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December 30, 2009

don’t worry if you don’t know “absolutely everything” before starting out

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“DON’T WORRY IF YOU DON’T KNOW ‘ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING’ BEFORE STARTING OUT.”

A lot of people massively postpone their EVIL PLANS, for the simple reason that they don’t have an answer for every possible contingency.

They don’t know enough about the industry. They don’t know enough people in the industry– especially the A-Listers. They don’t know enough about where the market is going to be in five years. They don’t know enough about what could possibly go wrong. They don’t know where EVERY SINGLE LAST POSSIBLE LANDMINE is buried.

So instead of getting on with it, they spend the next few years keeping their Nowheresville day job, whilst spending their evenings surfing the web, scouring the trade magazines, researching everything like crazy, trying to get a thorough, small-time Outsider’s view about what the big-time Insiders are currently up to.

And then they often compound this by also trying to get a handle on the even bigger stuff. What will happen to the American/Asian/European/Brazilian/Whatever economy in the next 2/5/10/25/Whatever years, and how will these BIG things affect their tiny, obscure niche.

They want to have ALL the answers, before ever risking getting their feet wet. Hell, before even getting their little toe wet…

Agreed, a wee bit of prudence and informed circumspection are lovely virtues to have, but overdoing it can be ultimately unproductive, for a variety of reasons. Here are my four favorite ones:

i. Being an Outsider with too much Insider Knowledge, makes it even more likely that you’ll make the same mistakes as everybody else.

When Google– the most successful advertising business in the history of the world– started their company, their founders knew practically nothing about the inside workings of Madison Avenue. Sergey Brin and Larry Page most likely had zero inside knowledge about famous advertising titans like Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, Lee Clowes, John Hegarty or Claude Hopkins. They were just a couple of twenty-something Stanford PhD students, who were far more interested in Internet search engines than they ever were in Nielsen Ratings, Proctor & Gamble or The Clio Awards. Which helps explain why, when the normal, mainstream, industry-obsessed kids of around the same age were just landing their first East Coast internships or junior executive positions at advertising blue-chips like McCann’s, Lintas, DDB or Saatchi’s, Sergey and Larry were already well on their way to becoming billionaires.

When I started my fine-art print business in late 2008, I didn’t wait for the acclaim of the big-city gallery scene, or a favorable review from the New York Times art critics before I took the plunge. [A] Those elite votes of approval were VERY unlikely to happen anyway, and [B] Even if did happen, it would have taken years and years. I just reckoned instead that [A] my blog readers already knew and liked my work, [B] a lot of them had disposable incomes and [C] a lot of them had a lot of wall space that needed filling. That was all the incentive I needed to get the ball rolling.

So I just put the idea out there on my blog to see if any fish would bite. And they did. A lot of them even liked the idea enough to put up money in advance, before I had spent a single penny. As a result, the business has been profitable since Day One, without me having to gain an encyclopedic knowledge of the big New York, London and Shanghai art galleries, the current career trajectories of all the artists they represent, or the recent auction prices at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Too much of that stuff would’ve just slowed me down, big time.

[Other, Far Better Examples Than My Own:] Before they launched their car companies, Henry Ford and Karl Benz didn’t decide to first spend a decade trying to win the approval of prominent horse breeders or railway magnates. Same goes for the Wright Brothers.

I love this story about Bill Gates: Some years ago, when the company he founded, Microsoft was at the height of its powers, he was giving a lecture to some college students. When the the Question & Answers came along, a keen undergraduate asked the question, “What advice would you give to a young person like me who wants to make a lot of money some day?”

Gates’ answer was as wonderful as it was short: “For Goodness’ sake, don’t do what I did. That money’s already been made by me.”

ii.“Events, Dear Boy, Events.” –Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister 1957 – 1963, after being asked by a young journalist, what is the most likely single factor to blow any government off-course.

If it’s pretty much impossible for the smartest people in Washington, Wall Street and Silicon Valley to predict what the big, bad world is going to do next, what chance does a guy wanting to open a small, highly-specialized, hand-built EVIL PLAN bicycle operation have, from his small storefront in Brooklyn?

Trying to micromanage the Macro, from the comfort of your wee bike shop… Seriously, your time is better spent trying to manage what you CAN control. Like being nice to customers, keeping your word, staying cheerful, positive and focused, completing a task cheaper, faster and better than you had originally promised, working harder and smarter than the next guy, fighting hard to keep your ideas fresh i.e. all those good, small moves that Grandma told you about decades ago.

To get some very lucid, hardcore perspective on this, I recommend that you read Nassim Taleb’s excellent and highly readable “Fooled By Randomness” (W. W. Norton & Co., 2001). Nassim’s thesis is childishly simple: That the bigger the historical event, the more random and unpredictable the event was to begin with. Nobody saw 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK, Lincoln or Archduke Franz Ferdinand (and the subsequent outbreak of a four-year World War), the Atomic Bombs being dropped on Japan, the 1923 collapse of the German Deutchmark, the Barbarians sacking Rome in 410 A.D., The Bubonic Plague of the 1300’s, or Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union coming down the pike. Ditto with Detroit not seeing the threat of Japanese cars coming after 1945, or IBM not seeing the threat posed in the 1970s by Microsoft and Apple. Everything just happened when it did, everybody was shocked completely, and everybody just had to deal with the MASSIVE AND UNPREDICTABLE consequences afterward. Not too much fun at the time, but there was no other choice. Nassim makes a damn good case.

