Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman's Blog About Surprise

The Spin, Chapter 2: Speedbumps and SnowBalls

Okay, we're back with the next installment on my selfish journey...where we learn a little more about our protagonist Curtis, and a little more why he dreads his financial statements.

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The Spin

 

Chapter 2:

Speedbumps and Snowballs

By most measures, Curtis Stanfield was rich.  Not obnoxious Trump-esque, Russian Oligarchy "my-shit-doesn't-just-not-stink but-it's-considered-a-lip-smacking-delicacy-by-epicureans" rich, but “just-enough-money-to-not-have-to-work-if-I-didn't-kinda-enjoy-working” rich.

He wasn't born rich and hadn’t been living rich for too long, either.  A clever, personable sales/marketing type, Curtis had enjoyed—truly enjoyed—a career bouncing around the somewhat disparate fields of fashion, consumer electronics and cosmetics.  Fifteen years after taking his first job, he was rapidly approaching his professional Peter Principle pinnacle as VP Marketing of Speedbump, a small, family-run snowboard accessory company that made white-label helmets, gloves and neck-warmers for big boys like Burton and Ride to brand.   

Curtis dressed and groomed and presented well, well enough to be noticed in a crowd, and knew how to draw a sizable one with his good-natured schmoozing; schmoozing that spilled out of his mouth effortlessly in a breathless, punctuation-be-damned clip.  While women didn’t mind him, he was far from what one would complimentary call a ladies’ man; he was a guy’s guy, equally at home with the suits and the bums and every other guy category in between. 

It was at Speedbump where he opportunistically intersected with a trio of these in-betweens, three uber-cool, tattooed, baggy-panted geeks in the company’s design department who turned him onto things like hardcore social networking and granular web analytics. Knowing every major mountain and board shop owner in America made Curtis the perfect evangelist for their stealth, after-hours high-tech adventure, an invisible wireless app that not only read a radio chip in practically every new ski pass issued, but could use this info to track one's every move on any snow-covered hill.  This tracking led to fascinating “hey, look at me!” statistics—number of runs taken, amount of vertical feet plunged, top speed reached, and so on—which led to friendly one-upmanship competitions, mountainside bar encounters and a way to market to everybody who chose to first consult their stats and status, and then broadcast them to the world on Facebook and Twitter.

At 32, he was about a decade older than his three Speedbump cohorts when—out of boredom and on a stick-out-your-tongue dare from one of them—he decided to join their start-up venture, cheekily called SnowBalls, as adult supervision…and for a full partner’s share.

Three years later, at 35, with Snowballs swallowed up by the nation's largest winter resort operator, this share was worth a cool $4,250,000.

Oh yes, he did well.  To his somewhat befuddled middle-class family, to his concentric circles of friends, to his somewhat jealous former co-workers, to the fawning local media, even to Miranda, he was seen as a shining success story.  Not just any success, but a multi-millionaire. 

Which he indeed was.  Low multiples, but multiples of millions nonetheless.  The literal descriptor of his financial status was no comfort to him, though.

Curtis considered his wealth as somewhat stifling; not enough to be classified as freedom-giving “Fuck You” money, and just enough to give him headaches. 

“Fuck Me” money, he called it, because those two words, delivered in an a exasperated sigh, quite contrary to his usual demeanor, greeted his financial statements when he begrudgingly sat down to review them at this most dreaded time of the month again.

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To be continued next week...

What I Learned This Week: Throwing In The Towel, and Putting On a New Spin

Let's cut right to the chase--here's what I learned this week:

It's time to throw in the towel...

...and pick up a Persian Rug.

And now, to explain such an oblique lesson.

I've been blogging regularly for five years.  It's one of my great pleasures, a getaway from my increasingly-stressful everyday, 90 minutes or so of me time I look forward to every weekend.

This blog, Pow!, has enjoyed two incarnations; one as the source and then support for my book on the element of Surprise (still available, folks!), the other as a repository of weekly lessons learned (and perhaps the fodder for my next book or books).

And today, it--I hope--celebrates its third life (that's the "throwing in the towel" part), as Pow! morphs into a shared creative writing space; shared inasmuch as I do the writing, and hopefully, you the reading. 

Over my many years in showbiz and the tech biz, I've harbored a couple of ideas in my head that I believed would make great short stories, perhaps a novella, or maybe even a film script. But when another such idea popped into my head recently, I realized that with a backlog of three, I'd better start getting them out there before they crumbled and rotted in the increasingly cobwebbed and clutterd attic that is my brain.

One of the problems of being the President of Just For Laughs Festivals and TV is that it leaves little room for additional extracurricular activity, so something had to give.  That "something" is the "lessons learned" element of this blog, which is now being replaced--for the time being--by the most recent of the aforementioned story ideas (that, ostensibly and somewhat pompously, is the "Persian Rug" part).

The blogosphere has changed much in the demi-decade since I first opened a TypePad account, and I think the world is well-served by millions of other marketing/business/social critics, thus would not over-mourn my removal from the space.

Not that it needs another struggling fiction writer either, but hey, that's my decision. 

