August 25, 2004
seek out the exceptional minds
More thoughts on “How To Be A Copywriter”:
4. Seek out the exceptional minds, avoid everyone else.Life is short. You don’t want to end up in The Watercooler Gang.
OK, I
Hugh MacLeod
I'm a cartoonist.
I sell limited-edition prints.
I wrote a book.
I'm CEO of Stormhoek USA, which markets South African wine in the States.
I also draw private commissions.
Prints |
Opening | Current |
|---|---|---|
Bluetrain |
$900 | |
We Need to Talk |
$650 | |
Portfolio #2 |
$300 | |
NY NY |
$275 |
Don’t toss out your comfortable old furniture, you might end up buying it back at twice the price!
If you only surround yourself with dreamers and schemers, then you run the risk of losing your common sense. Anyone remember the dot-com 90s? Can I get a witness? Of course, if you only surround yourself with sensible, predictible businessfolks then you won’t be motivated to try anything new.
Everyone has something useful to share: predictions, common sense, or even card-toons. — this comment is hereby declared public domain.
i like when all the assholes converge in one comment box
Imagine a society of iconoclasts. Imagine a society where the dominant ethos is “fuck the poor.” Next time you’re in an confined, public space, try imagining that the person next to you has multiple drug resistant tuberclerosis. Maybe that will help snap you out of your megolamaniacal self-absorption.
Nice to see the rigorous debate Guys =) Thanks
john t unger: “and yeah, context. If you routinely take risks, you will spend some portion of your life in both camps: brilliant and total fool.”
Wow. I really like that thought. Seriously.
Yeah, I think being a fool is a big part of the journey.
dbc9box, I’ve been tossed about like old furniture many times
Made me harder, made me smarter. It’s all good.
My experience has also been, people who are good at discriminating and setting priorities are much less likely to screw you over than people who are bad at it.
Relativism isn’t as well-intentioned as it likes to pretend it is.
Ummm… Katherine,
“To work with people who do, and who appreciate, good work. To avoid people who worry about who is, or isn’t, “exceptional”…”
Without good people, without exceptional people, without people who hold themselves and others to very high professional standards, you don’t get to make even good work, let alone exceptional work. You get to make drek.
Good work, I mean really good work, doesn’t just happen, doesn’t just spring into being because a bunch of nice, affable, well-intentioned people met for brunch and decided it would be a good idea. Good work happens because somewhere along the line someone decided to fight like hell to make it happen.
Your statement seem to imply that good work is generally a groovy, conflict-free proccess. My experience says otherwise.
To use my day job as an example:
Let’s say you’re the boss of a company and you’re coming to me asking if I can help you raise your sales. Let’s say your company is in a precarious state. Let’s say you really, really need the sales curve to go up or else the business will go under. And let’s say if we fail then the bank will take away your house, close down your company and force you to lay off 30 good people who gave everything to the cause. Then yeah, well, I would SERIOUSLY recommend you start worrying about whether I was exceptional or not.
Scott Cramer, well done, beautiful. I’m like, so totally with Emerson on this one. Like.
My earlier point, well fielded by Mark Huebner, was intended in the spirit of what Emerson says. But the exceptional achievements reached by Shakespeare, Einstein, Da Vinci et al are not to be devalued in themselves just because their current springs from the happy, rare meeting of the streams of chance, genetics, knowledge and history. I am not a subscriber to the ‘great Man’ theory of history, I favour the idea that the pressures of human desire, experience and history culminate occasionally in one individual whose socio-historical importance is inevitably (as humans) defined through the base circumstances of their physical and temporal existence (i.e. the thing we think first about Einstein is the hair and the tongue, right?).
That just seems obvious to me. Hell, I’ll admit, I think I’m exceptional. I’m a writer and I really do think I’m the dog’s bollocks. But at the same time, I know this is irrelevant — because I have developed what I think is the mildly psychotic delusion/safety net that I think is necessary to both succeed, or if not, guard against failure. It’s simply this: if I fail, it is not me, I remain exceptional, it is the world that is wrong.
