Hugh MacLeod Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards
Hugh MacLeod
I’m Hugh MacLeod. I’m a cartoonist. Occasionally I write books.
gapingvoid is interested in start-up culture, because changing business for the better is what we’re about; that’s what Social Object Factory is about. We live and breathe it; we help everyone from lone entrepreneurs, to mid-sizers, to Fortune 500’s do the same. Check out our work here.
We create art that helps companies kick ass, end of story.
If you want to talk business, then it’s probably best to please contact my business partner, gapingvoid CEO Jason Korman, here. We look forward to working with you. Thanks!
At first, I thought I should just do a few dozen of them for kicks and giggles, then move on to something else.
That I’d still be doing them 15 years later, didn’t even cross my tiny little mind.
But then it took on a life of its own. Its meaning, purpose and scope snowballed slowly over time.
The lesson here is, be careful of seeking out “The Big Moments” on purpose. Because when the big moments actually happen, they don’t seem very big at the time (like the one in the May, 2008 diary entry above). And too many moments that seem big at the time, often end up going nowhere (“The Failed Superbowl Ad Graveyard” is full of those).
Of course, the more you love your work, the less you need (or want) the “Big Moments” to sustain you. What you really end up needing (and wanting)is just to wake up fresh every morning, and get busy without a lot of fuss.
Thanks to Jonas Ellison for sending in the photo– it seems the family has started a new family tradtion, giving gapingvoid prints as Holiday gifts!
I’m very touched by that, Jonas. Thanks ever so much. Seriously…
In this episode of the Gape Into The Void Podcast Hugh and Jason have a chance to catch up with Internet phenomenon, Gary Vaynerchuk, a long-time friend of gapingvoid. If you don’t know Gary, you should. He’s an incredibly smart, dynamic and outgoing personality, and most of all he’s an incredible salesman.
Thanks again for listening. If you are enjoying Gape Into The Void, please tell your friends and leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or topics you want us to cover on the show email us at podcast at gapingvoid.com.
No matter what the glossy magazine try to tell us, being an entrepreneur is a hard, lonely, nerve-wracking business. We wanted to comunicate something that understands that.
Just like, we want to make art that understands that. Art that really connects with the world my fellow entrepreneurs ACTUALLY live in.
It’s time for another episode of Gape Into The Void! Join us as Hugh, Jason and Jeff talk about gapingvoid’s evil plan to disrupt the “office art” industry. We also are reminded about some big events in Hugh’s world and we give you a peek behind the scenes of some of our current client projects.
Thanks again for listening. If you are enjoying Gape Into The Void, please tell your friends and leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any questions or topics you want us to cover on the show email us at podcast at gapingvoid.com.
Keith Thomson, Managing Director up Stonegate Private Council (a wealth management firm up in Toronto) liked the “Dent” cartoon so much, he commissioned a special large one: 40x40 inches, printed on metal with a gloss surface.
It came out looking awesome. Very slick, very solid, very professional.
And then he graciously posed in front of the piece now proudly hanging in his office [with gapingvoid props scattered everywhere, tongue slightly in cheek etc etc.].
There are few better ways to let the people who walk into your office know, exactly where you and your company stands [Feel free to ping me if commissioning one would interest you: hugh at gapingvoid dot com].
Thanks to Keith for the great gig. I’m very, very excited about this new gapingvoid offering, there are no words. Rock on.
Thought experiment: It’s easier to be successful when you think of your business as a dialogue, rather than property.
I’ve been saying this for years: That all evolutions in marketing are evolutions of language.
In Cluetrain parlance, “Markets Are Conversations”. People talking to each other, metaphorically or otherwise.
When markets change, the conversation changes. People who change the market, change the way the market speaks to people.
Ergo, language changes. Language evolves, and so does the market.
People who want to change the market they’re in (in their favor) should think about this… how does your product “talk” to the market, how is the “voice” different from your competition?
A movie about an increasingly taboo subject in this vapidity-worshipping society of ours: Mastery.
“Jiro Dreams Of Sushi” is a documentary about the world’s greatest sushi chef, 85-year-old Jiro Ono. What’s striking about Jiro is not that he has reached such greatness, but how he reached it.
