Who's a global genius? Not me, not Col, and (sorry for crushing your dreams) not you either.

But we'll forgive Col opening with a Picasso comparison, because it points to a useful idea.

Your vision is capable of imagining quality beyond what your talent can presently produce.

So there's a painful period, that lasts anywhere from a few months to forever, where what you create doesn't meet the standards you aspire to.

Continuing to produce, in the face of that shortfall, is how you develop talent.

It can be frustrating and annoying, but that's the price of quality.

For me it was posting weekly videos before I thought they were good enough (Peter Cook and Alicia gave me the weekly framework, before then I posted exactly nothing).

For Col it was doing clunky public speaking that fell short of his ambition (pretty sure Pete helped him too!).

Quality matters, but it’s most usefully developed by focussing on quantity. The people whose work you admire have almost all been through some version of this process.

You’ll never regret the clunky early stuff.

Col thinks we're all basically bacteria.

Put bacteria in a warm, nutrient-rich environment and it thrives. Put it in a cold, sterile Petri dish and it stagnates.

Your conference in the beige hotel function room with polystyrene ceiling tiles sucks. You can’t put a bunch of humans into a Clifton's venue and ask them to feel inspired.

There’s a reason every good house party ends up crammed in the hallway, the laundry, the kitchen. The tight spaces create an intimacy an expansive lounge room can’t.

Right now a delightful bunch of solo pros are twinkling and shining at The Dale Loft in Redfern Sydney. We’d love to be masters of our own destiny, unaffected by trifling matters like the room we’re in. But the choice of Petri dish matters.

Yesterday was inspiring. Today we ferment.

P.S. For those wondering, Bluey is Col's homemade Catchbox mic. She's got a lav mic in her guts so the people online can hear things clearly. A side benefit is her role as "The Conch" to indicate who has the floor.

Something I couldn't bring myself to throw out five years ago is plainly junk now. The line separating nostalgia and rubbish is thin.

Every few years we wade through a sedimentary layer of crap in the Fink family home. We don't often make much headway, because the room is full of mementoes that span lifetimes. The trinkets in here go all the way back to Mum's childhood.

Mum's uncle Noel, who lived to 99 and ten months, had a framed letter from Winston Churchill. Amazing. Also useless.

Col and I had different feelings about the family home after we moved out, but we've landed in a similar place. Neither of us are attached to much there now, but there are some things we couldn't bear the thought of purging. A keepsake here, a handcrafted relic there. The rest could go tomorrow and we'd never notice.

The trouble is, the room doesn't know that. So it sits there, holding fifty years of stuff hostage on behalf of the handful of things that still matter.

As he often does, David Whyte captures the feeling well:

"Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end."

See you again in a few years.