And no, I didn't quit my day job.

I hope you'll stick around for this new journey; if not, thanks for coming by to share my learnings, ramblings and revelations.  From time-to-time, I'll revert back to lessons when something really smacks me between the eyes, but for the most part, I'll be regaling you every week with chopped-up, bite-sized (500-700 words) stepping stones of my off-beat stories as they deveklop and take life.

So without any further ado, I'd like to introduce you to the ride known as...

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The Spin

It was "that time of the month" again.

Curtis always hated "that time of the month."

Again.

It was that time of bills.  Car payments and mortgage payments.  Bills for necessities, like electricity, Internet connectivity and cable TV, although with the Internet, he wondered if cable TV was really still necessary.  Surely not all 165 additional channels he subscribed to, but he promised himself once again this month that one day he would weed through them and eliminate the non-essentials like The Food Network, Spike and PBS, whose constant whining and begging for funds coincidentally seemed to escalate with this time of the month.

Again.

It was that time of thick, expensive, forest-wasting magazines that slipped through his mail slot and thudded on his floor only to be picked up and unceremoniously heaved on a pile that twice a year he deposited directly into his recycling bin...never mind without reading, but most times without even removing the petroleum-based, protective plastic bagging.

Yeah, again.

It was that time to take his beloved dogs to the vet for their regular check-up.  As they say in storybooks, once upon a time this chore was actually one of his much anticipated highlights, but with both the beagle/spaniel and the poodle/terrier mix in their ninth and tenth years respectively, these days the monthly news was less happy-go-lucky and more Curtis-go-pharmacy.

Sadly, again.

All this, he learned to deal with. 

What really made that time of the month again unbearable was...her.  

"Her" was Miranda, his girlfriend of six years.  More than girlfriend really, she was his live-in wife sans diamond ring or legal commitment.  When he considered his relationship as a whole, he knew it was a good one. Well, to be honest and unapologetic to those around him with lesser personal bonds, a great one.   If he was a baseball fan, he'd calculate their batting average at about .750, maybe .800...not merely Hall of Fame numbers, but All-World. 

But All-World only in baseball.  In this relationship, all the lavish meals, all the walks in the park, all the society-level parties, all the passion, all the movies with gourmet popcorn in front of the fireplace, all the things that most other couples could only envy, all that could not overshadow the behavior she repeated over and over and over again every 30 days or so.  

Much to his chagrin.  

Much to his misery.  

Much to his continual detriment.

For it was that time of the month when Miranda would save some postage costs for the prestigious brokerage where she worked and personally, by hand, bring home Curtis's voluminous, detailed financial statements.

Again.

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To be continued next week...

What I Learned This Week: Putting the "Pro" Into Protest

As I compose this post, cities around the world--including my hometown of Montreal--are being "occupied" by people protesting the global financial situation. 

Their cause is a good one (Christ, anything to avoid another damn financial apocalypse!), but sometimes--and let me put this in a most diplomatic manner--the way in which the occupiers express their passions may work against their good intentions.  For example, take the torched cars, vandalized buildings, personal violence in Rome...well, that kinda takes the warm glow off the “[We are] reclaiming space in the face of the financial system and using it to voice ideas for how we can work towards a better future" sentiment expressed by one of the protesters in one of the many articles I've spent my last couple of hours reading.  (Happily, the Occupy Montreal protest was incident-free and upbeat.  I found the photo above, taken by @basiapuszkar, on the Montreal Gazette's Twitter feed of the event.)

Okay, so cut to yet another demonstration, this time by support workers at McGill University.  McGill sits smack-dab in the middle of my residence and my office, so I pass by the protesters at least twice daily.  And again, while I admire their passionate belief in their cause--picketing day and night, no matter how miserable the weather--I this weekend wonder if there's a better way to win over public sentiment than disrupting classes and blocking entrances to Homecoming Weekend events (it took an injunction to keep protesters from hampering student access to certain buildings).

People protest for a reason; they want to change the course of a particular action and behavior.  If they could do it without spending their time in the streets, I suspect they would.  But "taking it to the streets" brings public attention, and by swaying public attention to your school of thought instead of the other guys', well...that's when change takes place. From Tiananmen Square to the Arab Spring to the financial centers of the so-called civilzed world, I suppose.

But in my book, and I'm sure I ain't alone, there seems to be a disconnect between cause and effect when it comes to many of these protests.  Preventing kids from learning, or spooking senior citizens in town to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their McGill graduating class, or destroying public property in Rome and other major cities doesn't seem to be the best way to get one to say "Hey, these guys may have a point!"

It's no doubt frustrating being the downtrodden, or the seemingly downtrodden.  But when frustration boils over into aggression or misguided silliness (like anti-capitalism protesters I saw today wearing blatantly-branded hoodies), well, there's way more chance off your public turning off your message than being turned on by it.

So what did I learn this week?

Well, I learned that if I had to curry public opinion for my cause, I'd do something really out-of-the-ordinary and revolutionary...

...like lead a team of colorfully-dressed protesters to a children's hospital for a mass volunteer day. 

