Passion Fruit

Without passion, you don't have energy; without energy, you have nothing.

― Donald Trump

If I had a nickel for every time some guru said success stems from passion, I'd be living in Mar-a-Lago.

Sure, passion's prerequisite―but far less so than money, talent, timing and luck.

Passion alone, however, can lead to distinction. It won't lead to "great;" but it can lead to "worst."

Consider the case of Ed Wood, the Hollywood hack who earned distinction as "worst director of all time."

Passion alone―and he was passionate―couldn't carry him to greatness. The tides ran against him.

"Ed Wood wasn’t the worst filmmaker of all time," says film critic Matt Singer, "but he might have been the unluckiest.

"His life story is a series of missed opportunities and broken promises. He would prepare a film, and the financing would fall through. He’d plan a project for an actor, and the actor would die. He made what would become one of the most famous movies in history, then thoughtlessly sold the rights to it for a single dollar to pay his rent."

"Passion is the genesis of genius," Tony Robbins says.

But passion alone can bear bitter fruit. 

Unbacked by money, talent, timing and luck, passion is the font of failure.

Young at Art

This world is a dream within a dream; and as we grow older, each step is an awakening.

— Sir Walter Scott

We don't appreciate how formative youthful pursuits can be. They can shape not only the adult, but whole industries—even the whole world.

William Hogarth at 16 apprenticed to a London engraver, who taught him to design business cards and invitations. Whenever he had time off, Hogarth would amuse himself by wandering the nearby streets and sketching the odd characters he saw there. Within seven years, he was able to open his own business, engraving coats of arms, advertising handbills, and plates for booksellers.

Beatrix Potter at 14 began to keep a diary in which she wrote short stories, recorded impressions, and sketched pictures of her favorite pets, including rabbits, mice, frogs, lizards, snakes and bats. Although she never attended school, she learned to develop her skills in observation and draftsmanship from a private art teacher, Miss Cameron. 

Alfred Hitchcock at 15 enrolled in engineering school, but quit when his father suddenly died to take a job at a company that manufactured electric cables. Hitchcock worked in the advertising department there, writing copy and designing ads, all the while moonlighting as a title-card designer for the local silent-film studios. Within six years, he landed a full-time job with one of them.

Woody Allen at 16 held an after-school job with a New York ad agency. Every weekday, he would ride the subway into Manhattan from his high school in Brooklyn, all the while scribbling jokes onto pieces of paper. The agency's executives would place the jokes in the newspapers, attributing them to their clients. Woody's daily output of 50 jokes quickly landed him his first job as a comedy writer, for the TV personality Herb Shriner.

Bob Dylan at 12 would stay up every night until 3 am listening to Southern radio stations that played Muddy Waters, Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed and fingering their tunes on his guitar. While at summer camp in 1954, Dylan met a kid with his own high school doo-wop group. He formed a double act with the kid and, not long after, Dylan wrote his first song, a homage to Brigitte Bardot.

Roger Deakins at 18 enrolled in art school to study graphic design, but quickly discovered he preferred photography, and transferred to film and television school. After graduation, he found work as a cameraman, landing within seven years in the hot, new field of music videos. His music videos eventually earned the attention of the Coen Brothers, who asked him to shoot Barton Fink.

Steve Jobs at 18 audited a college course on calligraphy in which he learned about type design. He became so obsessed with typography, he began to look for a way to build a computer capable of printing multiple, variable fonts. He said of the course 22 years later, “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. Ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me."

HAT TIP to Ann Ramsey and Lucy Smith for inspiring today's post.

Make Your Mark

Pear and squash (Charcoal on paper)

I can never accomplish what I want―only what I would
have wanted had I thought of it beforehand.

― Richard Diebenkorn

Drawing classes have taught me something.

A plan means little, unless you make your first mark.

The plan says, "This is about perfection."

The blank sheet says, "This will never work."

The hand says, "This is beyond me."

The brain says, "This is embarrassing."

But as the generals know, no plan survives contact with the enemy.

