On the 80/20 rule, production efficiency and the art of bodging

I've been thinking a lot about the 80/20 rule lately, and how it relates to the "S curve". You know, how once you reach of the top of the curve where it starts to flatten out, it's not worth your while pushing to make that last 20% perfect. 

A student of mine recently came to me for advice on writing his end of high school maths exploration paper on learning curves, and our conversation reminded me of this post from the blog of one of my favourite books of all time, "Early Retirement Extreme" (ERE) by Jacob Lund Fisker. The key takeaway from the post is that you want to spend most of your time in the middle of the curve, where the curve is the steepest and you get the most improvement in outcome (y-axis) per unit of "effort" (x-axis). This would seem to be an argument for getting pretty good at lots of things, rather than trying to be the best at one thing - at least if maximising return on effort is an axiom you subscribe to.

This is closely related to the book's discussion about the art of bodging or "improvising a working solution using whatever is on hand" as an optimisation strategy. Many readers will note the similarity of this definition to the one for the verb "to MacGyver". The two terms can usually be used interchangeably, although I'd suggest that while "MacGyvering" is usually done to solve an urgent problem or prevent a catastrophe, "bodging" is usually undertaken with the aim of saving money and/or avoiding having to buy a solution. This site suggests that MacGyver is used in US English, while bodging is a British English term. 

I just put this picture of MacGyver wearing aviators here to get you to click on it. 

I discovered Fisker's book in late 2012, and it's had a massive impact on the way I think. This book review on Wise Bread is a good summary if you have the time and inclination, but the 50000-foot summary is that being a consumer is a choice, and that it's possible to live off a fraction of what you earn, if you're willing to make the necessary lifestyle adjustments. The reason most people don't "retire" (read: reach a point where the income earned from your assets exceeds your expenses; this doesn't necessarily refer to retirement in the traditional sense of golf and cruise ship vacations) extremely early is because reducing your expenses to that level requires some extreme measures!

Of course, desired retirement income and desired level of comfort and lifestyle expenses all exist on sliding scales, so it's possible to get a lot out of the book without needing to be a hardcore minimalist who walks everywhere, takes cold showers and buys socks all of the same kind so they never have to deal with mismatching pairs (all of which are approaches suggested by Fisker in the book).

So while the book does have many examples of strategies and tactics that many would consider ridiculously extreme (and that would ruin most marriages, mine included), it's also full of gold, and is littered with hilarious, tongue-in-cheek figures and diagrams that look like they belong in a science or mathematics journal article, like this one from the section on bodging:

(Fisker, 2009)

Some representative quotes from the book include the following:

"The most effective option to save money on clothing clearly is not to buy any."

"You wouldn’t toss a pet either just because you lost interest or found something cuter, right? Ownership implies responsibility: You were responsible for digging raw resources out of the ground and now you’re responsible for getting the maximum use out of the object."

and

"I recommend getting rid of all the weird things in your cupboard. The best way is to not buy anything until your last strange ingredient is gone. Just imagine that there was an earthquake and the stores were closed for a week. How would you do?"

I was inspired to try out that last suggestion recently when our apartment complex was put under a 14-day lockdown as part of Covid-19 control measures. I lasted nearly a week until I ran out of milk. I had the brilliant idea of improvising some coffee with butter and salt that I'd heard about during a recent trip to Ethiopia. It tasted like the Vegemite soup that my mum used to give us when we were sick. I gave up and phoned for delivery.

Further investigation online revealed that you need a blender to make butter coffee properly, which got me thinking about the line on the above graph. I wasn't about to go and order an industrial blender just so I could make myself the occasional butter coffee, but there have been examples of actions that I've found myself doing more often during social distancing (read: while spending more time in my apartment), such as grinding coffee beans, filling up the ice cube tray, and hoiking those really heavy 20L water bottles onto the water dispenser, that have made me contemplate moving upwards and left on the line - maybe I should get an espresso machine? A water filter? Upgrade my fridge to one with an inbuilt ice cube maker? But then I look at that quote about tossing a pet (from the list above, which is one of many ERE quotes on my wall, by the way) and start having second thoughts. 