Or take a group to shovel snow in front of an assisted living residence. 

Or clean up a school yard. 

Or serve meals to the homeless. 

Or do whatever positive, pro-not-con, heart-warming action it takes for people to take my side instead of the other side.

Now I ain't anti-union, or anti-free speech. Indeed, in times of injustice, the ends should indeed justify the means. 

But the means don't necessarily have to be mean.

If you really wanna shock the system these days, and win the battle of public opinion...try something nice.

(P.S. The photo above is 'sposed ta be ironic; it was actually taken at the G20 Protests.)

What I Learned This Week: The Best Career Advice Ever (You'll Never Guess From Where)

Well, it was indeed beneficial plowing through the mountain of magazines I whined and moaned about last week in this space.

To the untrained eye, it was a mere stack of periodicals.  But to me, I knew that it was an overflowing cornucopia of wisdom waiting to be discovered...and imparted.  With titles like Fortune, Fast Company, Time, Maclean's, Bloomberg Businessweek, US News and World Report and The Economist amongst others in the pile of pulp, I knew that somewhere within it, I would learn this week's lesson.

Well, I most definitely did...but from the most unlikely of sources, namely Entertainment Weekly.  (Note to self:  either change the parameters of your expectations or give those heady titles a more thorough read.)

Go figure.

But there, on page 43, buried within the cover story called "My Hollywood Survival Guide," written by Neil Patrick Harris (that's him below backstage with my wife and I at Just For Laughs two summers ago), was perhaps the greatest, most astute career advice I've seen in at least a decade.  Whether you're in showbiz, a restaurateur, in high-tech or manufacturing, these are wise words to heed.

Let's set the stage--Harris was a kid actor with limited experience and had just been anointed with the title role in Steven Bochco's groundbreaking medical dramedy "Doogie Howser, M.D."   To set the expectations of his star, and his star's commonfolk New Mexico parents, the sage Bochco--producer of such legedary TV hits as "Hill Street Blues" and "L.A. Law"--took them out to a restaurant and told them the following:

"A career is like surfing.

"You paddle out and paddle out and get wet and get hit by these waves.

"When you finally get out where you're supposed to go, you have to sit on a surfboard for a long time, just waiting.

"If you're really lucky, you'll catch a wave, and it'll be the most amazing feeling.

"But the key is that wave will inevitably crash to the sand.

"Then what you have to do is paddle back out again and get hit by a bunch of waves again.

"But trust that in the long term, there will always be waves to catch."

Poetic, profound, picturesque.   A shelf's-worth of biz book advice in about 100 words.

Hmmm, perhaps I should pick up Businessweek again.  Maybe there's a good movie or TV show review in it...

What I Learned This Week: The Mental Warm-Up

Well...I ALMOST got caught up on everything from Australia, but then two days of Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) spent in synagogue made this past weekend jam-packed with catch-up work.

On Saturday, on top of having to put the final touches on demo videos and PDF docs for a pair of new TV shows we have in development for CBC, I had to deal with over 100 emails, a dozen bills to pay, and a stack of to-read magazines that has somehow grown to over 18-inches high (sadly, no exaggeration; that's it above).

Yeah, to put it lightly, I wasn't just overwhelmed, I was fucking overwhelmed.

Now I'm no laggard.  I have To-Do lists up the wazoo, and am a disciple of David Allen and his "Getting Things Done" tribe/religion of hyper-efficiency. 

But still. I was, let's say it again, fucking overwhelmed.

So, what did I do?

I ignored everything in front of me...and went to fix a door in my house instead.

Yeah...I fixed a door.  Not the most herculean task, but I had to re-install a horizontal slat of wood that divided panes of glass on a French Door.  Now I'm no Mike Holmes, but after 20 minutes of dabbling with contact cement, a pile of clothes and a copy of the massive Kisstory book (didn't want to take the door off, so I piled the clothes and the book to act as a leverage/weight to keep the slat level and pressed to the glass in the proper spot), the job was done.

And I felt great.

And I was able to tackle the work with new energy and insight.

For I came back to it with a win; a small win, no doubt, but a win nonetheless.

So here was this week's lesson:

• When I go to the gym for a TRX or RipTrainer workout, I warm up first with a few minutes on a bike or elliptical machine. 
• When I play hockey, I warm up with a series of stretches, twists, skating drills and shots. 

In other words, I get my physical body warmed up before delving into the activity.

So, when faced with mental challenges (no jokes here, folks!) like video editing, proposal-writing, decision-making and reading, it's probably not advisable to "go in cold" either.

The fixing of the door, and the questions I had to answer--How can I do this without removing the door from its hinges?   How would I keep the slat in place?  Where's the optimum spot for the glue?--got my mind warmed-up for the tasks ahead.  The "win" made it even better; it even further leveraged the "got to get into the game" mode.

The end result? 

• Emails have been answered. 
• Bills have been paid. 
• Documents have been composed.
• Videos have been reviewed, and edits suggested. 
• Blog post has been written.

And now, to tackle those rabbit-like magazines.