Hands up all our favourite “I think I might have ADHD” people

This week’s Fink Tank kicks off with Col “diagnosing” both of us, before comparing ADHD to being left-handed. Something that only showed up in the stats once it became socially acceptable to admit it.

We dig into the blurry line between explanation and excuse.

When does understanding yourself help you grow, and when does it just become a way to justify bad behaviour? At what point does “this is how my brain works” turn into “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” (Ugh).

A slightly longer episode today, befitting the subject matter.

Ever meet someone’s family and think, ah, that explains everything?

Mum, Col, and his eldest son Deakin came to visit us in Wellington. Our collective Fink quirks, gathered in the McKay family home (portmanteau options include FcKay or McKink, pronounced with relish), were suddenly much more visible to me than usual.

We like to imagine we’re all unique, self-made individuals. But truthfully, most of us are just slightly modified versions of our parents. Flawed apples rolling a short distance from the tree.

Meeting the tree, as it were, can be enlightening.

Annoying traits become more forgivable when you see them in siblings and parents. At least that’s what I hoped as I watched Col unknowingly commit Finkish faux pas I’ve spent years trying to adjust in myself.

That doesn’t excuse any of us from doing the work. From knowing ourselves and taking what friend of the show Di Foster calls radical responsibility. I love that phrase.

But we’re all deeply flawed humans, requiring constant forgiveness. David Whyte’s poem on friendship might be the best articulation ever written of what enduring relationships truly demand.

At the very least, if you find someone a bit annoying but want to keep liking them, meet their family.

Ever noticed that the less you care about something, the easier it is?

Everyone wants to grow. Almost universally, we want to improve and upskill, we want to look back on our journey and see how far we’ve come.

And yet, we’ll reliably prevent ourselves from improving by locking ourselves away, playing small, and avoiding risks.

I have no particular interest in getting good at disc golf, but funnily enough the very fact that I don’t really care about the outcome means that yesterday, given a chance to play with Col and his son Deakin, I just gave it a crack. It went pretty well*.

Had it been something that feels more significant to my career and identity, I’m as guilty as the rest of us at protecting myself from feelings of inadequacy and shame.

It’s strange how, despite living with our brains our whole lives, we’re still terrible at managing them.

In this Fink Tank, Col and I talk about better ways of getting better at things; selfie videos, public speaking, anything that matters to your life and your work.

*My round ended one hole early when I threw Col’s favourite disc across a stiff Wellington breeze and it skewed 50 metres into impenetrable scrub. You've gotta spend money to make money.

Do I want to eat more Twisties?

If they’re within arms reach, apparently yes. But actually, no.

We’re on the way to pick up a planishing hammer (bonus points if you have any idea what a planishing hammer is. I didn’t), and Col has a huge open packet of Twisties in the centre console.

After a few mouthfuls I’ve had enough sickly orange grubs, yet I lack the self-control to stop shovelling them into my face. So I give the packet to Col to stash in his car door.

Why?

I have total agency no matter where the Twisties packet is. Yet I need to introduce a hurdle to change my behaviour. It’s stupid and irrational. And very human.

Moving the packet changes what economist Richard Thaler calls my “choice architecture”. Choice architecture plays a huge role in determining whether our behaviour aligns with our goals. Best intentions usually aren’t enough.

Whether it’s resisting Twisties, keeping an exercise routine, staying in contact with friends, or getting to bed on time.

Or posting videos.

I was utterly stuck at the start of 2020. I flogged myself trying to establish a video presence, but couldn’t post a thing. After weeks of floundering, Alicia McKay and Peter Cook flipped my approach.

They held me to account to ditch my perfectionism and post weekly phone videos for a month. I was up and running.

Sometimes small shifts lead to huge results.

In this weeks Fink Tank, Col and I talk about choice architecture experiments, and how to get the best out of ourselves.

Have you tried just… being better?

Col’s recent poll revealed what many of us already know. Most people admit they’re bad at marketing and sales. We avoid it.

Instead, we lean on referrals and word-of-mouth. We hoping the quality of our work speaks loudly enough to bring in the next client.

Col thinks many of us would be more successful if we focused less on blaming “bad marketing”, and more on becoming brilliant at our craft.

After all, being bad at marketing feels psychologically safer than facing the fear of being mediocre at what we actually do.

Go you good things!!

Who cares most about my expanding bald patch?

