Whatever You're Making, Make It Way Better Than It has to be Made

Apple isn't the only place you can enjoy the benefits of fanatical attention to detail. You can hear it in the slam of a new Audi's door; feel it in the cool delicious weight of a Waterford crystal glass; hear it in any Beatles song. (Well, I hear it anyway.) Point is, all these things are made way better than they have to be.

We've discussed the crafts of art direction and copywriting. Now, before we go any further, I want to emphasize the importance of employing these crafts to the very best of your ability; the importance of doing work that is insanely great. Because in the end these skills are all you have at your command to get a reader or viewer to lean in. And this leaning in is the ultimate goal for any artist, especially us advertising artists.

Let me describe what I mean by “leaning in.” Over the years I've judged many advertising award shows, and for the print portion of these competitions, thousands of ads were laid out on a series of long tables. The advertising judges (usually slightly crispy from carousing in the bars the night before) wandered up and down the aisles looking for creative work they thought worthy of recognizing in the award annuals. During the many times I watched the judges judge, I routinely saw this magic little moment—when the judge stopped, bent at the waist, and leaned in to more closely study a particular piece. What is it, I wondered, that made the judge lean in?

Over the years, I've come to believe the operative element is subliminal; not subliminal advertising the way Vance Packard complained about in his '50s conspiracy book The Hidden Persuaders. No, the operative element we're talking about here is subliminal quality. The very word sublime helps explain my point. Limen is Latin for “threshold.” Subliminal, then, means below the threshold of awareness. We're talking about baking quality so far into a thing that people who look at it perceive its quality subconsciously. They know they're looking at something of quality before they're even conscious of the realization, because when a thing is made way better than it has to be made its quality comes off of it in waves.

In his marvelous self-published book, Paste-Up, my old Fallon friend Bob Blewett agrees: “I believe the effort and struggle to create simplicity and grace live on in the work like a soul…and as the ad leaves the agency, your effort and care stand over the ad like a benediction.”¹

Blewett's benediction is the force I've been trying to get at here; the force that makes someone lean in to study a creation of beauty. There's no shortcut around Blewett's requirement; it takes “effort and struggle to create simplicity and grace.” It means sweating the details of whatever ad or script or site you're working on and going to any length to get it right—and then going beyond that. It means not letting even the smallest thing slide; if a thing bothers you even a teeny bit, you work on it 'til it doesn't bother you and then you keep working until it actually pleases you.

What you get for your trouble is described by Dave Wallace in his book on creative theory, Break Out. He likens the final approach toward a perfect idea to the sounds different kinds of glassware make. A so-so concept is like an ordinary jam jar. Hit it with your fingernail and you get an uninspiring tung sound. A tap on a nice wine glass might give you a tang. But a Waterford crystal idea, where you've done a thing perfectly, when all the molecules march in step and the stars align, there's that unmistakable ting.²

Tung. Tang. Ting. Don't stop until you get to ting.

Curiously, poet William Butler Yeats also used the metaphor of sound to convey perfection in an idea. He said the sound a good poem makes when it finishes is like “a lid clicking shut on a perfectly made box.”

This extra effort is how all of life's pursuits are turned into art; yes, even advertising. An anecdote comes to mind here: A village elder from Bali was trying to explain his culture's view of art to a puzzled anthropologist studying his culture: “We have no ‘art.’ We do everything as well as possible.”

This unwavering attention to detail will not only improve your craft and your client's fortunes, it will improve you.

There is no Such Thing as “Multitasking”

Ever notice how some middle-schoolers do their homework? They have the TV on “in the background,” music playing on the laptop, Facebook is open, and all the while their phones vibrate nonstop with important texts from BFFs.

If you challenge them on this less-than-ideal learning environment they'd likely protest, “But kids are different today. We can multitask.” If multitasking means “simultaneously doing several things poorly,” then yes, they're different.

To describe this popular and ineffective mindset, author Linda Stone coined the term continuous partial attention—in which we skim the surface of multiple incoming data streams, pick out a few random details that appear to be important, and move on. While such an approach may give the illusion of productivity, in reality you're slowing down. You're casting a wider net but catching less.

Here's the thing. Attention is binary. It's on or it's off. You're either paying attention to something, or you're not.

Which is to say, what didn't work back in middle school won't work today. Turn everything off; all the way off. Turn everything off except your brain.

Quit Wasting Time on E-Mail and Facebook, Wandering Around, Coming in Late

From the New York Times, I quote: “Employees in info-intensive companies waste 28 percent of their time on unnecessary e-mails and other interruptions.”