Fisker suggests that skill can shift the line down and to the left, but I'd also suggest that where the line lies for you is also a function of your attitude towards consumerism and sustainability and how much you value your time and labour at. For example, if we compared the lines for me and my wife on the matter of, say, what kind of coffee making device to own, they'd look something like this:

Figure 1: price of solution as a function of the reciprocal of use frequency, generalised with arbitrary units (produced by the author in Desmos, 2020) (to my maths teacher colleagues and IB maths students, excuse the screenshot - I couldn't get the labels to display when using the export feature)

For me, daily coffee-making warrants owning a plunger, whereas for my wife it justifies an espresso machine :-) 

Thinking about the physical interpretation of the x-axis units, we can modify the graph to be more intuitive and reflective of reality: "reciprocal of frequency of use" can be interpreted as "average time between uses", which can approach both zero and infinity but never reach either. This suggests that a reciprocal function might be a more appropriate model, with the expenditure level justified by the frequency of use approaching zero as the time between uses approaches infinity, and very high expenditures being justified for (almost) continuous use:

Figure 2: modified version of Fisker's 2009 model to account for asymptotic behaviour at very high and very low values of use frequency (produced by the author in Desmos, 2020)

What about you? Where does your line or curve lie on the spectrum? What are some examples of solutions you've improvised or "bodged" because you didn't want to buy something you weren't going to use very often? Share your stories in the comments! 

Anything, Anywhere, Anytime - the effect of the late 90s Goodies cult in Australia on the revival of retro 70s funk culture

When I posted about relaunching this blog a month or so ago, I got a request for a Goodies post. As it turns out, just as I was creating a hyperlink to a web page that would explain the connection between The Goodies and the phrase "Anything, Anywhere, Anytime" last Saturday, Tim Brooke-Taylor was literally on his death bed. When I heard the news of his passing, the decision on what to post about next was made for me. 

To explain why there was a Goodies cult in late 90s Australia, and why it's related to 70s retro music, we need to go back another decade, to the living rooms of late 80s suburban Australia. 

Back in those days, there wasn't a lot of choice in after school TV viewing options. I think we had 5 or 6 channels. Thankfully, The Afternoon Show and host James Valentine were making good choices for us. A quick look at the list of shows on the Wikipedia page reveals an all-star lineup of classic children's television, including Doctor Who, Inspector Gadget and of course, The Goodies. 

Fast forward to the late 90s, and those kids who had grown up watching The Goodies after school were now at university, and the dot.com revolution was picking up speed. It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise then, that Australian student Alison Bean would found the "The Goodies Rule-OK?" fan site while at university in Adelaide in 1995 (I love how the website still looks like it was made in 1995). 

The scene was set for the founding executive of the University of Queensland Goodies Appreciation Society to come together in 1997 at their university residence hall. I can't quite remember which came first - discovering the website or having the idea for the club - but after filing some paperwork with the student union and bodging up some t-shirts with a stencil and spraypaint, UQ GAS was born.

The newly-minted UQ Goodies Appreciation Society executive in February 1998 (the author is on the far left in a top hat).

The inspiration for the above photo (from the Goodies Wikipedia page)

Now while there was a significant Goodies fan base attending the University of Queensland at the time (for the reasons described above), at its core, the real reason for the club's existence (and many campus clubs and societies' existence, for that matter) was to see how much student union funding we could siphon off towards beer money. 

This was not just a simple matter of signing up more members and thus receiving more grant money. Naturally, grant money could not be claimed from beer receipts, so one had to think of other creative ways to "launder" it. In our case, our "core business model" was holding Goodies episode viewings and offering subsidised pizza afterwards:

A common sight after a UQ GAS gathering. Circa 1998. 

Another favourite tactic of many clubs was to hold BBQs with free or subsidised burgers. The money used to purchase the ingredients could then be claimed from your grant money allocation, and then spent on beer at a later date once the funds had cleared. These were also a good way to sign up new members - and of course, more members meant more grant money. 

A poster for a UQ GAS BBQ giveaway, circa 1999. 

The club's membership grew rapidly during 1998, and we started getting noticed by some of the bigger, well-established clubs. Early in our second semester, the president of long-running UQ clubs and societies giant, the Chocolate Appreciation Society, approached us about holding a joint ball. The concept was a retro-themed evening featuring chocolate mud cake. A random combination, for sure, but remember what I wrote earlier about the true purpose of most clubs' existence. Suffice to say these guys were on the same page as us!

Promoting the "Murrumbidgee Mudcake Ball" at a breakfast radio event, September 1998. Yes, that is chocolate on our faces, and we are wearing pyjamas.  

Funky Squad, ready for a big night out. 

So you're probably wondering why the 70s funk association. Well, apart from the obvious Funky Gibbon connection (this was one of their most famous songs, and Bill Oddie wrote about how it was influenced by Sly and the Family Stone in his tongue-in-cheek but slightly bitchy cover notes for the 1997 CD "Yum Yum - The Very Best of the Goodies"), true Goodies aficionados would know that the whole show was peppered with 70s funk soundtracks and ridiculously high doses of wah pedal. Just check out this version of the theme song from the mid-70s:

The music in most Goodies episodes will make any funk appreciator's face contort with pleasure. 

