MarioKart Trance

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I was in a show starring an Arnold Schwarzenegger stick-puppet, and I wasn’t sleeping enough.

We would wrap at midnight, so I would get home around 1am but I couldn’t sleep straight away because I was too wired.

So instead when I got home I would play MarioKart on the Wii. It was pretty fun and helped me unwind. I’d forget everything else and then after half an hour (= eight races) I’d go to bed.

In MarioKart Wii there’s a track called Coconut Mall, in which you can see clothing adverts starring your Miis (Miis are little avatars of you and your friends).

I was playing Coconut Mall one night and just above the bit where you jump over the fountain there was an advert with my Mii wearing a grey hoodie. I thought “Hey, that looks good on me! I should wear that more often!” and jumped over the fountain but then I did a double-take: WTF?! I never owned a grey hoodie.

The problem was that I wasn’t just working on show nights: there were only three of us in the team, so with all the prep and the business bits it added up to 80+ hours a week. On top of that I was doing a PhD application and writing terrible poetry and learning Mandarin and organising volunteer work on HMS Belfast and running a crappy website and still seeing friends even though I was little more than a shell at some points. It was a bit nuts and I was a bit nuts too.

I don’t want that to happen again, so I’m cutting back on a couple of things now.

All this to make room for the many other things going on at the moment. Finding a new job at the end of last year and now settling into the new one. Rewriting an academic essay that I’m going to present at a conference. Moving out of the old house and into a new one. And there’s a woman in the new house who keeps reminding me that I’m getting married this summer. Only doing four things at once – job, article, house, wedding – should make it easy, right?

I don’t want another MarioKart Trance, so one of the things I’m cutting back on is blog posts. This is my first post in almost a month and there are going to be fewer than usual between now and when I’m back from honeymoon in July (sorry, I’m a heart-breaker).

But oddly enough, since I stopped writing so regularly I’ve had a tonne of new ideas for posts, for this website, and for my Facebook and Twitter pages. So I’m planning a revamp for the second half of the year and I’ll have loads of new stuff for you to read too.

Sometimes you need a break. And break time can be the most productive time of all.

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A couple of zeroes

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There are something like 200,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. The universe is 13,700,000,000 years old. Even in our little solar system (surrounding one of the 200,000,000,000-400,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy), the nearest planet to Earth (Venus) is 25,700,000 miles away.

In 100 years I’ll be dead and so will you. In 1,000 years the houses we live in will be dust and books and gadgets we hold dear will have wasted away. In 7,500,000,000 years the Earth will crash into the Sun and that will be that.

You know what? It doesn’t matter.

Not because we’re tiny beings who will be gone in a cosmic instant, blah blah blahzzzzz.

It doesn’t matter because most of those numbers are so huge that they’re meaningless. Add or subtract a couple if zeroes and no-one’s going to notice.

So what matters – the only thing that can matter – is what’s happening right here, right now.

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Here’s what I learnt from my first teaching job

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“Yeah ok, why not?”

I was in the middle of the Canadian woods when I got the call. With those inauspicious words I began my teaching career, and two weeks later I was teaching my first class.

Those poor kids were paying £13k a year (ok, maybe not so poor) and I don’t think it took long for them to realise that I hadn’t done any teaching before.

But we stuck at it – them as much as me – and it worked out well in the end. I’m happy to say I had the best feedback of all the new lecturers, though since one of them sounds like a total deadbeat and the other had a petition raised against her by the class, there wasn’t much competition.

On the day of the first lesson, I was terrified. I really felt doubt in myself – that black hole emptiness, like your stomach is being sucked back in on itself. I was sweating, ugh. I rehearsed my first words over and over, like I was going to ask someone out on a date (thirteen 20-year-olds in this case).

I was teaching a course on how to make web projects – everyone started from scratch and in the first lesson we all built websites (based on WordPress, like this blog), then in each lesson after that we looked at a different way of trying to attract people to our sites – e.g. how to run Facebook ads or find customers through Twitter. There were projects on everything from movie food recipes to unusual furniture designs, Oriental beauty tips and ‘Living on the Edge‘ (mine was more prosaic, Advice for Media Students).

I’m not sure that all of them quite understood everything, but they did get the hang of posting stuff that would prompt a response.