Instead of the usual celebrity chef schtick– TV shows, cookbooks, fancy restaurants franchises in all the world capitals (including the mandatory Las Vegas casino location), he kept it REALLY simple: a single, TINY, 10-seater restaurant in a subway station in Tokyo.
Why did he do it that way? Because he wasn’t interested in money, he was interested in the MASTERY of his chosen craft. The bigger he made his restaurant business, the less time he would have to spend on his TRUE calling, making sushi.
Which is why the restaurant only serves sushi. That’s it. No appetizers. No side dishes. No tempura or yaki soba. No non-sushi entrees. A tiny little underground hole in the wall with only a few stools and even fewer tables. That’s it. And yet people have been known to make reservations a year in advance.
He wasn’t in it for the money, he was in it because it allowed him to strive for perfection.
In a world that often rewards money and office politics over mastery, maybe more mediocre people get to drive fancy cars, live in big houses and wear a lot of bling, but something is lost in the process. And we are the poorer for it.
Jiro reminds us that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can achieve mastery, or at least aim for it, if you decide to.
But only you can decide that, of course. Only you can decide what kind of example you want to be for your children.
A beautiful mediation on “Mastery”. A beautiful meditation on “Small is beautiful”. A beautiful meditation on “Meaning Scales”. I loved every last minute of it. I would urge anyone who actually cares about what they do– the process, not just the result– to go see this movie: It’ll change your life. Rock on.
[Today’s guest post is by Brian Solis, Principal Analyst, Altimeter Group.]
It’s inevitable that I will get the question. You’d think by now that I would learn to expect it…that I would prepare for it…or have a response that would be purely second nature. But I don’t. I’ve no standard answer that automatically inspires anyone in the moment to take action. And, to this day, I neither expect the question nor do I have a rehearsed or standard riposte committed to memory.
So what is “the question?”
The question faces those who see disruption all around them. They believe survival requires change and they aspire to fight for transformation. But, at some point in their quest to pursue a new course, a direction in which they deeply believe, they will ask reluctantly, even desperately, “How do I convince others to see what I see” or “how can I get those in control to recognize the importance of what’s happening around us so that we can move forward in the right direction?”
While my response in each moment always attempts to zero-in on the individual circumstance, the truest, most genuine answer that I can share is that…to bring about change does not take technology, it takes courage. And, this is why change is not a commodity. Change is not easy nor is it formulaic. But I can say this with the utmost conviction, change.is.inevitable and it is yours to define.
We live in disruptive times. As such, everything we know transcends into everything we once knew. How we communicate, connect, discover, learn and share is changing. New and emerging technology is becoming increasingly relentless and it is forcing evolution or complete transformation. And, it touches your personally and professionally. In our own way, we each are gravitating toward dissonance or disarray and it can be distressful. As students, parents, role models, employees, managers, entrepreneurs, artists, or some or all of the above, we will at some point collide with disruption. And in that moment, we will have a choice to make. We either fall down, choose to embrace change, or we will see the possibilities beyond what’s immediately apparent to pave the way toward a more meaningful outcome.
But again, it takes courage. It takes courage to see what others don’t or do what others won’t. It takes courage to push forward when pushed back.
Courage is the ability to do something that frightens one, yet it is the very thing that all leaders share. See, courage takes great strength to stand in the face of pain or inevitable grief and without it, your vision, no matter how brilliant or essential, is merely a masterpiece painted on a napkin — a promise that is never fully realized.
We stand today upon a foundation of uncertainty and apprehension. Everything is changing. What is constant however, is the absence of clarity, direction or answers. To tell you that there is an easy path toward transformation or that there are a series of “top 10 ways” to help you change the perspective of leadership or those around you is, well, misleading or a complete falsehood.
