I remember my first really big Internet “A-Ha!” moment like it was yesterday.

It was about a decade ago, just after the DotCom crash, around the same time I first heard about blogging.

I had just heard from somewhere that Salon.com, one of the first big-time magazines to launch exclusively online (that was still a big deal in those days) had blown through $60 million setting itself up, before the crash. Was it ever expected to make back its investors’ money? Of course not.

Sixty. Million.

Then I heard from somewhere that Arts & Letters Daily, a blog that appealed to the same kind of reader as Salon, had been set up for a couple of grand; I think $10K was the number.

People would tell me at the time that yeah, of course Salon was more expensive. It had an office in San Francisco and a big staff of proper journalists. It had all the overhead of conventional magazines, minus the paper and printing press. A&L Daily was just an aggregator blog that pointed to interesting bits and pieces across the web.

Yes, that was true, but as a random, semi-educated dude looking for a place that offered me something interesting to read on a regular basis, I preferred A&L Daily to Salon.

As far as I could see, A&L Daily was not only a better product, it was offering its better product for ONE SIX-THOUSANDTH the cost of Salon. For 0.0166% the overheads.

The idea that media could now be viably made for not just pennies on the dollar, but MICRO-PENNIES, hit me like train. BAM!

So I started blogging. The rest is history.

Ten years later, my only disconnect would be, with this amazing opportunity that hyper-cheap media offers us, why are so many of us squandering it?

While others Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare for hours on end about what hipster food truck they’ve just been to or what dumb TV show they just watched, my young cartoonist friend, Austin Kleon is using social media to transform his life and career (and the lives and careers of others).

This is a totally different league of Internet use I’m talking about. And Austin is just one example. So am I. So is John T Unger or Willo O’Brien of Willotoons fame. I could give hundreds of others.

The Internet has given you a HUGE, life-changing opportunity that simply didn’t exist a generation ago. Don’t waste it. A life just surfing the net for hipster-friendly dumbass stuff is no less a waste of a life than sitting in front of the television.

The way to use the Internet is to be more like Austin or Willo or John. Use it seriously.

After a decade or so since I last devoured his books, these last few weeks I’ve been happily, gloriously rediscovering the work of Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist.

My story is a common one among Campbell fans. A clueless, socially inept, lost kid with no idea about what to do or where to fit in the world, and suddenly along comes Joe Campbell with three simple, life-changing words:

“Follow Your Bliss”.

Boom! A moment of total clarity. A moment of incandescent lucidity.

Of course! FOLLOW YOUR BLISS! What else is there worth doing, besides that? How better to spend one’s life?

At the time, it made total sense. I mean, REALLY!!!!.…

I only first heard of Joseph Campbell the day I read his obituary, back in 1987 (A fact that still makes me sad, I’m not quite sure why). I then checked him out at the bookstore, and I found his work, quite frankly, mind-blowing. Transformative!

A floodgate of possibility being opened. Whoosh! Like being hit by a spiritual tidal wave.

But the thing is…

Joseph may have told me to follow my bliss, but he never told me how. He really didn’t have to many concrete tips or pointers. He just told his readers to just do it.

Much to our chagrin, it was something we were just going to have to figure out all by ourselves…

I was a bit intimidated by that. I think we all are, when we first encounter Campbell’s work. Do we have what it takes, do we have the guts to take what he said, make the necessary sacrifices etc etc and ACTUALLY apply it to our own lives?

I remember that fear well, a quarter century later…

So, now that I’m older, now that it seems I’ve followed my bliss pretty well, and it also seems to have panned out pretty OK for me creatively and careerwise, I now have young people asking me the very same question that Joseph’s students once asked him– “How do I do follow my bliss?”

Experience taught me well that there’s is no definitive answer. There is no instruction manual.

You just decide to do it, and then you go and do it. Or not. Whatever. It’s your call. It’s your path.

And it takes as long as it takes. Decades, maybe. An entire lifetime, even. There is no timeline. Nor any guarantees that you’ll succeed.

Nobody can do it for you. Nobody can go there for you– that mysterious place where the central energy of your being finds its source. Yes, you may fail in your quest to find it. But that risk is what makes it so damn powerful and interesting.

And Joseph Campbell would’ve told you the exact same thing.

Thinking about this earlier this evening, I drew the above cartoon just for the heck of it. I hope you like it, but I’m fine if you don’t.. Those little squiggly abstract drawings I do; well, that’s my bliss. Your bliss is something else. Your bliss is your own, not mine or anyone else’s.

Bliss. You have it within you, we already know that. The question is what you’re going to do about it.

Thank you, Joseph Campbell. Thank you all for reading. Godspeed!

(Like this? Check it out in the gallery here)

[Essential Reading: “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About ‘Cube Grenades’ But Were Afraid To Ask.”]

BIG NEWS: My new book, “Ignore Everybody“was launched June 11th, 2009. You can read the first 25% below, and you can order the book here:

Amazon.

Barnes & Noble.

Borders.

800-CEO-READ. [great for bulk buys]

IndieBound. [to find an independent store]

[Update: “Ignore Everybody” is on Amazon’s Top 10 Editor’s Picks, Business Books of 2009.]

IGNORE EVERYBODY

So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years.]

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.
3. Put the hours in.
4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
5. You are responsible for your own experience.
6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
7. Keep your day job.
8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.
11. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.
13. Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside.
14. Dying young is overrated.
15. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.
16. The world is changing.
17. Merit can be bought. Passion can’t.
18. Avoid the Watercooler Gang.
19. Sing in your own voice.
20. The choice of media is irrelevant.
21. Selling out is harder than it looks.
22. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.
23. Worrying about “Commercial vs. Artistic” is a complete waste of time.
24. Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.
25. You have to find your own schtick.
26. Write from the heart.
27. The best way to get approval is not to need it.
28. Power is never given. Power is taken.
29. Whatever choice you make, The Devil gets his due eventually.
30. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.
31. Remain frugal.
32. Allow your work to age with you.
33. Being Poor Sucks.
34. Beware of turning hobbies into jobs.
35. Savor obscurity while it lasts.
36. Start blogging.
37. Meaning Scales, People Don’t.
37. When your dreams become reality, they are no longer your dreams.

MORE:

1. Ignore everybody.

The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you. When I first started with the cartoon-on-back-of-bizcard format, people thought I was nuts. Why wasn’t I trying to do something more easy for markets to digest i.e. cutey-pie greeting cards or whatever?

You don’t know if your idea is any good the moment it’s created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is. There’s a reason why feelings scare us.
And asking close friends never works quite as well as you hope, either. It’s not that they deliberately want to be unhelpful. It’s just they don’t know your world one millionth as well as you know your world, no matter how hard they try, no matter how hard you try to explain.
Plus a big idea will change you. Your friends may love you, but they don’t want you to change. If you change, then their dynamic with you also changes. They like things the way they are, that’s how they love you– the way you are, not the way you may become.
Ergo, they have no incentive to see you change. And they will be resistant to anything that catalyzes it. That’s human nature. And you would do the same, if the shoe was on the other foot.
With business colleagues it’s even worse. They’re used to dealing with you in a certain way. They’re used to having a certain level of control over the relationship. And they want whatever makes them more prosperous. Sure, they might prefer it if you prosper as well, but that’s not their top priority.
If your idea is so good that it changes your dynamic enough to where you need them less, or God forbid, THE MARKET needs them less, then they’re going to resist your idea every chance they can.
Again, that’s human nature.
GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE POWER BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS, THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.
Good ideas come with a heavy burden. Which is why so few people have them. So few people can handle it.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.

We all spend a lot of time being impressed by folk we’ve never met. Somebody featured in the media who’s got a big company, a big product, a big movie, a big bestseller. Whatever.
And we spend even more time trying unsuccessfully to keep up with them. Trying to start up our own companies, our own products, our own film projects, books and whatnot.
I’m as guilty as anyone. I tried lots of different things over the years, trying desperately to pry my career out of the jaws of mediocrity. Some to do with business, some to do with art etc.
One evening, after one false start too many, I just gave up. Sitting at a bar, feeling a bit burned out by work and life in general, I just started drawing on the back of business cards for no reason. I didn’t really need a reason. I just did it because it was there, because it amused me in a kind of random, arbitrary way.
Of course it was stupid. Of course it was uncommercial. Of course it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Of course it was a complete and utter waste of time. But in retrospect, it was this built-in futility that gave it its edge. Because it was the exact opposite of all the “Big Plans” my peers and I were used to making. It was so liberating not to have to be thinking about all that, for a change.
It was so liberating to be doing something that didn’t have to impress anybody, for a change.
It was so liberating to be doing something that didn’t have to have some sort of commercial angle, for a change.
It was so liberating to have something that belonged just to me and no one else, for a change.
It was so liberating to feel complete sovereignty, for a change. To feel complete freedom, for a change.
And of course, it was then, and only then, that the outside world started paying attention.
The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will. How your own sovereignty inspires other people to find their own sovereignty, their own sense of freedom and possibility, will give the work far more power than the work’s objective merits ever will.
Your idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours alone. The more the idea is yours alone, the more freedom you have to do something really amazing.
The more amazing, the more people will click with your idea. The more people click with your idea, the more this little thing of yours will snowball into a big thing.
That’s what doodling on business cards taught me.

3. Put the hours in.

Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. 90% of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort, and stamina.

I get asked a lot, “Your business card format is very simple. Aren’t you worried about somebody ripping it off?“
Standard Answer: Only if they can draw more of them than me, better than me.
What gives the work its edge is the simple fact that I’ve spent years drawing them. I’ve drawn thousands. Tens of thousands of man hours.
So if somebody wants to rip my idea off, go ahead. If somebody wants to overtake me in the business card doodle wars, go ahead. You’ve got many long years in front of you. And unlike me, you won’t be doing it for the joy of it. You’ll be doing it for some self-loathing, ill-informed, lame-ass mercenary reason. So the years will be even longer and far, far more painful. Lucky you.
If somebody in your industry is more successful than you, it’s probably because he works harder at it than you do. Sure, maybe he’s more inherently talented, more adept at networking etc, but I don’t consider that an excuse. Over time, that advantage counts for less and less. Which is why the world is full of highly talented, network-savvy, failed mediocrities.
So yeah, success means you’ve got a long road ahead of you, regardless. How do you best manage it?
Well, as I’ve written elsewhere, don’t quit your day job. I didn’t. I work every day at the office, same as any other regular schmoe. I have a long commute on the train, ergo that’s when I do most of my drawing. When I was younger I drew mostly while sitting at a bar, but that got old.
The point is; an hour or two on the train is very managable for me. The fact I have a job means I don’t feel pressured to do something market-friendly. Instead, I get to do whatever the hell I want. I get to do it for my own satisfaction. And I think that makes the work more powerful in the long run. It also makes it easier to carry on with it in a calm fashion, day-in-day out, and not go crazy in insane creative bursts brought on by money worries.
The day job, which I really like, gives me something productive and interesting to do among fellow adults. It gets me out of the house in the day time. If I were a professional cartoonist I’d just be chained to a drawing table at home all day, scribbling out a living in silence, interrupted only by freqent trips to the coffee shop. No, thank you.
Simply put, my method allows me to pace myself over the long haul, which is important.
Stamina is utterly important. And stamina is only possible if it’s managed well. People think all they need to do is endure one crazy, intense, job-free creative burst and their dreams will come true. They are wrong, they are stupidly wrong.
Being good at anything is like figure skating– the definition of being good at it is being able to make it look easy. But it never is easy. Ever. That’s what the stupidly wrong people coveniently forget.
If I was just starting out writing, say, a novel or a screenplay, or maybe starting up a new software company, I wouldn’t try to quit my job in order to make this big, dramatic heroic-quest thing about it.
I would do something far simpler: I would find that extra hour or two in the day that belongs to nobody else but me, and I would make it productive. Put the hours in, do it for long enough and magical, life-transforming things happen eventually. Sure, that means less time watching TV, internet surfing, going out or whatever.
But who cares?

4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.

I was offered a quite substantial publishing deal a year or two ago. Turned it down. The company sent me a contract. I looked it over. Hmmmm…
Called the company back. Asked for some clarifications on some points in the contract. Never heard back from them. The deal died.
This was a very respected company. You may have even heard of it.
They just assumed I must be just like all the other people they represent– hungry and desperate and willing to sign anything.
They wanted to own me, regardless of how good a job they did.
That’s the thing about some big publishers. They want 110% from you, but they don’t offer to do likewise in return. To them, the artist is just one more noodle in a big bowl of pasta.
Their business model is to basically throw the pasta against the wall, and see which one sticks. The ones that fall to the floor are just forgotten.
Publishers are just middlemen. That’s all. If artists could remember that more often, they’d save themselves a lot of aggrevation.
Anyway, yeah, I can see gapingvoid being a ‘product’ one day. Books, T-shirts and whatnot. I think it could make a lot of money, if handled correctly. But I’m not afraid to walk away if I think the person offering it is full of hot air. I’ve already got my groove etc. Not to mention another career that’s doing quite well, thank you.
I think “gapingvoid as product line” idea is pretty inevitable, down the road. Watch this space.