At the end of the course I asked the students to write a report on how their own project had turned out, what went well, what went wrong, etc.

The last question was ‘What was the most interesting thing you learned during this project?’.

Here’s what one of them answered.

Funnily enough, that’s exactly what I learned too.

 

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Roll the dice

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(Russell Westbrook slams it)

 

My girlfriend Emma told me that sports photographers use cameras that take 11 photos per second.

 

(Carmen Basilio beats Tony DeMarco 1955)

 

That’s because everything happens in a split-second, and they don’t know exactly which will be right shot.

 

(Wladimir Klitschko – BOSH!)

 

So instead of taking one shot and hoping it works, they press the button and spread their bets. It’s a focused scattergun approach – you’re taking many shots, but you still need to be in the right place, press the button at the right time, and nail a really great shot.

 

(Bob Beamon breaks the long jump world record in 1968)

 

It’s hard to make something great. But if you roll the dice over and over again, you are loading them in your favour.

 

(Jordan doesn’t miss)

 

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A beautifully concise mind

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John Nash‘s Princeton PhD dissertation was only 28 pages long, but it produced four seminal papers on game theory and they earned him a Nobel Prize.

Quality over quantity.

I’m going to experiment with some shorter posts over the next month or so, mixing them in with the longer set-pieces I’ve been posting for a while now. Upcoming shorter posts will feature atoms, sports photography and the universe (which is easily covered in a short post).

I don’t anticipate a Nobel Prize, but do let me know whether or not you enjoy them.

Thanks ~ Todd

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How to become a world-ranked sportsman (just like me)

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In 2010 I was ranked #705 in the world. Heady days!

I also made it to #105 in Britain. I won a bronze medal in the British Championships and had beaten a couple of tricky opponents at the English Open.

But then I quit.

Why?

Not burn-out for sure. No injuries to speak of. No drug rumours swirling! (My agent took care of those.)

I quit because I didn’t want to practice. I was playing 2-3 times a week but I was getting tired of the late nights, it meant a lot of travelling, and winter was coming.

So I quit, and abandoned my world ranking.

But how did I get it in the first place? Skills + Niche.

1) Skills

I’ve been playing tennis since I was a kid – I’m not great (ok club standard at best), but it means my hand-eye coordination is decent so I’ve always been ok at other racket sports.

2) Niche

My world ranking came in a sport called racketlon. ‘Racket-l-o-n‘. It’s a Finnish sport: you play the same opponent in table tennis, then badminton, then squash, then tennis (with a two-minute break between sports). It’s first to 21 points in each sport, and you add up all the scores at the end to see who won.

Racketlon is pretty niche. My friend Jo told me about it and the next day I discovered I could simply sign up on the internet to play in the British Championships, which were happening the following weekend. I got my British Champs bronze by beating one guy – there were only four entrants in the amateur category, so by winning one match I came 3rd and got the bronze.

Skills + Niche = World ranking!

That’s probably true in lots of areas outside Finnish sports. Wikipedia’s list of sports is enormous. Maybe you would be a world-class player of Hooverball, Yukigassen or Old Cat? Figure out what you’re good at, and apply it to a niche.

The same must be true outside sports as well. It’s pretty cool to be the best damn recycled pencil maker in the world. Or the finest mandolin stringer in the world, or the funniest fridge poet. And if you combine >1 thing you can create all sorts of other niches – I’m sure someone out there is the greatest maker of brail for packaging, and there must be world-class manufacturers of shoelaces for football boots and utterly brilliant writers of jokes for Christmas crackers.

Who knows who they are – who cares? So long as they know, so long as they get the rewards of a feeling of mastery, and so long as they can hang out with the other best guys and girls around, it will still be a pretty cool feeling.

It’s not so hard to be one of the best in the world if you combine Skills + Niche.

So if you want a game of racketlon, come and get me.

But be warned: I’ve got this little bad boy in the trophy cabinet already, and your head is next.

 

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A little less conversation, a little more action

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The three main ways I spend time on the internet:

Consumption = reading or watching or listening or playing what others have made

Curation = picking out the best bits (e.g. my Time Machine blog)

Creation = making something new (e.g. posts on the blog you’re reading right now)

A combination is important – otherwise you’re stuck in your own little world. But I agree with Ira Glass: when it comes to creating stuff, you hit a wall. Or more like an obstacle course. Progress isn’t linear, or even inevitable.