Contrary to popular belief, there are no rules for revolutionaries…just as there are no leaders who don’t continually strive to earn a position of leadership. It takes courage to be a change agent, to rise up and lead the way when others are filled with fear. It takes courage to walk in a different direction when others walk along a contrasting path. Most important, it takes courage to drive persistence to overcome resistance…to find comfort outside your comfort zone when the promise of reward is ambiguous. For, it is the vision to see where you need to go and the conviction to shepherd the march toward relevance that earns the greatest rewards of all, leadership, significance, and advocacy.
This is your time…
“Courage is grace under pressure.” — Ernest Hemingway
“I’m not passive aggressive, I’m decaffeinated.”
Energy, passion, enthusiasm… these are the things that often drive one’s creativity.
They are also the things we can share to help inspire and drive the creativity in others.
When we share an idea we yearn for it to be met with one or all of the above. We want our audience of one or many to respond to our work with energy… with passion… with enthusiasm. When they don’t, we take it as commentary, or worse, as criticism. But sometimes their less than amazing reaction has nothing to do with us, or our stuff. Sometimes your audience is just too tired, or just too distracted by their own stuff to give you what you want. They’re not being mean, or trying to cut you down with their silence. Their cup is just too full at the moment to make room for you.
To those who don’t know us well, gapingvoid just appears to be in the business of selling Hugh’s cool illustrations. Over the years, Hugh and I have gone through the often-tortuous self examination required in the journey of finding our true purpose. Nearly every day asking ourselves: “What can one do with a cartoon?”
Thanks to our friend, Mark Earls, we think a lot about the notion of Purpose Idea, and spend a lot of time helping clients wrestle with the beast as well.
So, we have come up with our purpose, and much of it is around the idea of inspiring others.
Here is an excerpt of what we consider our Purpose – note that it is a work in progress, and always subject to change as we grow, morph and reinvent ourselves.
*We live in incredible times.
*Every single person on this earth has the capacity to make a difference… the ability to lead, and leave their mark.
*Every business is driven by forces far more powerful and profound than money.
*We help businesses discover and articulate their purpose
*We help people make a difference,
*We help leaders lead
*We help businesses kick butt.
*We create social objects that transform organizations, start conversations, and spread ideas at lightning speed.
*We live in incredible times, and as long as there is one person on this earth who does not agree, there is still work to be done.
We’ve all failed at some point or another in our lives, but the question is always; “what do you come away with?”
For me, it always inspired me to do better, somehow. I never gave up. So this kind of adversity-induced inspiration sorta became my “muse” after a while.
I’m getting to the age where the kids I grew up with who “Never made a mistake” are starting to plateau careerwise.
“Doing everything right” meant only dealing with known quantities, known outcomes, the opportunities of the unknown were never embraced.
None of them became cartoonists, that’s for damn sure…
Like I said on Twitter earlier today, the people who REALLY taught me “How To” do anything worthwhile, didn’t write a big ol’ list of instructions, didn’t hold my hand, they just led by example.
The great British advertising man, Dave Trott once did that for me, back in the day…
THIS is what REAL leadership means. THIS is what REAL inspiration means.
And you’d better get used to it. Because in the world we now live in, there are no more jobs. There are no more bosses. There are only clients and customers from now on.
The employees who don’t get that, are dead in the water. And so are the “bosses” who still like to be treated as “bosses”. Good riddance to them all.
So… go read Dave Trott’s stuff. Find out who he is. Go learn from a MASTER. Do it. Rock on.
I love this. A gapingvoid greeting card, newly printed, the finest inks on on the finest card stock yada, yada, yada.
No, we’re not selling them anytime soon. We sent them out to everybody who ordered one of our “Love Prints” in time for Valentine’s Day etc etc.
How do you make something ubiquitous seem valuable to people? A nice greeting card, for example? Something that you normally can find in any shopping mall for the price of a cup of coffee?
By making it scarce. Exactly. Special. Exactly. By making it NOT available in any shopping mall, by making it NOT for sale, at any price (within reason). Exactly.
Early on, Jason (my business partner these last eight years) and I figured out that gapingvoid would probably NEVER BE big and mainstream, a-la Dilbert or Doonesbury.
So there was NO POINT doing the same marketing as Dilbert or Doonesbury. Or anybody else, for that matter.