That's more than a quarter of the day.

D'oh.

Here's the thing, people. Every creative assignment you'll ever receive will have a deadline. You'll have only a certain amount of time to come up with something great. Yet I'll wager if any of us could watch a film of ourselves during a typical day at the office, we'd turn beet red seeing how much time we waste screwing around with coffee breaks, phone calls, texting, Facebooking, Twittering, and yuckin' it up out in the hallways.

In fact, we are so eager to be distracted that, left uninterrupted, we'll interrupt ourselves.

We do this because of what's called “resistance to writing.” It's a sort of self-imposed creative block we get whenever a promising creative opportunity actually gets challenging. We'll do anything to not do this cool project we want to do.

So we sit down to work with the best of intentions, but we'll leave the TV on and maybe keep our computer propped open like a sort of trapdoor through which we can escape when the ideas aren't coming and we begin to feel that anxiety. Interestingly, the second we feel that anxiety (“…ohmyGod,ohohohmyGod,ohmyGod…”) we hear “the Ping.” The Ping is what creative theorist Todd Henry calls the tiny signal that reminds us we need to check our e-mail and Facebook immediately. (“Hey! I'm pretty sure something out there is suddenly more important than my job.”)

And so off we go through the trapdoor, trading in our capacity for sustained mental effort for the rich comic experience of gr8 lol texts; an exchange well-described in Todd Henry's axiom: “You cannot pursue greatness and comfort at the same time.”

For today, all you need to do is acknowledge that this defense mechanism exists and when you sit down to work, commit to the work completely. Unplug your land line, turn off your phone, turn off the e-mail, turn off the TV, turn off the music, find a pen and paper, put your feet up, and give it your whole mind. And when the anxiety comes, don't run from it or deny it exists. Acknowledge it and remember, the only way out is through.

Control Your Monkey Brain

After you turn off your smartphone and find a quiet agency conference room, you're ready to sit down and face the final enemy of distraction: your own monkey brain.

This term is popular with practitioners of meditation and refers to the tendency of the mind to swing from branch to branch, topic to topic, jumping around, screeching, chattering nonsense, and carrying on endlessly.

If you've ever tried meditation, you know the near impossibility of keeping your mind focused. Your thoughts leap ceaselessly, into the future, to a distant memory to what's for dinner to that thing you saw that one time to that mark on the wall to the lyrics of….

The good news is that practicing any form of meditation or mindfulness will improve your capacity for sustained focus. No less a creative icon than Steve Jobs attested that it improved his creativity. Biographer Walter Isaacson quoted Jobs:

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse. But over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things—that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.³

“Squirrel.”

—The dogs in Pixar's UP

Ignore the Little Voice That Says, “I'm Just a Hack on Crack from Hackensack”

Every once in a while, your monkey mind will pause briefly to inform you that you suck.

We all have this voice. Even the superstars in this business secretly believe they're hacks at least twice a day. The difference is they get better about ignoring this voice. In their book Pick Me, Vonk and Kestin give advice on making the evil little voice shut up.

You have to learn to mute the voice. Or just use it to spur you on to do better. The painful truth is all the awards in the world don't take away the tyranny of the blank page. The only thing that does is making a mark on it. Somehow, just getting those first few thoughts out is helpful, even if they genuinely do suck. The act of moving the pen across the paper is the antidote to the belief you can't do it.⁴

Remember You Don't Have to Outrun the Bear

Another version of this same little voice is the one that goes, “This better be a really big idea, you.”

“It's hard to think of any idea, let alone a big one,” writes ad veteran Josh Weltman in Seducing Strangers. “And the bigger the idea the client wants, the emptier my head gets.”

To avoid freezing up, Weltman came up with his own definition.

A big idea is one that can beat or kill a smaller idea. It's like that joke about outrunning the bear. I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you. I think my definition is freeing because I no longer have to come up with a big idea. I just need to find one that's bigger than the other guy's.⁵

“Start from Where You Are”

Another stunt my chattering monkey mind pulls is to make me freak out when I face a huge project. The more important the project, the more I freeze up and in my head I'm goin', “There's online, there's print, outdoor, there's in-store and then, oh my god, there's social, there's radio, plus there's…”

Huge projects can be intimidating, true. The thing is, though, you want huge projects because these are where you'll hit the home runs that advance your career. So here's what you do, and I got this gem from a speech by one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott: “Start from where you are.”