5. You are responsible for your own experience.

Nobody can tell you if what you’re doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is.

Every creative person is looking for “The Big Idea”. You know, the one that is going to catapult them out from the murky depths of obscurity and on to the highest planes of incandescent ludicity.
The one that’s all love-at-first-sight with the Zeitgeist.
The one that’s going to get them invited to all the right parties, metaphorical or otherwise.
So naturally you ask yourself, if and when you finally come up with The Big Idea, after years of toil, struggle and doubt, how do you know whether or not it is “The One”?
Answer: You don’t.
There’s no glorious swelling of existential triumph.
That’s not what happens.
All you get is this rather kvetchy voice inside you that seems to say, “This is totally stupid.This is utterly moronic. This is a complete waste of time. I’m going to do it anyway.“
And you go do it anyway.
Second-rate ideas like glorious swellings far more. Keeps them alive longer.

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.”

So you’ve got the itch to do something. Write a screenplay, start a painting, write a book, turn your recipe for fudge brownies into a proper business, whatever. You don’t know where the itch came from, it’s almost like it just arrived on your doorstep, uninvited. Until now you were quite happy holding down a real job, being a regular person…
Until now.
You don’t know if you’re any good or not, but you’d think you could be. And the idea terrifies you. The problem is, even if you are good, you know nothing about this kind of business. You don’t know any publishers or agents or all these fancy-shmancy kind of folk. You have a friend who’s got a cousin in California who’s into this kind of stuff, but you haven’t talked to your friend for over two years…
Besides, if you write a book, what if you can’t find a publisher? If you write a screenplay, what if you can’t find a producer? And what if the producer turns out to be a crook? You’ve always worked hard your whole life, you’ll be damned if you’ll put all that effort into something if there ain’t no pot of gold at the end of this dumb-ass rainbow…
Heh. That’s not your wee voice asking for the crayons back. That’s your outer voice, your adult voice, your boring & tedious voice trying to find a way to get the wee crayon voice to shut the hell up.
Your wee voice doesn’t want you to sell something. Your wee voice wants you to make something. There’s a big difference. Your wee voice doesn’t give a damn about publishers or Hollywood producers.
Go ahead and make something. Make something really special. Make something amazing that will really blow the mind of anybody who sees it.
If you try to make something just to fit your uninformed view of some hypothetical market, you will fail. If you make something special and powerful and honest and true, you will succeed.
The wee voice didn’t show up because it decided you need more money or you need to hang out with movie stars. Your wee voice came back because your soul somehow depends on it. There’s something you haven’t said, something you haven’t done, some light that needs to be switched on, and it needs to be taken care of. Now.
So you have to listen to the wee voice or it will die… taking a big chunk of you along with it.
They’re only crayons. You didn’t fear them in kindergarten, why fear them now?

7. Keep your day job.

I’m not just saying that for the usual reason i.e. because I think your idea will fail. I’m saying it because to suddenly quit one’s job in a big ol’ creative drama-queen moment is always, always, always in direct conflict with what I call “The Sex & Cash Theory”.

THE SEX & CASH THEORY: “The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.“
A good example is Phil, a NY photographer friend of mine. He does really wild stuff for the indie magazines– it pays nothing, but it allows him to build his portfolio. Then he’ll go off and shoot some catalogues for a while. Nothing too exciting, but it pays the bills.
Another example is somebody like Martin Amis. He writes “serious” novels, but he has to supplement his income by writing the occasional newspaper article for the London papers (novel royalties are bloody pathetic– even bestsellers like Amis aren’t immune).
Or actors. One year Travolta will be in an ultra-hip flick like Pulp Fiction (“Sex”), the next he’ll be in some dumb spy thriller (“Cash”).
Or painters. You spend one month painting blue pictures because that’s the color the celebrity collectors are buying this season (“Cash”), you spend the next month painting red pictures because secretly you despise the color blue and love the color red (“Sex”).
Or geeks. You spend you weekdays writing code for a faceless corporation (“Cash”), then you spend your evening and weekends writing anarchic, weird computer games to amuse your techie friends with (“Sex”).
It’s balancing the need to make a good living while still maintaining one’s creative sovereignty. My M.O. is gapingvoid (“Sex”), coupled with my day job (“Cash”).
I’m thinking about the young writer who has to wait tables to pay the bills, in spite of her writing appearing in all the cool and hip magazines.… who dreams of one day of not having her life divided so harshly.
Well, over time the ‘harshly’ bit might go away, but not the ‘divided’.
“This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.“
As soon as you accept this, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career starts moving ahead faster. I don’t know why this happens. It’s the people who refuse to cleave their lives this way– who just want to start Day One by quitting their current crappy day job and moving straight on over to best-selling author… Well, they never make it.
Anyway, it’s called “The Sex & Cash Theory”. Keep it under your pillow.

8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.

Nor can you bully a subordinate into becoming a genius.

Since the modern, scientifically-conceived corporation was invented in the early half of the Twentieth Century, creativity has been sacrificed in favor of forwarding the interests of the “Team Player”.
Fair enough. There was more money in doing it that way; that’s why they did it.
There’s only one problem. Team Players are not very good at creating value on their own. They are not autonomous; they need a team in order to exist.
So now corporations are awash with non-autonomous thinkers.
“I don’t know. What do you think?“
“I don’t know. What do you think?“
“I don’t know. What do you think?“
“I don’t know. What do you think?“
“I don’t know. What do you think?“
“I don’t know. What do you think?“
And so on.
Creating an economically viable entity where lack of original thought is handsomely rewarded creates a rich, fertile environment for parasites to breed. And that’s exactly what’s been happening. So now we have millions upon millions of human tapeworms thriving in the Western World, making love to their Powerpoint presentations, feasting on the creativity of others.
What happens to an ecology, when the parasite level reaches critical mass?
The ecology dies.
If you’re creative, if you can think independantly, if you can articulate passion, if you can override the fear of being wrong, then your company needs you now more than it ever did. And now your company can no longer afford to pretend that isn’t the case.
So dust off your horn and start tooting it. Exactly.
However if you’re not paricularly creative, then you’re in real trouble. And there’s no buzzword or “new paradigm” that can help you. They may not have mentioned this in business school, but… people like watching dinosaurs die.

9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.

You may never reach the summit; for that you will be forgiven. But if you don’t make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow-line, years later you will find yourself lying on your deathbed, and all you will feel is emptiness.

This metaphorical Mount Everest doesn’t have to manifest itself as “Art”. For some people, yes, it might be a novel or a painting. But Art is just one path up the mountain, one of many. With others the path may be something more prosaic. Making a million dollars, raising a family, owning the most Burger King franchises in the Tri-State area, building some crazy oversized model airplane, the list has no end.
Whatever. Let’s talk about you now. Your mountain. Your private Mount Everest. Yes, that one. Exactly.
Let’s say you never climb it. Do you have a problem witb that? Can you just say to yourself, “Never mind, I never really wanted it anyway” and take up stamp collecting instead?
Well, you could try. But I wouldn’t believe you. I think it’s not OK for you never to try to climb it. And I think you agree with me. Otherwise you wouldn’t have read this far.
So it looks like you’re going to have to climb the frickin’ mountain. Deal with it.
My advice? You don’t need my advice. You really don’t. The biggest piece of advice I could give anyone would be this:

“Admit that your own private Mount Everest exists. That is half the battle.”

And you’ve already done that. You really have. Otherwise, again, you wouldn’t have read this far.
Rock on.

10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.

Abraham Lincoln wrote The Gettysberg Address on a piece of ordinary stationery that he had borrowed from the friend whose house he was staying at.
James Joyce wrote with a simple pencil and notebook. Somebody else did the typing, but only much later.
Van Gough rarely painted with more than six colors on his palette.
I draw on the back of wee biz cards. Whatever.
There’s no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership. None. Zilch. Nada.
Actually, as the artist gets more into his thing, and as he gets more successful, his number of tools tends to go down. He knows what works for him. Expending mental energy on stuff wastes time. He’s a man on a mission. He’s got a deadline. He’s got some rich client breathing down his neck. The last thing he wants is to spend 3 weeks learning how to use a router drill if he doesn’t need to.
A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind.
Which is why there are so many second-rate art directors with state-of-the-art Macinotsh computers.
Which is why there are so many hack writers with state-of-the-art laptops.
Which is why there are so many crappy photographers with state-of-the-art digital cameras.
Which is why there are so many unremarkable painters with expensive studios in trendy neighborhoods.
Hiding behind pillars, all of them.
Pillars do not help; they hinder. The more mighty the pillar, the more you end up relying on it psychologically, the more it gets in your way.
And this applies to business, as well.
Which is why there are so many failing businesses with fancy offices.
Which is why there’s so many failing businessmen spending a fortune on fancy suits and expensive yacht club memberships.
Again, hiding behind pillars.
Successful people, artists and non-artists alike, are very good at spotting pillars. They’re very good at doing without them. Even more importantly, once they’ve spotted a pillar, they’re very good at quickly getting rid of it.
Good pillar management is one of the most valuable talents you can have on the planet. If you have it, I envy you. If you don’t, I pity you.
Sure, nobody’s perfect. We all have our pillars. We seem to need them. You are never going to live a pillar-free existence. Neither am I.
All we can do is keep asking the question, “Is this a pillar” about every aspect of our business, our craft, our reason for being alive etc and go from there. The more we ask, the better we get at spotting pillars, the more quickly the pillars vanish.
Ask. Keep asking. And then ask again. Stop asking and you’re dead.

11. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.

Your plan for getting your work out there has to be as original as the actual work, perhaps even more so. The work has to create a totally new market. There’s no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one.

I’ve seen it so many times. Call him Ted. A young kid in the big city, just off the bus, wanting to be a famous something: artist, writer, musician, film director, whatever. He’s full of fire, full of passion, full of ideas. And you meet Ted again five or ten years later, and he’s still tending bar at the same restaurant. He’s not a kid anymore. But he’s still no closer to his dream.
His voice is still as defiant as ever, certainly, but there’s an emptiness to his words that wasn’t there before.
Yeah, well, Ted probably chose a very well-trodden path. Write novel, be discovered, publish bestseller, sell movie rights, retire rich in 5 years. Or whatever.
No worries that there’s probably 3 million other novelists/actors/musicians/painters etc with the same plan. But of course, Ted’s special. Of course his fortune will defy the odds eventually. Of course. That’s what he keeps telling you, as he refills your glass.
Is your plan of a similar ilk? If it is, then I’d be concerned.
When I started the business card cartoons I was lucky; at the time I had a pretty well-paid corporate job in New York that I liked. The idea of quitting it in order to join the ranks of Bohemia didn’t even occur to me. What, leave Manhattan for Brooklyn? Ha. Not bloody likely. I was just doing it to amuse myself in the evenings, to give me something to do at the bar while I waited for my date to show up or whatever.
There was no commerical incentive or larger agenda governing my actions. If I wanted to draw on the back of a business card instead of a “proper” medium, I could. If I wanted to use a four letter word, I could. If I wanted to ditch the standard figurative format and draw psychotic abstractions instead, I could. There was no flashy media or publishing executive to keep happy. And even better, there was no artist-lifestyle archetype to conform to.
It gave me a lot of freedom. That freedom paid off in spades later.
Question how much freedom your path affords you. Be utterly ruthless about it.
It’s your freedom that will get you to where you want to go. Blind faith in an over-subscribed, vainglorious myth will only hinder you.
Is you plan unique? Is there nobody else doing it? Then I’d be excited. A little scared, maybe, but excited.

12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.
The pain of making the necessary sacrifices always hurts more than you think it’s going to. I know. It sucks. That being said, doing something seriously creative is one of the most amazing experiences one can have, in this or any other lifetime. If you can pull it off, it’s worth it. Even if you don’t end up pulling it off, you’ll learn many incredible, magical, valuable things. It’s NOT doing it when you know you full well you HAD the opportunity– that hurts FAR more than any failure.

Frankly, I think you’re better off doing something on the assumption that you will NOT be rewarded for it, that it will NOT receive the recognition it deserves, that it will NOT be worth the time and effort invested in it.
The obvious advantage to this angle is, of course, if anything good comes of it, then it’s an added bonus.
The second, more subtle and profound advantage is: that by scuppering all hope of worldly and social betterment from the creative act, you are finally left with only one question to answer:
Do you make this damn thing exist or not?
And once you can answer that truthfully to yourself, the rest is easy.

[To read the remainder of IGNORE EVERYBODY– 40 chapters in all– please go check out the book, Thanks!

[Essential Reading: “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About ‘Cube Grenades’ But Were Afraid To Ask.”]

