Archive for the 'Blog' Category



Last recession

This blog started I guess roughly in the middle of the last recession. NZ wasn’t as hard hit as the US but it still felt the echos for a few years.

For long time readers you know where it’s taken me so I’m ever grateful for that initial step – and the many that followed.

Now that you’re at home, what new things could or should start now?

If you have nothing to do, embrace being bored, play some games, read, spend time with friends/family.

It’s hard but it can be a realigning around the things that you really want to be doing. Or should be doing.

Give it some thought, mull it around, start something. Truly, if not now, when?

March 28th, 2020

Pre-mortem and backcasting

I recently finished Annie Dukes, Thinking in Bets.

Three takeaways from the book:

Place an actual bet
When people are at a disagreement, consider asking to put money down. And seeing how if that changes your position. It forces you to consider what weighting is going in to your POV and find the strengths and weaknesses of the position.

Noah in Why Is ThisInteresting – The Certainty Edition gave a succinct example:

I was recently accused of being obsessed with gambling. It wasn’t from driving to New Jersey to bet on sports (though I’ve considered it), but rather because I was trying to convince a friend to make a bet on a political prediction he was making. I wasn’t pushing him to bet because I was trying to take his money (though I feel confident I would have), but rather I was legitimately trying to understand how strongly he believed in what he was arguing. When he said he was sure this particular set of events was going to occur, I didn’t know if he was saying he was 90% or 10% certain. And there’s obviously a vast gap between those probabilities.

The other two are related, Pre-Mortems and Backcasting.

Backcasting is looking at an end result, then working backwards to go, what had to go right for that goal to happen. This is very astute. And forces a focus on making quality decisions, rather than just focusing on the next step.

Pre-mortems, are looking at a decision and figuring out what could go wrong for it to fall over. Then you can adjust.

All three practices, are to sharpen the quality of your decision making. Do read the book, there are other skills she shouts out which are invaluable.

March 19th, 2020

The web is failing us

I’ve recently become obsessed with this idea of finding new and different videographer talent from emerging areas, to throw some briefs at. Just to experiment, to explore. 

The challenge – finding them. And not that finding new and undiscovered or up and coming talent is meant to be easy. I mean it’s in the brief. 

Bare with me. If you search on Google, all you find is marketplaces. No real blog posts. Fresh new content isn’t indexed, because it’s not created like it used to be.

If you search on the social networks themselves, you don’t find anything, because they’re made for finding content, or specific people. 

Not types of people nor types of content. 

It’s a weird problem.

The web has failed us, in that it has become silo’d, we know this instinctively. But it’s not till you try find something new, something that you can’t just hit a like button and an algorithm will find it. 

Google has been the last bastion of discovering new. But now it’s seo’optimized to the lowest common denominator, that which gets a click. And people have stopped their own curating or publishing on their own blogs or tumblrs. 

It’s especially now, that hard, tangible, real, is what we need. 

If anyone knows some creative folks, who are having fun with video. I’m here.

March 16th, 2020

What are you doing all the way down here? You could:
- View my about page
- Or for first timers the New Here? page
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