Being on the couch with free time stretching out before me has cemented my self-destructive belief that you are only as good as your output. Once I can get around a little bit better, I’m looking forward to putting myself to the test: what can I personally achieve with these two months off work?

I like Gabriel Orozsco’s approach to art. I like the way he embraces his natural attraction to fun, the way he modifies the familiar. I like his photography. In this short webfilm, I especially like the lint installation.

Keep making stuff and I will see you when this nasty surgery bollocks is done with.

The only thing that would keep Matthew and I quiet and safe from harm was a Sega Master System II. California Games was one of our favourites.

We became experts at virtual Flying Disc, Halfpipe, Surfing, BMX, and the insanely difficult Footbag. All the while, Fraser would lie back in a little bouncy chair with eyes as wide as 8-bit pixels. Of course, the chair was designed in such a way that he couldn’t leave it even if he’d wanted to. He grew up in that little chair. His bouncy yellow prison. I’m quite certain that growing up captive to an inanimate object sharpened his faculty for the cutting retort.

My mother often laments the laissez-faire style of parenting that Fraser experienced while she was busy holding Matthew back from slitting my throat with kitchen implements. Then again, Fraser turned out smarter than any of us, so maybe California Games does have a powerful educational quality embedded deep in its code.

Fraser is at university now, but I like to imagine that his passive consumption of Sega Sports as a child will leave him predisposed and defenseless in the face of this California Games-esque message from MTV.

Just a casual reminder to teenagers that unprotected sex is totally bogus. Radical scriptwriting aside, it’s clear that nostalgia (even through something as subtle as an animation style) is a powerful tool in commanding the attention of an audience when there is a very specific age range. It’s also an awesome way to enhance viral potential. Awesome to the max.

(Thanks to Hannah JV for the link.)

Human Clock is such a sweet and simple idea. It’s also a wonderful way to take a photo tour of the world. And now that it’s 10 years old, I like to imagine you’ll never see the same clock twice. Pictured above is Seattle, Washington, USA.

While we’re on the subject, it’s worth mentioning Christian Marclay’s video installation The Clock (2010). Certainly one of the most ambitious archival editing projects ever undertaken, Marclay creates a functional 24-hour clock face compiled from old movie footage. For this work he was awarded a Gold Lion at the Venice Biennale, where he was also named amongst the ten most important artists of today. Here’s an excerpt from the installation.

Greenpeace volunteers were amongst the first to respond with clean-up assistance. Of course, if you want to be honest about it, events like this one are vital to Greenpeace operations. Something close to home, that people can’t ignore, with powerful pictures to drive the problem home – it’s during times like these that Greenpeace is able to properly fundraise. This is the great New Zealand ‘Ambulance At The Bottom Of The Cliff’ Syndrome in action.

(Although may it be noted that accosting people on street corners with a clipboard or bucket is probably not the best way to raise funds either. (My high school girlfriend once taught me that the best way to get past the street collectors without the awkward tension is to tell them you’re already a member. Actual membership optional.))

Anyway, I am not here to judge Greenpeace as an organisation. I am here to judge the campaign Mojo was inspired to create. Lachlan McPherson is one of advertising’s good guys. If there’s a decent social cause that could use his help, he’ll be the first one on it. This is good news for ‘bad things’ as he’s also a smart guy and a great writer.

One effect of an oil spill is a lot of cute animals die. If YouTube has taught us anything, it’s that cute animals are the second most important thing on earth, after extended compilations of accidental personal injury.

So the team at Mojo took the deceased penguins, still coated in the oil that had killed them, and rolled them against street posters to make their point. They then convinced Radiohead to provide a classic track and made a beautiful piece of TV. It all comes together to form one of the most beautiful charity campaigns New Zealand has ever seen.

The disturbing thing is that while this campaign fully captured my heart and imagination, I am still left with this strange feeling of resent for the Greenpeace brand. I should love this brand, but so much of my experience of the brand stems from those awkward street-corner sign-up attempts. What do you do when your fundraising process is hurting your marketing efforts?

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I like this character, who projects the infinite misery of his adult world onto those around him. Reminds me of someone I know.

What resulted was a truckload of self-doubt, although in many ways this helped me to clarify a handful of my ambitions. The problem is, it turns out that most of the things I have been wanting are just really, really hard to come by.

So before you read this, I feel like I should warn you of exactly how completely miserable this mantra has kept me over the last 27 years. And also reinforce what an exciting, and at times productive, life it has made for.

Carrying an excruciatingly heavy set of personal expectations with you everywhere you go isn’t always practical. Nor, I imagine, is it particularly healthy or sensible. But I think it is probably good practice to examine your principles and try to reduce them to a clear purpose. A reason for being.

Why is it important to the world that you exist?

This is the first question you’d ask every brand you work with, given the chance. When a brand has a purpose, everyone with a responsibility to that brand has some tangible way to measure the things they say and do.

That sense of clarity is one of the reasons I have aspired to a brand purpose for myself. I can assure you it is born more out of curiosity than any kind of obsessive compulsive disorder. And anyway, the point of the exercise is not for me to modify my behaviour, because as chief executive of my existence, I am vetoing the fuck out of anyone who thinks they can tell me what I ought to say, or how I ought to behave. This is not about fooling myself into being a better person, either. It’s just about finding a flag to carry into battle.

As I worked through the architecture to reach my personal brand purpose, I began to see a few flaws in the exercise. How long would I need to stick to this purpose before I was entitled to a re-brand? Was it a problem that my current brand purpose was bound to differ from my brand purpose as a pre-23-year-old (the age at which I finally became an actual person)? What would this mean for me in the years beyond my inevitable mid-life crisis? If occasionally bending the rules around how my brand behaved (say at 4.00am on a Saturday morning) would I be undermining my fundamental principles – or just ‘keeping it fresh’?

Aside from shattering all of the very rigid ideas I had around the benefits of a brand’s architectural process, what I realised is that I had to seek a more flexible tool with which to measure my reason for being.

What I eventually arrived at was a question I could ask myself at any point during the during the week, amidst the annual moment of clarity I call ‘The Christmas Break’, or on my death bed, provided I still had cognitive function, which given the geriatric dementia that seems to run in my family I somewhat doubt.

Answers may scale from the slightest of tiny achievements – like writing a song with which to serenade a woman, right through to life’s great victories – like causing that woman to exit a baby from her sexy canal. The important thing is that I must be able to answer this question with something convincing – anything – or else it’s time for a new agency. So to speak.

Here is my personal brand purpose. A micro-architecture for being me. The heavy set of expectations I like to carry around, in spite of all they do to ensure my life is as difficult as is humanly possible.

Perhaps it will serve to inspire you also. Or perhaps you can dispute its relevance in the comments section and set me free.