I was what they called a “Computer Monitor”. A slightly ironic name, it was the name given to senior students in charge of the computer equipment. It was more socially unstable than being a librarian: And that’s saying a lot (one of our jobs was to clean the balls in mice. That’s right – mice used to have balls. And I cleaned them). On top of this, you’ll notice by my placement in this photo I am the chief computer monitor: King of the computer monitors. I supplemented this role at school with other nerdy activities: Skipping sports days and swimming sports, excelling in science, joining clubs, and enjoying homework. At the time you’ll be a bit of a dick, but it will lead later to a warped perspective on life that makes it much more fun.

2. Embrace what you love, no matter what (this is sort of tied into point 1):

When I was 15, I bred cats. Pure bred blue point Birmans to be precise. I entered them in cat shows and won lots of prizes. I only bring this up first because the last cat I bred, Chandler Bing, has just died. He was 16. Oddly, I can’t actually find a photo of him, so this is another cat I found at a cat temple in Osaka, Japan:

Anyway, what I learnt from my cat obsession is that obsessions lead to really fun stuff: You meet fun people, go to fun places, and become an expert on a certain subject. And the world is crying out for experts. So if you love writing, write heaps – and you’ll get better at it. If you love celebrities, go camp outside their hotel and find other people doing the same thing. Make magic together. If you love World of Warcraft – play it constantly and ignore your family and friends: You’ll go on some epic quests, man. If you want to study and get a degree, study f**king hard and get really good marks else why bother spending all that money? And most importantly, if you want to breed cats, breed cats.

3. Do stuff because you love it, not because you want money*
There are good reasons to disagree with this point, but they don’t work for me. All the good stuff that’s happened to me has sprung out of stuff because I wasn’t getting paid. Hell, sometimes I was paying to do stuff. Example: I really wanted to interview bogan metal band TOOL. Tool were playing a show in Hawaii for a day, so I flew myself to Hawaii for a day to see the show. I spent the morning on the big island physically walking to venues and tracking down their tour manager.


He OK’d an interview for a crazy New Zealander. I then looked in the Hawaii yellow pages and found a cameraman, hired him, and put him on my credit card. This got me an exclusive story. Now I get paid to do this sort of stuff. I wouldn’t have known I’d love it if I hadn’t gotten off my ass and just done it.
* The downside to this philosophy is that you are actually always poor. But this is also the occupation of “journalism”, of which poorness is part and parcel

4. Remember: Chances are, everyone you look at is more interesting than you are, in some way at least.
So talk to everyone you meet and try and learn from them. Here is me learning from male porn star, Evan Stone. Talking to him, I learnt we both wanted to be doctors when we were young, and we both failed miserably. But we’re not miserable about it. You can tell this, because we’re smiling:


5. Record everything.
This is sort of hard to explain, but basically I think it’s really important to record your experiences and share them with others. We live in a really fun time where news, twitter, facebook, youtube, vimeo, and a whole bunch of cool blogs have brought everything together into a really fun global village. I don’t mean becoming ridiculously self-involved (like me) and tweeting your every mundane move:  I just mean don’t be afraid to take photos of the good stuff. Write about it, share it. You’ll meet others into the same stuff and they’ll share back, and it all turns into this wonderful cycle of goodness. Take your camera everywhere (it’s faster than your cellphone camera, I guarantee you). Write stuff down in a diary. Or tweet it. Status update it. It’s good.