Older viewers/readers may be familiar with this story, but I don’t think I’ve ever told it while actually doing the thing that I was talking about in the story!
Others will have seen the “finished product” but not necessarily see how it emerges.
This is in the “extended voicemail” format where the narrative wiggles around as much as the lines I’m drawing 🙂
I dug into an old backup drive at the weekend and found this. I’ve been looking for it for ages.
It’s the very first piece of video that I made and shared via the internet. This was August 2005, 8 months after I’d started podcasting in a similarly impulsive, unplanned and amateurish way (three adjectives that have defined my career ever since!)
We’d heard of YouTube by this time, but I don’t think it was available in the UK so this was originally at libsyn.com where I was hosting my podcasts (audio blogs) – I can see I used a thumbnail of me gurning in the original blog post that linked to it.
Within a couple of months I had my first (unpaid) promotional vlog series for a line of men’s grooming products. So yes, I happily describe myself as an (if not ‘the’!) OG beauty vlogger.
I finally joined YouTube in March 2006, by which time I was regularly collaborating with Debbie Davies on our (too) short-lived series “All This And Brains Too” so my first video on YT was “Desperately Seeking Harvey”.
I’ve made a playlist of all the vlogging and vlog-like content I’ve got. I find it annoying that I can’t seem to edit the metadata so that things will show up in the order they were created rather than when they were uploaded. But that might just be me being old.
If you’re silly enough to try bingeing that vlog playlist, do let me know how far you got before your brain melted.
I’m trudging across the gap between my aspiration and my ability to fulfil it. Too much b-roll, not enough meat. Never mind. I’ve managed to get the red nose treatment on the thumbnail here.
It’s all helping me to see what I need to work on more. And in the meantime, I’m lucky enough to have work work to do. More fun again soon.
Stating the obvious today.
I got sidetracked today, thinking about how to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.
Another day, another videoblog.
I went up to London for a couple of meetings and remembered how tiring it can be to just exist sometimes. It was nice though to hang around the West End without the tension I used to feel that I ought to be somewhere else doing something else.
Fun to see my subscriber count going up on YouTube after a long flat line for so long. I’m making a determined effort not to look at any other stats though, just post these things and get on with life.
“I don’t know if this will be a ‘daily vlog’ or a ‘daily vlog except when it isn’t'”
“I don’t know what I’m talking about”
Classic Davis Vlogging
Something something, whatever it takes to get me working out loud again.
The convention will be that the date on these will be the day they get published, but they may contain footage shot at any time in the past, present or even the future. I think.
It’s my blogiversary. Here’s where it all started in September 2004…
Some thoughts now on my thoughts then:
“The world really has changed” – I obviously thought this needed saying. Who was I trying to convince? Will there ever be a time when this isn’t true?
“I am connected to a very diverse network of people” – I had no idea how much this would grow. Especially when Twitter came along.
“a traditional CV doesn’t give the flavour of real me” – still true. I spent another hour with someone the other day who wanted to understand “what it is that you do?” These days I’m much more light-hearted about it and worry less about being misunderstood.
“a blog is a perfect personal knowledge management tool” – this was marketing, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still true. I wish I used it more.
“It’s OK to turn up late to the party” – I really thought I’d missed the boat. Again, I had no idea what was just around the corner.
It does feel like the same sort of need is here again, for us to take responsibility for making our own media and building our own online relationships, instead of delegating it to the new corporations that have appeared in the last 20 years. I got close to taking August off again this year and we’re off to some woods for a week, but I’ve got some ideas for how I want to take this thing into it’s third decade. Thanks for sticking around x
So, I woke up thinking about practice. Just choosing to do a something, over and over again. Like, this morning, at 7 a.m., the kettle’s boiling, and there I am, setting up my camera, pressing the red record button and talking to myself in the kitchen like any other ordinary person in the 21st Century. But seriously, I like making this stuff and regardless of how it turns out, it’s a bit of practice I didn’t do yesterday.
And then I’m also thinking about acceptance, particularly in the process of making stuff. Like, nothing is ever totally right the first time, which I’ve been banging on about forever, but still find it hard to accept. I don’t want to draft stuff and then polish. Just. Don’t. Want. I want authenticity and I revert to believing it has to mean nailing everything in one go or giving up completely. Often, things just come out in the wrong order. They’re in some sort of right order in my head, but that’s a sub-optimal order for telling a story. Editing and switching stuff around isn’t just okay, it’s essential and I’ve had to cultivate my acceptance of that too. And since the camera never lies, I’ve had to accept that I now look like I’m 100 years old.