Sawyer Hollenshead made an info-quote-poster that sums up Glass’s description:

I feel like this blog is getting better. But I’m still very much in The Gap.

 

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21st-century job hunting

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On Thursday I started a new job at King.com (woohoo!). I spent the last few weeks of last year looking for work and I want to share 5 things I found out about modern-day job hunting.

Maybe everything below only applies to finding mid-level media jobs in London, or is specific to me in some way, but I don’t think so.

1) It’s a job, not a career

You’re not looking for something to do for 50 years. So don’t worry about finding it. It’s like dating. Don’t worry about whether you’re going to marry the girl when you’re on your first date. Just find someone interesting for the time being and see what happens.

2) Crossing borders

I’ve moved out of TV and into games. I also spoke to companies in tech and in music. No-one ever asked why my TV experience would be useful. This was a surprise to me – but it was just assumed that transferring skills to a new industry won’t be a problem. So I don’t think there’s a need to fret about staying the same exact industry. Don’t restrict yourself to changing lanes if you want to crash through the central reservation (NB this analogy cannot be safely applied to driving).

3) Metcalfe’s Law

‘Networking’ is a horrible word and some people who are good at it actually suck at being people. But if you think about it as building a network, instead of spinelessly fawning over the most powerful person in the room, it’s much easier to digest.

A couple of days ago I read about Metcalfe’s Law: the basic idea is that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users in the system. If you have two telephones, there’s one connection. But five telephones make 10 connections. And 12 telephones can make 66 connections.

So the value of the network increases as the number of people in it goes up. The same could be said of email or Facebook. And it could also be said of your personal network, because each person you know and trust has another set of people that they know and trust. I don’t have a huge network. But 80% of the jobs I considered came to me through it.

4) DIY track record

The most interesting projects / skills / experiences are the ones you developed in your own time. With free tools and free publishing you can build a DIY track record (see Start a project now – here are 5 tips). Back in the old days this would have been hard; now it’s easy. Most people don’t do this, but luckily I’ve done a few spare-time projects over the past few years so even though most of them were dumb, I think I got some marks for persistence.

5) One Direction

Last year when I was looking for a new job I went around asking for advice. That worked ok but it didn’t produce a lot of job opportunities. This year it’s been different – at the outset I chose a small number of directions to explore. That made my discussions 10x more productive, because I was asking about specifics rather than general stuff. And that makes it much easier for people to help you out.

I hope this post helps you out. Good luck!

 

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Your New Year’s resolutions won’t work, so try this instead!

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Your New Year’s resolutions won’t work, so don’t stress about keeping them!

Instead follow James Altucher and decide on a theme – something to tend towards, instead of an absolute promise that you’re unlikely to keep and will feel bad when you break.

So I have no resolutions at all for this year. Only one theme.

I’m sticking to one but there are lots to choose from. It could mean less email or less TV or less booze. Not ‘no email’ or ‘no TV’ or ‘no booze’ – those are specific resolutions and they’re almost impossible to keep. A theme like ‘less email’ is much more manageable: it would encourage me not to check my email so often when I get up or last thing at night, not to be reading emails on the journey to or from work, not to be tapping away on my phone when I’m on the loo (I know you do that too).

But for me in 2013 ‘do less’ that means less projects. Less new ones. Less old ones. Less continuing with projects I’ve lost interest in. Less less less.

So today I’m killing off two projects.

1. toddmgreen time machine

This is a collection of things I find interesting, beautiful, or inspiring. The aim is to record specific things I think are cool, along with the date when I discovered them – like a time machine for interests. A new post has appeared every Tuesday at 10pm UK time since September 2011 – 79 in all. I posted today’s just now though and it’s the last post.

2. Advice for Media Students

This is a project I made for the undergraduate class I was teaching. I figured it would be easier to teach the students how to make a web project if I did one too. So I made a site (18 posts in all) offering practical advice on how to get a media job. I’m done with teaching for now, so although I think there’s a gap here for something like AFMS, I’m done with this project too.

Two dead projects. Less less less.

So why do less?

To make room for more.

More time for getting good at my new job.

More time to help plan mine and Emma’s wedding.

More time to write!

Themes not resolutions. Less is more. Happy new year.

 

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