Seven-year-olds in sand traps

It's the documentary everyone's been waiting for: seven-year-olds playing golf! Honestly, this looks like it could shine a tremendously bad light on the parents of these kids. Although excellence, especially excellence at a young age, is intensely interesting, it's hard to imagine the emotional toll this kind of competition takes on youngsters. The line, "that golf course has crippled many a person," absolutely made me cringe.

This brings to mind all those pageant shows that expose the way the kids and parents act behind the scenes. The situations are stressful to watch and there is a sort of inhumanity to the whole thing. But there is also a great deal of humanity in these shows because makes them so hard to watch is that they expose something about ourselves.

We all want to be good, shockingly good at something, but we want that to be on our terms. We feel for the kids because what if it was us who were talented and pushed into something at a young age.

The issue isn't cut and dry, but it's interesting to think about. What if these 7 year olds had been us or our kids? 

Know this.

When I get angry I get angry about the work. Not angry about you. Not angry about the client. Only angry about the work.

As a result, there will be yelling. And shouting. And outbursts. That's just what's going to happen. Because I want to, nay NEED to put out something people are going to watch.

Something, hopefully, that people are going to like. We're not paid to make clients invisible. We're paid to expose them. Expose them through, and you can repeat after me:

THE WORK.

That's the alpha. The omega. The only thing.

And if I'm putting myself into it, I expect you to put a little bit of yourself into it as well. To care about its wellbeing. So maybe when I yell it's a little bit about you.

But it's all about the work.

Mired in Marketing Muck

When I was first trying to get into advertising I read everything I could get my hands on. Blogs. Trendy magazine articles turned into books. Even the odd newspaper article.

However, what had the greatest effect on the way I think about advertising were the books written by or about the giants of advertising. I read those book to try to glean some secret of greatness from them. I wanted to absorb, steal and transform the knowledge they provided. 

Maybe this wasn't the best approach but it has worked pretty well for me.

Perhaps the most important aspect I learned is where ideas come from. Not metaphorically, mystically, or physically (though the shower or a nice recliner isn't a bad place to start). Rather I was looking for the genesis of the idea behind the ideas. Where their highly original approach to briefs came from.

Now, obviously, these answers didn't come from YouTube or anywhere on the internet. Nor did they come from mass media like magazines, newspapers, or TV. 

Most of the time the answers came directly from, gasp,  the client. It was an off hand comment, or a line buried in some material the client has already produced.  Then the idea (and subsequent) execution geminated around that nugget of goodness.

This process led to some of the best ads in history.

Of course there were piles of bad work back then too. There's not going to be any time where everything is good because how we determine "good" is relative to everything else that's out there. 

But the great ones always had an essential truth about the brand. Had the unique selling proposition of unique emotional proposition that people talk about now with misty-eyed nostalgia. (As though there isn't anything original or unique to say these days. Ha!)

What gets in the way of these kinds of insights now, I believe, is the growing legion of MBAs. Not that all MBAs are bad, I happen to know some brilliant ones, but those three letters can often make an argument as impenetrable as the Berlin Wall. 

A byproduct of the MBA, though I'm not unconvinced it's not the primary product, is the introduction of pseudoscientific marketing speak. 

Marketing babble. Valueless words like engagement, content, real time media, wizbang, ecosystem. These are great to say, great meeting fodder, precisely because they are so devoid of meaning.

And how clients love to throw these words back at agencies. It's no surprise how hard it is to get great insights out of a client prattling on about the trend du jour. Even casual conversations about the work are laden with these terms.

However, answers are usually there if one digs deep enough. This isn't always the case, but by listening carefully you can find just enough to make an ad out of. A half thought from them turns into a full thought for us. These are usually in off-hand comments. When their marketing brains aren't turned on. When they're talking a bit like the people we're selling to.

Sometimes this is the role of the planner, to uncover these things for you. But if you aren't blessed with a planner (or at least not a good one) there's still hope. You just have to listen where no one else is. Dig for those answers as frantically as Cope and Marsh dug for fossils during The Bone Wars. Because without those nuggets of truth you're on your own. 

(A good addendum to this post is Ben Kay's "Not Enough Clients Shop at Prada" about what clients are looking for in work.)

Nothing gets done while all the balls are in the air

Posting this here for reference. Mostly because I thought it was already on the blog but couldn't find it anywhere.

Cleese says more about creativity in 10 minutes than most people can say in an hour long speech. Mostly it boils down to something none of us wants to hear (but all of us need to).

The key to doing good work is to do the work.

Frauds. Filthy Stinking frauds.

I've been rewatching all the episodes of Community with commentary on. It's all good stuff and has tons of insight into creating anything. Especially creating something with a highly positive brilliance-to-crap ratio. And something that is unapologetically human.

In the commentary of "Beginner Pottery" Dan Harmon, ex-showrunner and creator of the series, talks about about projecting himself and his childhood onto one of the charters. This struck me as particularly interesting.

"Every writer has a fraud complex. And every creative was probably a little over-praised by their mom. The idea that you think, 'Oh I could do that if I tried,' and failing."

This is something I struggle with. Most creative people, I think, struggle with it too. But that's sort of the point. It's dangerous to assume you're good at everything because you can break down the process. Or because it looks easy.

Trying to do something new is good. Automatically assuming greatness only leads to disappointment.

In a sea of "eh's" and "pretty cool's" this is extraordinary.

This is beautiful. Breathtaking. Raw.

It grabs your face and demands you pay attention. "Don't blink," it says. Don't miss a single second of this nearly 8-minute masterpiece. Because it's important, and it's touching and done with nothing but sincerity.

It took so many people to produce this video. So much effort in an age when publishing is nearly effortless for most. This wasn't think, laugh, post. It was work, work, work, work until it's perfect.

For all those reasons I think this is beautiful. I think it's exceptional when there is so much sameness we see online every day. This is so far away from the Harlem Shake craze, so original that halfway through I had this tingling feeling in my feet that this was truly something special. It never let me down.

via

What happens when an immovable force is forced to move on?

Keeping with the theme of long reads, ESPN came out with an absolutely fantastic piece about Michael Jordan in the lead up to his 50th birthday.

Never having been the biggest sports or Jordan fan (despite owning a pair in the 90s) I didn't expect to get much out of the piece. But I am a fan of immortality, so it was interesting from that angle.

Michael Jordan, the player/myth, seems to be immortal. But Michael Jordan, the man, need to figure out what to do with his life. Just like everyone else.

"I value that," he [Jordan] says. "I like reminiscing. I do it more now watching basketball than anything. Man, I wish I was playing right now. I would give up everything now to go back and play the game of basketball."

"How do you replace it?" he's asked.

"You don't. You learn to live with it."

"How?"

"It's a process," he says.

 

Short post about long articles

There's been some really great, really immersive long form writing lately. These are dense but well worth the read. If you have some time over the weekend/next week these are all gems.

Long listen: