The beautifulness of surpassing your teachers
Dear Graduates,
Don't listen to your teachers.
(I've said this before but most of you weren't listening)
Here's what I mean:
You must eat your teachers.
It's natural and it's necessary.
Quick, before some numbnuts starts reading me literally, here's what I mean:
If you liked a teacher, or listened to one, a part of you had to think that person knew more than you, or understood the business better than you, or perhaps did something once upon a time that impressed you.
Consequently, you were, maybe only for a moment, in awe and subservience to that person.
That's not bad.
Problem is, some people hold onto that.
Even as they grow in the business, they keep trying to solve problems the way they were taught.
After a hundred asignments they're still sticking to the formula they used on the first one.
I had some terrific teachers when I was young.
Dennis French. Tom Shortlidge. Jan Zechman.
I looked up to them.
I worked hard to work the way they worked.
No way was I ever going to see myself as their peer.
I still don't.
At Wieden & Kennedy in the early days, showing work to Dan & David, how the heck do you get past those guys?
How a person starts thinking his work is at their level I don't know.
I haven't gotten there yet.
Of what use am I then?
I solve problems differently.
I don't do work that looks like theirs.
Teachers can only take you so far.
Part of getting to where it's possible you can get to requires you be rid of the baggage teachers (without meaning to) put on you.
We were useful in setting a bar.
Now jump over it.
Don't carry it around like a trophy.
Reset it.
Do not shrink back.
Do not say "I cannot" or "I must not".
Do not say you're not good enough.
You are now and will be later.
Good as he was in his day, there's no way
could hit a superlative major league pitcher today.
Ok, maybe after enough time getting used to the speed and practicing reading the spin on the ball, maybe.
Here's the point though: he would have to change his approach in order to do it.
I can tell you that working at W&K now requires a whole different swing and a change in the way one looks at the ball from working at W&K in 1986.
Same with you.
Where you're going they'll throw faster & slipperier balls than your teachers ever had to swing at.
What this means?
How apply big thought to life?
Don't be quick to do what older people tell you.
Your success will come in a different way than your teachers' did.
The work you've got to do has to supplant the kind of work we did.
I'm not saying don't listen to the creative director.
Just don't be quick to do exactly what he says to do, as if he's reciting a recipe.
Don't wait on his words.
Solve according to your mind, not his/hers.
The best creative directors aren't prescriptive, they're constructive.
They'll take what...
(hold on, I can't say I know what the best creative directors are like, I don't; plus, everyone is different)
Here: don't just do what you're told.
There's a reason they hired you.
Don't listen to your teachers.
(I've said this before but most of you weren't listening)
Here's what I mean:
You must eat your teachers.
It's natural and it's necessary.
Quick, before some numbnuts starts reading me literally, here's what I mean:
If you liked a teacher, or listened to one, a part of you had to think that person knew more than you, or understood the business better than you, or perhaps did something once upon a time that impressed you.
Consequently, you were, maybe only for a moment, in awe and subservience to that person.
That's not bad.
Problem is, some people hold onto that.
Even as they grow in the business, they keep trying to solve problems the way they were taught.
After a hundred asignments they're still sticking to the formula they used on the first one.
I had some terrific teachers when I was young.
Dennis French. Tom Shortlidge. Jan Zechman.
I looked up to them.
I worked hard to work the way they worked.
No way was I ever going to see myself as their peer.
I still don't.
At Wieden & Kennedy in the early days, showing work to Dan & David, how the heck do you get past those guys?
How a person starts thinking his work is at their level I don't know.
I haven't gotten there yet.
Of what use am I then?
I solve problems differently.
I don't do work that looks like theirs.
Teachers can only take you so far.
Part of getting to where it's possible you can get to requires you be rid of the baggage teachers (without meaning to) put on you.
We were useful in setting a bar.
Now jump over it.
Don't carry it around like a trophy.
Reset it.
Do not shrink back.
Do not say "I cannot" or "I must not".
Do not say you're not good enough.
You are now and will be later.
Good as he was in his day, there's no way
could hit a superlative major league pitcher today.Ok, maybe after enough time getting used to the speed and practicing reading the spin on the ball, maybe.
