A totally random note on the Greek Mythology Character Sisyphus (The guy who was cursed to roll the boulder up the hill forever only to have it roll back down)…
Something that often gets forgotten is that Sisyphus was happy. He found happiness in the process, rather than focusing on the outcome.
The journey over the destination and all that.
corn-ball idioms aside, this philosophy is the only way to not let this industry strip your soul.
We get to have meetings about whether or not the duck should have pants. We get to bill time against the fringe.
What we do is so meaningless that we can revel in the absurdity of it all.
And once you admit that, the work tends to get better as well.
TIME MAGAZINE: Welcome to the Unapologetic Era of Bad Taste
Related reading: Welcome to the post-sellout era (Fast Co)
I’m a long time defender of low brow. And I think I figured out why– Dave Trott talks about living and dead art. Dead art is art that requires you know about art in order to understand it. Art that builds on what came before, or that requires an art school education to appreciate.
Living art is functional and can be appreciated by the average Joe.
One other thing from that Trott interview I’ve been thinking about is the difference between talent and creativity. And I mean creativity in the de Bono lateral thinking sense.
“Welding a tractor to a Ferrari doesn’t create a vehicle that can dig at 200 mph.”
Choose your measurements: Define silly meaningful 𝙺𝙿𝙸s
I believe this wholeheartedly. My favorite I’ve pitched was measuring the success of a brand campaign by the cost of old branded merch on ebay.
We’re more concerned with being informed rather than well read.
—> as information has become infinite, we’ve shifted from valuing being well read to being informed
“God is an all-encompassing term for things we don’t understand. Under that definition, luck is the secular God.”
Wish I remember where I lifted this from, but it’s a cool perspective on religions role in the world. Everything has its Gods. And every God is place holder for the unknown. The question becomes what you do when the unknown is suddenly knowable.
That’s why heretics were almost always those trying to lift a veil.
“Once you have many people doing something, you have lots of competition and little differentiation. You, generally, never want to be part of a popular trend… So I think trends are often things to avoid. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere.”