Me. Nobody else gives a shit.

Except it’s kinda news to me. Some recent video footage really tells it like it is! When else do I see the back of my own head?

Video shows us as we truly are, not as we imagine ourselves.

One of my jobs is helping people get comfortable with how they show up on camera. It's tricky territory, and most people find this confronting to the point they'll often choose total avoidance.

Nearly everyone has a complex about some aspect of their appearance.

But that thing you’re self-conscious about? There’s a good chance everyone else has either

a) not noticed, or

b) accepted it without judgement.

They’re too worried about their own shit to care about yours.

YES I REALISE I AM IN DANGEROUS TERRITORY HERE. PLEASE ACCEPT THIS HUGE CAVEAT FOR PATRIARCHY AND MISOGYNY BIAS, ABLEISM AND PRIVILEGE AND ALL OF THE THINGS.

Those factors are real and true and I’m not here to judge your experience. These barriers can be hard to overcome.

But Col and I both work with people who are the face of their business. And typically, the more comfortable you are with yourself, the more successful you’ll be.

Your hair, face, weight, voice, teeth, mannerisms - ALL OF IT - is already what people see every day. Show up anyway. It’s better for your business and your soul.

Yes, that’s custom lycra at Burning Man 2012.

PLOT TWIST at 90 seconds.

And yes, there’s a genuinely useful business lesson hiding in there.

In this week’s Fink Tank, we argue why you need to bang on about your core messages way more than feels comfortable.

Because the thing you’ve repeated 100 times?

Your audience has maybe heard… once.

Which is once more than you wish you’d seen the moustache I was rocking in 2012.

If my over-45s football league refereed themselves, every second match would end in a fist fight.

But in Ultimate Frisbee, that’s literally the rule. Even at the elite level!

Players call their own fouls. They debate it on the field. And at the end, the opposition gives you a Spirit Score. Like Uber ratings, but for sportsmanship.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “Strong spirit. Weak deodorant.”

And it works. Their unique culture means players regulate themselves.

Quite a contrast with soccer/football! Imagine Lionel Messi calmly discussing the merits of a penalty claim with the French back four in the World Cup Final. Whole nations would revolt.

I edited this episode on a flight from Brisbane to Melbourne last night. While pondering the merits of introducing referees into more general aspects of life, I saw a guy in hi-vis with a whistle start issuing fouls to dodgy drivers in the passenger pick-up lane at Tullamarine. Until the whistle came out, hardly anyone was following the rules.

But life doesn’t usually come with umpires and whistles. Most of the time, we have to referee ourselves.  

In this week’s Fink Tank Col and I discuss how self-refereeing shapes frisbee, and what it teaches us about trust, culture, and not being an arsehole.

Our mate Luke’s son Henry lost footy 62-1.

It was also... a good close game. What??

Sometimes the scoreboard tells one story, but the game tells another. Watching from the sidelines, the contest was fairly even. Henry and his teammates were solid in the midfield, and defended well. But they couldn’t kick goals.

Cue clunky segue to Col taking us through the five critical components of running your small business, and why you can’t afford to drop the ball (ba-dum tssh!) on any of them.

1. Have something worth buying

2. Promote it so people find out about it (Turn strangers into neighbours)

3. Sell it enough (Turn neighbours into friends)

4. Deliver it well (Friends become BFFs)

5. Get referrals (BFFs become advocates)

Every successful small business boils down to these five basics. And like in the footy metaphor, it’s not enough to be brilliant at one or two of them. You need to be at least competent across all five. Otherwise, the “scoreboard” could resemble the time Col's under-10s side lost 256-0.

His personal highlight was smothering a ball with his face.

This is not a story about grit or perseverance.

It’s about how the tiniest, dumbest mistake can unravel our best-laid plans.

Col trained for ten years to master Frisbee.

Then forgot to bring water.

You’re a seasoned speaker with a dazzling slide deck. 

But forgot your clicker.

I’m mid-zoom with 150 people, nailing my presentation.

Then my hard drive ran out of space.

Col reckons The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande is a blog post dressed in a trenchcoat. If it inspires a simple checklist that saves my blushes, it can dress however it wants.

Sometimes, the thing that stops you isn’t the big challenge you prepared for.

It’s the basic thing you forgot.

In the mid 00s our mate Bails designed himself a coat of arms. The ornate slogan underneath has lived  in my head rent free ever since.

