At The Do Lectures this year I was introduced to a video entitled the Girl Effect. It’s now a very short video that I can’t watch without a tear in my eye. It’s incredibly powerful and makes me want to do something to help. I owe Duke Stump a huge amount for introducing me to it.
So it was a bit strange to see a carbon copy used by Starbucks on a UK TV advert this evening. It was supposedly for a good cause, but I couldn’t help but have mixed feelings about a mega-corp nicking something creative that was purely for the benefit of others.
What do you think? Should they have taken 30 seconds to develop a new concept of their own? Or am I just being a bit “over-protective” of something that’s not important because as long as good stuff comes out of it it’s not important?
One of the ways I get myself to do big things is to commit to doing them in public. That way I face the shame of failure amongst those that know me if I don’t do them.
So, seeing as I’ve just got back from my first run since Berlin Marathon 7 weeks ago (something i did after publicly committing to it!) where my kneecap didn’t feel like it was trying to escape my leg, I feel ready to commit to training again. Here’s some stuff I plan to do:
By the end of next year i want to have done a triathlon. Anyone with me?
I’ve been meaning to give 100 push-ups a try for months. I start today.
I’m going to re-attempt Al Humphries “daily cold shower” thing. Going to be tough over the coming winter!
I’m going to re-start fencing (think this, not this) after losing touch with it during marathon training.
I’m going to re-start kung-fu. After a ten year hiatus. Time to dust off those belts!
Finally, here’s two great creative industries sites: SightUnseen (behind the scenes of the creative industries), and Creative Boom (a creative industries news site). And there’s some cracking music industry stuff over on the latest Dizzyjam blog post.
That’s it. My blackspotting dreams can come true anywhere. They’ve invented anti-wifi paint!
I genuinely can imagine a time in the not too distant future where cafes advertise that they are blackspots or, through the use of anti-wifi paint, they offer blackspot rooms.
In other news, I did a Dragon’s Den style pitch yesterday in front of a room full of potential investors. As I wrote recently, I’m looking for investment in Nocci, and I got a few good leads. I’ll keep you up to date!
It wasn’t the best pitch I’ve ever given, and there were relevant points that I forgot to say. But I learned a lot from my poor talk at Ignite a few weeks ago, and so I was better prepared for trying to convey a lot of information in a short period of time. If anyone’s interested, here’s the script of the pitch I did (PDF with pictures!).
I’ve just been away for a relaxed weekend in West Wales (staying in the highly recommended Old Oak Barn) and while having lunch in a great pub in the beautiful little village of Little Haven got chatting to a local couple. They were middle-aged, owned a local bed and breakfast and blew away all of my preconceptions about who tracks their website traffic and is aware of the dark art of SEO…
I know relatively little about the subject but, while their website could do with a little work, they were more than aware of the benefits of their URL (pembrokeshirebedandbreakfast.com) which puts them on the front page of Google for that search term, and were fascinated by tracking traffic that came from blog posts, international sites and B&B listings sites. And their understanding of their business and their ability to track where a lot of it comes from is probably much improved because of it.
So, any other examples of “unlikely” businesses engaging in digital marketing? Or is it just me thinks it’s still the preserve of young, city-dwelling digital companies? Any carpenters, farmers or rural pubs?
Oh, and hello to Jan as I’m sure she’ll be reading if any clicks went from this blog to their site…!
Now imagine if the government just spent a small amount of money on sponsoring things like this, in order to improve your day. A smile in the morning during your commute could make the world of difference. The knock on effect could be incredible….
Thanks to @suzicatherine for the tip off about this one.
Update – a few people have mentioned that the top video is possibly a Coca Cola viral. Yep, it might be. Probably is. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that it would be amazing if something like this just happened on the tube while you’re on your way to work….
As I alluded to in my last post, I didn’t think my talk at Ignite Cardiff on Thursday was very good. And now that I’ve seen it I’ve realised it’s actually pretty awful.
BUT, I think I’m kind of glad it happened. I’ve got a few big talks to do over coming weeks, including a pitch for some quite serious money. And with that being pretty much the worst talk I’ve given for a long time, it’s made me realise the importance of preparation. Particularly when there’s time constraints. The simple fact was that with organising the event I just didn’t have time to learn or rehearse it. Oh, the irony….!
It’s particularly cringeworthy through the first handful of slides where I completely forgot what I was intending to talk about and I’m pretty incoherent. I make a little bit more sense in the middle, but all in all it’s pretty embarrassing. I just mainly tried to squeeze way too much in, simply because I hadn’t rehearsed it so had no idea how jumbled, rushed and incoherent it would sound.
I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I’ve decided to post it. I think hopefully there’s some useful stuff in there for people to take home with them. And it’s an object lesson in what happens when you don’t prepare and you’re under time pressure. It’s clear from my gesture when I left the stage that I felt it was a garbled effort!