Here's the point though: he would have to change his approach in order to do it.
I can tell you that working at W&K now requires a whole different swing and a change in the way one looks at the ball from working at W&K in 1986.
Same with you.
Where you're going they'll throw faster & slipperier balls than your teachers ever had to swing at.
What this means?
How apply big thought to life?
Don't be quick to do what older people tell you.
Your success will come in a different way than your teachers' did.
The work you've got to do has to supplant the kind of work we did.
I'm not saying don't listen to the creative director.
Just don't be quick to do exactly what he says to do, as if he's reciting a recipe.
Don't wait on his words.
Solve according to your mind, not his/hers.
The best creative directors aren't prescriptive, they're constructive.
They'll take what...
(hold on, I can't say I know what the best creative directors are like, I don't; plus, everyone is different)
Here: don't just do what you're told.
There's a reason they hired you.
12 Comments:
Not only am I glad to see another posting, I concur with your thinking completely.
At school, I try to give students the layout of the field, a general description of where the individual players stand, what the uniforms look like, and an idea of the object of the game. I'll tell them how to behave on a team, but I don't tell them how to hit. Or throw. Or run.
Sometimes students want this how-to booklet. Sometimes, entire classes want it.
They won't get it from me.
Anyone who thinks there is such a guide misses the whole point.
Coughter,
I never wanted a playbook. I just wanted to drink in class as much as possible.
Mission accomplished.
D' Avignon can't hit a softball.
Love,
Butch
Good blog.
I check back here pretty regularly and I always find something worth thinking about.
Thanks for that.
An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was
among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
Camp
I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and childen collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity
The more you're like yourself the less you are like your teachers. What they wouldn't do may be the right thing afterall. Thank you for the all the inspiration.
Mark, you're the only creative leader in advertising I've encountered (I've only read your blog) that thinks like you. The perscriptive creative director is the default. Most brow beat their creatives into subordinate ghost writers. And if they have pencils from '92,'93 & '95 their arsenal of authority is truly fortified.
Fear governs most agencies. Not the good kind of fear. The bad kind that sows helplessness. If someone challenges their tenet of good, marginilaztion is the response. It's pure human nature to want to surpass your teacher. To take what you've been given and multiply it. All will benefit. So why are so many creative leaders afraid?
Once agan, really nice thoughts. I'd like my teacher smothered in habenero salsa, please.
However, as an avid baseball fan and amateur BB historian, I do have one complaint. You are 100% wrong about Babe Ruth not being able to hit today's pitching. The pitchers back in his day were just as fast and threw just as much funky junk as pitchers do today. In fact, it's been said that in all of sports, only baseball players can be compared era to era because of their relative talents. For God's sake, Walter Johnson regularly threw over 100 MPH, pitched nine innings every game, and only had two days off between starts. Babe Ruth could hit any pitcher in any era. As could A-Rod. And Walter Johnson or Cy Young could strike out any hitter in any era. As could Pedro Martinez and Rodger Clemens. The greats are great precisely because of their ability to adapt from ptch to pitch, and at bat to at bat.
I guess the same could be said abut Bill Bernbach and say, Mark Fenske.
Fenske only pitches underhand and he, like the AL, uses a DH. I'm not sure what Bernbach threw but I believe he could step to the plate a few times a game.
Boyd's got it right.
Don't put my name & Bernbach's in the same sentence.
I'm sandlot.
The need to tie each comment to a baseball analogy I count as Coughter's fault for not teaching hitting in his classes. Would one trip to a batting cage each term be harmful?
I wasn't paying attention to what you were saying, I was looking at the links. I think the Chuck Norris website should chuck Norris and replace him with Jack Bauer, the new Chuck Norris.
Ever reach for an old awards annual just because it makes you feel comfortable? Every now and then I pick up a 1994 because that’s when I started ad school. And for a minute I feel like these ads (well maybe some of them) were just as good as the outstanding stuff today. And then I have to hit myself over the head with the binding and snap out of that halcyon daze. The temptation to think in the past is a constant enemy.
How's this one?
Good creative directors help you focus on the whole season while you're busy trying to throw the next strike.
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