I often hear young people who are trying to get into our industry or any industry for that matter refer to the chicken and egg situation that is how to get experience when every job is asking for people with experience. How do you get experience if no one will give you a job to get it?

• Disclaimer: This is an internal email that we are sharing in the interest of helping others. Howdy! I figured it was time to send one of my semi-(ir)regular motivational-ish emails. I hope all is well with everyone and you are all enjoying life at The Finish Line. If you aren’t please let us know, we want to continue to improve and you are the most important thing to the company, without you, more importantly without you bringing your best to everything you do, we wouldn’t be what we are. You could say you are our unfair advantage. What does that mean?

Robert Rodriguez has been a massive inspiration of mine since watching El mariachi in the early 90s and learning about how he made it for $7000 and went on to win at Sundance. This episode of The Tim Ferriss show is a great listen and covers a lot of why I think he is someone everyone needs to take a tip or two from. I had the pleasure of meeting him at IBC in 2014 which was great. Very hard not to be a massive fan boy but I got through it. If you haven’t read Rebel Without a Crew you should but at least listen to this show.

I like to send out little emails to our team from time to time with tips on how I like to approach work/life/learning/tips/tricks… basically anything I find helpful that I think will help others. I’ve debated for a while what should be shared internally and what should be shared externally, ultimately I’ve decided (you will hear more on this later) that sharing is caring and if anything I have to share could help anyone then I should make it public. This is one such post. For me there have been a few specific things that have contributed to our success thus far and after reading Ed Catmull’s book Creativity, Inc I realised that a bunch of them are things that I have always done that have had major benefits for getting the most out of my time, work and most importantly, helping me to constantly improve, I thought I should share these tips.

I know it’s a really weird connection but I clearly remember the first time I saw these hooks from Black Magic Tackle. I grew up in a small town in New Zealand and fishing is pretty much the only thing I did as a kid. I would walk off down the train tracks from my house to the port with my little dog Suzie and we would sit down on the jetty at Port Taranaki and fish all day.