Of course I don’t look like this. Nobody does. This is what I look like.

I shaved so you can see my sketchy complexion and less than ideal skin. To say this particular angle only accentuates my chin would be being polite.

I would love to say that I was completely secure in my own skin but I’ve been guilty of doing things like this… [Click image to open at full size in new window]

This is a photograph of myself with singer-songwriter Sophie B. Hawkins (a great personal hero of mine). She’s holding a djembe drum which I won and she handpainted. The boat and wave embellishes are taken straight from the drum itself. This is a real photograph – only my face has been altered significantly. In truth it was after a concert and I was hot and sweaty and gross. The camera flash literally bounced off my shiny head. (Somehow Sophie, despite performing the wildly energetic shows she’s celebrated for, looks great.)

This photograph in it’s natural state seems fine to me now. But at the time it really bothered me, enough certainly to actually ‘rework’ it.

I wish I had some great conclusion to share with you, but I don’t. This was just something I was musing over and thought I’d share.

Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption

Lots of people have recorded this song over the years. I kind of wonder who these people are that have had only ‘a few’ regrets and deemed those too insigificant to even rank a mention. I guess at some point you have to make peace with your choices and their outcomes.

I have regrets about things I’ve done and some things I haven’t done. I regret for example not auditioning for a certain nameless Australian television show. I really wanted to be a part of it but I wasn’t really sure I had much hope of getting through, so I procrastinated. Eventually the weekend before the deadline I decided to attempt it. Unfortunately by this stage time was most certainly not on my side. I worked hard to get my audition video done but in my haste I overlooked their specified criteria. I knew I couldn’t submit it as it was and I also knew it wouldn’t make much sense without the particular embellishments I’d have to remove to meet their criteria. Even worse I realised I couldn’t possibly complete the 20 odd pages of the application in the time I had left.

So I was left with a video I was really proud of and a feeling that it had all been for nought. Any fears I had of being rejected through their review process became instantly moot since I wasn’t able to submit anything at all. I may not have got through, but at least my video would’ve been seen by someone.

I include the video here. It is very Australia-centric and I imagine a lot of the references will be lost on those outside of Australia.

This is a video I recorded for a specific audition for something but then didn’t end up using… I thought I’d upload it here for the hell of it.

For the non-Australians “Kochie” is David Koch, an Australian television presenter on Channel 7 and “money expert.” The somewhat sensationally titled “101 Ways To Survive 2009″ is actually a real book. (Similarly Kerry O’Brien is a news journalist on the ABC.)

Camera phone image from Flickr user jasonpratt. Music by Kevin McLeod Incompetech.com. Used by creative commons.

I want to distill some great wisdom from these experiences. There are certainly lessons about not procrastinating and operating inspite of fear. I guess really when you stop and look at your to do list and try to negotiate it consider which items you’ll regret not doing and work from there.

I found myself Googling the word ‘inevitable.’ In part to check my spelling. But also for another slightly more abstract (slightly silly) reason – just to check if it was indeed a word. Let me explain… when I was in high school ‘inevitable’ was one of my most favourite words. One day I got some piece of work back from my English teacher – it might have been an essay, I can’t quite recall – and there was a red line through the word in my answer. I was genuinely bewildered when I looked at it. Perhaps I spelt the word wrong, perhaps I inversed a couple of letters. Perhaps the word didn’t make sense in the context of that sentence. I was imbued with this sense that it was somehow wrong but I never found out why or how. I never thought to ask. There was just this terse dismissive red line on the page.

The consequence of this was basically that I stopped using that word. I forgot that it existed. I made this observation on Twitter and was interested to see I wasn’t the only one who forgot about certain words.

Susan Bentley (@suesbent) writes:

@johnlacey “tranquility” was mine and like you I forget this word and state of being still exist

Three final thoughts.

Inevitable is a word.

If you’re giving feedback explain why something is wrong.

If you’re receiving feedback – and that feedback is vague – insist on some clarification. Dig a little deeper. Knowing is much better than not knowing and limiting yourself (and in this instance, limiting your vocabularly).