Of course, thinking the world is wrong is going to give me some problems if in fact I do eventually have to admit I’ve failed. But that’s the trade-off. Otherwise I’d have self-harm with a wooden spoon at every rejection letter. Instead: the people who have rejected me are major-league assholes.
This is very straightforward stuff, I know. But what I’m saying seems contradictory:
A. No-one doing anything creative should think of themselves as anything less than ‘potentially exceptional’, otherwise what business do they have? ‘Oh yeah, I’m a pretty good sculptor, not great, but I’m still going to show my stuff.’ I scream, ‘WHY?!?!’ (the infuriating thing is that most creative types DO think they’re exceptional, it’s just self-regarding post-religious modesty that keeps them from saying so).
B. This necessary standpoint of regarding oneself as exceptional is utterly irrelevant, as one can never trust the world to recognise the exception — and achieving true greatness is always in the hands of history, not yours.
Therefore: believe you’re great, take the rejection letters, take people’s comments, and at the same time thinking your work is great, don’t give a shit about it. This is the age of accepting the great contradictions, I think (the biggest one of all, of course,being ‘Be a good person your whole life, save the whales, don’t give people crabs, and remember: you’re not going to heaven at the end of it).
But I am rambling on and long and on, and I apologise. My original point was simply going to be this: self-justification often hides behind abstraction, so what I want is, Hugh (or anyone else) is to know specifically what you regard as ‘exceptional’ in the people you work with. What criteria would I need to make the grade? I’m talking examples, anecdotes, hard facts, baby. Can you give me what I need?
My entire life has been spent resenting that which is stupid and mundane.
Sigh… This is just so reductivist. There are only 2 classes of people? Exceptional and mediocre? And you call that vision??
Of course we all want to surround ourselves with bright people — they challenge us and make things more interesting. But don’t confuse arrogance with exceptional.
“Sigh… This is just so reductivist…”
Nothing like starting off a comment with the word “Sigh” to electrify your audience, Rick.
It’s a bit like starting a conversation with a girl who won’t sleep with you with the phrase “We need to talk about us” in order to get her to change her mind.
When I started reading ‘gaping void’ not to long ago it seemed you had a lot of interesting ideals and concepts. But now, each time I visit, I am less impressed with the (repeat) content.
The fact that you believe you are deserving of only “the exceptional minds” is quite egotistical. And frankly anymore, you read like a Salesman.
Just a comment from someone who prefers to look for the exceptional in everything.
“Just a comment from someone who prefers to look for the exceptional in everything.”
Christine:
1. It’s a great philosophy for living, and should be applauded.
2. Yet it’s so utterly worthless on a practical level if you’re being paid a lot of money to make hard choices. And nobody pays you a lot to make easy ones.
Frankly, having read your blog for a while, I would say you are as every bit aware of that as I am.
Whatever. Seems like 1 and 2 are in conflict. They are not in alignment.
So, what do you do if your basic inner philosophy is not aligned with how you make a living?
Do you try to make the job more like you, or vice versa?
Or is that decision ultimately made by someone else?
Questions, questions…
Thanks for the post, Hugh. Clearly everyone has different ideas of what it means to be exceptional. I believe the exceptional person has passion, an open and independent mind, honesty, authenticity, and a willingness to stand up and take responsibility for what needs to be done instead of saying, ‘that’s not my job’. It’s not necessarily about intelligence or creativity, although often the exceptional person has both (so I suppose there are levels of exceptionality). I prefer to surround myself with exceptional people because they reflect my values.
I also like your comment ‘fuck the poor, they can’t afford me.’ I relate to it in a figurative, not literal, sense… with the ‘poor’ being unexceptional, unimaginative prospective clients who think they have nothing to learn from anyone (despite the fact that their business is in the toilet.) They’re closed-mindedness results in a poverty of knowledge and insight, and they’re not worth my time. Sounds callous, but it’s just the old adage, ‘don’t cast your pearls before swine.’ Don’t work for anyone who doesn’t appreciate your value.
“Good work happens because somewhere along the line someone decided to fight like hell to make it happen.”