So you're standing in front of this huge pile of work, every part of it clamoring for immediate attention, all equally important, and what you do is reach in and grab the piece that interests you the most.

That's the one piece you're likely to get a quick start on simply because it interests you. Start there. Here's the cool part. As soon as you get an idea on that first piece, doors start to open on either side of the idea, revealing adjacent possibilities you couldn't see until you put this first idea on paper.

Try it. It worked for me. A good example is this book. It qualifies as a fairly big project, right? I assure you the first page I wrote was not page 1. What happened to be on my mind that day was radio, my favorite medium. So I started there, writing what eventually turned into Chapter 17.

Identify Your Most Productive Working Hours and Use Them for Nothing But Idea Generation

I'm a morning person. By three in the afternoon, my brain is meatloaf and a TV campaign featuring a grocer named Whipple doesn't seem like such a bad idea. But you might be sharper in the afternoon. Just strike while your iron is hot and save those down hours for the busywork of advertising, or what I call “phone calls and arguments.”

Cluster Similar Activities

There's a wonderful book by Scott Belsky on this subject of time and energy management titled Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, & Sharpen Your Creative Mind. I recommend it.

One of his many smart suggestions is to cluster the various duties you tackle in a given day. Don't let your day's calendar be a patchwork quilt of 10 minutes answering e-mails, 30 minutes concepting, 10 minutes here, 10 there. Each one of these activities uses a different part of your brain, and it will help you creatively if you cluster the similar duties.

Belsky writes, “Finding intelligent adjacencies within your work day and clustering [similar] duties allows you to stay engaged and to focus more deeply for longer periods of time.” For me, my biggest clusters are meetings, e-mail, phone calls, and creative time. I found when I roped off my creative time into big three-hour chunks (and aligned with my most alert times of day), my focus was better and so was my work.

“You'll get better ideas,” Belsky wrote, “because you can dive deeper with an oxygen tank than you can if you have to surface for air every few minutes.”

Temper Your Irish With German

That's great advice for creative people. See, the thing is, advertising is a business. That whole chaos-is-good, whiskey-and-cigarettes, showing-up-late-for-work thing? That's fine for artists and rock stars, but advertising is only half art. It's also half business. The thing is, both halves are on the deadline.

So don't be sloppy. Don't be late. Meet your deadlines. Don't put off doing the radio because the mobile is more fun.

This also applies to expense reports and time sheets. Learn how to do them and do them impeccably. Be a grown-up. Sure, they're boring. But, like watching any episode of The Brady Bunch, if you just sit down and apply yourself, the whole unpleasant thing will be over in a half hour.

Be Orderly in Your Normal Life So You can be Violent and Original in Your Work

I don't know much about novelist Gustave Flaubert, except he said that cool line, and it seems to fit in right about here.

Many creative people find that a dash of ritual in their lives provides just the structure they need to let go creatively. I happen to prefer an extremely clean and empty room in which to write. That may sound weird, but I've heard of stranger things.

In The Art and Science of Creativity, George Kneller wrote: “Schiller [the German poet] filled his desk with rotten apples; Proust worked in a cork-lined room…. While [Kant was] writing The Critique of Pure Reason, he would concentrate on a tower visible from his window. When some trees grew up to hide the tower, [he had] authorities cut down the trees so that he could continue his work.”⁶

Don't Drink or Do Drugs

You may think drinking, smoking pot, or doing coke makes you more creative. I used to think so.

I was only fooling myself. I bought into that myth of the tortured creative person, struggling against uncaring clients and blind product managers. With a bottle next to his typewriter and his wastebasket filling ever higher with rejected brilliance, this poor, misunderstood soul constantly looks for that next fantastic idea that will surely rocket him into happiness.

In a business where we all try to avoid clichés, a lot of people buy into this cliché-as-lifestyle. I can assure you it is illusion, as is all that crap about how writers need to “work from pain.” Oh puh-lease, it's a coupon ad for Jell-O.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball, not on the Players

Don't get into office politics. Not all offices have them. If yours does, remember your priority—doing ads. Keep your eye on the project on your desk.

First of All, Being Stuck is a Good Sign. Seriously

Being stuck means you have moved through all the easy stuff. You've waded through all the crappy ideas and through the okay ideas, passed the low-hanging fruit, and are entering the outlying area of big, new thoughts. Being stuck is not only not unusual, it's what you want.

So don't be creeped out by those long silences that happen during creative sessions with your partner. You can spend whole days trying very hard and still come up with nothing. But I've found it's only after you've suffered these excruciating hours of meatloaf-brain that the shiny and beautiful finally presents itself. The trick is to stay with it. Suffer through it. Remember, the only way out is through.

