As a kid, I dreamed of creating visual effects for movies, but by the time I got into the industry, it had morphed from workshops full of people creating physical models by hand to endless rows of worker bees sitting behind monitors clicking through digital sequences frame by frame.

Zzzzz….

And if the movie you’re working on is terrible (See: Catwoman, The Stepford Wives, and Son of the Mask from my IMDB page), you feel your soul gasping for nourishment while you question life choices.

Distraction became a necessity to counteract the monotony, but standard cake-in-the-breakroom nonsense wouldn’t cut it. I required full-scale self-entertainment, so the entire studio became my playground.

I wanted to include as many people as I could, as participants or spectators.

I needed something with a low bar to entry, but stimulating enough to be compelling.

I had to invent stuff people could enjoy in the moment, but also talk about throughout the day to build momentum and sustain interest.

Using those criteria, I created Extreme Chess (a great story I’ll tell you over coffee someday), Mantastic 2006 (a beard-growing competition that spawned a sequel in 2008), and my favorite, the Full-Frontal Robotomy, a robot building competition with only one requirement for entry: your robot needed a name.

That’s as low a bar to entry as you can get.

Entries included a bread robot, a plant robot, candy robots, and some actual, working robots with motors and everything. Winners were crowned in four categories.

Along the way I decided to blog these events as a way to keep people informed and to give myself a creative outlet outside my job duties. The blogs wound up being something of an entertaining event unto themselves.

Over time, I created a slew of events and became the go-to guy for an off-center brand of fun people didn’t know they needed. At one point in my film career, I was recruited to a new studio entirely because of my ability to build morale.

The valuable lesson:

Commit to absurdity like it’s the most normal thing in the world and people will get onboard, no matter how insane it seems. 

I’d had enough of the film industry after my last studio collapsed and we were all laid off. Too much volatility, living hand to mouth, wondering if I was going to have a job in four months.

While applying for unemployment, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, so I figured I’d cast the net wide. On a whim, I added blogging to my state-mandated, online unemployment profile. I certainly couldn’t claim that I was blogging professionally, but I had definitely been blogging at work, so why not?

Smash-cut to me being recruited for a copywriting job at an international brand.

One of the interviewers said, “So, tell us about these blogs…”

After a few months of work as a newly minted copywriter, they said, “We didn’t care that you had no experience. Those blogs got you the job.”

Check out the Full-Frontal Robotomy