You will never accomplish what you want; but what you want doesn't matter.

Your first mark matters.

Stranger Things

While heading the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover spied on many left-leaning artists.

James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Albert Camus, Truman Capote, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Gene Kelly, John Lennon, Dorothy Parker, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and Orson Welles all crossed the G-man's radar.

But Hoover's strangest suspect, without doubt, was French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.

Hoover distrusted all philosophers (particularly French ones) and in 1945 asked, "Are Existentialists just Commie shills?"

To find the answer, Hoover assigned a team of agents to spy on Sartre, who was visiting the US in April of that year at the Office of War Information's invitation.

Hoovers' agents applied routine FBI methods—surveillance, eavesdropping, wiretapping and theft—to find the answer. But the agents were stymied. One stole notebooks from Sartre's personal effects, only to inform Hoover "this material is all in French." Their findings, in the end, were inconclusive (a lot like Existentialism's).

Twenty years later, Hoover again focused on the philosopher, tagging him for a co-conspirator in JFK's assassination, because Sartre had belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Lee Harvey Oswald was also a member. That investigation never quite panned out, either.

INTERESTED IN EXISTENTIALISM? Join The Authentic Existentialist, a private Facebook group.   

PHOTO CREDIT: Victor Romero 

Wasting Away

Not every artist is an addict, and certainly not every addict is an artist.

—Steven Pressfield

Getting wasted has wasted many an artist.

The list is long.

Scott Fitzgerald. Dylan Thomas. Jack Kerouac. Jackson Pollack. David Smith. Errol Flynn. Marilyn Monroe. Oliver Reed. Lenny Bruce. John Belushi. Chris Farley. Janice Joplin. Elvis Presley. Jerry Garcia. Amy Winehouse. And more.

Novelist Steven Pressfield thinks the path of addiction comes easily, but not inevitably, to the artist.

She can choose to get wasted; or she can choose to work.

"There are two ways to know if you’re taking the addict’s path or the artist’s," Pressfield says. "One, the artist’s way requires work. We have to sweat to find surcease of pain. And two, the artist’s imperative is to maintain self-sovereignty, not abdicate it. Her heart may surrender momentarily in order to hear heaven’s music, but her feet remain planted here on earth, where she will do the work to bring that song to human ears."

Work obsesses the most unlikely of artists, Jimmy Buffet.

According to his editor, Terry McDonell, Buffet has always worked—never for money, but "only because it was good for Jimmy Buffet."

It's why he's a success, with:

• Over 30 albums (8 Gold, 9 Platinum)
• Three New York Times best sellers
• A branded-merchandise company with $1.5 billion in annual sales
• 7 hotels, including Margaritaville, a 17-story resort hotel in Miami (8 more are underway, including one in Grand Cayman) 
• A family resort in Orlando with hotels, a 12-acre water park, and 1,200 homes
• 67 themed restaurants
• A Norwegian Cruise Line offering named Margaritaville at Sea
• A satellite radio channel
• A suite of mobile games and videos
• One of America’s fastest-growing craft beers
• A line of branded liquors, and
• A line of branded groceries, including iced tea, frozen shrimp, and tortilla chips

PS: With Jimmy Buffet's buy-in and enough financial backing, I plan to open the first Margaritaville-themed nursing home, Wasting Away, in Q4 2017. Call me now, to invest.

NOTE: This post does not constitute an offer to participate in any investment.

Nerves

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he
can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.

— Steven Pressfield 

Henry Fonda vomited before every performance he ever delivered.

Nerves never leave some of us.

Nerves are normal.

Nerves can make us better players.

That Old Black Magic

Whoever Americans elect as president next week, I hope she has a witch as her top aide, as does South Korea's president. We're going to need that old black magic to get well.

Writers need black magic, too; and editors are its source.

In his new memoir, The Accidental Life, Terry McDonell quotes Norman Cousins, the longtime editor of Saturday Review, on the art of editing:

Nothing is more ephemeral than words. Moving them from the mind of a writer to the mind of a reader is one of the most elusive and difficult undertakings ever to challenge the human intelligence. This is what being an editor is all about.