So if your EVIL PLAN is to open up a two-person internet software company, or a mom n’ pop fancy cheese shop in North Chicago, there’s little point in first waiting to see if, sometime in the next two decades, whether or not India and Pakistan decide to launch nuclear missiles against each other.

iii. Interesting destinies rarely come from just reading the instructions manual.

Yes, Louis Pasteur did say, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” On one level, he was right. That being said, the stuff you learn beforehand will never be one-tenth as useful as the stuff you learn the hard way, on the job. All the former can do is help train you to deal with the reality of the latter. The real truth is always found in the moment, never in the future. Sadly, not everybody is cut out for thriving in the present tense. Life is unfair.

iv. “Sometimes Paranoia’s just having all the facts.” –William S. Burroughs.

I’ve been in a few businesses in my time: advertising, marketing, fine art prints, greeting cards, phone sales, animation, magazines, wine, corporate consulting, English tailoring, and now, book writing. Take it from me– if I had known ONE HALF about these businesses that I know now, I doubt I would’ve bothered in the first place. Instead, I would’ve just gotten an MBA or law degree somewhere and landed a mid-level position in a bank, law firm, corporation or whatever. Maybe joined the local country club while I was at it. Lucky Me.

December 29, 2009

one night stands

90%

5 Comments

f-ing muse

death makes

December 28, 2009

gapingvoid prints: the new marketing campaign

64 Comments

[Rough banner ad ideas I wrote earlier today etc.]

Things here at gapingvoid Central have been busy. In order to spread the word on our fine art prints, we’re talking to a few people about some possible advertising and affiliate marketing deals.

It’s fairly virgin territory for gapingvoid, certainly, but I’m finding it an interesting experiment so far…

So the first thing on the list was to design some new banner ads. Earlier today I messed around with a few rough ideas, pictured above.

It’s not a bad start. I’ve written a couple of dozen already, and I can see running a lot of them in all sorts of websites out there. I’m so far having a lot of fun writing them, that’s for sure. The headlines above are kinda punchy, in-your-face, quite unlike most fine art advertising you see these days, which IMHO is a good thing. Art marketing is traditionally a pretty staid affair; I’d like to ratchet it up a bit… of course I would!

So naturally I’m thinking, what else could I do to make this more interesting, both for me and the Internet-munching public?

Suddenly I get the idea, hey, wouldn’t it be cool if other folk designed and wrote some of these ads as well? A “gapingvoid-community-open-source” kinda thing. How cool would that be?!!

So I’ll tell you what. Feel free to send in any ideas you may have via my usual email below. You can use words, graphics, whatever suits you. Or if you just have an idea off the top of your head, feel free to leave a comment below.

Don’t feel you have to imitate my format or shtick above– if you have another angle, I’d love to see it. If we end up using any of them, we’ll send you a free gapingvoid “cube grenade” print of your choice and also give you a mention & some linklove on this blog. Just remember they’ll be used in conventional sized banner ad format (at least for now), so please don’t stray to far from that for the time being.

This could be A LOT of fun. I’m looking forward to seeing what y’all will come up with. Thanks! Very cool…

[UPDATE:] The very first idea to be submitted came from Melle in the comments: “gapingvoid– Classier than a velvet Elvis.” HA! Thanks, Melle!

[UPDATE:] Within an hour or two of posting this, about 20 people have mailed in ideas, plus there’s all the comments below. Wow. Thanks, Guys! Now I’ve got to figure out how to sort through it all… Heh.

December 27, 2009

“evil plans” are not products. “evil plans” are gifts.

30 Comments

So sooner or later you’re going to have to explain to your friends and family EXACTLY why you decided to quit your stable 401K job and go off on some long-term ACT OF LUNACY i.e. your EVIL PLAN.

I don’t know what exactly you’ll tell them. I do know, however, that somewhere in the back of your mind will be a feeling that you have something you want to give to the world, something that you haven’t given yet, something the world needs but doesn’t quite know it yet.

Yes, you have already learned how to make a living and pay the bills…

But you know that’s not enough.

I’ve had my fair share of crappy jobs, as have we all.

You know what? I never hated a job because of what it took from me– ALL jobs take a lot from you, especially the best ones.

I hated a job because it never allowed me to give enough to the world..

That’s all I ever wanted: My best self, playing my best game. Being an advertising hack never allowed that, somehow. But I can now do that as a cartoonist. I’m damn lucky to have found that out, even if it did take me a painfully, embarrassingly long time.

I’m not the world’s most talented person at what I do. Neither are you. That doesn’t make the gift we have to give less valid.

Giving the gift is an act of love. And Love is the only thing that matters.

That’s why we have an EVIL PLAN. Because it matters. Because Love matters.

What else is there to say…?

print profile: “c.f.a.”