[“Poor Imitation”. The cartoon I sent out to the “Hugh’s Daily Cartoon” list a day or two ago…]

It’s been a while since I last wrote about blogging to any great length, but here are some random thoughts, in no particular order:

1. Blogs work SUPERBLY if you have great content. It’s when they don’t that people bitch & moan about the medium. That was true ten years ago, when I started blogging, and it’s still true today.

2. Great content is really, really hard to make. That’s why so few blogs have it, but that’s not the medium’s fault. The same is true for any other media.

3. It’s OK to sell something on your blog. We’ve all got a living to make. Besides that, your blog is your own personal property. If people don’t like your content– whether it’s selling something or not– there’s no law saying they have to read it. They can go somewhere else. When people complain about my own blog’s long-running commercial agenda, I just think, “Dude, you’re about a decade too late. That ship sailed A LONG time ago.” Besides, I LIKE selling stuff via the blog. Sure beats making cold-calls.

4. No, I’m not keeping up with your blog. Like a good friend said to me a couple of years ago, “Man, I don’t even have time to read the blogs of my good friends anymore.” Ditto with me. Heck, it’s hard enough keeping up with my good friends’ Twitter streams.

5. Time to quote Shirky again: “So for­get about blogs and blog­gers and blog­ging and focus on this — the cost and dif­fi­culty of publishing abso­lu­tely anything, by anyone, into a glo­bal medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that inc­rea­sed pool of poten­tial pro­du­cers is going to be vast.” -CLAY SHIRKY in 2004.

6.  Facebook? Twitter? Who cares? The latter two are easy. Like I implied earlier, blogging is hard. Writing is hard. Getting other people to read it is the hardest bit of all. “It’s the content, Stupid.”

7. My faith in the power of blogging is still as strong as ever. That doesn’t mean I find it any easier.

8. Focus and Continuity are key. I had so many projects going on these last years, I always found it hard to focus. What was gapingvoid really about? Cartoons? Marketing? Self-promotion? Self-expression? It seemed to change on a daily basis. Now that, besides writing books, my business is pretty much focused on two things i.e. making art and selling it, I feel more calm about it all. And gapingvoid’s new unofficial tagline, “Remember Who You Are”, helps keep me focused on the kind of work I want to be making long-term, and why.

9. No, it’s not too late to start blogging. “But the Blogosphere is so crowded now, it’s too late to get first-mover advantage”, I hear you say. Perhaps. But it’s only crowded in the middle and the bottom. There’s always plenty of room at the top. People’s need to be informed and inspired by the good stuff is insatiable. But, as I implied, it has to be good, it has to be more than good in order to get there. Nobody has time for mediocre drek. The world is just too interesting and competitive now.

10. I don’t intend to quit blogging any time soon. It’s become a central part to what I do, that’s just reality. I’ve pretty much always done my own thing on gapingvoid, making it up as I go along. Some stuff gets traction, some gets ignored, that’s just the nature of the beast. The only big change I’ve made to my shtick recently is that I no longer post new cartoons on the blog, just old ones. You can find out why here.

There are 100 million blogs out there already, so a big Thank-You for reading this one. Seriously. Rock on.

[About Hugh. Cartoon Archive. Commission Hugh. Sign up for Hugh’s “Daily Car­toon” Newsletter.]

EVIL PLANS is now out! Order it from:

Amazon.

Barnes & Noble.

Borders.

800-CEO-READ. (great for bulk buys)

[Below is a small taste of the first draft of my latest book, “EVIL PLANS”. Published by Penguin/Portfolio, the same people who published my first book, “IGNORE EVERYBODY”. It launched February 17th, 2011.]

INTRODUCTION: EVERYBODY NEEDS AN EVIL PLAN

Everybody needs an EVIL PLAN. Everybody needs that crazy, out-there idea that allows them to ACTUALLY start doing something they love, doing something that matters. Everybody needs an EVIL PLAN that gets them the hell out of the Rat Race, away from lousy bosses, away from boring, dead-end jobs that they hate. Life is short.

Every person who ever managed to do this, every person who manged to escape the cubical farm and start doing something interesting and meaningful, started off with their own EVIL PLAN. And yeah, pretty much everyone around them– friends, family, colleagues– thought they were nuts.

Thanks to the Internet, it has never been easier to have an EVIL PLAN, to make a great living, doing what you love, doing something that matters. My intention is that by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you will completely concur. More importantly, you’ll actually feel compelled enough to go and do something about it yourself, if you haven’t already.

“TO UNIFY WORK AND LOVE”

Sigmund Freud once said that in order to be truly happy in life, a human being needed to acquire two things: The capacity to work, and the capacity to love.

An EVIL PLAN is really about being able to do both at the same time.

At time of writing, this is my tenth year blogging at gapingvoid.com. I’ve done a lot of stuff with it since I started. Published cartoons, sold wine, sold suits, pimped Microsoft, pimped Dell, sold art, “built my personal brand”, written e-books, ranted on endlessly about marketing, new media and all sorts…

But looking back, I realize it all served a served a common purpose: to unify work and love. I was writing about what interesting and important to me, and trying to turn it into a career somehow.

Then I noticed, the people who read my blog the most avidly, and the bloggers I tend to read most avidly, hell yeah, they’re mostly trying to do the same thing too, in their own way. It’s a definite pattern.

To unify work and love. Are you one of these people? If not, don’t you think you should be? I mean, after friends and family, what the hell is there?

1. THE MARKET FOR SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN IS INFINITE

THE HUGHTRAIN MANIFESTO: “THE MARKET FOR SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN IS INFINITE.”

We are here to find meaning. We are here to help other people do the same. Everything else is secondary.

We humans want to believe in our own species. And we want people, companies and products in our lives that make it easier to do so. That is human nature.

Product benefit doesn’t excite us. Belief in humanity and human potential excites us.

Think less about what your product does, and think more about human potential.

What statement about humanity does your product make?

The bigger the statement, the bigger the idea, the bigger your brand will become.

It’s no longer just enough for people to believe that your product does what it says on the label. They want to believe in you and what you do. And they’ll go elsewhere if they don’t.

It’s not enough for the customer to love your product. They have to love your process as well.

People are not just getting more demanding as consumers, they are getting more demanding as spiritual entities. Branding becomes a spiritual exercise.

Either get with the program or hire a consultant in Extinction Management. No vision, no business. Your life from now on pivots squarely on your vision of human potential.

The primary job of an advertiser is not to communicate benefit, but to communicate conviction.

Benefit is secondary. Benefit is a product of conviction, not vice versa.

Whatever you manufacture, somebody can make it better, faster and cheaper than you.

You do not own the molecules. They are stardust. They belong to God. What you do own is your soul. Nobody can take that away from you. And it is your soul that informs the brand.

It is your soul, and the purpose and beliefs that embodies, that people will buy into.

Ergo, great branding is a spiritual exercise.

Why is your brand great? Why does your brand matter? Seriously. If you don’t know, then nobody else can– no advertiser, no buyer, and certainly no customer.

It’s not about merit. It’s about faith. Belief. Conviction. Courage.

It’s about why you’re on this planet. To make a dent in the universe.

I don’t want to know why your brand is good, or very good, or even great. I want to know why your brand is totally frickin’ amazing.

Once you tell me, I can the world.

And then they will know.

2004 was the year that I drew the cartoon above, which I ended up calling “The Hughtrain”. It appeared in my last book, “Ignore Everybody”, which came out five years later.

Why is it called The Hughtrain? Soon after I drew the cartoon, I wrote a little manifesto on my blog, trying to explain the cartoon in more depth. I called it “The Hughtrain Manifesto”, a pun on a book that had made a big impact on me around that time, “The Cluetrain Manifesto”.

Here’s the point of The Hughtrain: Whatever you’re selling isn’t just a product of capital, it’s also a product of a belief system– your own. And understanding your belief system is crucial. As my friend and mentor, the great marketing author, Seth Godin once told me in an interview I did for him:

You can’t drink any more bottled water than you already do. Or buy more wine. Or more tea. You can’t wear more than one pair of shoes at a time. You can’t get two massages at once…

So, what grows? What do marketers sell that scales?

I’ll tell you what: Belief. Belonging. Mattering. Making a difference. Tribes. We have an unlimited need for this.

Another friend of mine, the film director, David Mackenzie once quipped, “A film is only as good as the reasons for making it”.

What is true for Hollywood, is also true for products and businesses. It’s not what you make, it’s what you believe in. That is what people respond to. That is where your enterprise lives or dies.

The Hughtrain was me trying to articulate my coming to grips with this.

2. WELCOME TO THE HUNGER.

The Hun­ger to do something crea­tive.

The Hun­ger to do something ama­zing.

The Hun­ger to change the world.

The Hun­ger to make a dif­fe­rence.

The Hun­ger to enjoy one’s work.

The Hun­ger to be able to look back and say, Yeah, cool, I did that.

The Hun­ger to make the most of this utterly brief blip of time Crea­tion has given us.

The Hun­ger to dream the good dreams.

The Hun­ger to have ama­zing peo­ple in our lives.

The Hun­ger to have the synap­ses con­ti­nually fired up on over­drive.

The Hun­ger to expe­rience beauty.

The Hun­ger to tell the truth.

The Hun­ger to be part of something big­ger than your­self.

The Hun­ger to have good sto­ries to tell.

The Hun­ger to stay the course, des­pite of the odds.

The Hun­ger to feel pas­sion.

The Hun­ger to know and express Love.

The Hun­ger to know and express Joy.

The Hun­ger to chan­nel The Divine.

The Hun­ger to actually feel alive.

The Hun­ger will give you everything. And it will take from you, everything. It will cost you your life, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

But kno­wing this, of course, is what ulti­ma­tely sets you free.

3. THE GLOBAL MICROBRAND.

[I first published “The Global Microbrand Rant” on my blog back in 2005. Here it is again:]

Since I first coined the term in 2004, I have been totally besot­ted with the idea of “The Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand”.

A small, tiny brand, that “sells” all over the world.

The Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand is nothing new; they’ve exis­ted for a while, long before the Inter­net was inven­ted. Ima­gine a well-known author or pain­ter, selling his work all over the world. Or a small whisky dis­ti­llery in Scot­land. Or a small cheese maker in rural France, whose pro­duce is expor­ted to Paris, Lon­don, Tokyo etc. Ditto with a vio­lin maker in Italy. A clas­si­cal gui­tar maker in Spain. Or a small English firm making $50,000 shot­guns.

With the inter­net, of course, a Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand is easier to create than ever before. A commercial sign maker in New England. Or a small sheet metal entrepreneur in the U.K. All using the Internet, blogs, social media and whatnot to spread the word, to talk to people from all over.

And with the advent of blogs in the early years of this Century this was no lon­ger just limi­ted to peo­ple who made pro­ducts. We saw that any ser­vice pro­fes­sio­nal with a bit of talent and something to say could spread their mes­sage far and wide beyond their imme­diate client base and local mar­ket, without nee­ding a high-profile name or the good­will of the mains­tream media. Lawyers, IT consultants, marketing folk, you name it.

But it’s not just limi­ted to cot­tage indus­tries. In the 1990’s, the great business guru, Tom Peters talked about “Brand You”, a per­so­nal brand that trans­cends your orga­ni­za­tion or job desc­rip­tion. The grand-daddy of this space is pro­bably Robert Scoble, who worked full-time for Mic­ro­soft, but whose brand became much, much lar­ger than any job desc­rip­tion they could give him; that’s was worth far more than anything they ever paid him.

Once I crea­ted my own fled­gling glo­bal mic­ro­brand (i.e. via my weblog) I star­ted hel­ping other peo­ple do the same. A bespoke English tailor. A small winery in South Africa. It was something I really wan­ted to know about. It was pro­fes­sio­nally the most com­pe­lling idea I had ever come come across. I was hoo­ked.

Of course, “The Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand” is not con­cep­tual roc­ket science. You don’t need a Nobel Prize in order to unders­tand the idea. What exci­tes me about it is the fact that I now live in a small adobe in the Far West Texas desert, and career­wise I’m get­ting a lot more done than when I lived in a large apart­ment in New York or Lon­don, for a fifth of the overheads. For one fif­tieth of the stress levels.

My job allows me to travel a lot– New York, Miami, San Francisco etc. After three or four days away I start feeling really stressed out. For years I thought it was just me. No, actually, ever­yone in the big city seems really stres­sed out. It’s just con­si­de­red nor­mal.

I was tal­king to a friend on the phone about this.

“There’s only two ways to deal with life in the big city,” he says. “Alcohol and high pri­ces. Immer­sing your­self in high rent, luxury items, trendy, over­pri­ced cock­tail bars, flashy res­tau­rants, tall leggy blon­des who don’t give a damn about you, just to act as a buf­fer zone bet­ween you and the abyss.”

“Which you pay a lot for,” I say.

“Which you pay a hell of a lot for,” he says.

It seems to me a lot of peo­ple of my gene­ra­tion are loc­ked into this high-priced cor­po­rate, urban tread­mill. Sure, they get paid a lot, but their overheads are also off the scale. The minute they stop tap­dan­cing as fast as they can is the minute they are crushed under the wheels of com­merce.