Editors are advisers, coaches, cheerleaders, therapists, parents, midwives and—as Cousins implies—sorcerers.

They're also missionaries, as Robin Lloyd, contributing editor for Scientific American, says:

My motivation as an editor is clear, compelling communication for the reader. Delivering that is my first job. Readers are looking at every word for an excuse to bail out—to stop reading a story. My job is to prevent that and to keep them reading this story by focusing on clarity, pacing, logic, arc, and sparkling prose.

Above all, editors are match-makers, pairing willing writers with willing audiences.

That means an editor must be conversant in many fields; sense which topics are ripe for coverage; and know which ideas, words and phrases will keep readers reading.

No mean feat.

Resistance

When you're through changing, you're through.

— Bruce Barton

Resistance to change.

A psychologist would say fear of loss is behind it.

A Neoplatonist would say the devil is.

An inner voice advises you: Beware. Go slow. Back off. Give in. You're swamped. Next week. Next month. Next quarter. Next year.

What—or who—do you blame?

When There's Only Make

Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.

– Mae West

It took J.D. Salinger 10 years to write The Catcher in the Rye.

It took John Roebling 10 years to build the Brooklyn Bridge.

It took Leonard Cohen 10 years to compose "Anthem."

It took Julia Child 10 years to compile Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

It took James Cameron 10 years to film Avatar.

How long is your patience, your endurance, your long term?

Can you sustain your passion long enough to make something that may take years to complete?

Or are you satisfied ceaselessly prototyping?

"Your long term is not the sum of your short terms," Seth Godin says.

Celebrate!

Dylan is a reminder of how America used to talk to itself.

— Lili Loofbourow

"A great poet in the English-speaking tradition," Bob Dylan became a Nobel Laureate yesterday.

Killjoys will kvetch. "Someone who performed in Las Vegas the same day he became a Nobel Laureate doesn't belong to the club of Lewis, O'Neill, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Bellow and Morrison."

I refuse to accept this.

In his Banquet Speech, Faulkner said:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Don't Blame the Media

It isn't the medium that lacks depth, it's the artist.

Andrew Wyeth

Dead artist's and writers' homes intrigue us the way their unfinished works do: both are like ancient ruins asking for completion.

I just had the pleasure of touring one artist's home, Andrew Wyeth's, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Wyeth worked in his studio there for 68 years, completing (and abandoning) thousands of drawings and paintings.

Although he used other media, Wyeth mastered tempera, the favorite of Renaissance artists like Botticelli and Raphael. It's made by mixing dry pigment and egg yoke.

Wyeth preferred tempera because it's durable.

"There is something incredibly lasting about the material, like an Egyptian mummy, a marvelous beehive or hornet's nest," he once told a critic. "The medium itself is a very lasting one, too, because the pure method of the dry pigments and egg yolk is terrifically sticky. Try to rub egg off of a plate when it is dry. It's tough. It takes tempera about six months or more to dry and then you can actually take a scrubbing brush to it and you won't be able to rub off that final hardness."

But Wyeth was careful to distinguish the medium's force from the artist's.

"My temperas are very broadly painted in the beginning. Then I tighten down on them. If you get the design and the shape of the thing you want to paint, you can go on and on. The only limitation is yourself. I have always argued this is true with any medium. I have had people say to me, 'Why do you waste your time with watercolor, it's such a light medium, a fragile medium. It lacks depth.'Well, it isn't the medium that lacks depth, it's the artist. You can never blame the medium."

As in politics, when up against our limits, it's easy in creative pursuits to blame the media. 

I hear blame every week in the drawing class I attend. Charcoal sucks. Conté sucks. Graphite sucks. Ink sucks. This paper sucks.

But the limits are in ourselves.

You don't control your chosen medium.

You surrender to it.

Out of His Skull

It’s not so easy writing about nothing.

                                                                         — Patti Smith

Recently I met Noah Scalin, who launched his career as a fine artist by creating a skull every day for a year.