OK, granted, the website could use some work design-wise, but it’s still early days, she’s new to this world…
This is what Web 2.0 REALLY means to me, why it’s REALLY important.
It allows a young woman like Danielle to follow her dreams, without having to take out a loan, without having to sign a lease with some rich landlord in some expensive neighborhood.
I’m passionate about the idea that a business card should be more than just a way of handing out contact details, but a social object that states what you believe in, what you stand for.
I got the idea for gapingvoid business cards when I was living in New York, when I discovered that I preferred giving out my own, hand-drawn business cards to people, rather than the ho-hum business cards that my employer at the the time issued me with.
Of course, after a while it became a lot of work, drawing them every time I met someone. Eventually I started getting them printed. Then I thought, why not print them for other people? The rest is history…
I always thought there was a market for business cards that stood out. Cards that reflected the personality of the person handing them out, cards that said, “I’m not just one more random shmuck in a bar, doing the usual handing out his card to an equally random chick in a bar yada, yada, yada.”
Living in New York, in a sea of other equally opportunitist young people on the make, it was easy to be “another random guy”. I don’t want to be that random guy. I wanted to be something else.
And it worked. What started out as an act of rebellion among the suits and hipsters of Manhattan, turned into a successful business and art career.
The gapingvoid business cards– my cartoons printed on the back, your personal details printed on the front– are designed to act like “Idiot Filters”. In other words, people who are cool seem to like them right away, people who are idiots always tend to ask “WTF?” So it’s a good way of gauging people, quickly.
That’s the idea, anyway. At the very least, they’ve created A LOT of fun for people over the years. And now we have more designs than ever. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions. Rock on.
After this cartoon went out in the newsletter earlier this year, we received a number of emails from people asking for female version. Here it is!
I think the Buddhist in me came out in this one. So much human suffering is tied to hanging on to things; material, emotional, or otherwise.
I believe that happiness comes from inside us - We often forget that, and spend a lot of time blaming other people for our unhappiness.
The commentary on the original image read:
“If you’re unhappy, nine times out of ten it’s because you’re clinging onto something.
Nine times out of ten, happiness and letting go are synonymous.”
Hardly a morning goes by these days without me hearing some story on NPR Morning Edition about American economic woe. Especially around this Christmas time. People who’ve been working hard all their lives, suddenly can’t afford presents for their kids. Those kind of stories. They’re sad as hell, and they seem to be getting more and more frequent.
At the same time I keep seeing news stories like this one from the WSJ: About how competition in Silicon Valley for engineering talent is so fierce, they’re fighting over interns now:
Silicon Valley’s talent wars are going younger.
Bay Area tech companies, already in a fierce fight for full-time hires, are now also battling to woo summer interns. Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response — sometimes even luring candidates away from college.
And then there was another story from the BBC, about how Brazil has now overtaken the UK as the world’s sixth largest economy.
A lot of the world is in flux, so it seems. And to this cartoonist, it has a simple enough explanation:
The Great Convergence is upon us, and our friend, the Internet is accelerating the process. This would be happening with our without “The 1%” misbehaving themselves– whatever the mainstream media and the Occupy crowd might say.
The good news is, if you have a talent, the world wants it, and it has never been so easy to show your talent to the world.
The bad news is, especially for us fat & lazy Americans, is that the great, century-long era of Prosperity-on-Autopilot is over.
The world still wants serious talent. And it still wants people doing the grunt work: pushing mops, digging ditches, waiting tables, answering phones, flipping burgers etc..
It’s the people in the middle that nobody knows what to do with anymore. And the politicians who claim that they do, are lying.
It’s probably too late for my generation, that ship has already sailed. But for the kids out there reading this, who are just starting out?
Learn how to work hard, work long hours. Find something you love, and then excel at it. Above all else, learn how to create, learn how to invent. That’s your only hope, really.
The benefits of Consumer Capitalism– the dominant ideology of our age– are pretty self evident:
Lots of people having stuff, lots of things being invented, lots of livelihoods being attained, plus the greatest measure of them all– life expectancy– being increased.
But there is a cost, mostly psychological. Consumer capitalism makes us more covetous.