You know what? It’s not sus­tai­na­ble.

Howe­ver, the Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand is sus­tai­na­ble. With it you are not behol­den to one boss, one com­pany, one cus­to­mer, one local eco­nomy or even one industry. Your brand deve­lops rela­tionships in enough dif­fe­rent pla­ces to where your per­ma­nent address beco­mes almost irre­la­vant.

Frankly, it beats the hell out of com­mu­ting every mor­ning to the cor­po­rate glass box in the big city, something I did for many years. Just so I could make enough money to help me for­get that I have to com­mute every mor­ning to the cor­po­rate glass box in the big city.

There are thou­sands of rea­sons why peo­ple write blogs or spend a lot of time building their online equity. But it seems to me the big­gest rea­son that dri­ves the blog­gers I read the most is, we’re all loo­king for our own per­so­nal Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand. That is the prize. That is the tic­ket off the corporate tread­mill. And I don’t think it’s a bad one to aim for.

4. THE MAGIC NUMBER.

Ten Thou­sand is my magic number.

The first few years of this cen­tury were tough ones for me. My career in adver­ti­sing pretty much tan­ked around the same time as the dot­com crash, and I found myself unem­plo­yed, broke, living in the boo­nies, scra­ping a mea­gre living wri­ting free­lance brochure copy. Then 9–11 came along and made it even worse. Not fun or nice.

Up until that point, I had spent my entire wor­king career “cha­sing gigs”. Whether we’re tal­king full-time sala­ried posi­tions, or three-day free­lance oppor­tu­ni­ties, I had spent well over a decade cha­sing that ever-elusive island of secu­rity in a swe­lling ocean of advertising-industry chaos. And these gigs would never last, they would always end even­tually, for wha­te­ver rea­son. Reces­sions, layoffs, down­si­zing, incom­pe­tence on my part, incom­pe­tence on the boss’ part, wha­te­ver. And usually the timing was bad, of course it was.

Chase, chase, chase…. And I was sick of it. Really, REALLY sick of it. Over a decade of wor­king my butt off, and those islands of secu­rity were no less elu­sive than before. And I wasn’t as young as I used to be. The hams­ter wheel was star­ting to do me in.

Then, in these dar­kest of days, I had a sud­den flash of life-changing insight. Like I told my fellow burnout-advertising drin­king buddy that eve­ning, as we com­mi­se­ra­ted at the bar about our sad lot in life:

“I don’t want to be cha­sing gigs any­more.”

“What do you want, then?” asked my buddy.

“I just want ten thou­sand peo­ple giving me money every year.”

“Where are you going to find these peo­ple?” he asked.

“The Inter­net,” I replied.

“What do you plan on doing there?”

“I think I’ll start by publishing my car­toons online… on a blog.”

“What’s a ‘blog’?”

The rest, as they say, is his­tory…

There was nothing magi­cal about the ten thou­sand num­ber. I just rec­ko­ned that, as a car­too­nist, if I was making t-shirts, books, wha­te­ver– and ten thou­sand peo­ple were buying pro­duct every year, with me making a few bucks pro­fit off each unit, well, it wouldn’t make me a billio­naire, but at least I’d be able to feed myself.

Also, ten thou­sand peo­ple sup­por­ting me see­med like a good way of sprea­ding my bets eco­no­mi­cally. If one per­son drops out, and all you lose is a t-shirt sale, with 9,999 other peo­ple still on board you can easily reco­ver. But in the world of cha­sing adver­ti­sing gigs, if the one per­son you lose hap­pens to be your jac­kass boss, you’re dead meat.

There’s nothing special abut the ten thousand number. It all depends on what you’re selling. If you’re selling hand-built motorcycles, your magic number will be less. If you’re selling 5-dollar jars of hot Cajun chilli sauce, your number will be larger. Whatever that number will be, I hope you find it one day. I hope you find THOSE PEOPLE one day.

5. WELCOME TO THE OVER-EXTENDED CLASS.

“If ever there was a time to be ove­rex­ten­ded, this is it.” – Chris Anderson, Editor-In-Chief, Wired Magazine.

Back in August, 2009 I interviewed Chris Anderson for my blog:

Hugh: You’ve got your Edi­tor job, you’ve got your book deals, you’ve got your blog, you do a lot of spea­king gigs… As your name gets more and more known, are you having trou­ble kee­ping up with everything? What’s your coping mecha­nism? How do you find the balance?

Chris: Plus the five little kids, the two star­tup com­pa­nies on the side, etc. Obviously, balance is a dis­tant goal. In the mean­time, I dele­gate, work all the time, hardly sleep, totally ignore poli­tics, sports and pop cul­ture, neglect my family too much and pro­bably don’t do any ofmy jobs as well as I could. But these are exci­ting days, and if ever there was a time to be ove­rex­ten­ded, this is it.

I agree with him com­ple­tely. I know what it means to be over-extended all too well. Recently I made a list of all the pro­jects I’m currently wor­king on. The next book. The road trip. The prints. Blog­ging. Con­sul­ting. Dra­wing car­toons. The list goes on…

All in all, it came down to ten items. Ten. Each one inte­res­ting and poten­tially luc­ra­tive enough to be taken on as a full-time job. Ten.

Ouch. Even for me, that see­med like WAY too much.

The other day, a friend of mine was kvetching about having to hold down three jobs. “Three?” I quip­ped. “Try hol­ding down ten…”

My friend loo­ked at me funny. He was pro­bably right to do so.

Since about 1991, it’s been like that for me. From the moment I woke up till the moment I went to bed, I was wor­king on something. The day job or the car­toons or something else. Sure, I’d have girl­friends come and go, but the girl­friends never las­ted too long, and I also ended up inven­ting, in 1997, an art form that would allow me to carry on wor­king WHEN I was going out to the bars i.e. the “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”.

I’ve not had a pro­per vaca­tion in ten years, either. Nor am I plan­ning one.

Call Chris and myself, and pro­bably over 50% of the peo­ple who are reading this book, mem­bers of “The Ove­rex­ten­ded Class.

You know who you are. And you know what? In terms of per­cen­tage of the popu­la­tion, there were less of us twenty years ago. And there’ll be more of us in two decades.

Our parents and grand­pa­rents spent their “Cognitive Surplus” watching tele­vi­sion. That’s a thing of the past… a his­to­ri­cal acci­dent of the old factory-worker age mee­ting the modern mass-media age. Of course it wouldn’t last fore­ver. We humans as a spe­cies were desig­ned to com­pete, not to sit around on our asses.

Wel­come to the Ove­rex­ten­ded Class, Peo­ple. You may opt out of it if you want, but over time it’s going to get har­der and har­der to make ends meet, let alone be suc­cess­ful, if you do.

Choi­ces.

6. A WORLD-CLASS PRODUCT.

“The curious story of an English Savile Row tailor and an under-employed cartoonist.”

In late 2004, things were still rough for me. I was still broke, unemployed and wondering what the hell I was going to do next. The answer came from a direction I would never have predicted.

At the time, I was living in Cumbria, in a cottage in the Northern English boondocks, not far from the famous Lake District. I was just lying low, scraping a living doing freelance, trying to save money. It was a bleak and miserable time for me, frankly.

In the local village pub, I got friendly with a local fellow named Thomas Mahon. We were about the same age, and his business wasn’t going very well, either.

Thomas was a tailor. He made suits. And not just any kind of suits. He made the best of the best. $5000, hand-made suits. He’d been trained down on Savile Row in London, the legendary English home of tailoring. Some say they make the best suits in the world, there. He had made suits for rock stars, royalty, famous designers and… you name it. He really was that good. The man who trained him, Dennis Halberry, was head cutter for Anderson & Sheppard, one of the most esteemed tailoring firms in the world.

A few years previously, Thomas had got sick of working on Savile Row, decided he missed his beloved Cumbria, and decided to move back home and set up shop in the village he grew up in.

Everyone told him he was mad, but he paid no attention.

Though he was one of the most respected tailors on Savile Row, it turns out he wasn’t very good at getting the word out about his work. His customers loved him, but they didn’t like to tell other people about him. They wanted him all to themselves. So in spite of his formidable talent, Thomas wasn’t getting one-fitth the business he deserved.

So there we were, Christmas approaching, and in spite of us both feeling a wee bit gloomy about our current economic statuses, we were cheerily sitting in the local pub one evening, with Thomas telling me all these wonderful stories about the people and experiences of working on Savile Row.

Finally I interrupted him.

“Tom”, I said, “these Savile Row stories are terrific. You should blog about them.”

“What’s a blog?”

By this time I had been blogging for about three years, and knew all about how it worked. That night, we came up with an EVIL PLAN. I would show Tom how to blog, he would make the suits, I would figure out a way to spread the word online.

EnglishCut.com was born.

Instead of using the blog to hard-sell his suits, Thomas just wrote these great little blog posts about the world he knew and loved– the community of Savile Row tailors. He’d write about it all– his friends on the Row, the pubs they drank in, the other businesses on the Row. He just wrote about it honestly, with great passion and affection. He praised the other shops, his competition. Why not? They were all good people, with second-to-none skills.

A few years later, he would confide in me that he never thought anyone would ever find what he wrote about that interesting, so not expecting anybody to read it, he just wrote it his way. If he had thought a lot of people would be interested in it, he would have written it differently. More uptight. Less transparent.

And boy, was he wrong in the end. People LOVED his blog. They ADORED the transparency and Thomas’ easygoing, unpretentious manner. So much so that, within no time at all, he had gone from under-employed tailor, to having a two-year waiting list, just to get a first appointment.

If you go online and Google Thomas or English Cut, you’ll find a lot to read about. The story got a got of attention in the blogopsphere back then, simply because in 2005, an English Savile Row tailor was probably the person you’d least expect to start a blog. But it worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well.

We worked together for about two more years, before amicably going our separate ways. It was one of the most rewarding career moves I ever made. And I think Thomas would say the same.

My father once remar­ked to me, “I bet you had no idea in the begin­ning that the blog would work as well as it did, eh?”

True, I had no idea. But loo­king back, we had a few things going for us.

i. A great pro­duct. Tho­mas is one of the best tai­lors in the world. His suits REALLY ARE that good. If we were just selling com­mo­di­fied drek, I doubt if anyone would’ve paid much atten­tion.

ii. A uni­que story. When he star­ted, Tho­mas was the only Savile Row tai­lor wri­ting a blog, and this gave him a uni­que voice in the blo­gosphere. This fue­lled the inte­rest. Had mas­ses of tai­lors already been blog­ging, it would’ve been much har­der for his own uni­que “idea-virus” to spread. The first-mover advan­tage rule still applies.

iii. Pas­sion & Autho­rity. Tho­mas has both in spa­des. That’s what kept peo­ple coming back. That’s what built up trust. That’s what tur­ned his rea­ders into cus­to­mers. Which is why “Share what you love” is the best advice there is.

iv. Con­ti­nuity. He kept at it. He didn’t expect the blog to trans­form his for­tu­nes over­night. As I’m fond of saying, “Blogs don’t write them­sel­ves”. Based on our expe­rience, if you want blogs to trans­form your busi­ness, I’d say give your­self at least a year.

v. Focus. It was always about the suits. It was never about what he had for break­fast, Google traffic, or frothy gossip about other bloggers.

vi. Tho­mas spoke in his own voice. Tho­mas is a straight­for­ward, affa­ble fellow, and the voice on the blog is the same as the voice you meet in real life. He never tried to mis­re­pre­sent him­self on his blog, nor try to create some over-glamorized image of his pro­fes­sion. He just told it like it is. And peo­ple res­pon­ded well to that. As he once put it, “We’re so lucky we don’t have to create the brand out of thin air. We just tell the truth and the brand builds itself.”

vii. Sove­reignty. The only peo­ple we had to please were the two of us. No bos­ses or outside inves­tors to keep happy. Bos­ses and inves­tors like gua­ran­tees, but there aren’t any.

viii. We were both broke when we star­ted. Had we had mas­ses of money at the begin­ning, we would have had a lot more options on how to get the word out. In all like­lihood, these options would have been a lot more expen­sive and not nearly as effec­tive. Some­ti­mes lack of capi­tal is a defi­nite advantage.

A blog is a great way to build one’s own per­so­nal “glo­bal mic­ro­brand”. As the Job-For-Life no lon­ger exists, as the value of the social “posi­tion” ero­des and the value of the “pro­ject” takes its place, per­so­nal brand deve­lop­ment beco­mes far more impor­tant to one’s career. Blogs are a good place to start.

Hey, if a Savile Row tai­lor can do it, what’s your excuse?

7. FILL IN THE NARRATIVE GAPS.

If peo­ple like buying your pro­duct, it’s because its story helps fill in the narra­tive gaps in their own lives.

Human beings need to tell sto­ries. His­to­ri­cally, it’s the quic­kest way we have for trans­mit­ting use­ful infor­ma­tion to other mem­bers of our spe­cies. Sto­ries are not just nice things to have, they are essen­tial sur­vi­val tools.

