Having failed to become a rock star, I went to university and eventually ended up doing a Ph.D. (in Psychology) at the University of Sussex. Like many postgraduates, I taught to survive. I was allocated to second-year undergraduate statistics. I was very shy at the time, and I didn't have a clue about statistics, so standing in front of a room full of strangers and talking to them about ANOVA was about as appealing as dislocating my knees and running a marathon. I obsessively prepared for my first session so that it would go well; I created handouts, I invented examples, I rehearsed what I would say. I went in terrified but knowing that if preparation was any predictor of success then I would be OK. About half way through one of the students rose majestically from her chair. An aura of bright white light surrounded her and she appeared to me as though walking through dry ice. I guessed that she had been chosen by her peers to impart a message of gratitude for the hours of preparation I had done and the skill with which I was unclouding their brains of statistical mysteries. She stopped inches away from me. She looked into my eyes and mine raced around the floor looking for the reassurance of my shoelaces. 'No one in this room has a rabbit¹ clue what you're going on about', she spat before storming out. Scales have not been invented yet to measure how much I wished I'd run the dislocated-knees marathon that morning. To this day I have intrusive thoughts about students in my lectures walking zombie-like towards the front of the lecture theatre chanting 'No one knows what you're going on about' before devouring my brain in a rabid feeding frenzy.

The aftermath of this trauma is that I threw myself into trying to be the best teacher in the universe. I wrote detailed handouts and started using wacky examples. Based on these I was signed up by a publisher to write a book. This book. At the age of 23 I didn't realize that this was academic suicide (really, textbooks take a long time to write and they are not at all valued compared to research articles), and I also didn't realize the emotional pain I was about to inflict on myself. I soon discovered that writing a statistics book was like doing a factor analysis: in factor analysis we take a lot of information (variables) and SPSS effortlessly reduces this mass of confusion into a simple message (fewer variables). SPSS does this in a few seconds. Similarly, my younger self took a mass of information about statistics that I didn't understand and filtered it down into a simple message that I could understand: I became a living, breathing factor analysis... except that, unlike SPSS, it took me two years and some considerable effort.

¹ She didn't say 'rabbit', but she did say a word that describes what rabbits do a lot; it begins with an 'f' and the publishers think that it will offend you.