Insufficiency is Not Enough.

Here’s how a $32 second-hand unicycle changed Col’s life.


For 15 years, Col did what so many of us do:

* Sat at the desk.

* Felt guilty for not being productive.

* Refused to leave the desk until “enough work” was done.

* Got… nothing done.

One day, he bought a $32 unicycle on eBay.


The rule: when the work stalled, he was allowed to get up and ride it for as along as he wanted.

If he came back to the desk and was STILL unproductive, he was allowed to immediately go ride it again.

It broke the loop. Moved his body. Shifted his brain.


Over the next decade, his work rhythm and his life changed completely.

These days, it’s disc golf outside his shipping container office. Different toy, same principle.

On this episode of the Fink Tank, we talk about how the best productivity “hack” might be the thing that looks least like work.

What’s your unicycle?

Do you go to high school reunions?

My recent Eltham College reunion surprised me in the best way.

I LOVED it.

I wasn’t popular at school. I had a couple of decent friends, but never belonged to the "main" groups. When I got to Uni there was no looking back. My flimsy high school connections dissolved instantly as I smeared myself in the Melbourne Uni social life smorgasbord. Those Uni mates remain my core group.

So why, two years ago, did I LOVE my thirty‑year reunion so much?

Half our year level turned up. When dinner finished, nobody went home. We stayed out laughing and swapping stories until the bar kicked us out. It was so good Olivia Wenholz planned another catch‑up for our “collective 50th birthday” because ten years felt way too long to wait. Thanks Liv!

That second reunion was last week. And it was magic all over again.

In this episode of The Fink Tank, Col and I chat about why these moments still matter, and why I made absolutely certain I’d be there.

P.S. Massive shout‑out to Kathie van Vugt, who’s working on an Aussie project to LAND A ROVER ON THE MOON. How wild is that?

How nervous would you feel if you had to spin the webcam around and show us the rest of your house? And your life?

If you’re hiding the mess, the quirks, the chaos, this episode is for you.

Most of us are hiding things we deem unprofessional.

Col Fink’s Zoom background is neat and tidy, complete with a colour-coded bookshelf. Beyond the curated frame? Some friendly sheep, an untouched woodpile from 2022, and a rogue step balanced on a tree stump.

But here’s the thing:

Col’s best clients already know he’s allergic to email, works part-time hours, and lives in the middle of a messy paddock. He's open about it.

None of this “unprofessionalism” gets in the way. If anything, it builds stronger more human connections. If you do great work AND show your real life, you’ll likely attract more of the right people.

Sure, you need a baseline of credibility and conviction before you invite people into the circus. But once you’ve got it?

You don’t need to fake the full 360° to be taken seriously.

You can admit your chaos, your niche interests, your foibles.

You can build a business that fits around your actual life, not the other way around.

There might only be two fish in the sea.

This is good news if you’re one of the fish.

Leadership coach Belinda Thomas told me she felt like she was swimming in a huge ocean of competitors. Her confidence was down.

I said “Sure, there’s a million videographers too. How many do you know?”

And she said… “Two.”

If Belinda needs a videographer, she’s not choosing from a teeming ocean. She’s fishing in a pond with two fish. And I’m one of them.

Pretty good odds!

Yes, I know more than two videographers. But that’s not relevant. SHE doesn’t.

Comparison is the thief of joy. But possibly not the thief of your market. 

Col has some great thoughts on how to refocus a fear of competition in this episode of The Fink Tank.

KP’s been to SEVEN OLYMPIC GAMES as a performance psychologist. I had no idea until yesterday.

That is RIDICULOUS.

For the first couple of years I knew Dr Kirsten Peterson, she never mentioned she’d been to the Olympics SEVEN TIMES. She was an engaged participant in my Be Less Shit on Camera course during that time, creating videos talking about her work. I still didn’t know!

It felt like she actively hid it from me.

And she’s not alone.

To get paid to do the thing you do, people need to know you do it.

Most people fall down at two main hurdles:

1. Saying it at all

2. Saying it enough

These comically simple barriers affect nearly everyone running a small business.

Fear of rejection. Imposter syndrome. Tall poppy. Take your pick.

Over several months as KP’s business coach, Col lovingly hounded her into owning it. Her LinkedIn bio now leads with “7x Olympic Games Performance Psychologist”.

