Loving to fail

There’s few things that concerns a teenage boy. Usually the list is along the lines of 

  • Eat lots
  • Do well enough at school to pass
  • Try and impress the girl you like for that week/month.

Today I was reminded of an experience centred around that last point and our theme for the week on failure. There was this girl, I thought she was rather attractive, she knew my name (which is a plus), and we could even hold a small conversation. The only strange thing was, she wasn’t really into boys at the time, let alone me. 

Her birthday was coming up and one of mates thought a big romantic gesture would be sure to move the needle in my favour. However I probably should have been skeptical with the way he [would] have phrased it “girls love flowers and romantic shit”.

It wasn’t until much later in life I discovered the words of Tim Kreider and as an outsider looking onto a situation like the one unfolding how his words ring true.

There’s a fine line between the bold romantic gesture and stalking. The tricky crux of the matter is the it depends to a great extent on how that gesture is going to be received — which factor, unfortunately the impetuous suitor/obsessed stalker has lost all ability to gauge 

Tim Kreider

Here was the plan, buy a single red rose from one of the local flower shops, get a girly card and give it to her on her birthday before school. 

It’s almost like the start of a bad joke “three boys walk into a flower shop…” But that’s what we did, paid the $7 for a single flower and left. Somehow we managed to carry it back to school and home again. Then back to school the following day on my bike without crushing and killing it.

So with great nervousness I waited, and waited and waited for her to turn up to school. It seems that there is a law that states the closer you live to school, the later you are. I knew kids coming from an hour long bus ride, rocking up to school 35 minutes early. This girl lived quite close by in a near by street, but obviously had timed the journey down to the second, so she could optimise sleep or something.

She finally arrived, the awkward teenage exchange happened and I didn’t feel on top of the world, but I don’t remember feeling bad about it. But given our theme is on failure, I’m sure you can see where this is going. A few weeks later she basically told me to bugger off. To which I did, but the strange thing was a few years later we reconnected and became great friends. In the short term, it felt like I had failed. Not only had I gone from bold romantic gesture, to weird guy, but I was told to piss off and find someone else to stalk. But in the long term, I actually scored a pretty great friend. And I guess that God or the universe had other plans for me when it comes to beautiful girls, because a few years later I meet another beautiful girl, and she still puts up with me, all these years later.

Awesome Jar

Why did I not think of this earlier? Imagine having the technology to save every great small memory for recall at a later date. Imagine how useful this could be on those times when your feeling a bit down and like life just keeps kicking you in the stomach. This is not some futuristic technology, all you need is some notepaper*, a pen^ and a jar#. (Something to write on, something to write with, something to collect the things that you wrote on).
Either as it happens, or at the end of the day make a list of the awesome things, the small things that weren’t necessarily big things, just things that made today good, or great.    

Periodically dip into the jar of awesome and read some of the past awesomeness.

I’ve been doing this for a few days now. I’ve found it to be a good way to appreciate the day., and to be thankful for the good things that happened.

*any paper that allows you to write on it would work, note paper, scrape paper, toilet paper (unused preferably).

^any tool used to write with is fine, pen, pencil, crayon, feather dipped in ink, etc.

#ok this is getting silly, any jar, container, bowl, cup, mug, glass, plastic bottle that will hold numerous pieces of your chosen paper. 

Thanks to Tim Ferriss’ ex girlfriend for the idea, and thanks to Tim for sharing it.

Failure is the only option

Sometimes the system breaks. Today was one of those sometimes. 

“The morning starts the day before” was the quote dropped by my friend Phil as I told him about my bad start to the day. Instead of bounding out of bed, I hit the “shut up you stupid alarm” button on the alarm clock and rolled over. Only to awake 10 minutes after I was meant to be at the first meeting of the day. This was a failure.

I was chatting with a group of 16 year olds today and the concept of “the oral speech” popped up. (For starters, what other kind of speech is there?) One guy had an assignment due tomorrow and all he had done was written it, he went on to say that his teacher won’t be impressed with his work, for he hadn’t prepared any cue cards. “Cue cards?!”, I replied “if you rocked up with que cards I’d probably fail you before you started”*. But another student was shocked at the idea of not having the guiding comfort of a cue cards, and expressed her horror at my comment. I went on to say “who uses cue cards in great TED talks?”

“But we aren’t professionals” was the response from the group. 

I have a feeling the real issue underlying this was “we are afraid to look silly and fail”. 