But acceptance is something that literally “comes with practice”. I have to keep doing the thing—setting up the camera, pressing record, and then gradually coming to ignore my tummy, or the dumb things I say or the number of times I touch my face. And that’s the part I didn’t fully understand until I talked it all through. I knew that practice was important and that acceptance mattered, but I hadn’t realised that practice is what actually leads to acceptance.
That’s what I wanted to say. But it’s not how it came out the first time. I had to write it down and think it through and turn it around. You see, I’m trying to get back in the habit of shooting video of myself and when I came to seeing if I could edit this morning’s ramble into something intelligible I realised I hadn’t noticed how much I’d been touching my face. So I made the video into just a montage of that instead.
One of the things I’ve been reflecting on lately is that I’ve been making things on the web for at least 20 years now. It’s been almost 20 years since I started this blog, and that got me thinking about why I called it “Perfect Path.” That’s a question nobody ever actually asks. People always say, “Hmm, yeah, I get it.” I think for a long time, I was waiting for someone to ask, but nobody did. And this goes for a lot of the work I’ve done – I’ve been itching for someone to ask me what it means, but nobody does because they just get it. Or they don’t get it at all and it seems no amount of explanation helps them.
So, the story behind the name: I was in a bit of an odd place in 2004. By the autumn of that year, I was approaching the end of my 30s. I had been sober for less than three years, though it didn’t feel like I was new to it anymore. When you’ve struggled with drinking for most of your adult life, and then you manage to stop for two or three years, it feels incredible. You think you’ve got it under control, and everyone else tells you it’s still early days. But you think (I thought), “Yeah, I know, but not me.”
But it did mean that for the first time, I had some form of spiritual life. I was, I suppose, wrestling with the first three steps of recovery. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I kept going over those first three steps, particularly the third one, about turning your will and life over to the care of a power greater than yourself, or God as you understand it. I came up with a prayer that included the words, “I am willing to follow God’s perfect path for me, wherever it may lead,” which is very much in the spirit of Step Three. And I really liked that image. So, that’s one version of where the words came from.
Another source of inspiration for the name came around the turn of the millennium when I working on improving public services and expanding my organisational thinking, especially as the internet was becoming more prevalent. I was drawn to complexity theory, and in 2000, I took a course on managing complexity. One idea from that stood out: the concept of a creative boundary between stagnation and chaos. It’s a very simplistic model of complexity theory, but I found the idea compelling—that there’s a perfect path between those two extremes, you don’t want to fall either side of it because it’s hard to get out. So that became a more secular interpretation of “Perfect Path.”
Both ideas were very much alive in me at the time, and they fed off each other. And then by the summer of 2004, I had stopped doing an interim management job that had run its course, and I’d already been trying to blog for three or four years but always gave up after a few posts. That summer, I decided I was just going to go for it and see what happened. I knew by then that blogging wasn’t as scary or dangerous as I once thought, and I was already confidently telling people that it was OK to blog. Around the same time, podcasting was starting to emerge, and I knew I needed to do this thing—to write stuff on the internet and see where it led, both in terms of my personal work and my consulting.
I had already called my company Perfect Path Consulting. I think that was actually in 2002, when I left the Audit Commission and needed to start billing people. It became a brand for me, so I used it for my blog too. I used a typeface from Neuland, the facilitation company which had a distinctive way of writing with a chisel-tipped marker. That became my blog’s logo, in a green that felt fertile, and I dove into it all.
This is a kind of preamble to me reminding myself that I’ve been doing this stuff for 20 years now. Sometimes I’m tempted to think I still don’t know what I’m doing and that I have no idea “how to do the internet”. But then I look back and realise it’s been two decades. I’ve definitely put in a few “10,000 hours”—probably on multiple aspects of creating social media. And by “social media” I just mean media that is social, not just the microblogging, photo-sharing, social network platforms that people think of now. I’ve been doing this for twenty years, man. If I have to point to something I can’t stop doing, it’s writing silly stories on the internet.
That’s my thing, and this blog is the place for it. For a while, it got a bit lost because the dominant popular format of storytelling shifted, and a lot of my stories don’t fit into those neat little boxes. Which sounds a bit like Norma Desmond but I’ve also come to understand a lot more about how I work particularly how my brain works and what is realistic to expect from it.
