[00:00:09.01] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.11] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.22] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.15] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.11] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast, where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back.

[00:00:23.07] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:23.26] - Gordon
Thank you for joining us. Been a busy week again. I feel like I say that every week, but I do like to fill my weeks with things. So any news, first of all?

[00:00:36.02] - Taylor
Not from me.

[00:00:37.08] - Gordon
No, I don't think there's any from me either. So let's get straight into our topics. Right, do you want to go first?

[00:00:42.23] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.

[00:00:43.22] - Gordon
Go on then.

[00:00:44.11] - Taylor
My topic this week is about a 75 day challenge. So at the beginning of the week on Monday, well on Sunday I decided it, but I decided to start a 75 day challenge where I have a set of things that I need to do, and it's based on a well-known or an established challenge called the 75 Day Hard. And what the challenge is, is you have to drink a gallon of water. You have to do two 45 minute workouts, of one of which has to be outside. You need to stick to your diet, whatever you decide that to be. You're not allowed to drink alcohol. You need to read 10 pages of a non-fiction, and you need to take a progress picture every day. So I modified it slightly to work better for me with my Crohns and just in general, my goals. So mine is very similar. So two 45 minute workouts, 10 pages of a book, a photo, 2 litres of water, which is four and a half... A gallon is four and a half litres, so 2 litres, which is kind of the recommended. And my nutrition is minimum 2,500 calories eaten, 100 grams of protein, and cutting out fizzy drinks and energy drinks. So that is my 75 day challenge. So that will take me to the third of January. And the reason I started it was because I wanted to prove to myself that I could be disciplined and stick to something that I set myself out to do. For example, drinking water is not something I've actually really done. I didn't really like the taste of it, but it's good if I have electrolyte tablets, it's good for my stoma. And yeah, just trying to cut down on things like fizzy drinks, which aren't great. And also increase the food, increase protein, and stick to something at the gym going regularly.

[00:03:01.19] - Gordon
That's very good. And whose challenge is this?

[00:03:04.20] - Taylor
I can't remember his name. I think his name's Andy something, I want to say. So he started it, he called it the 75 Day Hard challenge. And there's also the 75 Day Soft, which is, again, a slightly simpler or less strict version. And I customised it to myself because cutting out alcohol would be very, very easy. I don't really drink alcohol anyway. So I thought, let me customise it to suit something that I would find challenging. So yeah, it's going to be interesting. There's a lot of things that I have to think about throughout the day to make sure that I'm hitting all of those targets. So making sure that I'm eating, making sure that I'm eating stuff that has protein in it, for example, making sure that I am scheduling workouts based on what I'm doing. There's no point just going about my day and not thinking about that, because then I'm going to get to seven o'clock, eight o'clock in the evening, go, "I haven't done any workouts." And a workout doesn't have to just be the gym. It could be a dog walk, it could be playing squash, play tennis, any type of physical activity where I'm getting out or doing something essentially. And that's the goal for it, really. And yeah, it's a lot about mental discipline, physical discipline, and just being able to... Have you ever done something like that?

[00:04:33.13] - Gordon
No, not at all. I'm not really a gym sort of person or an exercise sort of person. I do exercise when I'm doing my parties because that's a bit of a workout for me, especially carrying all the equipment in, setting it up, taking it all down, bringing it out, etc, etc. But yeah, that's probably the only exercise I do.

[00:04:53.06] - Taylor
This challenge isn't about keeping fit or trying to be better at being fit. It's more about being disciplined and having that mental resilience to, if you say you're going to do something, do it. There's been lots of times in the past year or so where I've gone to bed and I've thought, "I'll get up and go to the gym if I'm up," sort of thing. Whereas if you say, "I'm going to go to the gym in the morning," funnily enough, you actually get up. Whereas if you say "maybe," it doesn't really happen. But yeah, it's less about the fitness side of it. It's more about setting yourself a challenge that is actually going to challenge you and following it through and sticking to it.

[00:05:33.28] - Gordon
And what's the normal goal for this 75 day challenge? Is it to make sure you do keep disciplined, or is there like you're going to look better, feel better at the end of it?