We had our third Ignite Cardiff last night. It was great, I think. But I enjoyed it least out of all of them. We were in a different venue from normal (the utterly beautiful WMC), but it became pretty stressful because of a whole load of technical issues, all because of one unforeseen variable – we changed laptops at the last minute. For some reason Claire’s laptop didn’t work with the WMC’s screens and so we thought we’d transfer all the talks to my laptop and just use that. No problem, right?
Wrong.
I may be over-exaggerating a little, and I’m told that it seemed no big deal out in the crowd. But it certainly made our lives sweatier than they should have been! I’m sure there’s a bunch of lessons here about testing, being prepared, introducing variables at the last minute, but I just know that we’re using Claire’s laptop next time. I must add, though, that the WMC were amazing and helpful in trying to help us keep on top of our self-induced gremlins!
I also have to say that from the feedback, which I’ve been reading over a cuppa and with a big smile this morning, it seems like the speakers were really well received. And they were all brilliant. And Brian from Crimzn very kindly filmed them all so we should hopefully have them online sometime soon.
One of the points of my talk was that by publicly committing to doing things you are more likely to do them, and hopefully will learn something in the process. I learned that because you were so busy organising things, and therefore not actually having any time to learn or practice your talk, you don’t realise that you actually tried to cram too much in, so just it comes out as one incoherent, rambled mess! I hope some of my points came across in the process, anyway. But next time I won’t be speaking at one of my own events.
I’m putting together a presentation I’ll be doing in a few weeks time. It’s about time-management, simplifying your life, and achieving your goals. But far from being an instructional talk, it’s more about how I’m incredibly bad at most of these things, and how I have to trick myself into getting stuff done and striving for that ideal life. For example, I’m writing this while sat in a cafe that has no wifi. And I sought it out on purpose. And I’m doing that a few mornings a week now. I call it “blackspotting – the act of purposely seeking disconnected areas in order to get more work done” (mainly in a vague hope the phrase will catch on, it’ll become a trendy thing to do one day and I can pretend to be the inspirational founder of a global movement that someone actually thought of years before me).
The thing is, like many creative people, I’m quite easily distracted, and with email, web, twitter I’ll often find myself sitting down to do some work and find I “need” some information. I open up a browser, ask a question on Twitter, or search through my email archive. But I’ll get distracted by a shiny link to an interesting report/blog/site/whatever. And before I know it half an hour has passed and all I’ve been doing is browsing.
Anyway, that’s beside the point. I’m finding that with all the things I’m doing now, and the increased amount of time I’m spending on Dizzyjam (full launch any day now!) and various creative industries consultancy projects, I’m finding less time to spend on the things I love that I do for free. The case in point is Nocci. It is a success story, with events happening all over the UK, and has attracted a huge amount of attention. However, because it doesn’t generate any revenue (well, at least not at the moment), I can’t justify giving it the time and attention it deserves. People have told me it’s been incredibly valuable to them in terms of meeting new people, finding project & business partners, and generating thousands of pounds of income. And now I’m starting to get requests to run international events. It’s on the cusp of being a truly global network of events for people in the creative industries, all run by members in their own towns and cities. But despite being effectively run and operated purely by its members, it still takes time to administrate, upload pics of events to the site, keep the news pages up to date etc etc.
So, I’m thinking of how I can get more people involved to get it expanding at the rate it deserves to. Do I ask for volunteers? Do I give “ownership” of countries/territories to members that are pro-active there? Do I appoint a news editor; someone who can write an interesting and engaging news piece once or twice a week? Will people be willing to give up their time to be involved?
Or do I go down the hard, sweaty path of trying to attract (a relatively small amount of) funding – say £40,000 a year – to pay someone to work fulltime for Nocci and have a small budget to work with? And what about crowdfunding (anyone had any experience of Kickstarter.com)?
To bring it back to the beginning of this post, one of my tricks is to put stuff “out there” as a means of creating dialogue between friends, Twitter followers etc that will spur me into action. By publically committing to running Berlin Marathon before I’d even found out whether spaces were available i kind of had to do it! And so hopefully by writing this down and committing it to the ether, it will have a magical catalytic effect!
The first lecture of the last day was postponed half an hour. Because everyone was still in bed. At 3am the night before everyone had gone straight from the teepee where Katy Carr and Bass Clef performed so brilliantly, and walked the 30 or so metres to “the pub” (a tiny renovated cottage of sorts where they stocked loads of that gorgeous Pen Lon beer. And then Katy had brought out her ukelele and started singing sea shanties. It all gets a bit blurry from there on in…
Katy Carr performing in the teepee before Bass Clef tore it up with his sample-tastic dubstep.