The bigger picture here (I think) is that The Goodies were part of a broader movement on university campuses across Australia in the late 1990s and in the underground music scenes of Australia's capital cities, in which 70s funk music styles and fashion became cool again. Perhaps it was a reaction to the teen angst-fuelling grunge music culture of the mid-90s. Or perhaps these things just go in 20-year cycles (according to this logic, Brisbane will be poised for my university funk band "High Density Beagles" to make a comeback sometime around 2037). 

 At any rate, I'm sure growing up listening to The Goodies soundtracks and The Pinball Song from Sesame Street were major contributing factors in the development of my own "Cosmic Funk" world view. But more on that in a later post :-) 

For now, I'll wrap this post up in the way that Tim Brooke-Taylor's Goodies character would have wanted it to end - with a stirring rendition of "Land of Hope and Glory":

Here's to you TBT. RIP.

The "From the Archives" Series Episode 2 - Life on the road as a Chivas Regal Brand Ambassador

It all started with a business card. Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe I was supposed to make the business card so that I'd start looking for ways to turn the vision it outlined into a reality. Depends on whether you believe in synchronicity or not I suppose:



I guess I should start by explaining the term "老外". In pinyin "laowai"; it's the word the Chinese use to refer to a foreigner, sort of in a tongue in cheek way; like "farang" in Thailand, "gwai lo" in Hong Kong, "gringo" in Latin America, and “gaijin” in Japan. And so "老外" (Laowai) Extra­ordinaire (24h Service), then, is like a Chinese version of the "Anything, Anywhere, Anytime" slogan coined by The Goodies (I’ve had this printed on a business card too!) -­ referring to the kind of foreigner who hangs around developing countries, and perhaps, some would say, capitalising on their foreign­ness, picks up all sorts of odd jobs where talent and actual qualifications and experience take a back seat to the requirement for a foreign face. The "socialite and celebrity for hire" line, then, follows from participating in these kinds of jobs and building up contacts over a period of time. Some of the bizarre requests that I'd had and jobs that I'd done during my 18 months in Nanjing (see previous post) -­ which made me realise that it was actually possible to achieve D­-grade celebrity status as a Chinese­-speaking foreigner if you chased it -­ were the inspiration for that section of the card.

Socialite and Celebrity For Hire

In March 2009, a colleague of mine who was doing some part-time work for the British Council forwarded me a job ad. They were seeking a Chinese-speaking caucasian male to give presentations about Chivas Regal 12YO Whisky and run Whisky tasting sessions for Chinese customers, all while wearing a kilt. I didn’t think twice. The gist of my email application was something like "my last name is Wallace, I speak Chinese and I like whiskey. And my legs will look great in a kilt". I'm pretty sure I sent them a copy of the business card too.

I remember telling Nan (my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time) about the job and saying “now that’s what ‘celebrity for hire’ means” (she had been involved in helping me translate the final version of the card after we just met, and was ridiculing me at the time for calling myself a celebrity for hire). It was almost as if the business card had become a self-­fulfilling prophecy. At the end of the shows, I even got to shake hands with the guests as they left, and sign Chivas gift packs. It was all so wonderfully D­-grade-celebrity­-style cheesy.

Putting on my cheesiest smile, 2009

Showing a bit of knee - what's under that kilt?

"Dr Chivas" in the Whiskey Lab, circa 2010

That ain't workin'...

Now, while flying around China on your weekends drinking Chivas in a kilt might sound like fun (and it was), it was also a lot of hard work. I had to learn a fairly complicated Chinese script with a lot of whiskey vocabulary, and be able to deliver it all at a sharp and witty pace alongside a Chinese MC. Often, my Saturdays would involve an 8am flight to a random Chinese city, followed by a dress rehearsal, then three 45 minute shows in the afternoon/evening. The day would then finish with the obligatory marathon Chinese dinner/drinks/karaoke, which would often involve more Chivas.

The job was, of course, not without its perks (as if free single malt whisky wouldn’t be enough of a perk for many people reading this). After being selected for the job, we had to undergo a whisky training day, which included sampling fine whiskies from all over the world, including a 25-year-old and even a 50-year-old whisky. To match the brand's image, we usually stayed in nice hotels too.

Frank, the Chivas product manager for China, was often quite generous with the company account, even after I’d finished all the shows. One summer, a friend was visiting Shanghai, and I was looking for a way to impress him with my “man about town” connections, which hadn’t yet developed to the point they once had in Nanjing. Thankfully, Frank came to the rescue. I casually inquired what he was doing that night (it was a Saturday after all), knowing full well that, as a man in his position, he was likely to have tickets to some alcohol sales promotional event involving lots of models serving free booze.