I heard another story today of a guy who’s  left the business venture that he co-created with some others just under 6 months ago. He expressed his feeling of failure. I questioned him on how he was measuring his success or failure. At the end of the day he traded time & money for a learning opportunity. Which sounds an awful lot to me what thousands of university students do each day. Sure he didn’t come out as the next Mark Zuckerberg, but few do. 

In the 2009 movie of Star Trek Kirk cheats I. commander Spocks Kobayashi Maru simulation, as Spock has designed it to show that sometimes the only way is failure.

Out of all these ideas around “failures”, it seems that the only real failure is my inability to be disciplined enough to get enough sleep. Students are unfortunately living in a space where they have to be instantly amazing at the task at hand, and don’t have the freedom to try new things and “fail” in the process. Business foke who go out on a limb, risk a little bit of money to try something new, if it doesn’t work out, but you learnt something in the process, it’s not a failure, it a learning experience. 

If I could work out how to do it, I would design an assignment for students that the only way to succeed at the assignment is to break down the barriers created by other well meaning people and force the student to failure, multiple times, but through the process learn, and continue to learn how to learn, experiment & think creatively and ultimately come up on top of all the others who are too afraid to fail. Unlike Spocks simulation where the designed outcome is failure, this would have a designed outcome of success, but not in a typical linear fashion.

I hope that I have the courage to go out on a limb, take a chance & fail every once in a while.
*in hindsight that language was a little too emotive. 
I think I’ll put a disclaimer on this blog alon the lines of “Most of these blog posts reflexes Andrew’s thoughts at the end of a long day. In hindsight, he only ever agrees with about 90% of what he has written/said. If any material offends you, sorry, but that’s too bad, but in retrospect and growth, some of it will offend the author, and that is ok.”

Tiredness 

Beep beep beep goes the alarm at 6:30 this morning and after snoozing it a couple of times (a filthy habit I hope to one day rid myself of) I was off and going for the day, finally finishing up at 10:44 as I write this post. A day full of meetings, travel, general IT related problem solving, some skill acquisition, followed by more travel, a phone call or 3, a late dinner and some more work.

Reflecting on all the activities of the day, which part is the tiring part? Was any one particular activity tiring, or is the compound effect of them all? Or are today’s activities not actually the issue, rather the looming nature of all the other projects on my plate, both professional & personal, are they actually what causes the tiredness?

I’m not sure. I just know I felt like I despised the traveling. It seems like a waste of time, after not having to do it for two months straight. 

Time, the one thing that we all have a level playing field with.

[Tuesday morning update: it appears I was tired, I slept through my alarm and didn’t wake until 9:20….10 minutes after my first meeting for the day. Oops ] 

I feel more at ease in a room full of pole dancers, than a church.

As we stood in the pew, the comment muttered to me was”I feel more at ease in a room full of pole dancers at practice, than I do here”. What does she mean by that? 

“Why’s that?”
“These people [the other pew dewellers] are judgemental.”
“and pole girls aren’t?”
“the more of your body you revile, the less you can hide.”

Should we therefore drop the Sunday best attire, and replace it with more of an Adam & Eve inspired dress code? I don’t think so, but the idea was interesting.

Last year I attended not one, but two pole dancing competitions. Just like any scored sport, a dancer is given X amount of time to show their skills and to be graded by a panel of judges in numerous categories that someone, once felt they were good guidelines for grading said sport. As part of this process, the dancers submitted a bio of sorts for the MC to read random facts about the upcoming performer as the change over occurred. There was a constant theme to a vast majority of these bios, across both competitions. The essence of what these girls had written was “I found a home and a community that I felt I could belong in” (that wasn’t how any actually worded it, but like I said, the essence). 

Isn’t this what people who attend church should be saying? Is it possible that with all the music, worship, pretend smiley faces and “church stuff”, that we miss the point. And instead the pole dancing class down the road, that barely anyone from the church would step foot in is actually better at building community? 

Does this mean we should erect pole dancing poles in a church auditorium? If it builds communities, then sure, why not. Although I think that only helps a small group of people. I’m sure similar communities are built in other sports & interest groups. 

Once again I don’t have any answerss, just more questions.

However if your in the pole dancing / pole fitness / areal performaning community, I’m interested in hearing your story & collating these into a video project.

Short update on Digital Minimalism – iPhone apps

Quick recap, digital minimalism centres around the idea of keeping digital files organsised consumes brain space, just like physical objects do. To begin this journey down the rabbit hole, I started with auditing the apps on my iPhone.