Katy leading a sea shanty singalong at about 3am in “the pub”, with Duke Stump on my right, providing backing vocals….
When everyone did blearily emerge from under their canvas we were treated to a lively and funny talk from “El Gigante”, Ben Hammersley. Ben’s one of those blokes that seems to have done everything. He’s a war correspondent (great photos from Afghanistan), a consultant to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, editor-at-large of Wired UK, ultra-runner and a very nice guy too. And it’s difficult to hate him because he’s a lot bigger than everyone else in the room. Ben’s talk was about numbers and stats. But in a good way. He talked of making sure you’re measuring the right numbers when assessing the success of something and how, when put on a wall, numbers will always go up. <note to self – need a big wall graph of Dizzyjam sales>. I quizzed him afterwards on why Wired had decided to launch a UK magazine when publishing was in such a spiralling nose-dive at the moment. He believes it will work because it’s concentrating purely on being a magazine and nothing else. In other words, concentrate on the “it-ness” of whatever it is that you do, and do it to the best of your ability. But I’ve still yet to find out why he had an egg in his pocket…
Caroline and Helen
Alice Taylor from Channel 4 plays games. Lots and lots of games. She’s an uber gamegeek. But if anyone ever understands the corellation between games and education then it’s her. After a flash of neurochemical-biology (succeeding in tasks makes our brains reward us with dopamine) we were treated to advance previews of some of the brilliant educational games she’s working on for Channel 4. Excellent stuff!
Adam Lowry from from Method cleaning products took on the big boys with his environmentally friendly products. And before long they were copying him. One thing that everyone seemed to be in agreement with was that so many “eco” products had failed because they required to make a sacrifice. In other words, they were a bit rubbish at doing their job in comparison to the competition. Method aims to be the best, regardless of whether their products are “green” or not. I also love their attitude to resourcefulness (“because the little guy has to be more resourceful”), and their unofficial mantra – “What Would Macgyver Do?”
Andrew and Marcin
The last talk was delivered by Alastair Humphreys, a brilliantly energetic explorer who’d driven overnight after delivering a best-man speech to talk to us. He once cycled round the world – it took him 4 years. I hope he told his mum where he was going. He loves testing his own limits and says that “if you fail, at least you know what your limits are”. I loved his zest and energy for life, and the challenges and “micro-adventures” he sets himself (“find a daily dose of self-discipline”). He spoke of the joys of cold showers (erm….right…!) and that if you go to bed 10 minutes late and get up 10 minutes early every day, you earn yourself a whole extra 5 days a year, and a whole year over the course of your life.
I’ll leave the final word of the lectures that year to him:
“Set your goal. Then begin it”.
The thing that struck me most about the Do Lectures is that despite there being 20+ utterly brilliant and inspiring lectures over the course of 4 days, some of the best and most inspiring conversations were happening over the dinner table. Everyone there believed in doing something, and when you get 100 people like that together in a beautiful setting, things are bound to happen. The lectures themselves just acted as a catalyst.
Before dinner we had an hilarious axe auction, all donated by Gabriel, of course. Obviously everyone wanted an axe after his talk. They’re such beautifully crafted things. I live in a first floor flat near the centre of Cardiff, and I was desperately thinking of reasons to justify buying one! I was soon out of the bidding though, as prices went sky-high (all proceeds going to the Do Lectures), and impromptu auctioneer Oli Barrett kept the crowd laughing and cheering. He’s the one with the big cheesy grin in the pic below Then I finally got round to having a bushcraft lesson (or “getting my Mears on” as I preferred to call it) and attempted to make fire with Nick (MD of those delicious Teapigs teas). Despite a solid hour of what amounted to rubbing twigs together, and again dripping in sweat, it was not to be and we left the woods aching, sweaty and with our manhood very much under question. We took solace in the fact that nobody else had managed over the course of the weekend either.
From the top: Helen, me, Nick, Oli, Nigel, Mark & Simon
I left camp later that night to drive back through the wind and rain to Cardiff, leaving a lot of people loving the folk band who were playing in the canteen, knowing I would definitely be back next year. I could actually hear them as I walked down the long country road towards where my car was parked. And, at the risk of sounding pretentious again, I felt like there was an incredible energy coming from Fforest. A hub of inspiring people who want to go out and “Do”. People who want to change the world, all gathered for one brief glimmer of time in a magical setting. I just pray that we can take all that back to the real world….
I'm a music industry survivor & mentor, creative industries consultant, and according to some friends, a "creative industries ninja" and "a good egg". I'm MD of Dizzyjam and founder of Nocci.
Find out more here.
I’m putting together a presentation I’ll be doing 
Then I finally got round to having a bushcraft lesson (or “getting my Mears on” as I preferred to call it) and attempted to make fire with Nick (MD of those delicious 
