What is My #JohnWick_77_Challenge all about?
When/Where started: JAN 2019 — Manila
In January 2019 I was at a pretty low point in my career (and life) — at least from an external POV. After a string of pretty good education related jobs — I now had no job, would turn 60 in just over a year, was living with a (good friend) ex GF, and had exhausted my savings. But I was anything but depressed.
Frustrated? Hell ya. Depressed? No.
Though I had been quite busy (product development but no income) since choosing to leave a Chinese unicorn in June 2018. Like many of you, in my downtime I enjoy action movies to relax and escape reality for a bit. The two John Wick movies (remember, this is Jan 2018) blew me away. Not just the movies, but lots of the ‘behind the scenes’ videos! At one point I did a search of the kill count in Wick 1 and came across this infographic:
Though I like action movies — I am a complete anti-war, anti-gun, anti-violence guy. However, the number 77 began to resonate with me. From a storyteller POV, I began to look at each of the 77 kills as an obstacle that Wick needed to overcome to reach his objective.
Thus my #JohnWick_77_Challenge. To change my life situation I decided to accomplish 77 unique challenges in 12 months. [NOTE: I am now at month 14 and getting close to my goal] These challenges needed to be measurable actions and would also require me to have to learn some form of new skill.
Some context:
I am Canadian, have an M.Ed in Curriculum Design and have worked abroad (South Korea, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, China and Thailand) for all but four years since March 2003. Check out this link for a bit of an overview of the past 15 years:
#JohnWick_77_Challenge #1: PORTFOLIO VIDEOS
How do you put thousands of hours of face-to-face teaching, hundreds of hours of instructional design for face-to-face and/or flipped classrooms, and another few hundred hours of instructional design of online courses into a resume or CV?
This was the point I found myself at the end of 2018. How do I try and promote myself? I had a bit of a format that used a graphical style which got me the job in China, but it still wasn’t really doing what I wanted it to do and there didn’t seem to be any software around to try and do it. Besides, even with a highly graphical CV, most HR algorithms would choke on it and spit it out.
So I came up with the idea of trying to put together a portfolio in InDesign. I had done some basic work with Adobe InDesign in the summer of 2018 when I was putting together a draft of my first ‘training novel’ ebook.
My idea was to put together a series of eight to ten short videos that would explain an overview and process of each project. It was sort of a’ highlight reel’ of what I was doing but it was also part chronological of my Journeys around the globe you can see from the attached picture of my cover sheet. The Challenge of course was trying to get the videos together which meant I had to do a really deep dive into Premiere Pro. I’ve been wanting to do this for quite a while and this was my kick in the ass to do it. The learning curve with Adobe products can be insane but if you stick with it the payoff is amazing.
I had used all kinds of easier video editing programs in the past like Camtasia and a few others, but for the stuff I wanted to try and do nothing could work like Premiere Pro. So I drove in and spent bazillians of hours working through YouTube videos trying to figure it out. wasn’t a matter of shooting, as I had tone of old footage (in a variety of formats and resolutions LOL) as it was a matter of putting together still images and video clips of what I had on file over the last 15 years. The initial storytelling of it wasn’t great as I used PowerPoint sort of as my outline and then added in all of the clips try to do some basic editing and Transitions along with a voice over.
The initial product was not amazing but it was pretty good. Now a year later I will reworked it in a different style and format however at that point it was certainly good enough for me to get the product out (see link) which led to #JohnWick_77_Challenge challenge #2.
Thoughts, comments and any info about similar challenges you have undertaken are always appreciated.
