If you want to produce special work, it’s worth collaborating with special people.
Having the courage and determination to focus on one subject or area of expertise gives you the solid foundation that is absolutely necessary if you’re to come up with a truly great idea, one that will be key to your future success.
Too many creative people think they don’t need to specialize, that they can have lots of ideas in lots of different subjects all of which are going to be great.
It can be easy to settle on something that feels right. Something that seems to make sense of all the confusion.
You’ll feel relief when you get to this point. You’ll think you’ve cracked it. You’ll feel good.
But then you have to take a step back from what feels really good and ask:
But is it great?
To create great work you should be making up your own beliefs as you go along, changing them one day to the next, always pushing against the boundaries of current thinking, trying to escape the confines of conventional wisdom.
In the end, everything is connected and the more connections you make the more interesting your work will become.
To be a successful creative person you have to be fascinated by the world and all its wonders, absurdities, failings, and mishaps.
Stay open to new ideas, new places, and new people will feed your creative soul.
Lack of inspiration may be just another way of saying lack of experience.
If it’s a race to get into minds and stay there, then it’s the artists who make their points faster, smarter, and more thought-provoking that will be the ones who succeed.
From your smart TV to your iPhone to your iPad, we’re seeing more but reading less.
All courtesy of digital technology.
For most of us, anger amounts to stress, and the worst type of stress at that.
But for artists, anger can be a positive force.
If focused and channeled into a piece of work, it is capable of producing something of great profundity.
When I’m asked, ‘When do you do your best thinking?’ My answer is always, ‘When I’m not thinking.’
That is why a brainstorming session is a complete and utter waste of time for the truly creative person.
Creativity doesn’t work like that. Too much thinking jeopardizes the creative process.
You can’t be good at everything. The skill is to work with someone who is good at what you are not.
We’re all creative but only some of us will be lucky enough to earn our living by it.
In advertising, the best partnerships are usually those formed between art director and writer. The reason for this is in their job titles:
Art directors think visually.
Writers think in terms of narrative.
Any great work, regardless of medium, is almost certainly expressing a distinct point of view.
But if that point of view doesn’t contain a truth, then you can bet that the work’s impact will be fleeting.
Rather than simply stating the facts most advertisers typically embed their message into creative contextual devices that evoke feelings and bypass rational resistance.
This is why advertisers use stories, poems, slogans, songs, jokes, pictures, symbols, characters, roles, and metaphors.
They are particularly ripe marketing tools, because they lead the imagination and evoke the feelings that strike at our heart not our head.
7 unconscious errors we make when buying brands by Douglas Van Praet
Break things.
All our life we’re told to make things. Breaking things is a process from which you can learn so much more if you decide to learn from somebody else whose done something great and break it and take it apart.
Creativity isn’t an objective pursuit. Its value can’t be measured the way other skills can be.
Eventually, of course, its value will be confirmed, but often long after it was created.
There’s no doubt creativity flourishes in adversity.
And while I’m not suggesting starving yourself is the best spur to great thinking, I do believe one discomfort is worthwhile.