"Creativity is a practice," Scalin said. His advice:

Pick something—anything—and make one every day for a year.

Scanlin's is the best advice on creativity I've heard.

Authors—bloggers, marketers and thought leaders—fret constantly over "finding their voice," "discovering their brand essence," and "achieving authority."

None recognizes "author" and "authority" share the same Latin root, auctor.

In Ancient Rome, an auctor originated. (In contrast, an artifex (artisan) labored to realize the vision of an auctor; he had less clout as a consequence.)

Want to find your voice? Discover your brand essence? Be an authority?

Originate. Something. Every. Day.

Killer Phrases

Today's post was contributed by Margit Weisgal, author of Show and Sell: 133 Business-Building Ways to Promote Your Trade Show Exhibit. Margit is managing director of DARE and writes for The Baltimore Sun.

Chic Thompson wrote one of my favorite books, What a Great Idea!, about the way creativity is stifled in organizations by people uttering what he calls Killer Phrases.

Imagine, if you will, someone staring you down when you suggest a new way of doing something and, then, saying, “But we’ve always done it this way” or “It’ll never work.”

You drop your head and wish it were possible to sink through the floor and disappear. “Why,” you ask yourself, “did I open my mouth? Why did I even try?”

Change is scary to a lot of people; unfortunately, we face change on a daily basis because we’ve evolving at an unheard of pace with new everything: new technology, new opportunities, and new competitors, all of which seem to loom on the horizon, forcing us to rethink how we function.

We’d far prefer to play it safe and maintain the status quo. But we can’t stay the same. It’s that simple. Moving forward is the only option. And those naysayers, the perpetrators of Killer Phrases, should be left out of any conversation. New ideas should be greeted with delight. Figure out how to make it work. Not every idea is a great idea, but they should all be considered.

Killer Phrases are nothing new. “The negative voice of 'It’ll never work!' has been around a long time," Thompson writes. "In 1899, the Director of US Patent Office declared, 'Everything that can be invented, has been invented!' and tried to close the Office down.”

Business is about connecting with customers, telling a story that resonates with them. With every new decade and every new generation, we have to change. Thompson says the key to innovation is “abandoning the obsolete, the irrelevant, and the programs without promise.”

It's time to kill the Killer Phrases. The next time someone says to you, “What if…,” respond with, “Let me hear it and we’ll see how we can make it work.”

Wouldn’t that be a nice change of pace?

Judge. Jury. Executioner.

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. 

He watches it, but he knows he can't do it.

— Howard Fast

In the moment we forget, the critic always has an agenda far different from the creative's.

When it appeared in 1929, critics trashed William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. 

Clifton Fadiman headlined his review in Nation, "Hardly Worth While," and wrote, "The themes and the characters are trivial, unworthy of the enormous and complex craftsmanship expended on them."

Twenty years later, the novel was a chief reason Faulkner won the Nobel Prize; and today it's considered the apotheosis of modernist fiction.

Critics—without qualifications or qualm—act as judge, jury and executioner. (Fadiman wrote a lot of criticism in his lifetime; but never a single novel.)

Critics who can't do what you do aren't worthy. 

They're bystanders. Peeping Toms. Eunuchs in a harem.

So fuggedaboutem, whatever you create.

Let a real jury (the market) decide.

Coda: Seth Godin says, "If a critic tells you that, 'I don’t like it,' or 'this is disappointing,' he’s done no good at all. In fact, quite the opposite is true. He’s used his power to injure without giving you any information to help you to do better next time. Worse, he hasn’t given those listening any data to make a thoughtful decision on their own. Not only that, but by refusing to reveal the basis for his criticism, he’s being a coward, because there’s no way to challenge his opinion."

Fuggedaboutem.

Rebel, Rebel

"Don Draper with a conscience," copywriter Howard Luck Gossage created ads in the 1960s for airlines, breweries and oil companies.

But his favorite and finest work was extracurricular.

