I’ll go ahead and join the chorus of folks reblogging this today. It was a great conversation and triggered one of those “Ah ha!” moments for me. One quote Merlin used was absolutely brilliant. It’ll be printed, framed and hanging in my office by the end of the day.
“It takes a woman nine months to make a baby, no matter how many women you throw at the job.”
This is the most clever and true way to say something I’ve been attempting to tell people at the start of every new project. One of my biggest gripes about working in an ad agency is that every project’s timeline is dictated by a marketing schedule. It’s a well established fact that marketing schedules have no basis in reality. Well, to the extent that an MBA throwing a dart at a calendar has a basis in reality.
The quickest way to demoralize a creative team is to reduce their craft to something that “just needs to be done as quickly and cheaply as possible.” To paraphrase Office Space, that kind of thinking will make you work just hard enough to not get fired.
So many of us spend too much time in this horrible space between “just working hard enough” and “trying to get a month’s work done in a week.” This usually results in countless hours spent on projects we will never be proud of.
I sincerely love hard work. I love spending the time perfecting my skills, creating something useful or fun and getting that great feeling that comes with being productive and creative.
But here the kicker, doing an insane amount of work in a short amount of time is not hard work. It’s amplified busywork. It’s Lucy working in the chocolate factory. Everything’s moving too fast and nothing is being done properly.
So watch the video. Or, do like I did: just listen to it while trying to get work done. If you end up saying “HELL YEAH” more than once before it’s over, then we probably have a lot in common.
“I’m just gonna go make my own table.”
Episode 27: Missionless Statements
I like how Dan’s interview with Mr. Veen and me turned out.
In this special episode, Dan Benjamin talks with two of his heroes, Merlin Mann and Jeff Veen about independence, free thinking, email, productivity, and changing your game.
That Jeff guy’s pretty smart for being so Dutch and tall.
- Video: Download; Watch in a Window
- Audio: Download; Listen in a Window
