Author: tworuru

The other day, while playing the famously egalitarian game of “golf” with one of my CEO buddies, we had a completely normal conversation, as humans often do. This being That Time Of Year, the topic of New Year’s resolutions came up. I was all ready with an almost titularly cynical spiel about how everyone thinks NY resolutions never work when my friend said something jaw-dropping (doctors hate him.)

The previous year, he’d made a resolution to learn conversational Chinese… and he’d actually done it.

To be fair, I did not immediately fact-check him on this, as my level of conversational Chinese is zero. He could have said 我不会说中文 and I’d have believed him. I did quiz him a little more about his method, though, as keeping a New Year’s resolution is something I’ve long resolved to eventually do.

It was pretty simple, he said: he had a group chat with some mates. They told each other their (achievable) resolution at the start of the year and checked in on each other throughout.

And they pretty much all achieved it.

That is probably all the information you need to replicate his success for yourself but feel free to keep reading! I suppose I was meant to leave the big secret until the end of the article but I’m just not very good at that kind of bait-posting. Or perhaps there’s more to it. Surely, success can’t be that simple? To find out, I decided to interview him, Diary of a CEO-style, to extract his secrets and sell them to the world like a human Juicero machine.

Interview with a “CEO”

You’re Jamie Moore, world-famous CEO of enigmatic golf company Q. I doubt there’s anything about you that anyone doesn’t know, but just in case something’s slipped through the cracks, tell us a little about yourself.

Sure. For 15ish years I ran website design companies but then in the Covid times I switched career to start a golf product company with my father.

We make an all-in-one adjustable golf club that can be used for every shot – putting, drives, chipping, bunkers etc. It’s fairly early days, but we’ve had some good traction selling them in 55 countries around the world (mainly the US)

Right. Obviously, we are both old, and my memory is failing. Refresh it by reminding me how we know each other?

We attempted law school together and each wisely decided to bail out. Definitely no ragrats here.

While at uni, we bonded over a range of things including the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution, playing pool and hosting a radio show.

Fascinating! Now, Tell me about that New Year’s Resolution accountability scheme you talked about when we played such extraordinary golf on that luxury course the other day.

What a place. Tahuna Golf Course. Home of the legendary 4th hole that is nowhere near the 3rd hole.

Yes, I’m part of a group of friends that for the past 3 years have set New Years resolutions each year… and actually check in on their progress throughout the year!

What did you, personally, achieve (or aim to achieve)?

A couple of my favourites:

• Learned to swim (200m of good freestyle, complete with tumble-turns)
• Learn to like Marmite and Vegemite (one of next year’s goals – backstory: these were my swearing punishment foods growing up so this will take some undoing!)

What were your resolutions for 2024, which is somehow almost over, and how did it go?

• Complete a triathlon (was progressing well, but had some back issues that meant the running was no bueno and had to abort).
• Speak Mandarin Chinese (hard to quantify – which in hindsight was a weakness – but I’d give myself a pass. I’d say I’m now OK at basic conversations on select topics)
• Make a pasta, preserve and pastry from scratch (achieved the first two but not the third)

While not the most stellar success rate this year, the thing that makes it feel like it was a success was the regular discussion and reflection throughout the year.

​What are some of the cool things other people have done?

• Eat at 5 ethnic restaurants you’ve never tried before.
• Run a marathon
• Host a murder mystery night
• Create an original 3-track EP
• Shoot a movie with your family as actors
• Stay a night in a DOC hut
• Create a family photo album

Why do you think doing resolutions this way works?

It’s a good question actually – since I had set goals like this in the past but never lasted beyond Jan.

I think it’s the combination of a few things:

• A ringleader to initiate it
• A group chat where the ringleader asks for updates every month
• The group already knows each other well
• The defined structure: 2x self-imposed goals, 1x goal

But on reflection, the most important factor of all is setting goals that are specific and things you genuinely wish you could achieve.

​Do I have your irrevocable, legally-binding, un-indemnifying permission to ahem utilise this NYE resolution accountability scheme of yours for the betterment of Cynic’s Guide subscribers?

You do.

​What’s your secret?

I quite like the song Lose You To Love Me by Selena Gomez.

(To success, obviously.)

Oh, disregard last answer.
I guess it would be embracing the slow power of compounding returns – when it comes to learning, growing a business, self improvement etc.