Nicknamed "The Socrates of San Francisco," evenings Gossage turned his agency, headquartered in an abandoned Barbary Coast firehouse, into a salon where iconoclasts like Tom Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Marshall McLuhan and Bucky Fuller met regularly to booze it up and brainstorm.

Gossage was the first marketer to see advertising as a "conversation," coining the word "interactive" to describe the ads he created. Their goal, he said, was to get audiences to opt in, join communities and converse with brands. "Our first duty is not to the old sales curve, it is to the audience," he said.

Gossage also dreamed up "pay per view" (30 years before we could access the Web) and was the first marketer to integrate advertising and PR.

In 1966, Gossage took on the fledgling Sierra Club as a client, creating ads to protest the damming of the Grand Canyon. The ads galvanized activists everywhere, halted the government's project, made Gossage's client a household name, and spawned yet another group, Friends of the Earth, which was kickstarted in a rent-free back office in Gossage's agency. Friends of the Earth today is the largest grassroots environmental organization in the world.

David Ogilvy once called Gossage, "The most articulate rebel in the advertising business."

Rory Sutherland, vice chair of OgilvyOne, calls him a forgotten hero of advertising's Creative Revolution.

"Gossage is the Velvet Underground to Ogilvy’s Beatles and Bernbach’s Stones," Sutherland says. "Never a household name but, to the cognoscenti, a lot more inspirational and influential."

Entering Adjacencies and Bringing It All Back Home

"Entering adjacencies has become the growth strategy du jour," Ken Favaro says in Strategy+Business.

Some companies aren't good at it (remember Harley-Davidson's Men's Colognes or United' Airlines' TED?); others excel (Apple's iPhone and Disney's Cruise Line are examples).

The danger in entering adjacencies is “averaging down,” Favoro says. You may subsist in two markets, but you won't be exceptional in either.

Do people face the same danger when they stray from their core competence?

"We often stop surprising ourselves (and the market) not because we're no good anymore, but because we are good," Seth Godin says. "So good that we avoid opportunities that bring possibility."

Opening yourself to possibility may very well court danger:

• The New York Times lambasted an exhibit of Bob Dylan's paintings."The color is muddy, the brushwork scratchily dutiful, the images static and postcard-ish. The work is dead on the wall."
  

• In its review of Jon Stewart's feature film Rosewater, NPR said, "Stewart shows no signs that he can handle such tonally complex material."
  

• Paul Simon's Broadway musical The Capeman opened to universally poor reviews and ran for less two months. The New York Times said, "The show registers as one solemn, hopelessly confused drone."
  

• Hans von Bülow called one of Friedrich Nietzsche's musical compositions “the most undelightful and the most antimusical draft on musical paper that I have faced in a long time.”

Compared to the artists' other work, these missteps fairly stink (a lot like Harley-Davidson Cologne). But they prove the artists aren't afraid to change, take risks, or be a bit incompetent.

"Competent people have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems," Godin says. "They solve a problem the same way, every time. That's what makes them reliable. That's what makes them competent."

But competent people hate change—even though change opens possibilities of fresh perspectives, disruptions and breakthroughs—because it threatens their reputations.

For people, entering adjacencies—opening to possibility and taking a flyer—is a lot like foreign travel. 

It may very well bring you back home to what you do, not just competently, but masterfully.

A case in point: Before he directed the drama Interiors, Woody Allen spent a decade mastering popular low-comedy films like Take the Money and Run and Sleepers. While loathed by critics (The New Yorker called it an "achievement of suffocating emptiness"), Interiors was immediately followed by 38 years of award-winning comedies.

5 Keys to Creativity

Red Smith was asked if turning out a daily column wasn’t quite a chore. Why, no,” dead-panned Red. “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

—Walter Winchell

We link creativity to talent, but blogger Greg Satell insists "talent is overrated" and says the least talented among us can find the keys to creativity. For Satell, they are:

Habit. Rain or shine, Satell writes every day. A friend calls it , “Letting the muse know you’re serious.”

Experience. Satell brings a wealth of experience in different businesses, countries and cultures to his writing. "That gives me a lot of raw material to work with."