Well, duh.
My point is that “exceptional” is too fuzzy a metric to apply in most situations. I honestly don’t care if my personal assistant is gifted, creative, exceptional. I care very much that she handles my schedule and travel arrangements without alienating my clients or stranding me in Chicago.
Same thing with your example. I want to know exactly how my ad agency plans to increase sales, and I want them to be able to demonstrate that they’ve accomplished similar results for other clients. If they can’t do that, then I don’t care how many pretty awards they have sitting on their shelves, or how many inspiring manifestos they’ve published.
Katherine,
Yeah, agreed.
Duncan J. Watts writes: “Real science occurs in the same messy ambiguous world that scientists struggle to clarify, and is done by real people who suffer the same kind of limitations and confusions as anybody else.… Our papers get rejected, our ideas don’t work out, we misunderstand things that later seem obvious, and most of the time we feel frustrated or just plain stupid.”
This is the story of my own experience, and to that I would also add the impossibility of knowing about everything in one’s own field, let along the wider world, the unertainty in the face of critics, some of which are genuine and others of which are less so, and the difficulty of expressing that which is so clear in one’s own mind as clearly in written words, equations, algorithms or diagrams.
In such a state is the exceptional. How, then, to expect them to simply declare themselves as such? Any self-declaration will draw a mixture of the profound and the pedestrian. Probably the only way to find the exceptional is to know what you are looking for, more or less, and to then go looking.
Andreas: you have described the paradox that I think most people whom consider themselves to be exceptional (including myself) struggle to overcome.
Here is the logic behind our affliction:
–You cannot truly be exceptional, in every sense of the word, without being morally exceptional.
–Being morally exceptional is to be truly humble.
–One who passes judgement upon another based upon _any_ metric has abandoned humility.
So then, by brazenly dismissing others as lacking exceptional qualities, Hugh therefore cannot be exceptional. And in doing the same thing, neither can I.
As others have mentioned, part of being exceptional is having an ability to cultivate a harmonic existence. When we fail to do so, we ourselves fail to be exceptional.
It is easy to toss up our arms in frustration when dealing with a seemingly incompetent boss, co-worker, or spouse. But it is at this point in time that we must stop to realize that these ‘difficult’ people are ultimately in our life because we allowed them to be there. If my level of consciousness and self-worth is so awe-inspiring, than why have I allowed these hurdles to become a part of my life?
In my view, those whom have reached the true pinnacle of exceptionality view the above question differently: These problems I seem to encounter, they are of my own making, how can I overcome them? What can I do in order to ensure the most amount of smiles on the most amount of faces?
Once you reach this level of consciousness, you sail through life. This is why Andreas remarks that in general, the people she’s observed to be exceptional, are not trumpeting their achievement. To them, having self-fulfillment is an almost natural and effortless occurance. They needn’t tell others about it. Their humility does not permit their doing so. Having the opportunity to live in a state of self-actualization is in and of itself sufficient compensation.
Examples of historically exceptional people in this regard might include Mother Teresa, Confucious, Abraham Maslow, Bob Marley, and/or Epictetus.
— — -
Thank you, Hugh, for the stimulating discussion. Your blog is new to me and was found via blogdex.
e-mail = digs ( at ) myway .com
All good points, Dave.
Moral of the story: it’s OK to seek out the exceptional minds, just not OK to discuss it with others. Heh.
Maybe “remarkable” would’ve been a less contentious word choice. But less punchy. Oh well…
This is a truly enlightening discussion. I think the problem with the world at the moment is that it isn’t run by ad agencies. People keep complaining about the lack of accountability, honesty and results from our society’s leaders, without realising that such mundane concerns are better seen as the lack of CREATIVITY and EXCEPTIONALITY. If the world was more supportive of the truly, creatively exceptional (don’t bug me, anyone who’s exceptional *knows* they’re exceptional, we’re self-selecting) we’d be so much better off. For instance, products would be nicer, people would be inspired to spend more (which in the long run provides opportunities for the poor anyway), and so on. I’m surprised no-one’s picking this up. Don’t politicians read blogs?