[00:05:45.09] - Taylor
I think there's a lot of by-products from it. You're going to build up resilience. You're going to build up habits, like good habits and things like that. But most of it is building up the mental discipline to actually follow through with what you say. And the actual rules say that if you don't complete one of those five goals or challenges in a day, you go back to day one again. So the whole point is to complete the 75 days, which is what I'm going to do.

[00:06:20.23] - Gordon
So gamifying, looking after yourself, basically.

[00:06:24.09] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:24.25] - Gordon
Yeah, that's good. It's very good. Well done. We shall come back to this in January, shall we?

[00:06:31.17] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:32.05] - Gordon
And then you can tell us how far into your 75 days you've got, based on whether you had to restart or not.

[00:06:38.11] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:38.26] - Gordon
Very good. Anything else you want to say on that?

[00:06:41.22] - Taylor
I don't think so. I just think if you can set yourself a challenge, it doesn't have to be, I guess, as extreme as the challenge that I've gone for. But if you're able to set yourself challenges, it takes you outside of your comfort zone and you're always going to be improving and doing better.

[00:06:56.06] - Gordon
I agree. So my topic this week is use the things that you have. So this week I've had a couple of things that have happened. One is that I've got a customer of mine that I do filming for, and he's got a marketing company now that are going to be creating assets for social media and so forth to then get his name out and about to prospective customers; show them what he does. And I've done many films for this guy before, and whenever I've done them, we've always used them on a website. So I've always filmed them landscape and on my digital SLR or prior to that, it was on my tape camera. But because the marketing company want to do social media with it, they have requested that we do portrait video filming. Now, you can do portrait video filming on a DSLR. It's not ideal, though, because you're basically having to hold a camera that's quite heavy at an angle that's not very comfortable and therefore is going to not necessarily be stable. It then requires during the editing process to flip it so that it's portrait because that's not the native format of it, etc etc. So I thought, "Okay, for this challenge, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my DJI Osmo Pocket 3, which is a little portable camera with a little screen that flips out so that you can have it either landscape or if you want, you can record portrait. But it does it at high quality, which is what I need. And that is what I'm going to use. Now, my only concern with this is I've never used it for a professional job before, so I needed to gen up on it and make sure I knew what I was doing and where the settings were so that I wasn't going to be sitting there while we were supposed to be filming going, "Hang on, just give me a second. I know the settings here somewhere." And make sure I know where everything is. And I'm also going to be using my DJI Mic 2s, which are a system which are wireless mics. We used them once before on this and I hadn't got the hang of them and it didn't come out great. And I think I know why now, because I wanted to make sure that I was all ready for it again. So it's coming up tomorrow. I'm filming tomorrow. I've been looking up and making sure I understand all the things I need to for being able to attach these mics to one to my customer who's going to be performing, and the other one is going to go on to the person he's performing to. And that way I can get clean audio from each of them without having to put a rifle mic or a gun mic onto my camera because it's just not big enough. The quality of the camera is good, but the audio is not so good because it's coming into it, whereas using the mics is going to give me much higher quality. And I've never done this before. I've never used them in that combination before. So I need to make sure that it's going to work. And by doing that, I'm going to make sure that I do some tests, first of all. And there were a couple of things while I was just looking through them that I didn't know they did, which is really good. One is that it's got a sync to video feature. So what happens is when you start recording on the camera, it will also record from the microphones. Now, I don't mean recording into the camera; because they're wireless the audio is coming straight into the camera and being recorded in the camera. But it's also backing up the audio by recording it on the mics themselves. So they have their own memory chips in them and they can record directly to the mics. So you've got not only a backup, but you've got a separate audio feed for each person, which you can then take afterwards and it gives you more options when you're editing. And I didn't know it did that. So that is really handy to know. And the other thing I didn't know it did is that you can actually plug in USB-C headphones to the camera and plug them into your ears so that you can then hear what's coming into the camera. So very easily, you can find out if there's any issues with the audio while you're recording, which is what I always do when I use my DSLR, but I've never used it with this camera because I didn't know it was possible. However, I didn't have USB-C headphones, so I'm using lightning headphones that came with my phone, in fact, came with my iPhone, but they've got a lightning connector on the end. And just by putting a little dongle in that I already had, which makes a lightning into USB-C, I've now got what I need to be able to hear. And it means that I can check the audio as it's recording. And if there's any problems, I can stop there and then and say, "Look, so sorry, we lost audio. Can we go again?" And we can do it again. And I'll know that the footage that I'm collecting is going to be fine. So that's the first thing that I wanted to mention. That's happening for my customer tomorrow. And then we're going to do another one in about a week's time as well. So it'll be good because I'll be able to learn from this experience and see what I need to change or add to the next time I do it to make it even better. Because obviously we're learning all the time, even if it's something we've done a lot. So that's the first thing. The second thing is I've got a website called facethepodcast.com, and it's a website for family and children's entertainers, and it's one that I started last year. It's a new podcast, and vidcast, where I talk to children's and family entertainers, and I haven't been recording any interviews recently. The last one I put up was back in February of this year, and that's not good enough because people really like them. And I've had lots comments about how they've enjoyed the episodes that I have up there, there's seven episodes. And if you go to that website, it looks very similar to This Week With. And that's because we took the whole infrastructure of This Week With and migrated it over and gave it a new facelift so that it met the criteria for what it is that I'm recording there. But I have restarted it again this week. I think what the problem is, is you get out of the habit of doing things, and this links in nicely with what you're talking about with your challenge. You get out of the habit and other things take its place, and the time that you have to do these recordings and to find people to do the recordings, and then the long process, which is actually the editing, all gets swallowed up with other things. Life gets in the way or work comes in. We've been working hard on lots of things; a website in particular has taken up quite a bit of time, but that's going to be launched soon, so that will be finished. And so I've started recording again, and I've already lined up another two dates where I'm going to be recording two other people. So I'm going to be having recordings coming in. And as soon as I've got the recordings, it's then down to me to edit them. But if I've got the recordings to edit, it will push me to then actually edit them and get them up and out so that I can then get on to the next ones. And they'll be up there as a record and an archive of these people and what they do and how they do it, which is what that podcast is all about. And I was neglecting it. I wasn't using it. I wasn't uploading to it. And so it fits in with my topic this week of using what you have. So if you've got equipment, if you've got software, if you've got a website that's waiting for content, then use it. Get on with it, or shut it down. That's the other alternative, isn't it? If you're not going to use it, then if it's a physical product, then sell it so that someone else can make use of it. And if it's a website, shut it down. But you obviously started these things or you bought these things because you had something in mind to use it for. So I would recommend, personally, get out there and use it, and you'll find out very quickly if it's the sort of thing that you want to continue doing or not. And if you don't, then don't waste time on it. Shut it down, sell it, get on to the next thing. Don't linger and go, "Yeah, one day I might get back to that," because it never happens. You'll end up with it sitting there for a year, two years, three years, And you'll go, "Oh yeah, I really should get back to that." And by that time, it's too late. So that's pretty much all I want to say. Is there anything you want to add to that?