Due to a rather unfortunate printing error Penguin Books Australia has pulped a run of its cookbook, the Pasta Bible. According to the news section of the Penguin Books Australia website:

At Penguin every book is proofread at least twice, depending on its complexity. In this case it is clear that a spell-check error crept in, the recipe incorrectly suggesting the addition of salt and freshly ground black people instead of freshly ground black pepper. Normally such an error would be picked up by proof readers, but they would have been concentrating on checking quantities, a common source of error in cookbooks. Penguin would also like to point out that it maintains the highest of standards throughout the editing process, hence a mistake such as this is a very rare occurrence. Obviously though, editors are human and even the best and most professional will at times overlook an error.

While this is clearly an unintended term of phrase it did remind me of something equally morbid – and apparently true. In Jadoo, John A. Keel documents his adventures in the Middle East and the Orient in search of Jadoo (real magic). He writes:

Four hundred years ago you could buy “Egyptian Mummy” in any apothecary. It was a coveted cure-all during the Middle Ages. Ground-up bodies hauled out of Egyptian crypts were considered good for everything from a hangtail to a knife wound. For this reason hundreds of priceless tombs were rifled by profit-hungry merchants, and undoubtedly many records and relics of immense historical value were stolen or destroyed. Eventually the heavy traffic in mummies exhausted the supply, so the merchants had to start manufacturing more.

So the next time your pasta seems a little bland, or your medicine has a terrible aftertaste, or you realise you’ve spelt ‘possession’ wrong, just think – it could be worse…

In the nineties the only way to get media attention was to be a self-proclaimed ‘expert’. Interestingly there were a plethora of ‘expert experts’ educating people on how to be the expert in their given field. You didn’t have to know a lot; you just needed to know how to communicate well. Media outlets could impress their audiences by using the term and applying it to yourself somehow lent credibility to you – by association, if nothing else.

I cannot help but think much of the magic associated with that particular term has since waned. Log on to Twitter and watch the deep suspicion with which self-proclaimed ‘social media experts’ and ‘SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts’ are treated. Both from other ‘experts’ and the general public as a whole.

Heavy handed marketing exercises involving ‘experts’ have left a bad taste in many people’s mouths. Some ‘experts’ have been more interested in broadcasting at people rather than communicating with them. They maintain their way is the only way and that anybody who diverges too wildly from their methods doesn’t know what they’re doing and certainly shouldn’t be trusted with your business!

Others have attached the mantle of ‘expert’ to themselves to lure unsuspecting people into short-lived but profitable scams.

Our economies are founded on the premise of ‘specialisation,’ the idea that we all do something well and other things perhaps not as well. Rather than try to be an all-rounder, we spend most of our time and energy focusing on our specialisation and outsource those other tasks to suitably qualified people. However I put to you that the way we source and consume information has changed considerably. Few people are searching for a ‘guru’ for the sake of having a guru to follow. We are all searching for answers to specific problems within our lives and businesses. The way information is stored and catalogued now (on the internet) means that in a given moment we can easily locate advice on a very specific query.

This has considerable implications for all teachers, advisors and consultants. Suddenly the need for somebody who has read everything, who ‘knows’ everything, is significantly reduced. We don’t require the services of a person who knows everything, simply the person who knows the answer to our current question. Search engines take the information we provide them with, make some assumptions and suggest sources which may or may not be relevant. The process isn’t perfect but it helps us filter information and reach our own conclusions, and the investment of time – and money – is significantly reduced.

The other thing to appreciate is that even if you do have the right answer to an individual’s current dilemma there is no guarantee of a continuing relationship with that individual. It may be that your specialisation is not something that particularly interests the individual, though at one time they had need of a specific piece of advice or information. (A lot of ‘experts’ currently have audiences that consist primarily of other would-be experts in the same area of specialisation. Sometimes you have to wonder if businesses are meeting genuine needs or merely perpetuating their own industries. Internet marketing is particularly notorious for selling internet marketing affiliate programs to other internet marketers.)

Knowing a lot of things and being able to communicate them well may no longer be enough to sustain a relationship. The internet may necessitate new, more social dimensions to what were previously exclusively business relationships. It may mean you need to be inspiring and encouraging, rather than merely instructional.