Adam Montandons Blog – The Montandon Method

25)    I always wish I could do more.

24)    I hate to see wasted potential. It’s my biggest pet hate. I often thought that if you have a talent you should use it, push it to the max, because there are millions of people out there who wish they had that talent, so please don’t waste it.

23)    I really don’t understand why, in business, the single most important thing you can do is “Be different” yet everybody teaches us to be the same. Come on. Be different. Don’t fear it. If you are going to be the same as everybody else then don’t complain if you blend into the background of obscurity. Just because everybody does it one way, it’s not a reason for YOU to do it that way.

22)    I love giving lectures. It’s my favourite thing to do in the whole world, presenting things to people who are interested. I have seen so many great lectures from so many amazing people who would visit my university. Danny Brown, Kevin Warrick, Stephen Perrella to name a few. And I really want to “give back” the knowledge stored up in my brain to other people. If I didn’t have my current job, I would love to be a lecturer. My favourite thing is to give a guest lecture, because I can just zoom in, blow people’s minds, and then zoom out again. No academic politics or paperwork, just sheer inspiration. Because to me that is so important. One of my favourite lectures was when I gave the Keynote speech at Lego Land and showed some new projects for the first time and the crowed loved it. If anybody is reading this and wants me to come and do a lecture at their university or organisation, let me know!

21)    I can’t quite believe that in my life I have spoken at the Royal Institute of Science, and had digital artworks in Tate Britain. I would never have imagined that in my wildest dreams.

20)    Two of the biggest influences on my life are Walt Disney and P T Barnum. When I tell people this, they don’t believe me though.

19)    I am constantly surprised by how magical reality is, and how surprising and unusual life is. There is no such thing as a “daily grind” because there is magic everywhere.

18)    When I was working on the Butterfly Garden, I went to sleep the night before the installation. I hadn’t had time to test much of the code, because the hardware wasn’t entirely finished. In the night, I dreamt of every single line of code, and saw it vividly in my imagination. Every list, every variable, every handler.  When I woke up, I realised that there would be an error, and I knew exactly in which line of code it would be, and I knew exactly how to fix it. When I finally got to the installation I checked it and I was right. I had compiled all the code in my dreams.

17)    When I was 19, I really did see the matrix. Lines and blocks of code everywhere. This was BEFORE the movie came out, and the matrix to me was white and green and blue and grey, and tabbed in paragraphs. It happened when I was kissing a girl. That’s probably not a good thing.

16)    When I was 9, I had the most horrible teacher ever, an evil old Irish catholic dragon. She would read out maths questions and we had to answer them in our schoolbooks. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was audio-dyslexic ( I wouldn’t find this out till I was 22, and I deduced that at least now I had a psychological reason for “never having to listen to anything anyone ever said”) and I found it hard to answer the question in my head without writing it down.

I developed my own shorthand for writing down the questions, much like a computer code ( I started coding my own simple games when I was about 8 years old). I always got the answers right, but the “working out” was wrong, so my teacher always failed me. I thought it was so unfair. As I grew up I realised that finding my own solution would serve me better in the long run than getting a 10 out of 10 from Mrs Wilkins.