From the gapingvoid Gallery:

December 26, 2009

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December 24, 2009

my web predictions for 2010:

12 Comments

Enough said.

haunted by beauty

decisions were made

our time together

fat, dumb and useless

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as long as your arm

4 Comments

December 23, 2009

if your boss tells you, “our brand must speak with one voice”, quit.

17 Comments

I once had a boss who didn’t like the fact that I had a blog. Especially when I blogged about stuff that was relative to our industry. Yeah, “Our brand must speak with one voice” was his idea. Yes. I know.

Actually, the reality was, HE wanted to be “The One Voice”. He wanted all the credit, and all the rewards. He didn’t mind me putting words into his mouth– stuff I had written– so long as the outside world gave him all the credit. But he didn’t want me in any other role, other than subservient, nowheresville wage slave. He fought tooth and nail to keep me from ever becoming a rainmaker inside the company, something he wanted all for himself.

I left the job a few months later. I was glad to leave, frankly.

The story actually has a happy ending. To deflect some of the heat the boss was currently giving me, I decided to stop blogging about our industry for a while. I decided instead to write about a different subject altogether.

Not sure what to write about, I just dug into my past experiences and started writing a series of blog posts on the subject of creativity, from what I had learned from all those years of cartooning. This series ended up being read online by a lot of people, and then went on to become my first book, “IGNORE EVERYBODY”, which went on to become a business bestseller.

Last time I checked, my former boss’ situation hasn’t changed much. He’s still hacking away in buzzword-infested mediocrity, his “speak with one voice” shtick still being completely disregarded by anyone who matters in the industry.

Schadenfreude…

what entrepreneurs can learn from artists, and vice-vera

I really liked this title, “What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Artists…” when I first wrote it. I even had plans to turn it into a major blog post, with a long list of useful, lucid pointers that my readers would find useful and/or inspiring.

But nothing happened.

The line just floated there in limbo for weeks, almost mockingly…

Every time I tried to write the “useful, lucid” blog post, I ended up hating what I had written.

Of course I did.

Why? Because the thought is redundant.

Because in their own way, all artists are entrepreneurs, and all entrepreneurs are artists.

Though their tools and products may differ, both entrepreneurs and artists are in the same game– the making and selling of work that is personally and emotionally important to them.

Artist. Entrepreneur. They’re just words. What’s far more interesting is not what we create, but how we create it, WHY we create it.

Life is short.

lovely grain of sand

shrouding

the revolution is now here, and it’s permanent

For a cartoonist, I got into blogging relatively early, in May, 2001.

It was a format I “got” right away, for no other reason that compared to building regular websites back then, it was cheap and easy. And I was REALLY broke at the time, so for someone wanting to get their work online and seen by people, it was a godsend.

Around 2005, back when blogs became the hot news story for journalists everywhere, Clay Shirky’s words above came in handy. It kept things in perspective during Blogging’s short-lived media frenzy.

But things changed soon enough, of course. The Blogger’s reign at the top of the new media foodchain soon came to an end. At time of writing this, Twitter is the hot new website that everyone’s talking about incessantly. A year or two ago it was Facebook. The year before that it was MySpace. Doubtless something else will come along next year– it always does.

But what blogging represented back in 2004 is never going away, save for the total extinction of the human race: Cheap, Easy, Global Media.

It’s here forever. It’s not a fad. That’s what Shirky was talking about.

Get used to living with it. Get used to working with it. Avoid it at your peril. Exactly.

you can only live life

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christmas pyscho-drama

December 22, 2009

“fight like hell. this is it.”

43 Comments

Mark Morris is a famous contemporary dancer and choreographer in New York. His dance company, The Mark Morris Dance Group tours the world, has its own large building in Brooklyn (not just the usual New York rented loft space), and has its own school for children. He’s successful, cutting-edge, critically acclaimed and really, really good at what he does.

I saw him being interviewed on television one evening several years ago. He said something that really stayed with me, something I always remember when I need a little jolt of inspiration. To paraphrase:

I confess, I was doing ANYTHING BUT my life’s best work at the time. I was holding down a crappy, hack advertising job. Luckily times have changed since then, but at the time it was killing me, to be honest. Thank God they laid me off after not too long.

We’ve all been there. You know you’re capable of doing great things, being in “The Zone”, but every external marker out there indicates otherwise– that you’ll never get to do the “life’s best work” that you’re capable of. That your career will be nothing but drudgery and abuse, in exchange for what seems an increasingly meager paycheck.

Yeah, it’s a painful place to be. But it doesn’t last forever, not if you don’t give up. Not if you don’t succumb to all the overpriced, “treadmill-enabling”, external markers of success– fancy houses, cars, schools, vacations and “stuff” that you can’t really afford, that you don’t really need nearly as much as the guy in the next cubicle says that you do.

Fight like hell.

This is it.

health insurance

4 Comments

i don’t have a career

December 21, 2009

i’m not angry

4 Comments

old drunk

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cheap rent

i wish my heart was bigger

dead forever

history of the internet

all searches for god

9 Comments

my phone number

December 20, 2009

“don’t do it unless you have to”

8 Comments