Another thought: when I’m feeling exhausted, when I feel like I’ve done too much but it’s only half way through the day, I’m finding more suitable ways of dealing with it.. Yesterday, I found myself cutting up bits of magazines to make letters for titles of an video series I’m planning. And that’s the way to move forward while resting. Mindless art-making. Not even art, really—just mindless action that is also towards a goal. I wrote a lot in my journal yesterday about getting organised and about the tasks I need to complete, but those tasks can sometimes be too stimulating. They don’t replenish my energy in the way mindless activity does. So, I sat there, cutting out letters to use in a collage-y kind of a thing that isn’t totally defined yet. That was exactly what I needed—no decision-making involved, just: are these letters big enough? Yes. I’ll cut them out and use them.
The other option is putting a record on (no, not flicking to spotify, putting a record on a turntable and hearing the hiss of the needle in the groove). Chopin’s Nocturnes are the most magical to me. They transform me. I don’t care why—maybe it’s something deep, but I don’t need to know.
Speaking of something deep, I had an interesting (to me!) dream last night. In the dream, I was with someone I know, although I couldn’t tell you who they were – a kind of amalgam of wise, kind, brave men in my life. We were talking about the inner work I still need to do, and they asked me what else I needed to let go of. I described some of my fears—that boiled down to fear of being out in the world, being seen, being misunderstood (haha – see the opening paragraph of this post!). It’s hard to explain exactly because it’s more of a feeling inside me. If I had to name it, it would be the fear of being out in the world. The person in my dream said, “Well, let’s get rid of that, then.” They had me open my mouth and tip my head back, and then they pulled something out of me—a long, black, gooey thing that looked like a fish skeleton without a head or tail, just a long spine with ribs (is that what fish have?). It was covered in black sludge and had obviously been inside me for a long time, rotten, but strong and coherent. The guy just pulled it all the way out and it was much longer and blacker and more gooey than I’d expected. Very David Lynch.
Now, this morning, I’m wondering: am I free of that fear now? Is it gone? How will I know? How will I know if I’m free of it? Part of me says, “Let’s just trust that it’s done, that the magic worked.” That it’s been removed and I don’t have to live with it anymore. It was prickly and uncomfortable, so it’s good to have it gone. Who cares what it means? It sounds like a good symbol. It feels like a good thing to be rid of. So, let’s be rid of it.
Onwards.
The quiet early hours, from 5 to 7 in the morning, have always been my most fertile time for ideas. However, there’s a catch: when I sit down to type, I lose the flow of thoughts because I’m still processing them while trying to write.
So, this morning, as I sat with my half-drunk coffee and a half-completed Sudoku, my thinking drifted, yet again to the challenge of producing consistent work and/or producing work consistently. In my personal technology-free fantasy world—definitely sometime before I was actually born—I would have a secretary to transcribe my handwritten notes or dictation, an editor to review my drafts, and a publisher ready to turn it all into paper material to be distributed to places where people who might like my work might pick it up and pay some cash for it.
But inspired by Jay Springett’s recent words about his “Menagerie of Models” I’m now playing with tools that can serve as my own digital secretary and editor. They’re still my words, but I’m getting help from the machines when it comes to capturing and organising my ideas so that I can distribute them more effectively. And here we are, writing not only to people who happen to be in a bookshop or newsagent or are lucky enough to be my personal correspondents, but to just about anyone with a computer.
The 1960s are the only decade in my life (so far) which I didn’t use computers. I had a bit of a dip in such activity in the eighties (at college *nobody* thought of using a computer for anything!) But despite that long relationship, I’ve always had a nagging unease about letting machines do all the hard work that I thought I had an obligation to do myself. But if I really believed that, where would I draw the line? Is using a word-processor too lazy? Should I be hand-coding my html pages? I don’t think so, so why am I squeamish about using ChatGPT with due intelligence and discernment?
That’s the question. Where’s the line between what’s authentic and what’s too artificial? I recently saw a personalised video response, for example, which addressed the recipient by name. And it made me uncomfortable in a way that personalised text does not now, but might have done when I first saw it (just to remind you that I’ve been mail-merging since before you were born!) And that leaves me wondering about future generations who are being born into this kind of digital intimacy or weird (to me) interactions. Will they find it perfectly normal? Or will there always be an inherent strangeness that they learn to ignore? It makes me think of my relationship to photographs – 200 years ago people might have wondered about what effect it has on me that I have so many photos of myself, my family and my breakfasts.
Anyway, I’m not (yet) making video mail-merges but if I did, I wonder how long it would take you to realise?
Perfect Path 