And covetous makes us more stressed out and less happy.
There’s no answer to it really, other than greater self-awareness…
We are living in a world that gets weirder all the time, especially this time of year.
So much of people’s day to day satisfaction comes from consumption, that it’s becoming harder and harder to remain objective about what matters.
We love our gadgets, we love our cars. We love our stuff. Where does this all lead?
One thing you can do around products though, is to use them as a vehicle for creating community.
Whether we like it or not, ALL community has love baked in there somewhere, even if you can’t always taste it. Maybe that is the upside here?
Even in the non-romantic usage, “Love” is a highly loaded word. Dynamite. Nitroglycerin. It’ll burn your eyes and then your skull.
This is the new calling card I designed for gapingvoid. Note how the message is more communication-based, rather than art-based. Exactly. Also, the message is more about the team (Jason, Laura, Sammy and myself), as opposed to about just me and the drawings.
To paraphrase Seneca, the tragedy isn’t that life is short, the tragedy is that we waste so much of it.
The other types of tragedy, the more violent kind, never worry me too much, thankfully. I never lost much sleep, worrying about wars or serial killers or whatever.
But the thought of getting to the end of my life and realizing that I had wasted most of it, that froze my blood.
I first drew this in 2004. A wee doodle that I thought very little about at the time. Yet over time, the simplicity of the message seems to have resonated with a lot of people.
Any fool can be a burnout or a calcified dinosaur. Reinvention is much harder. And to keep doing it, again and again? MUCH, MUCH harder.
After a decade or so since I last devoured his books, these last few weeks I’ve been happily, gloriously rediscovering the work of Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist.
My story is a common one among Campbell fans. A clueless, socially inept, lost kid with no idea about what to do or where to fit in the world, and suddenly along comes Joe Campbell with three simple, life-changing words:
“Follow Your Bliss”.
Boom! A moment of total clarity. A moment of incandescent lucidity.
Of course! FOLLOW YOUR BLISS! What else is there worth doing, besides that? How better to spend one’s life?
At the time, it made total sense. I mean, REALLY!!!!.…
I only first heard of Joseph Campbell the day I read his obituary, back in 1987 (A fact that still makes me sad, I’m not quite sure why). I then checked him out at the bookstore, and I found his work, quite frankly, mind-blowing. Transformative!
A floodgate of possibility being opened. Whoosh! Like being hit by a spiritual tidal wave.
But the thing is…
Joseph may have told me to follow my bliss, but he never told me how. He really didn’t have to many concrete tips or pointers. He just told his readers to just do it.
Much to our chagrin, it was something we were just going to have to figure out all by ourselves…
I was a bit intimidated by that. I think we all are, when we first encounter Campbell’s work. Do we have what it takes, do we have the guts to take what he said, make the necessary sacrifices etc etc and ACTUALLY apply it to our own lives?
I remember that fear well, a quarter century later…
So, now that I’m older, now that it seems I’ve followed my bliss pretty well, and it also seems to have panned out pretty OK for me creatively and careerwise, I now have young people asking me the very same question that Joseph’s students once asked him– “How do I do follow my bliss?”
Experience taught me well that there’s is no definitive answer. There is no instruction manual.
You just decide to do it, and then you go and do it. Or not. Whatever. It’s your call. It’s your path.
And it takes as long as it takes. Decades, maybe. An entire lifetime, even. There is no timeline. Nor any guarantees that you’ll succeed.
Nobody can do it for you. Nobody can go there for you– that mysterious place where the central energy of your being finds its source. Yes, you may fail in your quest to find it. But that risk is what makes it so damn powerful and interesting.
And Joseph Campbell would’ve told you the exact same thing.
Thinking about this earlier this evening, I drew the above cartoon just for the heck of it. I hope you like it, but I’m fine if you don’t.. Those little squiggly abstract drawings I do; well, that’s my bliss. Your bliss is something else. Your bliss is your own, not mine or anyone else’s.
Bliss. You have it within you, we already know that. The question is what you’re going to do about it.
Thank you, Joseph Campbell. Thank you all for reading. Godspeed!
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