​In the unlikely event that there is someone among my subscriber base that does not know about your world-beating, adjustable (and now ultra-portable) Q golf club, please outline the details and any purchasable special offers in the following blank space.

begin pitch
We’ve just started preorders for a second generation of the Q club.
This has an 8-in-1 adjustable club head – and a two-part shaft that means it can fit in a small suitcase.
It’s all about giving golfers a simple and lightweight experience on the course – but also when travelling for golf.
If subscribers are interested, they can learn more at https://q.golf
end pitch

Josh again. So yeah, I think that’s pretty cool! (The New Year’s Resolution thing, although the golf club is also neat.)

In fact, I thought it so cool that Cynic’s Guide readers might like to join in. I’d been wanting to set up a subscriber chat on an app like Discord for a while, and this is the perfect excuse. Plus, I’m interested to see what resolutions people come up with, especially in the bit where they get to pick ideas for other people. I’ve embedded a sign-up form below, but if you can’t see it for some reason, here’s a direct link: New Year’s Resolution Tracking 2025.

The form asks for your email so I can prevent spammers and invite you to the group chat, but seeing as you’re probably reading this newsletter in your email that probably won’t be a problem. As for the resolutions, I’ll start: Mine for this year are:

1. To do a muscle-up (Rating: very hard, and you may recognise this as a previous goal from this newsletter, which I obviously did not achieve. But this year will be my year!)
2. To play the drum part in Toxicity by System of a Down to a reasonable degree of proficiency (Rating: possibly harder. I don’t actually know – drummers, feel free to laugh at me. It’s a fantastic song though, and great for hangovers.)

You don’t, of course, have to do the NY resolution thing! It is completely optional, and if it all seems a bit too non-cynical for you, that’s fine. This might help on that front: if you want to give it a crack but worry that you might find it all a bit much and drop out, no-one else will actually care.

But I’ll venture that people will care if you do achieve your resolution, and that might make it worth trying after all.

It was only a few short months ago, not long after the birth of our second child, that I had the vain – and, in hindsight, very funny – hope that I could continue writing this newsletter during her early infancy.

As it turned out, I could not.

Or perhaps I could have. I dunno. Other writers seem to manage! What I do know is that while I’ve had a whirlwind and often quite wonderful few months taking care of a beautiful new baby, I’ve also never felt more behind on, well, everything.

I might have felt this way when our previous child was this age. Unfortunately, I can’t remember, because sleep deprivation.

(I’d also meant to keep a journal during this time so I’d actually have some memories of it, but my curious aversion to journal-keeping keeps getting in the way.) Anyway, in all honesty, November would have been a hellmonth even if we didn’t have a new arrival. We had family over to stay, which isn’t something we could enjoy when the first kid was born because of that whole global pandemic malarkey. That wasn’t the hellish bit; it was lovely to have them over. The problem was that we began the month by contracting Covid, all together, as a family. Hm. It’s almost like the pandemic isn’t quite over, isn’t it? Someone should look into that.

It was nasty. I feel like I’d have managed the virus better if I’d been able to nurse the thumping headache and weird fatigue by staying in bed and drinking chicken soup, rather than looking after ill children. No sooner were we testing negative than the first tranche of family came to stay, which was (as mentioned) wonderful and life-affirming but didn’t afford any time for recuperation. And once they’d flown the coop I came down with the most vicious, uncompromising strep throat thing I’ve had in living memory. I ran fevers, and a mild inability to climb stairs faster than several minutes at a time, for two days before a dose of antibiotics killed whatever was trying to kill me.

As of the last week or so I’m much better, and the baby (who for the purposes of this newsletter I will name Pandora) is sleeping better. I think one may be linked to the other in some way. That sense of behind-ness, though – it’s never been worse. My work suffered, especially given I’d only just come off paternity leave when I got sick, and I’d just picked up fresh responsibilities in my job. The yard was overwhelmed by waist high grass, the garden got taken over by a Triffid-like mint infestation, the other undone tasks became even undone-er. It did not spark joy. In fact, I kept hearing this unhappy little ditty play in my head:

After some weeks of frantic effort coupled with the rest of the country slowing down somewhat for Christmas, it’s all starting to relent slightly. I feel like I’ve just caught a breath after being held down by crashing waves.

