I spent years searching for land, until we found it — a 3 acre plot in the Portuguese countryside, 40 minutes north of Lisbon. We moved to the region in August 2025 and are currently living in rented accommodation. We will soon start building our eco-house in the footprint of an existing ruin and cultivating the land to produce much of our own food. It’s a long game. And whilst we’re still right at the start of this journey, so much has happened since the book came out.Book 1, Pathways: To The LandConsider any aspect of the current human experience and there’s a very good reason for doing things differently. This book is an honest look at the absurdities of modern life and why I quit the only way of living I’ve known, to pursue a very different one in rural Portugal.Book 2, Pathways: To Purposeful LivingA series of mini essays and thought exercises to help us face a simple question: how can we cut through the noise to identify the things that make us feel good and fulfilled?I’m Leyla. I write about becoming aware of the systems that do not serve you and reclaiming your energy, amongst other things. I send this once a week to 9000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.If this conversation landed, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And hit the ❤️ so Substack shows it to more people. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leylakazim.substack.com/subscribe

An interview with Leyla Kazim as part of Rosie Birkett's Kitchen Hang series. We talk about the potency of herbal remedies, conscious community farming, DIY domestic flour mills (and more of Leyla's niche kitchen gadgets), the art of patience in permaculture and Leyla's recent big announcement about her imminent life-changing move to become a small scale farmer in Portugal.📕Pathways is Leyla Kazim's debut book, a two-part limited edition special with independent publisher The Pound Project.Part memoir, part manifesto, part guide, this book chronicles my decision to leave the only life I've known to answer a calling to live off the land in rural Portugal. It's an honest look at the absurdities of modern life and how we can cut through the noise to pursue a more fulfilling existence.Pathways is on sale now for a limited time only, until 27th May 2025. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leylakazim.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this podcast on A Day Well Spent with Leyla Kazim, a Substack for people seeking pathways to purposeful living! If you’re reading this by chance and are not yet subscribed, allow me to help you with that - just enter your email here. Doing so will ensure you never miss my twice weekly posts (Thursdays and Sundays).In today's conversation I speak with Charlie Morley, a lucid dreaming teacher and bestselling author who helps people wake up in their dreams and harness the power of sleep for psychological growth. Charlie formally became a Buddhist at the age of 19 and has been lucid dreaming for over 20 years - he was “authorised to teach” lucid dreaming within the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism in 2008. Since then he has written four books and has run workshops and retreats in more than 30 countries.Charlie lives in London, next door to the Buddhist centre with his mini-dachshund called Waffles and its in his apartment where we had this chat. I came across one of Charlie's books on lucid dreaming a few years ago and I've found the subject - and the potential of it for personal fulfilment and growth - to be completely fascinating and such an untapped resource. I really hope you enjoy this interview with Charlie as much as I do.In this conversation we talk about what lucid dreaming is, why it's something we might want to do more of, what's so great about it, Charlie's background and how he became a lucid dreaming teacher, his personal examples of how lucid dreaming has helped him answer big life questions, how we can make ourselves become lucid whilst dreaming, whether lucid dreaming is just for the spiritually inclined, and so much more!As always, I (we!) would love to hear your thoughts - you can join the conversation here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leylakazim.substack.com/subscribe