And yes, the sto­ries we tell our­sel­ves are just as impor­tant than the sto­ries we tell other peo­ple.

Ergo, The Global Microbrand is not about selling per se. It’s more about figu­ring out where your pro­duct stands in rela­tion to per­so­nal narra­tive.

So where does your pro­duct fit into other people’s narra­tive? How does telling your story become a sur­vi­val tool for other peo­ple? If you don’t know, you have a mar­ke­ting pro­blem.

Narra­tive gaps. It’s all about the narra­tive gaps.

8. AVOID DINOSAURSPEAK.

Gaping­void is the per­fect web­site to get your daily blog­ging fix. Filled to the brim with hila­rious car­toons, it also offers timely and insight­ful com­men­tary on the new rea­li­ties of adver­ti­sing and mar­ke­ting. Indeed, some peo­ple would say it’s just not the blo­gosphere without gaping­void to enhance their qua­lity blog­ging expe­rience. Start your day the switched on way– subscribe to get gaping­void on your RSS fee­der today!

I wrote the pre­ce­ding para­graph to illus­trate the inte­llec­tual ban­kruptcy of what I call “Dino­saurs­peak”. That rather socio­pathic com­bi­na­tion of being com­ple­tely focu­sed on cus­to­mer bene­fit and yet com­ple­tely sel­fish at the same time.

And yeah, if it doesn’t work with my shtick, it ain’t going to work with your pro­duct, either.

What is inte­res­ting to me is that this style of lan­guage was pretty uni­ver­sal only a few years ago. Sure, you had a few mave­ricks out there sti­rring things up, but most exter­nal busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tion was pretty much stuck in firehose mode.

But when mar­kets become smarter and faster than the com­pa­nies ser­vi­cing said mar­kets, thanks to the Internet, lan­guage chan­ges. Of course it does.

So your language you use has be on the cutting edge, or at least, well ahead of the curve. Otherwise you’re just going to sound like everyone else, and people will ignore you.

9. WHO ARE YOU, REALLY?

There’s a won­der­ful metaphor in the Bible [Reve­la­tion 2:17] about “a white pebble”.

“Let the one who has an ear hear what the spi­rit says to the con­gre­ga­tions: To him that con­quers I will give some of the hid­den manna, and I will give him a white peb­ble, and upon the peb­ble a new name writ­ten which no one knows except the one recei­ving it.”

The metaphor was once explai­ned to me by a Catho­lic monk. To paraph­rase:

“You have three sel­ves: The per­son that you think you are, the per­son that other peo­ple think you are, and the per­son that God thinks you are. The white peb­ble repre­sents the lat­ter. And of the three, it is by far the most impor­tant.”

He then gave me some good advice, something I’ve always kept with me:

“When life gets really tough, just remem­ber the white peb­ble. Just remem­ber who you really are. Just remem­ber the per­son that only God can see.”

Wha­te­ver your thoughts on God or Reli­gion may be, posi­tive or nega­tive, the white peb­ble is a very sim­ple metaphor that auda­ciously asks the ques­tion: “Who are you, really?”

Yes, why are you here, exactly? Who are you here for? Your­self? Other peo­ple? God? Or maybe some other cause? You tell me…

It’s one of those ques­tions that never gets old. Unlike the poor body that hou­ses us.

10. THE COMPLEXITY WAR i.e. “SUCCESS IS MORE COMPLEX THAN FAILURE”.

Rud­yard Kipling once desc­ri­bed Triumph and Disas­ter as “Impostors, Both”. The lon­ger I stay in the wor­king world, the more I start to get what he means.

It’s funny how you can have two guys sit­ting next to each other in an office, both doing the same job. Both using the same com­pu­ters and pho­nes. Both with the same aca­de­mic qua­li­fi­ca­tions. Both with a simi­lar IQ. Both wor­king the same amount of hours. But why does one guy take home five times more sales com­mis­sion than the other guy? What’s going on? Is it luck? Skill? Jus­tice? Injus­tice?

The ques­tion of what sepa­ra­tes suc­cess from fai­lure, is something I’ve always liked to pon­der on. Sud­denly this week, out of nowhere, the follo­wing line hit me:

“Suc­cess is more com­plex than Fai­lure.”

Think about it. Being a fai­lure is a no-brainer. All you have to do is sleep till noon, get out of bed, scratch your crotch, have your mor­ning visit to the bath­room, turn on the Star Trek re-runs, help your­self to some break­fast [Lef­to­ver pizza and a bottle of Jack Daniels, Hurrah!], light up your first joint of they day, down­load some porn, and already you’re well on your way. Sure, a few incon­ve­nient varia­bles may enter the pic­ture here and there, to com­pli­cate an other­wise per­fect day of FAIL, e.g. what you’re going have to say to your brother in order to con­vince him to lend you that $300, so you can pay off the telephone bill, that kinda thing. But for the most part, the day-to-day modus ope­randi of your “Ave­rage Total Fai­lure” is quite straight­for­ward.

Being suc­cess­ful, howe­ver, is a whole dif­fe­rent ball game. Break­fast mee­tings at 7.00am. Con­fe­rence calls at mid­night. Visi­ting twelve cities in five days. Fiel­ding ques­tion from a swarm of hos­tile jour­na­lists. Dea­ling suc­cess­fully with an enra­ged, multi-million dollar cus­to­mer who’s screa­ming bloody mur­der over something rather tri­vial in the grand scheme of things. Dea­ling suc­cess­fully with an enra­ged, multi-million dollar inves­tor who’s screa­ming bloody mur­der over something rather tri­vial in the grand scheme of things. Making sure there’s enough money in the account to meet the pay­roll of all your legions of highly-paid, highly-effective, highly-talented emplo­yees. All these hun­dreds of unre­len­ting issues to deal with, all day, every day. You get the pic­ture.

And as always, what’s inva­riably true of peo­ple is also inva­riably true for busi­nes­ses. So when I see a small but insanely-successful busi­ness sud­denly implode over­night [it seems to hap­pen quite a lot in Sili­con Valley], I’m gues­sing chan­ces are it wasn’t ina­bi­lity to manage growth per se that des­tro­yed the busi­ness [a favo­rite rea­son cited by those wri­ting busi­ness obi­tua­ries], but the ina­bi­lity for the busi­ness to manage com­ple­xity. Com­ple­xity inc­rea­ses expo­nen­tially with growth, most small com­pa­nies can cul­tu­rally only handle inc­re­men­tal inc­rea­ses in com­ple­xity. As I’m fond of saying, “Human beings don’t scale”.

Which is why wal­king around the hall­ways of large, suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies can often seem so oppres­sive to some­body new to it. All that cul­tu­ral regi­men­ta­tion is there for one rea­son only: To fight “The Com­ple­xity War”. Sure, it might feel a bit ghastly to the more idea­list and free-spirited among us, but until some­body can come up with a bet­ter way to win this Com­ple­xity War at a Fortune-500 level, I don’t see it ever going away.

11. TREAT IT LIKE AN ADVENTURE. AN ADVENTURE WORTH SHARING.

“DON’T WORRY IF YOU DON’T KNOW ‘ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING’ BEFORE STARTING OUT.”

That’s probably the last thing you need…

A lot of people massively postpone their EVIL PLANS, for the simple reason that they don’t have an answer for every possible contingency.

They don’t know enough about the industry. They don’t know enough people in the industry– especially the A-Listers. They don’t know enough about where the market is going to be in five years. They don’t know enough about what could possibly go wrong. They don’t know where EVERY SINGLE LAST POSSIBLE LANDMINE is buried.

So instead of getting on with it, they spend the next few years keeping their Nowheresville day job, whilst spending their evenings surfing the web, scouring the trade magazines, researching everything like crazy, trying to get a thorough, small-time Outsider’s view about what the big-time Insiders are currently up to.

And then they often compound this by also trying to get a handle on the even bigger stuff. What will happen to the American/Asian/European/Brazilian/Whatever economy in the next 2/5/10/25/Whatever years, and how will these BIG things affect their tiny, obscure niche.

They want to have ALL the answers, before ever risking getting their feet wet. Hell, before even getting their little toe wet…

Agreed, a wee bit of prudence and informed circumspection are lovely virtues to have, but overdoing it can be ultimately unproductive, for a variety of reasons. Here are my four favorite ones:

i. Being an Outsider with too much Insider Knowledge, makes it even more likely that you’ll make the same mistakes as everybody else.

When Google– the most successful advertising business in the history of the world– started their company, their founders knew practically nothing about the inside workings of Madison Avenue. Sergey Brin and Larry Page most likely had zero inside knowledge about famous advertising titans like Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, Lee Clowes, John Hegarty or Claude Hopkins. They were just a couple of twenty-something Stanford PhD students, who were far more interested in Internet search engines than they ever were in Nielsen Ratings, Proctor & Gamble or The Clio Awards. Which helps explain why, when the normal, mainstream, industry-obsessed kids of around the same age were just landing their first East Coast internships or junior executive positions at advertising blue-chips like McCann’s, Lintas, DDB or Saatchi’s, Sergey and Larry were already well on their way to becoming billionaires.

When I started my fine-art print business in late 2008, I didn’t wait for the acclaim of the big-city gallery scene, or a favorable review from the New York Times art critics before I took the plunge. [A] Those elite votes of approval were VERY unlikely to happen anyway, and [B] Even if did happen, it would have taken years and years. I just reckoned instead that [A] my blog readers already knew and liked my work, [B] a lot of them had disposable incomes and [C] a lot of them had a lot of wall space that needed filling. That was all the incentive I needed to get the ball rolling.

So I just put the idea out there on my blog to see if any fish would bite. And they did. A lot of them even liked the idea enough to put up money in advance, before I had spent a single penny. As a result, the business has been profitable since Day One, without me having to gain an encyclopedic knowledge of the big New York, London and Shanghai art galleries, the current career trajectories of all the artists they represent, or the recent auction prices at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Too much of that stuff would’ve just slowed me down, big time.

[Other, Far Better Examples Than My Own:] Before they launched their car companies, Henry Ford and Karl Benz didn’t decide to first spend a decade trying to win the approval of prominent horse breeders or railway magnates. Same goes for the Wright Brothers.

I love this story about Bill Gates: Some years ago, when the company he founded, Microsoft was at the height of its powers, he was giving a lecture to some college students. When the the Question & Answers came along, a keen undergraduate asked the question, “What advice would you give to a young person like me who wants to make a lot of money some day?”

Gates’ answer was as wonderful as it was short: “For Goodness’ sake, don’t do what I did. That money’s already been made by me.”

ii.“Events, Dear Boy, Events.” –Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister 1957–1963, after being asked by a young journalist, what is the most likely single factor to blow any government off-course.

If it’s pretty much impossible for the smartest people in Washington, Wall Street and Silicon Valley to predict what the big, bad world is going to do next, what chance does a guy wanting to open a small, highly-specialized, hand-built EVIL PLAN bicycle operation have, from his small storefront in Brooklyn?

Trying to micromanage the Macro, from the comfort of your wee bike shop… Seriously, your time is better spent trying to manage what you CAN control. Like being nice to customers, keeping your word, staying cheerful, positive and focused, completing a task cheaper, faster and better than you had originally promised, working harder and smarter than the next guy, fighting hard to keep your ideas fresh i.e. all those good, small moves that Grandma told you about decades ago.

To get some very lucid, hardcore perspective on this, I recommend that you read Nassim Taleb’s excellent and highly readable “Fooled By Randomness” (W. W. Norton & Co., 2001). Nassim’s thesis is childishly simple: That the bigger the historical event, the more random and unpredictable the event was to begin with. Nobody saw 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK, Lincoln or Archduke Franz Ferdinand (and the subsequent outbreak of a four-year World War), the Atomic Bombs being dropped on Japan, the 1923 collapse of the German Deutchmark, the Barbarians sacking Rome in 410 A.D., The Bubonic Plague of the 1300’s, or Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union coming down the pike. Ditto with Detroit not seeing the threat of Japanese cars coming after 1945, or IBM not seeing the  threat posed in the 1970s by Microsoft and Apple. Everything just happened when it did, everybody was shocked completely, and everybody just had to deal with the MASSIVE AND UNPREDICTABLE consequences afterward. Not too much fun at the time, but there was no other choice. Nassim makes a damn good case.

So if your EVIL PLAN is to open up a two-person internet software company, or a mom n’ pop fancy cheese shop in North Chicago, there’s little point in first waiting to see if, sometime in the next two decades, whether or not India and Pakistan decide to launch nuclear missiles against each other.

iii. Interesting destinies rarely come from just reading the instructions manual.

Yes, Louis Pasteur did say, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” On one level, he was right. That being said, the stuff you learn beforehand will never be one-tenth as useful as the stuff you learn the hard way, on the job. All the former can do is help train you to deal with the reality of the latter. The real truth is always found in the moment, never in the future. Sadly, not everybody is cut out for thriving in the present tense. Life is unfair.

iv. “Sometimes Paranoia’s just having all the facts.” –William S. Burroughs.

