Ignore Everybody - MacLeod, Hugh [12]
The people you trust and vice versa are what will feed you and pay for your kids’ college. Nothing else.
This is true if you’re an artist, writer, doctor, techie, lawyer, banker, or bartender.
In other words: Stop worrying about technology. Start worrying about people who trust you.
In order to navigate the New Realities you have to be creative—not just within your particular profession, but in everything. Your way of looking at the world will need to become ever more fertile and original. And this isn’t just true for artists, writers, techies, creative directors, and CEOs; this is true for everybody. Janitors, receptionists, and bus drivers, too. The game has just been ratcheted up a notch.
The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur.
That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you’re already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. It doesn’t matter what industry we’re talking about—architecture, advertising, petrochemicals—they’re around, they’re easy enough to find if you make the effort, if you’ve got something worthwhile to offer in return. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can’t help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct; they are extinction.
18. Merit can be bought. Passion can’t.
The only people who can change the world are people who want to. And not everybody does.
HUMAN BEINGS HAVE THIS THING I CALL THE “Pissed Off Gene.” It’s that bit of our psyche that makes us utterly dissatisfied with our lot, no matter how kindly Fortune smiles upon us.
It’s there for a reason. Back in our early caveman days, being pissed off made us more likely to get off our butts, get out of the cave and into the tundra hunting woolly mammoth, so we’d have something to eat for supper. It’s a survival mechanism. Damn useful then, damn useful now.
It’s this same Pissed Off Gene that makes us want to create anything in the first place—drawings, violin sonatas, meat packing companies, Web sites. This same gene drove us to discover how to make a fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow, indoor plumbing, the personal computer, the list is endless.
Part of understanding the creative urge is understanding that it’s primal. Wanting to change the world is not a noble calling, it’s a primal calling.
We think we’re “Providing a superior integrated logistic system” or “Helping America to really taste Freshness.” In fact we’re just pissed off and want to get the hell out of the cave and kill the woolly mammoth.
Your business either lets you go hunt the woolly mammoth or it doesn’t. Of course, as with so many white-collar jobs these days, you might very well be offered a ton of money to sit in the corner-office cave and pretend that you’re hunting, even if you’re not, even if you’re just pushing pencils. That is sad. What’s even sadder is that you agreed to take the money.
19. Avoid the Watercooler Gang.
They’re a well-meaning bunch, but they get in the way eventually.
BACK WHEN I WORKED FOR A LARGE ADVERTISING agency as a young rookie, it used to bother me how much the “Watercooler Gang” just kvetched all the time. The “Watercooler Gang” was my term for what was still allowed to exist in the industry back then. Packs of second-tier creatives, many years past their sell-by date, being squeezed by the creative directors for every last ounce of juice they had, till it came time to fire them on the cheap. Taking too many trips to the watercooler and coming back drunk from lunch far too often. Working late nights and weekends on all the boring-but-profitable accounts. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.
I remember some weeks where one could easily spend half an hour a day listening to Ted complain.
Ted used to have a window office but now had a cube, ever since that one disastrous