She’s talked about it on radio and TV.

She (apparently) references it often, yet I STILL DIDN’T KNOW.

That’s how much noise is out there. Even people who know and like you might miss the message.

So say it.

Then say it again.

Then keep going.

One 2003 ski trip. 50 mates.

Plenty of dickheadery.

And a warning about forming strong opinions from weak evidence.

In this episode of The Fink Tank, Col and I talk about the beautiful human habit of overthinking the anecdote and underthinking the maths.

About how we love to build worldviews from tiny, noisy data points, and then swear they’re true. Humans are notoriously poor at assessing probability, sample size, and causation. Where your business is concerned, this is probably costing you.

What can we do about it?

I loved revisiting this old footage which is somehow TWENTY TWO YEARS OLD. This episode is actually two years old itself! A 9 minute version was sitting unused in the folder for season 1. So I gave it a trim and added the ski trip footage.

We haven’t changed a bit.

People are weird. Our lives of abundance have meant we often feel compelled to satisfy ourselves in illogical ways with our hobbies. 

Col is three sheds deep into a scientific enquiry into how humans often love buying stuff more than they like having it or using it.

This episode is a sprawling ode to that deeply relatable, slightly unhinged truth. Humans have strange and dumb ways of finding joy and distraction in our post-capitalist hellscape of privilege.

Also, is anyone out there willing to admit they spent $500 on a pair of running shoes?

Some childhood beliefs leave quietly. Others wait until you’re an adult to slap you in the face.

The moments of realisation tend to stick in the mind, too.

I turned beetroot red during my turn for roll-call in grade 2. It’s pronounced Penelope, not Penny-lope. (Mispronouncing words you learned reading is a whole sub-genre here. Good luck, Siobhan)

Col’s primary school mate Tim thought bands played their hit songs live at the radio station for every broadcast.

I genuinely slapped my forehead when I realised pipe-cleaners aren’t just for craft. They also… clean pipes.

The beauty of these childish realisations is they continue into adulthood. Hopefully at reduced frequency. There’s a great xkcd comic about treating these moments with reverence. If you laugh at someone’s embarrassing adult discovery you’re training them not to tell you next time. And you miss out on the fun.

I first saw a pineapple plant with Ed in Thailand in my mid 30s. It blew my mind. I thought they grew like bananas! (Please comment if you’re just now finding out they grow on the central stalk of a spiky bush. See also: cashew nuts.)

There’s a right way and a wrong way to tie your shoelaces (I’m going to make a video about this). Blake’s shoelaces kept coming undone on our New Zealand hiking trip. I gently enquired about his technique. “I’ve been tying my own shoelaces for TWENTY FIVE years Cam!! I know how to do it!!”. He did not.

On a camping holiday in the mid ‘10s, we discovered TWO people in our group independently thought molasses was a type of sea creature. They were both from the UK. Coincidence??

Also, the frozen bananas in The Simpsons are sold AT THE AQUARIUM.

Embarrassing adult realisations are a source of immense joy. Once the shame dissipates.

We’d love to hear your best “Wait…. WHAT??” moments.

Your workshop isn’t a suitcase. Stop overpacking it.

You’re trying to provide value. So you cram in every model, every framework, every brain nugget you’ve ever loved.

The result? A learning day that’s chokkas.

No space to breathe. No time to reflect. No energy left by 2pm.

In this episode of The Fink Tank, recorded during the lunch break on the second day of Col's 2 day summit, we talk about the urge to overstuff, why it comes from a good place, and how to fight it.

Shoutout to the random guy who got in the lift with us at 45s. And Deb Bailey.

The amazing satirical commentators H.G. and Roy host a long running radio program called This Sporting Life.

Their tagline is “Too much sport is barely enough”

With facilitation and training it’s sometimes the opposite:

“Barely enough stuff is too much.”

It started with our shit original band and stupid holiday videos. Now it’s keynotes, coaching, and feature films.

Compound interest isn’t just about money.

In this mid-summit episode of the Fink Tank, Col and I chat about the cruel human condition of being overly critical of our progress or growth.

About how we underplay our past accomplishments in our journeys toward mastery. This whole room of solo pros deliberately and meaningfully joined the dots of their history. And were called out on pointless self-deprecation!

It's really gratifying to reflect on the timeline of your accumulated skills.

Try it!