I’ve been in a few businesses in my time: advertising, marketing, fine art prints, greeting cards, phone sales, animation, magazines, wine, corporate consulting, English tailoring, and now, book writing. Take it from me– if I had known ONE HALF about these businesses that I know now, I doubt I would’ve bothered in the first place. Instead, I would’ve just gotten an MBA or law degree somewhere and landed a mid-level position in a bank, law firm, corporation or whatever. Maybe joined the local country club while I was at it. Lucky Me.

[About Hugh. Car­toon Archive. Sign up for my “Daily Car­toon” News­let­ter.]

Recently I did  something dramatic: I got rid of my Blackberry, and I started leaving my computer at the office.

So now I am without (GASP!) Internet access 12–16 hours a day!

The “Always-On Culture” had been feeling oppressive for a while now. Finally I decided to do something about it. Basta.

The biggest benefit so far is; I’m drawing a hell of a lot more. This is, after all, what I get paid to do, and what I’ll be remembered for. Nobody will ever care how many Twitter followers I had or how SEO-optimized my blog was.

The Internet liberates us from so much; it’s our duty not to become again enslaved by something else.

[Backs­tory: About Hugh. E-mail Hugh. Twit­ter. Limi­ted Edi­tion Prints. Car­toon Archive. News­let­ter. Book. Inter­view. Essen­tial Rea­ding: “Everything You Always Wan­ted To Know About ‘Cube Gre­na­des’ But Were Afraid To Ask.”]

Probably the hardest thing for a young adult to learn is JUST HOW LITTLE the rest of the world cares about you. We’ve all been there, right? Took us forever to learn the hard way, right?

Hell, it’s still hard, even after you get older.

It’s REALLY hard for marketers, for some reason. So many of them waffle on endlessly on, like we’re actually paying attention. Or something.

But of course, once you’re able to Internalize “Nobody Cares”, it’s very liberating.

Both as an adult, and as a marketer. Exactly.

[Backs­tory: About Hugh. E-mail Hugh. Twit­ter. News­let­ter. Book. Inter­view One. Inter­view Two. EVIL PLANS. Limi­ted Edi­tion Prints. Pri­vate Com­mis­sions. Cube Gre­na­des.]

[Backstory: About Hugh. Twitter. Newsletter. Book. Interview One. Interview Two. EVIL PLANS. Limited Edition Prints. Private Commissions. Cube Grenades.]

[UPDATE: These prints are now also for sale individually. Go check out gapingvoidgallery.com to see more.…]

After the very successful launch of Portfolio Series Number One, we’re happy to announce the launch of Portfolio Series Number Two.
After consulting with y’all recently about what designs to use, we narrowed it down to the four designs you see above.
Same deal as last time: They measure 11“x14”, and can be framed and hung, or kept in a portfolio to view or use for meetings and then put away etc. They are all hand-pulled serigraphs, and printed on Rives-Arches paper. All four are taken from cartoons that appeared in my book, IGNORE EVERYBODY.
You can pre-order them for $300 for the set of four, by just leaving a $50.00 deposit using the PayPal button below. We’ll send you an invoice for the remainder when they’re printed an ready to ship.

[$50.00 deposit/pre-order PayPal button etc.]

Portfolio One used black and red. This time we used mainly a black and blue theme. This group of cartoons I selected comes out of my New York days, when my tone was less about business– more personal– and more about being sardonic and hanging out in bars too much. Blue is the perfect color for that…
They came out looking well. I’m excited! Hope you like. Rock on.

Pre-order the book here:

Amazon.

Barnes & Noble.

Borders.

800-CEO-READ. (great for bulk buys)

[Below is a small taste of the first draft of my upcoming book, “EVIL PLANS”. Published by Penguin/Portfolio, the same people who published my first book, “IGNORE EVERYBODY”. It launchesFebruary 17th, 2011.]

INTRODUCTION: EVERYBODY NEEDS AN EVIL PLAN

Everybody needs an EVIL PLAN. Everybody needs that crazy, out-there idea that allows them to ACTUALLY start doing something they love, doing something that matters. Everybody needs an EVIL PLAN that gets them the hell out of the Rat Race, away from lousy bosses, away from boring, dead-end jobs that they hate. Life is short.

Every person who ever managed to do this, every person who manged to escape the cubical farm and start doing something interesting and meaningful, started off with their own EVIL PLAN. And yeah, pretty much everyone around them– friends, family, colleagues– thought they were nuts.

Thanks to the Internet, it has never been easier to have an EVIL PLAN, to make a great living, doing what you love, doing something that matters. My intention is that by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you will completely concur. More importantly, you’ll actually feel compelled enough to go and do something about it yourself, if you haven’t already.

“TO UNIFY WORK AND LOVE”

Sigmund Freud once said that in order to be truly happy in life, a human being needed to acquire two things: The capacity to work, and the capacity to love.

An EVIL PLAN is really about being able to do both at the same time.

At time of writing, this is my tenth year blogging at gapingvoid.com. I’ve done a lot of stuff with it since I started. Published cartoons, sold wine, sold suits, pimped Microsoft, pimped Dell, sold art, “built my personal brand”, written e-books, ranted on endlessly about marketing, new media and all sorts…

But looking back, I realize it all served a served a common purpose: to unify work and love. I was writing about what interesting and important to me, and trying to turn it into a career somehow.

Then I noticed, the people who read my blog the most avidly, and the bloggers I tend to read most avidly, hell yeah, they’re mostly trying to do the same thing too, in their own way. It’s a definite pattern.

To unify work and love. Are you one of these people? If not, don’t you think you should be? I mean, after friends and family, what the hell is there?

1. THE MARKET FOR SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN IS INFINITE

THE HUGHTRAIN MANIFESTO: “THE MARKET FOR SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN IS INFINITE.”

We are here to find meaning. We are here to help other people do the same. Everything else is secondary.

We humans want to believe in our own species. And we want people, companies and products in our lives that make it easier to do so. That is human nature.

Product benefit doesn’t excite us. Belief in humanity and human potential excites us.

Think less about what your product does, and think more about human potential.

What statement about humanity does your product make?

The bigger the statement, the bigger the idea, the bigger your brand will become.

It’s no longer just enough for people to believe that your product does what it says on the label. They want to believe in you and what you do. And they’ll go elsewhere if they don’t.

It’s not enough for the customer to love your product. They have to love your process as well.

People are not just getting more demanding as consumers, they are getting more demanding as spiritual entities. Branding becomes a spiritual exercise.

Either get with the program or hire a consultant in Extinction Management. No vision, no business. Your life from now on pivots squarely on your vision of human potential.

The primary job of an advertiser is not to communicate benefit, but to communicate conviction.

Benefit is secondary. Benefit is a product of conviction, not vice versa.

Whatever you manufacture, somebody can make it better, faster and cheaper than you.

You do not own the molecules. They are stardust. They belong to God. What you do own is your soul. Nobody can take that away from you. And it is your soul that informs the brand.

It is your soul, and the purpose and beliefs that embodies, that people will buy into.

Ergo, great branding is a spiritual exercise.

Why is your brand great? Why does your brand matter? Seriously. If you don’t know, then nobody else can– no advertiser, no buyer, and certainly no customer.

It’s not about merit. It’s about faith. Belief. Conviction. Courage.

It’s about why you’re on this planet. To make a dent in the universe.

I don’t want to know why your brand is good, or very good, or even great. I want to know why your brand is totally frickin’ amazing.

Once you tell me, I can the world.

And then they will know.

2004 was the year that I drew the cartoon above, which I ended up calling “The Hughtrain”. It appeared in my last book, “Ignore Everybody”, which came out five years later.

Why is it called The Hughtrain? Soon after I drew the cartoon, I wrote a little manifesto on my blog, trying to explain the cartoon in more depth. I called it “The Hughtrain Manifesto”, a pun on a book that had made a big impact on me around that time, “The Cluetrain Manifesto”.

Here’s the point of The Hughtrain: Whatever you’re selling isn’t just a product of capital, it’s also a product of a belief system– your own. And understanding your belief system is crucial. As my friend and mentor, the great marketing author, Seth Godin once told me in an interview I did for him:

You can’t drink any more bottled water than you already do. Or buy more wine. Or more tea. You can’t wear more than one pair of shoes at a time. You can’t get two massages at once…

So, what grows? What do marketers sell that scales?

I’ll tell you what: Belief. Belonging. Mattering. Making a difference. Tribes. We have an unlimited need for this.

Another friend of mine, the film director, David Mackenzie once quipped, “A film is only as good as the reasons for making it”.

What is true for Hollywood, is also true for products and businesses. It’s not what you make, it’s what you believe in. That is what people respond to. That is where your enterprise lives or dies.

The Hughtrain was me trying to articulate my coming to grips with this.

2. WELCOME TO THE HUNGER.

The Hun­ger to do something crea­tive.

The Hun­ger to do something ama­zing.

The Hun­ger to change the world.

The Hun­ger to make a dif­fe­rence.

The Hun­ger to enjoy one’s work.

The Hun­ger to be able to look back and say, Yeah, cool, I did that.

The Hun­ger to make the most of this utterly brief blip of time Crea­tion has given us.

The Hun­ger to dream the good dreams.

The Hun­ger to have ama­zing peo­ple in our lives.

The Hun­ger to have the synap­ses con­ti­nually fired up on over­drive.

The Hun­ger to expe­rience beauty.

The Hun­ger to tell the truth.

The Hun­ger to be part of something big­ger than your­self.

The Hun­ger to have good sto­ries to tell.

The Hun­ger to stay the course, des­pite of the odds.

The Hun­ger to feel pas­sion.

The Hun­ger to know and express Love.

The Hun­ger to know and express Joy.

The Hun­ger to chan­nel The Divine.

The Hun­ger to actually feel alive.

The Hun­ger will give you everything. And it will take from you, everything. It will cost you your life, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

But kno­wing this, of course, is what ulti­ma­tely sets you free.

3. THE GLOBAL MICROBRAND.

[I first published “The Global Microbrand Rant” on my blog back in 2005. Here it is again:]

Since I first coined the term in 2004, I have been totally besot­ted with the idea of “The Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand”.

A small, tiny brand, that “sells” all over the world.

The Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand is nothing new; they’ve exis­ted for a while, long before the Inter­net was inven­ted. Ima­gine a well-known author or pain­ter, selling his work all over the world. Or a small whisky dis­ti­llery in Scot­land. Or a small cheese maker in rural France, whose pro­duce is expor­ted to Paris, Lon­don, Tokyo etc. Ditto with a vio­lin maker in Italy. A clas­si­cal gui­tar maker in Spain. Or a small English firm making $50,000 shot­guns.

With the inter­net, of course, a Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand is easier to create than ever before. A commercial sign maker in New England. Or a small sheet metal entrepreneur in the U.K. All using the Internet, blogs, social media and whatnot to spread the word, to talk to people from all over.

And with the advent of blogs in the early years of this Century this was no lon­ger just limi­ted to peo­ple who made pro­ducts. We saw that any ser­vice pro­fes­sio­nal with a bit of talent and something to say could spread their mes­sage far and wide beyond their imme­diate client base and local mar­ket, without nee­ding a high-profile name or the good­will of the mains­tream media. Lawyers, IT consultants, marketing folk, you name it.

But it’s not just limi­ted to cot­tage indus­tries. In the 1990’s, the great business guru, Tom Peters talked about “Brand You”, a per­so­nal brand that trans­cends your orga­ni­za­tion or job desc­rip­tion. The grand-daddy of this space is pro­bably Robert Scoble, who worked full-time for Mic­ro­soft, but whose brand became much, much lar­ger than any job desc­rip­tion they could give him; that’s was worth far more than anything they ever paid him.

Once I crea­ted my own fled­gling glo­bal mic­ro­brand (i.e. via my weblog) I star­ted hel­ping other peo­ple do the same. A bespoke English tailor. A small winery in South Africa. It was something I really wan­ted to know about. It was pro­fes­sio­nally the most com­pe­lling idea I had ever come come across. I was hoo­ked.

Of course, “The Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand” is not con­cep­tual roc­ket science. You don’t need a Nobel Prize in order to unders­tand the idea. What exci­tes me about it is the fact that I now live in a small adobe in the Far West Texas desert, and career­wise I’m get­ting a lot more done than when I lived in a large apart­ment in New York or Lon­don, for a fifth of the overheads. For one fif­tieth of the stress levels.

My job allows me to travel a lot– New York, Miami, San Francisco etc. After three or four days away I start feeling really stressed out. For years I thought it was just me. No, actually, ever­yone in the big city seems really stres­sed out. It’s just con­si­de­red nor­mal.

I was tal­king to a friend on the phone about this.

“There’s only two ways to deal with life in the big city,” he says. “Alcohol and high pri­ces. Immer­sing your­self in high rent, luxury items, trendy, over­pri­ced cock­tail bars, flashy res­tau­rants, tall leggy blon­des who don’t give a damn about you, just to act as a buf­fer zone bet­ween you and the abyss.”