(In what is probably not a coincidence, my wife started reading How To Keep House While Drowning on audiobook around a week ago. A few people here have recommended it so I’m going to pick it up too, and listen to it while I wear the infant around the house like an inconveniently heavy, uncomfortably warm, and incomprehensibly precious jacket. )

With the recap recapped, I want to talk about something that helped pull me out of this especially funky funk.

It is, of course, a self-help book.

I’ve shouted out John Birmhingham, author of He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, a few times in the Cynic’s Guide. He’s long been a favourite writer of mine, since I discovered his oeuvre leafing guiltily through the problematic Ralph magazines I bought in my late teens. I may have purchased them for the pictures, but I did end up reading the articles! Of late, Birmo has written frankly of his own battles with procrastination viz online time-wasting. After this touched a chord with readers of his newsletter, he decided to write an honest-to-god self-help book, which he made free to subscribers for a couple of days as both a kind gift and a clever way to juice Amazon reviews.

And the book, which rejoices in the search-engine-optimised title of “THE COMPLETE BUT LITTLE BOOK ABOUT PROCRASTINATION: A SELF-HELP GUIDE TO BREAKING FREE OF YOUR BS“?

It is fucking great.

Available now at your favorite digital store!

THE COMPLETE BUT LITTLE BOOK ABOUT PROCRASTINATION: A SELF-HELP GUIDE TO BREAKING FREE OF YOUR BS. by John Birmingham

Universal Book Links Help You Find Books at Your Favorite Store!AUTHORS

JB has managed to do what no-other self-help author ever has, in my quite extensive experience: keep it short. The book is a blessed 51 pages long, and it is relatable. If the following passage doesn’t resonate with you, you are reading the wrong newsletter:

You have a problem, but it’s not laziness. [Procrastination] is a human problem. It messes with people no matter their gender, their class, their culture, whatever. We procrastinate about household chores. We put off important personal decisions. We leave our taxes too late. We sit, staring at the blank page, the empty screen, our stomachs churning, our spirits low.

It also hits you – or at least me – right in the fear feels. Procrastinate as we might, there’s an ultimate deadline there’s no getting away from, and after my recent bout of illness this one rang a knell:

I didn’t grow out of it. If you’re reading this, chances are, neither did you. Lying in that bed, a bunch of tubes punched through my ribcage, I suffered the horrifying realisation that comes to all procrastinators in the end. It really was the end. I’d left it too late. There’d be no wriggling out of this.

Drawing on contemporary psychology and techniques like cognitive behavioural therapy, and working with rather than against the fact that his target audience is incredibly likely to put his book down due to a sudden urge to browse the Wikipedia entry on alpacas, Birmingham goes straight for the jugular of procrastination. What is most off-putting about putting things off is that you know it’s illogical and that it will come back to bite you, and the reason for that — Birmingham writes, with plenty of science to back him up – is that procrastination is the all-but-inevitable outcome of emotional dysregulation.

It’s about discomfort.

Imagine I have a big project due in a week. I know I should start, but instead, I find myself cleaning the house, checking emails, or plating up my fourth rewatch of Justified. What the fuck, JB? When I thought about my daunting task, my brain did not get that immediate dopamine kick. In fact, thinking about all that hard work possibly even turned off my dopamine tap and crashed me into a trough—making me feel even less motivated. To escape this uncomfortable feeling, my treacherous brain starts seeking out something, anything, to provide a quick dopamine fix. And here comes my old friend the donut, the doomscroll, the infinite void of streaming TV. Anything feels better than sitting in the discomfort of the work.

The only drawback – and this is not Birmingham’s fault, it’s your neurobiology’s – is that working with the discomfort that gives rise to procrastination is obviously uncomfortable. He offers an admittedly cornball acronym, as is traditional in CBT, to help remember the required steps before tackling a given incidence of procrastination. I am reproducing it here not to try and dick over JB’s book sales but because writing things down is about the only way I remember them.

RULER: Recognise, Understand, Label, Express, Respond.

The way I’ve put this into practice, when facing a potentially delay-able task like “my excellent and usefully bill-paying job” or “writing a catastrophically late newsletter for inexplicably patient subscribers” is to open up a blank, plain-text document and dump whatever mess of emotions I am experiencing in there.