I just recently quit my job to go work somewhere else. I’d been interviewing at various places for over a year, but no place had really impressed me. Last week, talking to the director who would be my boss, he told me, “Other places I’ve been and people I’ve worked with all try to surround themselves with average people who make them look good in comparison. I hate that. I only hire people who are smarter than me and harder working.”
I accepted the offer without a second thought.
from monty python:
- All of you guys are so exceptional!
- I’m not! (somebody from the crowd)
I remember a poem by Bukowski:
The Strongest of the Strange
You don’t see them often
For whereever the crowd is they are not,
these odd ones ‚not many ,
but from them come the few good paintings,
the few good syphonies,
the few good books,
and other works
and from the best of the strange ones
perhaps nothing,
they are thier own paintings,
thier own books,
thier own music,
thier own work.
Sometimes I think I see them,
say a certain old man
sitting on a certain bench
in a certain way
or a quick face going the other way
in a passing automobile,
or there’s a certain motion
of the hand of a bag boy
or a bag girl
while packing supermarket groceries,
sometimes its even someone
you’ve been living with for sometime,
sometimes its even someone
you’ve been living with for sometime
you will notice a lightning quick glance
never seen from them before
sometimes you will only note thier excistance suddenly in vivid recall some months,
some years after they are gone.
I remember such a one
he was about 20 years old
drunk at 10am
staring into a cracked new orleans mirror
face dreaming againt the walls of the world
where did i go?
“I am unique, just like everybody else.
We all have our strenghts,
We all have our weaknesses,
That is what makes us unique.”
I used to believe (genuinely) that I was better than everyone else. I went from nothing to having a VC put great gobs of cash into my dream. I was achieving. I worked hard. Too hard. I had a nervous breakdown. Depression, suicidal. Then, with the help of my CBT psycologist, came up with the above mantra.
It gives me value (I am unique), it gives you value (you are unique).
To phrase this another way, I am exceptional in something, you are exceptional in something.
It is not about anyone being mediocre.
Life is about associating with people who share your passion about what you are exceptional at. Your passion may change, who you associate with will change.
It’s ok not to spend a lot of time with the others, but it is foolish to dismiss them as mediocre.
Touch
I love it.
I’m the controversial ruthlilycat at livejournal.com — look me up and join my blog if you’re interested.
its been interesting reading all your views here and i can’t believe the amount of commentary over such a short timespan! (aside to hugh — do you really work/sleep? you’re quite omnipresent).
to add a little thought — i fundamentally agree with the nurturist view touched on earlier that most have the innate ability but lack the motivation/catalyst. the solution for excellence/exceptionality and what we should be striving to is to solve THAT riddle. when everyone (read “the majority”) start climbing the ladder concientiously — then we will see progress and then will our hopes be attained as humanity.
the best we can acheive with minimal participation is discrete bubbles of acheivement (read “the brilliant”). sure feeds the individual ego for those that make it but leaves the rest behind and in a rut. especially the gawkers!
out of curiousity — are most of you commenters here based in the US? the tone and idiom here suggest so but i just wanted to check. it would be interesting to see if this is a culturally unique mode of thought. to make it simpler — who here is not in the US? (disclosure — i am in kuwait)
hugh — a final note: keep up the brilliant work.
i find there is another alternative to avoiding the water cooler groupies: isolation. this is actually a good thing, as it allows me to be productive in an attempt to do something with merit that will lead to many conversations with gifted people. until then i toil…
[i’ll end up in the dissipated-dreams-midlife-depression category most likely, but at least i didn’t take anyone else with me. heh]
Hugh:
I like what you write. Ever read any Ayn Rand? I ask because even though I think she’s over the top I do agree with her in many regards. Especially when it comes to having to deal with people who just can’t keep up with you.
Gaylord
What is most exeptional off all is this fork in the road website. Everything on this website is true in perspective, and understanding yourself could very well lead you to a exeptional perspective. I turn, doing so will only promote great ideas, and to me everyone has a great idea but getting of their block and doing so is another thing. Idea+Ambition=(You tell Me)