“Which you pay a lot for,” I say.

“Which you pay a hell of a lot for,” he says.

It seems to me a lot of peo­ple of my gene­ra­tion are loc­ked into this high-priced cor­po­rate, urban tread­mill. Sure, they get paid a lot, but their overheads are also off the scale. The minute they stop tap­dan­cing as fast as they can is the minute they are crushed under the wheels of com­merce.

You know what? It’s not sus­tai­na­ble.

Howe­ver, the Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand is sus­tai­na­ble. With it you are not behol­den to one boss, one com­pany, one cus­to­mer, one local eco­nomy or even one industry. Your brand deve­lops rela­tionships in enough dif­fe­rent pla­ces to where your per­ma­nent address beco­mes almost irre­la­vant.

Frankly, it beats the hell out of com­mu­ting every mor­ning to the cor­po­rate glass box in the big city, something I did for many years. Just so I could make enough money to help me for­get that I have to com­mute every mor­ning to the cor­po­rate glass box in the big city.

There are thou­sands of rea­sons why peo­ple write blogs or spend a lot of time building their online equity. But it seems to me the big­gest rea­son that dri­ves the blog­gers I read the most is, we’re all loo­king for our own per­so­nal Glo­bal Mic­ro­brand. That is the prize. That is the tic­ket off the corporate tread­mill. And I don’t think it’s a bad one to aim for.

4. THE MAGIC NUMBER.

Ten Thou­sand is my magic number.

The first few years of this cen­tury were tough ones for me. My career in adver­ti­sing pretty much tan­ked around the same time as the dot­com crash, and I found myself unem­plo­yed, broke, living in the boo­nies, scra­ping a mea­gre living wri­ting free­lance brochure copy. Then 9–11 came along and made it even worse. Not fun or nice.

Up until that point, I had spent my entire wor­king career “cha­sing gigs”. Whether we’re tal­king full-time sala­ried posi­tions, or three-day free­lance oppor­tu­ni­ties, I had spent well over a decade cha­sing that ever-elusive island of secu­rity in a swe­lling ocean of advertising-industry chaos. And these gigs would never last, they would always end even­tually, for wha­te­ver rea­son. Reces­sions, layoffs, down­si­zing, incom­pe­tence on my part, incom­pe­tence on the boss’ part, wha­te­ver. And usually the timing was bad, of course it was.

Chase, chase, chase…. And I was sick of it. Really, REALLY sick of it. Over a decade of wor­king my butt off, and those islands of secu­rity were no less elu­sive than before. And I wasn’t as young as I used to be. The hams­ter wheel was star­ting to do me in.

Then, in these dar­kest of days, I had a sud­den flash of life-changing insight. Like I told my fellow burnout-advertising drin­king buddy that eve­ning, as we com­mi­se­ra­ted at the bar about our sad lot in life:

“I don’t want to be cha­sing gigs any­more.”

“What do you want, then?” asked my buddy.

“I just want ten thou­sand peo­ple giving me money every year.”

“Where are you going to find these peo­ple?” he asked.

“The Inter­net,” I replied.

“What do you plan on doing there?”

“I think I’ll start by publishing my car­toons online… on a blog.”

“What’s a ‘blog’?”

The rest, as they say, is his­tory…

There was nothing magi­cal about the ten thou­sand num­ber. I just rec­ko­ned that, as a car­too­nist, if I was making t-shirts, books, wha­te­ver– and ten thou­sand peo­ple were buying pro­duct every year, with me making a few bucks pro­fit off each unit, well, it wouldn’t make me a billio­naire, but at least I’d be able to feed myself.

Also, ten thou­sand peo­ple sup­por­ting me see­med like a good way of sprea­ding my bets eco­no­mi­cally. If one per­son drops out, and all you lose is a t-shirt sale, with 9,999 other peo­ple still on board you can easily reco­ver. But in the world of cha­sing adver­ti­sing gigs, if the one per­son you lose hap­pens to be your jac­kass boss, you’re dead meat.

There’s nothing special abut the ten thousand number. It all depends on what you’re selling. If you’re selling hand-built motorcycles, your magic number will be less. If you’re selling 5-dollar jars of hot Cajun chilli sauce, your number will be larger. Whatever that number will be, I hope you find it one day. I hope you find THOSE PEOPLE one day.

5. WELCOME TO THE OVER-EXTENDED CLASS.

“If ever there was a time to be ove­rex­ten­ded, this is it.” – Chris Anderson, Editor-In-Chief, Wired Magazine.

Back in August, 2009 I interviewed Chris Anderson for my blog:

Hugh: You’ve got your Edi­tor job, you’ve got your book deals, you’ve got your blog, you do a lot of spea­king gigs… As your name gets more and more known, are you having trou­ble kee­ping up with everything? What’s your coping mecha­nism? How do you find the balance?

Chris: Plus the five little kids, the two star­tup com­pa­nies on the side, etc. Obviously, balance is a dis­tant goal. In the mean­time, I dele­gate, work all the time, hardly sleep, totally ignore poli­tics, sports and pop cul­ture, neglect my family too much and pro­bably don’t do any ofmy jobs as well as I could. But these are exci­ting days, and if ever there was a time to be ove­rex­ten­ded, this is it.

I agree with him com­ple­tely. I know what it means to be over-extended all too well. Recently I made a list of all the pro­jects I’m currently wor­king on. The next book. The road trip. The prints. Blog­ging. Con­sul­ting. Dra­wing car­toons. The list goes on…

All in all, it came down to ten items. Ten. Each one inte­res­ting and poten­tially luc­ra­tive enough to be taken on as a full-time job. Ten.

Ouch. Even for me, that see­med like WAY too much.

The other day, a friend of mine was kvetching about having to hold down three jobs. “Three?” I quip­ped. “Try hol­ding down ten…”

My friend loo­ked at me funny. He was pro­bably right to do so.

Since about 1991, it’s been like that for me. From the moment I woke up till the moment I went to bed, I was wor­king on something. The day job or the car­toons or something else. Sure, I’d have girl­friends come and go, but the girl­friends never las­ted too long, and I also ended up inven­ting, in 1997, an art form that would allow me to carry on wor­king WHEN I was going out to the bars i.e. the “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”.

I’ve not had a pro­per vaca­tion in ten years, either. Nor am I plan­ning one.

Call Chris and myself, and pro­bably over 50% of the peo­ple who are reading this book, mem­bers of “The Ove­rex­ten­ded Class.

You know who you are. And you know what? In terms of per­cen­tage of the popu­la­tion, there were less of us twenty years ago. And there’ll be more of us in two decades.

Our parents and grand­pa­rents spent their “Cognitive Surplus” watching tele­vi­sion. That’s a thing of the past… a his­to­ri­cal acci­dent of the old factory-worker age mee­ting the modern mass-media age. Of course it wouldn’t last fore­ver. We humans as a spe­cies were desig­ned to com­pete, not to sit around on our asses.

Wel­come to the Ove­rex­ten­ded Class, Peo­ple. You may opt out of it if you want, but over time it’s going to get har­der and har­der to make ends meet, let alone be suc­cess­ful, if you do.

Choi­ces.

6. A WORLD-CLASS PRODUCT.

“The curious story of an English Savile Row tailor and an under-employed cartoonist.”

In late 2004, things were still rough for me. I was still broke, unemployed and wondering what the hell I was going to do next. The answer came from a direction I would never have predicted.

At the time, I was living in Cumbria, in a cottage in the Northern English boondocks, not far from the famous Lake District. I was just lying low, scraping a living doing freelance, trying to save money. It was a bleak and miserable time for me, frankly.

In the local village pub, I got friendly with a local fellow named Thomas Mahon. We were about the same age, and his business wasn’t going very well, either.

Thomas was a tailor. He made suits. And not just any kind of suits. He made the best of the best. $5000, hand-made suits. He’d been trained down on Savile Row in London, the legendary English home of tailoring. Some say they make the best suits in the world, there. He had made suits for rock stars, royalty, famous designers and… you name it. He really was that good. The man who trained him, Dennis Halberry, was head cutter for Anderson & Sheppard, one of the most esteemed tailoring firms in the world.

A few years previously, Thomas had got sick of working on Savile Row, decided he missed his beloved Cumbria, and decided to move back home and set up shop in the village he grew up in.

Everyone told him he was mad, but he paid no attention.

Though he was one of the most respected tailors on Savile Row, it turns out he wasn’t very good at getting the word out about his work. His customers loved him, but they didn’t like to tell other people about him. They wanted him all to themselves. So in spite of his formidable talent, Thomas wasn’t getting one-fitth the business he deserved.

So there we were, Christmas approaching, and in spite of us both feeling a wee bit gloomy about our current economic statuses, we were cheerily sitting in the local pub one evening, with Thomas telling me all these wonderful stories about the people and experiences of working on Savile Row.

Finally I interrupted him.

“Tom”, I said, “these Savile Row stories are terrific. You should blog about them.”

“What’s a blog?”

By this time I had been blogging for about three years, and knew all about how it worked. That night, we came up with an EVIL PLAN. I would show Tom how to blog, he would make the suits, I would figure out a way to spread the word online.

EnglishCut.com was born.

Instead of using the blog to hard-sell his suits, Thomas just wrote these great little blog posts about the world he knew and loved– the community of Savile Row tailors. He’d write about it all– his friends on the Row, the pubs they drank in, the other businesses on the Row. He just wrote about it honestly, with great passion and affection. He praised the other shops, his competition. Why not? They were all good people, with second-to-none skills.

A few years later, he would confide in me that he never thought anyone would ever find what he wrote about that interesting, so not expecting anybody to read it, he just wrote it his way. If he had thought a lot of people would be interested in it, he would have written it differently. More uptight. Less transparent.

And boy, was he wrong in the end. People LOVED his blog. They ADORED the transparency and Thomas’ easygoing, unpretentious manner. So much so that, within no time at all, he had gone from under-employed tailor, to having a two-year waiting list, just to get a first appointment.

If you go online and Google Thomas or English Cut, you’ll find a lot to read about. The story got a got of attention in the blogopsphere back then, simply because in 2005, an English Savile Row tailor was probably the person you’d least expect to start a blog. But it worked. It worked AMAZINGLY well.

We worked together for about two more years, before amicably going our separate ways. It was one of the most rewarding career moves I ever made. And I think Thomas would say the same.

My father once remar­ked to me, “I bet you had no idea in the begin­ning that the blog would work as well as it did, eh?”

True, I had no idea. But loo­king back, we had a few things going for us.

i. A great pro­duct. Tho­mas is one of the best tai­lors in the world. His suits REALLY ARE that good. If we were just selling com­mo­di­fied drek, I doubt if anyone would’ve paid much atten­tion.

ii. A uni­que story. When he star­ted, Tho­mas was the only Savile Row tai­lor wri­ting a blog, and this gave him a uni­que voice in the blo­gosphere. This fue­lled the inte­rest. Had mas­ses of tai­lors already been blog­ging, it would’ve been much har­der for his own uni­que “idea-virus” to spread. The first-mover advan­tage rule still applies.

iii. Pas­sion & Autho­rity. Tho­mas has both in spa­des. That’s what kept peo­ple coming back. That’s what built up trust. That’s what tur­ned his rea­ders into cus­to­mers. Which is why “Share what you love” is the best advice there is.

iv. Con­ti­nuity. He kept at it. He didn’t expect the blog to trans­form his for­tu­nes over­night. As I’m fond of saying, “Blogs don’t write them­sel­ves”. Based on our expe­rience, if you want blogs to trans­form your busi­ness, I’d say give your­self at least a year.

v. Focus. It was always about the suits. It was never about what he had for break­fast, Google traffic, or frothy gossip about other bloggers.

vi. Tho­mas spoke in his own voice. Tho­mas is a straight­for­ward, affa­ble fellow, and the voice on the blog is the same as the voice you meet in real life. He never tried to mis­re­pre­sent him­self on his blog, nor try to create some over-glamorized image of his pro­fes­sion. He just told it like it is. And peo­ple res­pon­ded well to that. As he once put it, “We’re so lucky we don’t have to create the brand out of thin air. We just tell the truth and the brand builds itself.”

vii. Sove­reignty. The only peo­ple we had to please were the two of us. No bos­ses or outside inves­tors to keep happy. Bos­ses and inves­tors like gua­ran­tees, but there aren’t any.

viii. We were both broke when we star­ted. Had we had mas­ses of money at the begin­ning, we would have had a lot more options on how to get the word out. In all like­lihood, these options would have been a lot more expen­sive and not nearly as effec­tive. Some­ti­mes lack of capi­tal is a defi­nite advantage.

A blog is a great way to build one’s own per­so­nal “glo­bal mic­ro­brand”. As the Job-For-Life no lon­ger exists, as the value of the social “posi­tion” ero­des and the value of the “pro­ject” takes its place, per­so­nal brand deve­lop­ment beco­mes far more impor­tant to one’s career. Blogs are a good place to start.