This is all kinds of yuck. Seeing what you’re feeling on the page – often, in my case, self-loathing and shame and anxiety expressed in what can be quite worrying terms – is confronting. The good news is that writing these things down before starting a job feels a bit like procrastination, which is a helpful little hack. And then once I’m done recognising, understanding, labelling, and expressing, I delete the document and it all goes away. Then I respond, by actually doing whatever task my emotional maelstrom was sucking me away from.

It is of course not necessary to do this exercise via the written word: you can do it all in your head. Or perhaps, if you work alone or don’t mind looking like you’re rehearsing a role in Glengarry Glen Ross, you could say it aloud. As with any other self-improvement exercise – say it with me, I’ve written it enough times here – YMMV. Your Mileage May Vary. I suppose I should add the caveat that because everyone is different this method may not work for you at all, but I suspect that it might, and I am very happy because at this point in time it does work for me.

Despite only being 51 pages long, this isn’t all that’s in the book. TCBLBAPASHGTBFOYBS is a dense little nugget, the neutron star of self-help texts. There are plenty more tips and tricks that are only to be deployed once you’ve accepted the inconvenient truth that fixing procrastination very likely requires addressing some emotional dysfunction. But it’s eminently doable, and it’s helped me enormously.

It might do the same for you. It’s worth a punt: the book costs less than the coffee you were probably planning on buying. And if you’re (somehow, in this economy) feeling flush, why not kick in here too? I want my writing here to be free forever, but your contributions really do help keep the server lights on.

Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope to be back sooner than a three-month unplanned hiatus: the New Year is upon us, and it’s like catnip to the self-improvement-obsessed. I have something coming up to mark the occasion that I think you’ll like. In the meantime, feel free to say gidday in the comments, it’s been a hot minute but I’d love to hear from you.

To close, here are are some wise words from my four-year-old who got interested in the laptop while I was writing this.

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So there you are. Stop, go. And a very Merry Christmas to you all.

I am writing this using voice transcription software because at the moment I’m slowly pacing about the house, carrying a two-week-ish old infant around the lounge room, because if I stop for more than about 30 seconds she’ll realize I’m not her mother and I’m of no use to her because I don’t have mammary glands and she’ll start crying so please bear with me – it might be a little bit disjointed.

In the previous newsletter I talked about my “dopamine detox” (a nonsense name for something you can’t actually do, and yet it was quite helpful) and about how it had enabled me to do a painting and… yeah.

This is the painting.

I even did a TikTok, which you should not watch if you are on your own dopamine detox or have a weak stomach:

For more information about why I would do such a thing I’m going to leave a Q&A that I did with David Farrier on a paid edition of his Webworm newsletter.

I think it’s fairly comprehensive and should answer any of the questions that you might have had and possibly even more.

Other questions are being answered at the TradeMe auction that I am currently running for this “artwork“.

I suppose the connection to self-improvement isn’t all that tenuous because without intentionally avoiding aimless scrolling for a couple of weeks I can honestly say that this painting wouldn’t exist.

Whether that is a net good or a net bad is kind of up for discussion but I think it’s probably a positive, because a big part of the reason I started this newsletter experiment was to see if I could find space in my life to get more art done. A lot of that space was to be carved out at the time that I spent aimlessly reading news websites and scrolling social media, and as unlikely as it may seem, this hideous painting feels like a very real triumph on my self-improvement journey.

So with that I will cut to the Q&A which – given our audience overlap you may have already read on Webworm – and I’ll ask gently that if you have any questions to ask me of this painting that you leave them up on the TradeMe auction as the Q&A is really where the actual art occurs, given the artistic value of the painting itself is… well, let’s say, questionable.

As always thanks for reading – do look forward to my next voice-recognition-penned diatribe whenever I can capture enough sleep to have the mental faculties to actually write one.

A Q&A with David Farrier & Joshua Drummond

Dear God, what is this abomination? Please explain what is going on in your mind – why are you doing this?

Man, I’m not entirely sure what it is or why I’m doing it. I guess there’s a bit of a backstory. Part of it is that most of what I paint is cute stuff, self-conscious kitsch, like birds wearing hats or landscapes from video games. 