Out of all the apps I removed, I have missed exactly….none. How odd, by removing the unused, I continued to no use them, nor care about them. I managed to reduce the number of screens down. The only thing that bugs me, one app that was in the top left on the 10th screen (that’s right, I had to swipe 9 screens to get there) is now on the 2nd screen & I keep swiping past it. (O dear how sad I hear you say in a sarcastic voices).

Early Morning & Personal Projects

It’s that time of the year again when the mornings are rather chilly, and the last thin that you want to do is leave the warm comfort of the bed and face the near zero degree temperature of the house and start the day. But somehow, for some reason if the reason for the early start is a fun personal project, it makes the transition a little easier.

This morning in the two degrees Celsius I dragged myself out of bed to film a local band being interviewed on the local radio. Radio station studio spaces are small at the best of times, there isn’t enough room to swing a cat (poor cat), yet somehow we managed to squeeze in the radio presenter, a couple of band members, and not one, not two, but 4 cameras in the space. It was a blast to film (other than a small technical hitch with an SD card) and by 8:45am we were all over, car packed and all. Most days I’ve barely eaten breakfast by 8:45.

Later on in the day I sat down to start the editing process. {side note, 4 cameras and no slate is a dumb idea for those wanting to try something similar at home…always slate the footage, at both ends if you can.} I spent about half an hour, maybe 45 minutes on it, at least that is what I thought I’d done, I looked at the clock, 2 hrs 15 minutes. Where has all the time gone???

As I’m exploring a raft of personal projects, mixed in with professional projects, I’m amazed at how quickly time flies on the personal ones, yet in the professional ones sometimes I feel someone needs to chain me to the computer just to keep my attention on the project.

This probably highlights something, I should find people to pay me to do the same work as I do in my personal projects, and scrap some of the professional ones. However I wonder if the opposite would happen, like a children’s see-saw, would getting paid to do more small c creative work (photography, filming, design) ultimately mean that the more technical projects I started doing would be be more enjoyable again & I would start to dread the small c creative stuff? 

I’m not sure. 

Would I bound out of bed, no matter the outside temperature? Or go back to being a lazy 10 times snoozer?

Slow and steady 

Slow & steady isn’t really my strong point. 

I have always wanted to win at the ‘get rich quick’ dream or the retire at 21 dream. Neither of which I’ve won.

This week I’ve been back listening to ‘The Tim Ferriss Show’ podcast & listened to Christopher Sommer on gymnastics strength training. One thing that Christopher said sparked my interest around how Americans (I’d also add Australians) get bored with small stuff & rush through things (heavily paraphrased, if I get a chance I’ll look up the quote). Today this was brought home with my session with the physio. As I want to ‘run’, he is getting me to focus on the basics on crawling.

It turns out that I need to slow down & focus on getting the small stuff done.

Mail Bag: New books

The postman came knocking today with some new books.

Free+Style by Carl Paoli & Anthony Sherbondy & The Roll Model by Jim Millar. 

Why two books on health & fitness? In Januray of 2015 I was at home one day & received a newsletter from the folks at creativelive an it had some rar rar about New Years resolutions, etc. one of the courses interested me, Kelly Starretts, maintain your body. It stuck out among all of the small c creative courses. I watched the free sample intro video and was hooked with what Kelly had to say. This completely changed the course of year for 2015 into a new discovery of health, but not getting strong for the sake of getting strong, getting healthy, making better desisions day to day now, so that the odds of having a functional body for the rest of my life increased. If a knee joint is design to last a century & my sister had to have surgery at age 15, then something weird is going on. Did she just have bad knees, or bad mechanics around how she used her knee & therefore it wore out prematurely?

Fast forward to 2016, my goal is to be able to touch my toes with my hands (with straight arms & legs). I don’t have a single memory of being able to do it. I do however remember at age 10 having a break dance instructor say that some people just have short arms, long legs wen I wasn’t able to complete the feat, it was also a regular test in high school.

Surely I should be able to do such a basic thing. So that was my challenge for the start of the year. One evening I spent over an hour doing a Pilates routine, combined with some extra mobility exercises from mobilitywod & for the first time ever I was able to reach out with one arm & just barely touch my toes on my leg on the same side. A couple of weeks latter I joined the stretching class my girl friend attends. 

8 weeks later, on one of the first wet days of the year I slipped outside & fractured my scapula into a million peices. Not fun. But even worse, all of my work, basically gone. 

Mobility has taken on a new meaning now. I have been spending weekly sessions with a Physio trying to get my shoulder functioning how a shoulder is meant to function. Hopefully the blessing in disguise here is that my shoulders function better than they use too.  

My challenge after touching my toes, a hand stand.