Ultimately, the skill we prize is the ability to get other people to do things.
We might call it leadership, as if it has something to do with being in the front line when you’re asking people to go into battle, but you can motivate people in so many different ways that selecting one style is a bit disingenuous. Some people at the top of organisations or departments get the best out of people by positive reinforcement, while others use fear, or guilt, or double bluff, or leave it up to the person they’re motivating to work it out for themselves.
The annoying thing about that is that they can all work. I’ve been scared into doing better work, but I’ve also just seen how high a boss’s standards are and resolved to live up to them, all by myself. I worked for one guy who I’d show a script, chat about the previous night’s TV, then ask what he thought of the work. He’d hand it back approved even though it had been in his hands upside-down the entire time. He presided over departments that won Agency of the Year several times, so despite appearances he clearly knew how to get the best out of people.
And if you’re an advertising creative, that’s how you get promoted. I once asked a boss whether I should follow the advice of the highly awarded copywriter down the hall, who suggested I tell the client to fuck off. ‘Ben’, my boss replied, ‘that’s the reason why (copywriter X) isn’t an ECD’. So the better writer (but also, alas, a massive, somewhat cantankerous, boozer) had been surpassed in his career by his less talented but people-friendlier colleague. That’s not to say that somewhat cantankerous boozers can’t make it to the top – plenty have – but copywriter X was never going to be the guy to fire up a department for a big pitch or make a callow junior happy to go back for a tenth revision on an endline. It was difficult to put my finger on why I was not motivated to impress him, but overall he was just a bit of an arsehole who didn’t seem to like anything much. The stick/carrot balance was weighted too heavily towards the former.
So if you can write a great ad but alienate everyone in the process; get a reputation as a brilliant maverick that nobody wants to work with; inspire grudging, resentful, reluctant admiration; and win the hearts and minds of precisely no one, you’ll only go so far.
However, if your creative work rarely breaks 7/10 but you can persuade a client to give you business; a writer to (gladly) work the weekend; a trade journalist to write favourably about your agency’s recent quiet patch; a superstar MD to join your agency; and a delightful person to marry you, a happy life will be yours.
When in doubt, connect.
Watch a rude man take an amusing tumble.
Analysis of the ending of Goodfellas (thanks, J):
Partridge interviews Daltry (thanks, T):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xoQiyzQyUo&feature=youtu.be
The 37 best sites on which to learn something (thanks, B).
Fireworks ladder (thanks, J):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCW1ObmcLWE
Warhol interviews Hitchcock (thanks, J2).
TV changes to Scarface:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcJ61KEynm4
Rumours abound of a Deadwood movie. Here’s a little video essay on that great show:
That’s very well made, amusingly written and firmly linked to the product. Reminds me of the kind of top stuff that regularly appeared in the early 2000s (I mean that in a very good way).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KpBLFvK4G0
Ditto.
(Thanks, J.)
The most interesting thing I’ve learned so far is this:
And that, my dear friends, is exactly what they did.
For those of you who need a primer in the basics of advertising, Dave Trott has kindly offered everything you need to know in one simple TED talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0gZfhkoi1E
And when you’ve finished that you can read his new book, 1+1=3:
It’s entertaining, thought-provoking and comes in lovely little bite-sized chunks (I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but those chunks seem to last about as long as a poo).
Buy it here and have a slightly better life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_hWeN249fs
What if ‘Don’t You Want Me’ by The Human League was just the line about working as a waitress in a cocktail bar? Well, you’d end up with something surprisingly wonderful (thanks, T):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=120&v=X58g1HKxXPo
Mark Hamill: best autograph signer of all time (thanks, T).
Houses that look like Game Of Thrones characters (thanks, A).
National Geographic photos of the Year (thanks, L).
Let’s mash up the XX and Biggie Smalls (more here; thanks, G):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=52&v=zuIYBvsYVGI
Kim Kardashian’s face as a roamable mountain range (thanks, J).
Another great musicless music video:
John Malkovich recreates famous portraits (thanks, A).
And then a lady recreates model shots with herself (thanks, G).
Football’s bad boys recreated with kids (thanks, T).
I was just listening to Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast interview with Judd Apatow.
About halfway through they started to discuss Stephen Colbert, who lost two brothers and his father in a plane crash when he was ten.
He said that as he’d already been through the worst thing you could possibly imagine there was nothing to worry about. Apparently his mum said to him, ‘You need to look at this through the light of eternity’.
When Stephen explained this to Judd, his reply was, ‘Yes, but why did you listen to her? Why didn’t you just do drugs?’
‘Oh, I did do drugs!’ Stephen replied.
At the time of the crash Stephen simply stopped doing any work at school and barely graduated. He felt that there was no threat anyone could have over him.
‘I was a broken kid,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong. But I did not compound that by feeling guilty about not doing work. But the real point is that it forced me to look at the world differently.’
Then Judd says in the podcast interview, ‘What I don’t understand is why that works’.
Indeed… Why does that work? How do some people use that incident as rocket fuel when others use it as poison?
I then listened to Howard Stern interviewing Louis CK in 2006:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3VK8IrVTpo
Louis had some pretty odd things happen to him as a kid, such as being sent to a summer camp for the mentally handicapped for three straight years at around eight years old.
And, after many visits to prostitutes, he turned the lemons into lemonade, too.
It seems that whatever happens in our formative years, we make decisions about it that create what we are today. We have no choice over those decisions because we don’t know we’re making them, and the vast majority of us have no idea they’re still controlling everything we do.
If we’re lucky, things work out, even with a few bumps along the way. If not, they don’t. But whatever the decisions, they become the life we live into.
What I find odd is how the same incident can send one person to Skid Row and another to Madison Square Garden. Or both.