My hunch proved to be correct, and Frank got us tickets to a Bacardi pool party, complete with models in bikinis splashing each other in a pool, and lots of Shanghai’s beautiful people (a.k.a. “glitterati”, according to the invite for the next party that we were given as we left) mingling with expensive drinks while DJs spun subtly mixed retro tunes. Unfortunately, the Bacardi cocktails were also priced for the glitterati, but Frank, bless his heart, forbade us to pay money for a competitor’s drink, so he graciously bought yet another bottle of Chivas 18YO (in addition to the many that he'd bought for the crew after Chivas shows), which the three of us proceeded to polish off. And then it hit me that the final piece of the puzzle on my business card was now in place – I had become a Shanghai socialite!

And not just because I found myself socialising with the young, well-to-do Shanghai hipsters who ran the advertising agencies. Indeed, in working for Chivas I found myself coming into occasional contact with C-grade celebrities - the kind who were actually scraping a living out of their celebrity hustle and making regular appearances on Shanghai television. As an example, I went through my initial "ambassador training" with Dantes Dailiang, a French musician based in Shanghai who writes songs in Chinese - this video summarises his career nicely. Alas, I wasn't able to make the transition from D-grade celebrity to C-grade celebrity myself (see Table 1) before I left Shanghai in early 2013. 

 Table 1: Celebrity Grading Rubric (produced by author).

	Income	Media Exposure	UK football league equivalent
A-grade	Stupid money	Blockbuster Movies, Madison Square Gardens, etc.	Premier League
B-grade	Enough to live the stereotypical “rich” life - 6-7 figures	Straight to video movies, regular gigs at large festivals etc.	Championship
C-grade	Full-time hustle, enough to live well	Regional TV stations, indie films/albums	League 1-2
D-grade	Side hustle	Occasional regional TV appearances, Youtube Channel	Part-time National League Conference

Questioning the trade-offs

The novelty of working for Chivas as a Brand Ambassador - “customer mentoring” they called it – while wearing a kilt, sporran and long socks began to wear off after a while. Usually, we had to present and mingle with the clients in Chinese, but sometimes they wanted us to pretend that we didn't speak Chinese (presumably because it would seem more plausible that a whiskey expert from Scotland wouldn't know Chinese), which was surprisingly hard to do and could even be annoying at times. Without the challenge of delivering a Chinese script and wowing everybody with my Chinese, waiting backstage in a kilt, smiling for the camera and having to pretend to rely on Chinese colleagues for translations that I could do better myself got a bit stale after a while, and around about the spring of 2011 I began questioning the loss of free time vs extra money tradeoff. Sometimes they asked me to pretend I was from Scotland too, which could get tricky when audience members started asking too many questions. Here's my hilarious attempt at a posh accent - I hastily made the video after a Chivas contact invited me to apply for a Ballantine's promotional gig. In case you can't tell, I was reading from a teleprompter. 

After a hard day at the office, circa 2011

The magic returned; though, when I got a call from a different events management company, asking me to be the Brand Ambassador at a series of Chivas 25YO fine dining events. Apart from the fact that I got to drink 25-year-old whisky all evening, it was a sweet deal because the kilt was replaced with a suit, and I spent less time on stage and more time socialising with guests. After the initial nerves of the first night, subsequent shows were basically like getting paid to have fun. Sometimes they would even bust out cigars at the end of the dinner. And that's before I even start talking about the great nights out at some awesome jazz clubs in Beijing and Chengdu that were had with the Chinese jazz musicians who came along on the tour to provide the live music for the evening. 

All aboard the good ship Chivas 25!

The name's Wallace...Benson Wallace

It's a hard life being a D-grade celebrity.

Slange Var - it's Scottish for "Cheers".

Out on the town in Chengdu, 2012

Like a cricketer enjoying a return to form in their golden years, during that final 2012 tour of duty I was at the top of my Chivas Ambassador game, and I was putting runs in the bank while I still could. Sure, charging 3000RMB to go drink 25-year-old whiskey and socialise with rich people for a few hours was a great gig, but like all good things, it had to come to an end. One could argue that leaving Shanghai when I did killed my momentum and prevented me from making the leap to true C-grade celebrity status(!), but if I'm honest with myself, the writing was on the wall anyway. I could see it in the final Chivas training session that I attended, where I met new ambassador recruits who were younger and hungrier than I was, with better Chinese, and who I'm sure were willing to do the job for much less than I was. The job, much like the product it was promoting, was becoming commoditised, and it was time for me to stop chasing fame and start focusing on something more meaningful and sustainable.

Today, my kilt hangs on the wall (metaphorically speaking) as I sit by the fireplace (also metaphorical) sipping my single malt whiskey in a highball glass with a spherical steel ice cube (that part is real). If anything, "The Chivas Years" have given me some interesting stories to tell when sharing a scotch with someone. So look me up next time you're in my part of the world - I have a second steel ice cube ready for such occasions. Slange Var everybody!