[00:16:40.02] - Taylor
I think that if... Yeah, like you said, I think the best way to do it would be to schedule stuff and set yourself goals. So if you want to do X number of podcasts a year, schedule them in. Reach out to people and say, "look, I'd love to interview you. Are you around next year?" And schedule them in throughout the year next year, and then you've got them in there. And then obviously, it's just a matter of doing them. And then you've just got to edit them.

[00:17:08.23] - Gordon
Yeah. And by having somebody else having it in their diary, you feel like you need to do it. It's that compliance thing, not the compliance thing. It's when you know there's someone else involved and you don't want to let them down.

[00:17:23.13] - Taylor
Accountability.

[00:17:24.26] - Gordon
Accountability. That's the word. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's the accountability and making sure you actually do what you say you're going to do, but have someone else involved. So it's not just you that has to do it. That's it from me.

[00:17:38.05] - Taylor
And me as well.

[00:17:39.02] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, we can be found on YouTube. Please like, share and subscribe.

[00:17:45.26] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:17:50.21] - Gordon
And if you ring that bell on YouTube, if you are subscribing, then it'll tell you when our next episode is out. So you can be alerted that way. If you would prefer to listen to these, then we are on all the major podcast platforms. You can find us there. If you find a platform that doesn't have us, then let us know and we'll do our best to get on there because we want to make sure we're available to as many people as possible. We'll be back with you next Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:18:25.14] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:18:28.01] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:18:28.12] - Taylor
Bye.

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