I like the way Mark Fenske tells his students: “People, advertising isn't brain surgery, okay? Brain surgery can be learned.”

If You're Stuck, Relax

Most of the books I've read on creativity keep bringing up the subject of relaxation. You can't be creative and be tense. The two events are never in the same room together. Stay loose. Breathe from the stomach. If you're not relaxed, stop until you are. Just the simple act of physical relaxation will bring on new ideas. I promise.

But remember you do in fact need a certain amount of pressure to be creative. Creativity rarely happens when things are perfectly under control. To make the kettle boil, a little fire is necessary, and a deadline that's a month and a half away isn't always a good thing. I find if I have too much time to complete a project, I'll put off working on it until one or two weeks before it's due just so I can dial up the pressure a little bit.

The trick is to control the pressure, not let it control you. Relax.

Leave the Office and Go Work Somewhere Else

Leave the office. Work in a public place. Some restaurants are close to empty between one and five in the afternoon. And as Sally Hogshead says, “Domino's delivers to Starbucks.”

There are other things you can do. If the in-store isn't coming, polish the online ideas. If you can't write the headline, write the body copy. And if it's not happening during office hours, stop in the middle of dinner and write.

“If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.”

—H. G. Wells

What does the Ad Want to Say?

Here's one silly trick I've used from time to time to circumvent my chattering monkey mind and access the deeper, more creative part of my brain.

With pen poised over the notebook in my lap, I close my eyes and ask, “What does the ad want to say?” Not me, not the writer, not Mr. Advertising Expert, but the ad. What does the ad want to say?

I know it's weird, so don't tell anybody I do this. But when it works, the answer seems to rise up out of the dark like the little triangular message inside that toy, the Magic 8 Ball.

Get Off the Stinkin' Computer

When you're coming up with ideas, don't do it sitting in front of your computer. Doing so presupposes a verbal solution. Let all your early thinking happen with a pencil and paper. In fact, you may find handwriting brings an altogether different part of your brain into play. David Fowler agrees: “Try it.…It's just different. The connection between your hand and the page via a tiny strand of ink imparts something that's somehow closer to your heart.”⁷

Go to the Store Where They Sell the Stuff

There is demographic data typed neatly on paper. And then there's the stark reality of a customer standing in front of a store shelf looking at your brand and then at Brand X. I'm not saying you should start bothering strangers with questions. I find it inspiring just to soak in the vibes of the marketplace. Just watch. Think. I guarantee you'll come back with some ideas.

Author Jack London's advice: “You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

Go to a Bookstore and Study Books on Your Subject

Say you're working for an outboard engines client. Go to a bookstore and page through books on lakes, oceans, submarines, vacation spots, fish, pistons, hydraulics, whatever. Just let your brain soak up those molecular building blocks of future concepts.

You might get the ideas flowing right there in the store. And even if you don't, what's to risk, except maybe getting the hairy eyeball from the clerk who thinks you ought to be buying something. (“Hey, whaddaya think this is? A li-berry?”)

Read an Old Far Side Collection by Gary Larson

The man is an absolute screaming genius. The cartoons are always funny. Go online and order a few collections of his work. Study the economy of his ideas. Look how simple they are. How few moving parts there are. At the very least, with a trip to Larson's sick little world you get a break from the tension in yours. But you might get that small nudge you need. I know I have.

I also can get that same nudge by leafing through magazines from different categories. I'll be working on an insurance campaign, but if there's a snowboarding magazine on the conference room table, I'll pick it up and go through it.

One student told me when she's stuck, she likes to go online, often to sites like PSFK or ffffound. Not a bad idea. Probably any site that's got cool stuff and is a little random can help fool your brain into coming up with something new.

Leafing through the awards annuals is okay, too. The shows are a good learning tool, early in the business, and they are the best way to study craft. They're a good starting point, early in the ideation process but at some point, they will begin to steer your thinking. I know plenty of absolutely stellar advertising people who don't own a single CA or One Show. They realize, sooner or later, they're going to have to unmoor and sail into the unknown.

Ask Your Creative Director for Help

That's what they're there for. There is no dishonor in throwing up your hands and saying, “I'm in a dark and terrible place. Help me or I shall perish.”

Your creative director may be able to see things you can't. She hasn't had her nose two inches away from the problem for the past two weeks like you have. She knows the client, knows the market, and can give you more than an educated guess on what's jamming up your creative process. Sometimes all it takes is a little nudge, two inches to the left, to get you back on track. (You hack on crack from Hackensack.) Oops, there's the evil voice again. Begone, self-loathing. I banish thee.