A few years back I decided I wanted to see if I could learn to paint photo-realistically. It worked, kind of – I ended up spending a bit more than five years working sporadically on a painting of our cat that was meant to be a birthday present for my wife and I only finished shortly before she died. (The cat, not my wife.) 

After I finished the painting I decided I never wanted to do any genuinely photorealistic stuff ever again, as it’s too fiddly and time-consuming, but I was able to use the skills I’d picked up to do a decent painting of a Bored Ape as payment for a mate who’d helped me out with my parody NFT project, the Bird Hat Grift Club. 

I ended up taking a similar approach with this portrait of the Prime Minister – realistic enough, but not so you’d mistake it for an actual photo.

The other part of the story is that I’ve done this a couple of times before, that is, painted portraits of people I don’t have a high opinion of and sold them on TradeMe.

Dislike can take up a lot of mental space, and I’ve written quite prolifically of the agony of having no real ability to change what is quite clearly — as in scientifically, objectively — wrong with the world.

I guess painting is a way of processing this. 

The people I’ve painted so far have either been prominent mainly because they’re so objectionable (like Michael Laws) or have been gifted lead roles in making New Zealand a significantly worse place (like Christopher Luxon.)

And I guess I’m just kind of fascinated by politicians of all stripes; the way that they have to sacrifice their humanity to gain and maintain power. Especially with Luxon, you end up with this caricature who speaks entirely in trite slogans and gormless cliches and never seems to respond sincerely to questioning.

I find this so weird and objectionable — people always talk about how politicians should be “someone you’d like to have a beer with” but if someone showed up at my house talking in the fundamentally Martian patois that top politicians adopt I’d kick them out.

Another thing is that I don’t have a very high regard for my actual artistic skills, and I think contemporary art is mainly a grift that enables the ultra-rich to either appear learned and magnanimous or just indulge in money-laundering.

This limits my chances for a career in the contemporary art world. I’m fine with that, art is very much a part-time gig for me, but what I do consider myself good at is TradeMe auctions. The real art isn’t the painting, it’s the auction and the Q&A that arises. That’s where I have the most fun, anyway.

I guess the last part of the reason I did this is I just find it so completely absurd, to the point that I kept cracking up while working on some detail of the painting.

I’m very aware that it’s quite a strange thing to do.

And that might stem from the fact that I’m very sleep-deprived, as our daughter was born just a few weeks ago, and I’ve got my son crawling around on my lap as I write this.

It all adds up to create an interesting mental space.

What gear did you use? How did you paint this? How long did it take?

It’s acrylic paint on canvas. I used the biggest, cheapest canvas I had: it’s a metre tall. I’ve had it for over a decade. I don’t know where I got it, and I could never think of the right painting to put on it, and as I moved houses and such it just kind of came with me getting more and more decrepit.

It was covered in spiderwebs and cat hair and dead insects, so I decided it’d be the perfect substrate for a portrait of the Prime Minister. I used acrylic paint because I’m familiar with it, even though it’s probably not the ideal medium for a painting like this.

The best thing about acrylic is that it dries very quickly. The worst thing is that it dries very quickly, so you have to be sitting at the easel with a little spray mister thing to keep the surface moist if you want to blend paint on the canvas.

Occasionally, if you want to make a quick blend or correction, it makes sense to lick your finger and smudge the canvas, which is why the auction (truthfully) describes the painting as being 0.1 percent body fluids. It’s interesting to think there’s some of my actual DNA in it, and that some of the painting is probably in me.

I hope it’s not too toxic.

Oh and it took about a bit over a month to paint, maybe 30 hours total?

Maybe a weird question, but did you listen to any music or podcasts while painting it?

Yes. This is going to sound like the biggest suck-up ever but I did listen to Flightless Bird while I made it — the “Navy Dolphins” and “OnlyFans” episodes. I also listened to Behind the Bastards; I’m a big fan of that pod and they had a weirdly appropriate two-parter about the “evilest painter,” Thomas Kinkaide.

I also listened to an audiobook of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, a book I reviewed for The Spinoff. My friends and I exchanged a lot of rambling voice messages.

And there was a good mix of music. The soundtrack to the 2016 Doom game, a bunch of shoegaze instrumental rock like Mogwai and Maybeshewill and Godspeed You Black Emperor, a band called Berlinist, the album Typhoons by Royal Blood, some Radiohead and Low Roar, and in the end phases of the painting I got really into Incubus again for some reason.