Productivity.  "The more work you produce the more likely you are to come up with something truly creative," Satell says. "The more you produce, the more skilled you become and the more you can experiment with different combinations."

Serenity. Writer's block can be overcome by finding a distraction that calms your mind. Exercise, walks, coffee with a friend, reading or movie-watching all work.

Compromise. "When you start something it’s always crap," Satell says. "I dare to be crap, knowing that it really doesn’t matter what my first draft looks like." It's easy to fix a first draft, he says. "The only problem that can’t be fixed is a blank page."

Only the Lonely

A new study published in the Academy of Management Journal says creative workers ignore their spouses.

Two management professors interviewed 108 workers and their spouses every day for 10 days. The workers held jobs in a variety of industries that included finance, healthcare, government, education, transportation and construction.

Workers were asked about the tasks they performed during the day; spouses, about the time spent with their husbands.

The findings: the more the worker was busy with idea-generation on the job, the less time he spent at home.

To remedy "the relational aftereffects of creative behaviors at work on relationships at home," the professors say, bosses should critique creative workers' results at the end of each day.

By providing an immediate critique, bosses, in effect, reboot creative workers' brains before they head home.

"Validating ideas at work may liberate an employee’s cognitive resources in a way that allows them to provide more effective support to their spouse after work," the professors say.

Of course, downloads of domestic devices also work.

Flight to Safety

A stock sell-off/bond buy-up by jittery investors is known on Wall Street as a "flight to safety."

A different kind of flight to safety takes place every hour on every street, at every workplace, in every town in America.

A colleague told me yesterday he was leaving a good company because his marketing ideas—which produced considerable results—don't "fit the culture."

A Cornell study reveals that company leaders often reject new ideas not because the ideas don’t have potential, but because the leaders themselves lack the guts to face risk and uncertainty.

It gets worse. 

When cautious leaders quash new ideas, the study says, they do so unconsciously. 

Their fear actually blinds them to the ideas.

No wonder 7 of 10 workers aren't engaged.

As adman Leo Burnett said, "To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas."

The Art of Art is Simplicity

The art of art, the glory of expression, is simplicity.

—Walt Whitman

Simplicity's cool... so cool, brand researchers now index it.

But before it was cool, two artists preached simplicity every week on popular TV shows.

The beatnik, Jon Gnagy

Beatnik Jon Gnagy premiered in 1946 on NBC's first regularly scheduled TV program, the hour-long variety show Radio City Matinee. 

In the opening segment of the first episode, Gnagy stood at an easel and demonstrated, in a few simple steps, how to draw a tree. 

The show's producer called those 10 minutes of airtime "pure television," and within four months gave Gnagy his own 15-minute show, You are an Artist—TV's very first spin-off.

Gnagy used his weekly show to teach viewers how to draw the barns, haystacks and water mills that symbolized bygone America. He sketched his subjects using four basic forms—the ball, cone, cube and cylinder—with shadows cast from a single light source. When he finished each drawing, he matted and framed it, so—voila—the piece was ready to hang on the wall.

During each broadcast, Gnagy also pitched his branded art kit, complete with pencils, paper and a book of drawing lessons.

While Gnagy's prime-time show lasted only two years, it continued in weekend syndication for another 12, inspiring thousands of Boomers to learn how to draw chestnut trees, horse corrals and covered bridges.

The hippie, Bob Ross

Hippie Bob Ross preached simplicity for 11 years through his half-hour PBS show, The Joy of Painting.

Remembered for his fuzzy Afro and fuzzier aphorisms—"Happy little trees" being the most famous—Ross popularized the 16th century oil painting technique known as “wet on wet."

He also marketed a branded line of paints.

Throughout the 1980s, Ross' weekly show (which his business partner called “liquid tranquilizer”) inspired thousands of pre-Internet kids, if not to pick up a paintbrush, at least to contemplate das Künstlerleben.

Ross himself finished over 30,000 paintings in his lifetime, many of which he donated to PBS fundraisers.