Get More Product Information

You may not know enough about the problem yet, or you may not have enough information on the market. So ask your account folks or planners to go deeper into their files and bring you new stuff. It's likely they edited their pile of information and gleaned what they thought most important. Get to the original material if you can.

Go into It Knowing There's a Chance You Could Fail

This isn't heart surgery, folks. No one's gonna die. And as much as a client may hate to hear it, in this business failure is a possibility. In fact, if your ideas don't fall on their face every once in a while, dude, you're not tryin' very hard.

The story has it that Dan Wieden once told one of his top creative directors, “I have no use for you until you've made at least three monumental mistakes.” Clearly, Wieden believes creative people don't develop unless they're willing to fail and fail and fail again. It's a credo so ingrained in the agency, they created a huge work of art for the hallway (Figure 9.2). Made entirely of more than 100,000 pushpins, it's a daily reminder you aren't pushing it hard enough if every one of your ideas turns out just hunky-dory.

Failing harder is good, and when it comes to digital, failing faster is even better. In Chasing the Monster Idea, Scott Anthony, managing director at Innosight, discusses failure: “Figuring out how to master this process of failing fast and failing cheap and fumbling toward success is probably the most important thing companies have to get good at.” Writer Jena McGregor agrees, calling it “getting good at failure.”⁸

At a SXSW Interactive seminar I chaired, most folks in the audience agreed failure is like a federally-required ingredient of creativity. You have to risk a belly flop. In the online space, a sense of play is important, and part of play is failure: the skinned knee, the black eye. Everyone, to a person, said to push past the pain and “fail forward, fail harder, fail gloriously.” Whatever flavor of fail you get, our group said, get up, walk it off, and go at it again.

It Helps to Work on Several Projects At Once

You may find that the ideas come faster if you move between projects every hour or so. Designer Milton Glaser said: “Working on one thing at a time is like facing a rhinoceros; working on 10 things at a time is like playing badminton.”

Don't Burn Up Energy Trying to Make Something Work

Follow the first rule of holes: If you are in one, stop digging. In the book Lateral Thinking, Edward DeBono uses this metaphor: Don't dig one hole and keep digging down until you hit oil; dig lots of shallow holes first, all over the yard.

Even when you do manage to force a decent idea onto paper, after hours of wrestling with it, it usually bears the earmarks of a fight. You can count the dents where you pounded on the poor thing to force it into the shape you wanted. There's none of the spontaneous elegance of an idea born in a moment of illumination.

Be Patient

Tell yourself it will come. Don't keep swinging at the ball when your arms hurt. Maybe today's not the day. Give up. Go see a movie. Come back tomorrow. Pick up the bat and keep trying. Be patient.

Learn to Enjoy the Process, Not Just the Finished Piece

I used to hate the long process of coming up with an idea. I simply wanted the work to be done, the idea to be there on my desk. But thinking this way made my job way harder than it had to be. The fact is, most of your time in this business will be spent in some cluttered, just-slightly-too-warm room, thinking—not admiring your finished work. And nowadays with work that appears online, there's rarely an “I'm-finished-now” moment anyway. You'll likely never be done. Customers will keep responding to your idea, new stuff will come to light, cool ideas will walk in the door, and everything will keep changing.

So, remember to let the fun be in the chase. Even if you have an award-winning career, only 0.00000002 percent of it will be spent walking up to the podium to accept an award at the One Show. All the rest of the time you will likely spend in a small room somewhere, under fluorescent lights, trying to decide whether crisp or flaky is the right word to use.

Remember, You Aren't Saving Lives

When you get stressed and the walls are closing in and you're going nuts trying to crack a problem and you find yourself getting depressed, try to remember you're just doing an ad. That is all. An ad. A stupid piece of paper. (It's not even a whole piece of paper you're working on. It's just half of a piece of paper in a magazine, and somebody else is buying the other side.) Or it's a stupid landing page. Or a stupid radio spot. Remember, advertising is powerful, and even a “pretty okay” idea can increase sales. I know, I know. Don't tell my clients I said this. But we're talking about times when it feels like your mental health is at stake. Don't kill the goose trying to get a golden egg on demand.

Bertrand Russell said: “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief one's work is terribly important.”

Okay, when you're ready to come in off the ledge, close the window and meet us in Conference Room C. They're about to brief everyone on the digital.