I am looking at this painting and my brain does not want to process it. Please tell me, as the artist, what is going on here?

You know that internet gag where someone sees something awful that leads them to comment “what a terrible day to have eyes?”

That’s what I’m going for.

If your brain doesn’t want to process it then it’s working. I love that sort of thing. For an example, I really like Henrietta Harris’ work — she renders people (and cats!) in this rich illustrative style but with multiple eyes or noses or distortions in the picture that make it quite genuinely difficult to tell what’s going on and the overall effect is enjoyably disturbing.

For the Luxon portrait, I could tell it was doing what I wanted it to when I took a friend down to my basement studio without hinting at what I was working on and she screamed when she saw it.

It was very important that Luxon look as much like Luxon as possible, while his …environment looked as surreal and disturbing as possible.

Also I should clear something up.

A bunch of people who’ve seen the painting seem to think it’s a butthole. It’s not a butthole.

If your butt looks like that, seek help urgently. It’s just meant to represent flesh, something between elbow skin and a throat and an areola and a boil and varicose veins. Human skin is weirder the more you think about it, right? We’re just naked flesh covering pulsating veins topped with a knob of hair, if we’re lucky. (I’m not, and neither is Luxon.)

Originally, the painting was meant to be Luxon’s eyes and nose and mouth in the centre of the picture with the rest of his face stretched across the canvas a bit like the Last Human from Doctor Who, but I didn’t have the artistic skill to pull that off. Then I had the idea of making it look a bit like Jim Carrey emerging from the robot rhino in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, except with Luxon kind of joined to whatever he’s emerging from, like the uvula at the back of your throat.

And I wanted him to look very happy to be there, just thrilled off his nut, but also with a kind of grimacing grin like Hide The Pain Harold or the old Flight Centre captain a few seconds before the ad ended. Because I based the portrait on what I think was Luxon’s LinkedIn profile picture, it mostly works.

Do you want Luxon to see this, and if so what do you want him to take from it?

Sure. There’s a good chance he sees it, but if he’s anything like my previous subjects he’ll refuse to comment.

On the other hand, it’s 2024, shame is the new fame, he’s got a social media team, and there’s every chance he tries to make some kind of hay out of it. While I hate to break the character I’ve put together for the auction, I’d like to get ahead of any attempt to leverage this. What I want him to take from it, and what he absolutely will not, is: people see through you.

And he — and you — should be a bit horrified by this, actually. 

For me, what’s creepy about this painting isn’t Luxon’s sweaty, grinning face; it’s what’s implied to be behind it. Of course the painting is meant to be gross and funny but, if you’re looking, it’s also meant to be frightening, because it’s representative of the insane situation the country and the world are in.

Behind that grinning mask, that millimetre or less of paint, is a howling vortex of anthropogenic anti-reality bearing down on us to devour all possibility of a decent future. If you saw the mini-series Chernobyl, that show had the perfect metaphor: the gaping maw of an open reactor; the cost of lies.

We’ve put all this carbon in the atmosphere, incurring a debt to the laws of thermodynamics, and physics is coming to count the cost. And Luxon and his ilk are — somehow — pretending that we don’t need to do anything meaningful about this; instead we need to do all the things that led to the problem, like neoliberal economics and fossil fuel production, harder and faster and more cheerfully. I find that inhuman, and terrifying, and so should you. 

Ideally, Luxon would too. 

But he won’t. 

Just to be clear again, where is the money for this auction going?

It’s currently up for auction with half of the proceeds split between Rainbow Youth and Kiwipal, the Kiwi Trust for Palestinian Children’s Relief.

As an evangelical Christian, I’m sure Luxon will be enthused about both those causes. The other half will be going to a cause I like to call “buying food for my children.”

Is there anything else you’d like to add? This is your time to shine.

I am very tired. Part of this is the new baby in the house and part of it is that I clearly have too many hobbies. You can purchase my artwork here.

I have two newsletters: one about self improvement, and one about media and politics that I find too depressing to update.

I write other stuff too. For a completely different product of dwelling on dislike: if you don’t enjoy the heel turn JK Rowling has taken, read my Harry Potter fanfic. What a great way to close out this Q&A!