Seth Godin on Quieting the Lizard Brain

You already know this stuff. But it's always good to hear again.

Rejection and the Freedom to Fail

I'm reading a book called Rejected: Tales of the Failed, Dumped and Canceled, in which various funny people recall not getting it quite right. As I was reading, it struck me how big a role rejection plays in what we do. Our job is basically a stream of rejection, punctuated by the very occasional stepping stone of success. Our partners reject our ideas. Our creative directors reject our ideas. Our clients reject our ideas. Heck, we even reject most of our own ideas. And success in our careers is determined less by how many successes we have, but more by how we handle all the rejections.


I also heard an interview with the book's author, Jon Friedman, on The Sound of Young America. He hosts "The Rejection Show," more or less a live version of his book. And in the interview, he explained how once he started doing the show, he became much bolder in his ideas. Because no longer were his failed ideas simply failures. Now they were material for his show. Having the show released him from fear and gave him greater freedom to just go for it.

The point is that you need to be able to take risks and put yourself out there. You need to have the freedom to fail. You want to work at an agency that allows it as part of its culture. An agency that celebrates the spectacular failures. Even more so, you need to give yourself permission to fail. And when you do fail, when you are rejected, get right the hell back up and fail again.

John Turturro on Creative Freedom

Last week, Greg posted Jelly Helm's Five Rules from W+K. A buddy of mine just sent me this clip of John Turturro talking about creating the Jesus character in the Big Lebowski, and it struck me that what John is talking about is very similar to what Jelly is talking about. Particularly Act Stupid, Always Say Yes, and Be Fearless.



Turturro's talking about working with the Coen brothers and the amount of trust they have in him. They realize he's an acting genius, so they give him the freedom to do his thing. To let it all hang out and fail spectacularly if need be. And Turturro responds to this freedom by by throwing everything into his performance and embarrassing himself, then trusting his directors to make the right decisions.

This is also a description of the ideal creative/creative director relationship. It could be be said to be the ideal client/agency relationship or agency/director relationship too. Hire the right people, then trust them to do their thing.

If you haven't seen The Big Lebowski, shame on you. So strong is my opinion of this movie that I have named my two English bulldogs Dude and Walter. Below is the scene Turturro is talking about.