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.

Col has hoarded so much stuff he literally owns a forklift to manage it.

This week on The Fink Tank, we dig into the psychology of keeping shit you don't need.

I LIVE for the moment when someone asks "do we have a cable for this?” and I can produce it from a cluttered box I fought to keep. That feeling is so good it almost justifies the years of stepping over the box.

Almost.

We’re at Mum’s place, the Fink family home where we grew up, attempting to declutter.

Progress is slow.

She rarely wants to throw anything out, and we quickly get distracted by sedimentary layers of keepsakes.

Our mate Pete Cook wrote a blog that’s helped with my slow recovery:

“I think when you buy a thing (as opposed to an experience) you pay for it three times.

You pay to buy it. You pay to own it (in physical space, head space, and possibly maintenance and repairs). And then you pay to dispose of it. And generally, we underestimate the cost to own and the cost to dispose.

It’s a good reminder to think twice about the next thing I want to buy.“

The complication is that throwing things out feels terrible too. Another item condemned to landfill, when it might come in handy one day.

It's a real tension, and we obviously haven’t solved it.

But Mum, Cato, if you're reading this, step away from the hard rubbish.

The Fink Tank started in 2019. The first episode came out in 2023.

If you've got an idea sitting on the launch pad, this one's for you.

It wasn’t called The Fink Tank back then. I didn't even know what it was. I just knew I wanted to publish something fun with my brother Col.

On the day this was recorded I'd been producing a curriculum series for Jaquie Scammell in a rented filming space. Col dropped in to take advantage of the setup and record some work-related content.

I seized the moment. Just before pack-down I jumped on camera with him and we made this playful video.

I posted it on Facebook in May 2019 and people loved it. Hundreds of likes and comments. I was delighted. The idea had legs!!

And then… nothing.

In 2020 and 2021 I produced over one hundred episodes of the video podcast What's on Your Mind for Digby and Alicia. It was hugely popular. People still talk about it.

I made a hundred episodes of a podcast. For someone else. And still didn't feel ready for my own.

In early 2023 Col and I finally recorded content for the first few Fink Tank episodes. It still took me FOUR MONTHS to get over my block and publish episode one.

Since then we've put out more than 120 episodes, a frankly astonishing and very un-Fink-like discipline and consistency.

It's built a small, engaged following. It feeds into our businesses. And, most importantly, it's a fun thing to do with my brother Col.

I look back sometimes and wonder what I was waiting for.

What are you waiting for?

When is it okay to break your own rules?

Picture this:

You’re the team manager of a social over 45s football team, where the mantra is every player gets a fair go.

Your team hasn’t won in two years. Your goal differential is a dismal -99.

Somehow, in the last game of another winless season, you’re 1-0 up at half time.

Your worst defender is sitting on the bench, due his 30 “fair go” minutes.

What do you do?

Every collective of people has rules. Families, social groups, sports teams, and organisations all have rules and norms about what is considered fair and reasonable.

When is it okay to break them?

I play crap level old-man football. The stakes are low, but feelings aren’t.

At the other end of the spectrum, Col has coached ultimate frisbee for the Australian team at international level. Winning matters. It’s the explicit goal. Yet some concession is still made to opportunity and fairness.

Whether at work or at home, I'm sure you've got rules that help ensure people are treated fairly.

I'm also sure there are times when it feels right to break them.

If you’ve replaced your knees, your opinions, your wardrobe, your habits, and most of your cells since 2009…

Are you still you?

Welcome to The Fink Tank Chair of Theseus, a deeply sensible conversation between two men in the second half of their lives.

We move from ancient philosophy to identity, personal change, and why Dr Suess might have the answer.

Col brings his usual insightful ideas, I reprise my role from undergraduate philosophy tutorials. But there is something useful in all this nonsense.

A lot of people feel trapped by old versions of themselves.

But if a Fink Tank chair can change piece by piece (and still be a Fink Tank chair), maybe so can you.

Here at The Fink Tank we usually aim for practical observations.

NOT TODAY.

Today we get our woo-woo on.

Col and I usually deal in useful ideas for solo pros, sibling dickheadery, and the occasional uncomfortable truth.

Today we ask a far less manageable question:

Who ARE you?

It gets pretty weird.

Also, I learnt some new words.