Hey, if a Savile Row tai­lor can do it, what’s your excuse?

7. FILL IN THE NARRATIVE GAPS.

If peo­ple like buying your pro­duct, it’s because its story helps fill in the narra­tive gaps in their own lives.

Human beings need to tell sto­ries. His­to­ri­cally, it’s the quic­kest way we have for trans­mit­ting use­ful infor­ma­tion to other mem­bers of our spe­cies. Sto­ries are not just nice things to have, they are essen­tial sur­vi­val tools.

And yes, the sto­ries we tell our­sel­ves are just as impor­tant than the sto­ries we tell other peo­ple.

Ergo, The Global Microbrand is not about selling per se. It’s more about figu­ring out where your pro­duct stands in rela­tion to per­so­nal narra­tive.

So where does your pro­duct fit into other people’s narra­tive? How does telling your story become a sur­vi­val tool for other peo­ple? If you don’t know, you have a mar­ke­ting pro­blem.

Narra­tive gaps. It’s all about the narra­tive gaps.

8. AVOID DINOSAURSPEAK.

Gaping­void is the per­fect web­site to get your daily blog­ging fix. Filled to the brim with hila­rious car­toons, it also offers timely and insight­ful com­men­tary on the new rea­li­ties of adver­ti­sing and mar­ke­ting. Indeed, some peo­ple would say it’s just not the blo­gosphere without gaping­void to enhance their qua­lity blog­ging expe­rience. Start your day the switched on way– subscribe to get gaping­void on your RSS fee­der today!

I wrote the pre­ce­ding para­graph to illus­trate the inte­llec­tual ban­kruptcy of what I call “Dino­saurs­peak”. That rather socio­pathic com­bi­na­tion of being com­ple­tely focu­sed on cus­to­mer bene­fit and yet com­ple­tely sel­fish at the same time.

And yeah, if it doesn’t work with my shtick, it ain’t going to work with your pro­duct, either.

What is inte­res­ting to me is that this style of lan­guage was pretty uni­ver­sal only a few years ago. Sure, you had a few mave­ricks out there sti­rring things up, but most exter­nal busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tion was pretty much stuck in firehose mode.

But when mar­kets become smarter and faster than the com­pa­nies ser­vi­cing said mar­kets, thanks to the Internet, lan­guage chan­ges. Of course it does.

So your language you use has be on the cutting edge, or at least, well ahead of the curve. Otherwise you’re just going to sound like everyone else, and people will ignore you.

9. WHO ARE YOU, REALLY?

There’s a won­der­ful metaphor in the Bible [Reve­la­tion 2:17] about “a white pebble”.

“Let the one who has an ear hear what the spi­rit says to the con­gre­ga­tions: To him that con­quers I will give some of the hid­den manna, and I will give him a white peb­ble, and upon the peb­ble a new name writ­ten which no one knows except the one recei­ving it.”

The metaphor was once explai­ned to me by a Catho­lic monk. To paraph­rase:

“You have three sel­ves: The per­son that you think you are, the per­son that other peo­ple think you are, and the per­son that God thinks you are. The white peb­ble repre­sents the lat­ter. And of the three, it is by far the most impor­tant.”

He then gave me some good advice, something I’ve always kept with me:

“When life gets really tough, just remem­ber the white peb­ble. Just remem­ber who you really are. Just remem­ber the per­son that only God can see.”

Wha­te­ver your thoughts on God or Reli­gion may be, posi­tive or nega­tive, the white peb­ble is a very sim­ple metaphor that auda­ciously asks the ques­tion: “Who are you, really?”

Yes, why are you here, exactly? Who are you here for? Your­self? Other peo­ple? God? Or maybe some other cause? You tell me…

It’s one of those ques­tions that never gets old. Unlike the poor body that hou­ses us.

10. THE COMPLEXITY WAR i.e. “SUCCESS IS MORE COMPLEX THAN FAILURE”.

Rud­yard Kipling once desc­ri­bed Triumph and Disas­ter as “Impostors, Both”. The lon­ger I stay in the wor­king world, the more I start to get what he means.

It’s funny how you can have two guys sit­ting next to each other in an office, both doing the same job. Both using the same com­pu­ters and pho­nes. Both with the same aca­de­mic qua­li­fi­ca­tions. Both with a simi­lar IQ. Both wor­king the same amount of hours. But why does one guy take home five times more sales com­mis­sion than the other guy? What’s going on? Is it luck? Skill? Jus­tice? Injus­tice?

The ques­tion of what sepa­ra­tes suc­cess from fai­lure, is something I’ve always liked to pon­der on. Sud­denly this week, out of nowhere, the follo­wing line hit me:

“Suc­cess is more com­plex than Fai­lure.”

Think about it. Being a fai­lure is a no-brainer. All you have to do is sleep till noon, get out of bed, scratch your crotch, have your mor­ning visit to the bath­room, turn on the Star Trek re-runs, help your­self to some break­fast [Lef­to­ver pizza and a bottle of Jack Daniels, Hurrah!], light up your first joint of they day, down­load some porn, and already you’re well on your way. Sure, a few incon­ve­nient varia­bles may enter the pic­ture here and there, to com­pli­cate an other­wise per­fect day of FAIL, e.g. what you’re going have to say to your brother in order to con­vince him to lend you that $300, so you can pay off the telephone bill, that kinda thing. But for the most part, the day-to-day modus ope­randi of your “Ave­rage Total Fai­lure” is quite straight­for­ward.

Being suc­cess­ful, howe­ver, is a whole dif­fe­rent ball game. Break­fast mee­tings at 7.00am. Con­fe­rence calls at mid­night. Visi­ting twelve cities in five days. Fiel­ding ques­tion from a swarm of hos­tile jour­na­lists. Dea­ling suc­cess­fully with an enra­ged, multi-million dollar cus­to­mer who’s screa­ming bloody mur­der over something rather tri­vial in the grand scheme of things. Dea­ling suc­cess­fully with an enra­ged, multi-million dollar inves­tor who’s screa­ming bloody mur­der over something rather tri­vial in the grand scheme of things. Making sure there’s enough money in the account to meet the pay­roll of all your legions of highly-paid, highly-effective, highly-talented emplo­yees. All these hun­dreds of unre­len­ting issues to deal with, all day, every day. You get the pic­ture.

And as always, what’s inva­riably true of peo­ple is also inva­riably true for busi­nes­ses. So when I see a small but insanely-successful busi­ness sud­denly implode over­night [it seems to hap­pen quite a lot in Sili­con Valley], I’m gues­sing chan­ces are it wasn’t ina­bi­lity to manage growth per se that des­tro­yed the busi­ness [a favo­rite rea­son cited by those wri­ting busi­ness obi­tua­ries], but the ina­bi­lity for the busi­ness to manage com­ple­xity. Com­ple­xity inc­rea­ses expo­nen­tially with growth, most small com­pa­nies can cul­tu­rally only handle inc­re­men­tal inc­rea­ses in com­ple­xity. As I’m fond of saying, “Human beings don’t scale”.

Which is why wal­king around the hall­ways of large, suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies can often seem so oppres­sive to some­body new to it. All that cul­tu­ral regi­men­ta­tion is there for one rea­son only: To fight “The Com­ple­xity War”. Sure, it might feel a bit ghastly to the more idea­list and free-spirited among us, but until some­body can come up with a bet­ter way to win this Com­ple­xity War at a Fortune-500 level, I don’t see it ever going away.

11. TREAT IT LIKE AN ADVENTURE. AN ADVENTURE WORTH SHARING.

As a marketing blogger, I get asked a lot, “What is the future of marketing?“
I always answer the same: “The Blue Monster”.
What’s The Blue Monster?
A Blue Monster is a Social Object that articulates a Purpose-Idea.
What’s a Social Object? What’s a Purpose-Idea?
Sit yourself down, pour yourself another glass of whisky. This might take a while to explain…
1. THE BLUE MONSTER BACKSTORY
In the late 1990’s I was living in New York, working as a mid-level copywriter at a mid-size advertising agency, when for whatever reason I started drawing cartoons exclusively on the back of business cards, just to give me something to do while sitting at the bar. Like I wrote on my blog:

All I had when I first got to Manhattan were 2 suitcases, a couple of cardboard boxes full of stuff, a reservation at the YMCA, and a 10-day freelance copywriting gig at a Midtown advertising agency.
My life for the next couple of weeks was going to work, walking around the city, and staggering back to the YMCA once the bars closed. Lots of alcohol and coffee shops. Lot of weird people. Being hit five times a day by this strange desire to laugh, sing and cry simultaneously. At times like these, there’s a lot to be said for an art form that fits easily inside your coat pocket.
The freelance gig turned into a permanent job. I stayed. The first month in New York for a newcomer has this certain amazing magic about it that is indescribable. Incandescent lucidity. However long you stay in New York, you pretty much spend the rest of your time there trying to recapture that feeling. Chasing Manhattan Dragon. I suppose the whole point of the cards initially was to somehow get that buzz onto paper.

I started my blog, gapingvoid.com in 2001. I was back living in the United Kingdom, where I grew up and where my mother and sister still lived.
By this time I had accumulated a couple of thousand business-card cartoons, and just started posting them on a semi-daily basis.
Fast Forward to 2006. By this time my blog is pretty well known– one of the largest in Europe-getting over a million unique visitors a month. My cartoons are all over the internet, it seems, especially around the tech blogger scene.
It’s around this time that I meet Steve Clayton, at one of the many “Geek Dinners” that have begun sprouting around the London tech scene.
Steve works for Microsoft, at the time he was running the UK Partner Group [I could tell you what that actually means, but that would take too long. Suffice to say, he’s one very clever and talented chappie].
Steve’s not the first “Microsoftie” I’d met before, but he was the first one I got on really well with. Over the next few months, we start seeing each other around a lot. He’s a really super nice guy, highly intelligent, and fun to hang out with. Good times all round.
Early on, he tells me something that really struck with me: “I could be making a lot more money, and taking a lot less social grief if I worked somewhere else. But I choose not to, simply because at Microsoft, you get to work on some REALLY cool stuff, sooner than anywhere else.”
Why was that so interesting to me? Because I had heard that very same reason cited to me by EVERY single Microsoft employee I had ever met up until that time. Secondly, like every other Microsoft employee I had ever met before, Steve was a really nice, open, fun guy. He did not typify the stereotype “Evil Borg Hive Member” that Microsoftees were often accused of being.
I pondered this for a while. Why did these folk work at Microsoft? It wasn’t the money, it wasn’t the social kudos. Something else was motivating them
So in October, 2006 I posted a cartoon on my blog that tried to express this drive, at least to myself. It went on to be called “The Blue Monster”:

[“The Blue Monster”. First blogged in October, 2006.]
I posted it in high-resolution, the idea being that people at Microsoft who liked the idea, could download it and print it out poster-style, if they wanted. Like I said on my blog:

I just designed this poster for my buddies over at Microsoft [you know who you are]. Feel free to download the high-res version by clicking on the image, and print it out onto - posters, t-shirts etc.
The headline works on a lot of different levels:

Microsoft telling its potential customers to change the world or go home.
Microsoft telling its employees to change the world or go home.
Microsoft employees telling their colleagues to change the world or go home.
Everybody else telling Microsoft to change the world or go home.
Everyone else telling their colleagues to change the world or go home.
And so forth.

Microsoft has seventy thousand-odd employees, a huge percentage them very determined to change the world, and often succeeding. And millions of customers with the same idea.
Basically, Microsoft is in the world-changing business. If they ever lose that, they might as well all go home.
I chose the monster image simply because I always thought there is something wonderfully demonic about wanting to change the world. It can be a force for the good, of course, if used wisely. It's certainly a very loaded part of the human condition, but I suppose that's what makes it compelling.

What happened next was quite extraordinary. Steve saw the cartoon, and really liked it. He immediately started using the image in his e-mail signature. He stared talking about the cartoon on his blog. Next thing you know, other folk inside Microsoft start doing the same. The “idea-virus” is unleashed.
Today, if you’re ever invited onto the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, if you walk around the offices, chances are you’ll see the Blue Monster poster, hanging on somebody’s wall. Or you might very well see someone with a Blue Monster sticker on their laptop, wearing a Blue Monster t-shirt, or handing you their business card with the Blue Monster on the back. Though the Blue Monster wasn’t created by Microsoft, for many people working there, it seems to articulate why they work there. It’s also been written about in the UK National Media, as well as countless tech blogs.
It's not that everybody inside Microsoft "gets" The Blue Monster. It's never been officially endorsed by them. But the ones who do get ito, REALLY get it. For them, it's a cult object. It represents the conversation they INDIVIDUALLY wish to be having with the world about their company and technology in general, not what the corporate "Brand Police" upstairs want to be having with the world. They may be loyal employees of Microsoft, but they're also individuals. Somehow The Blue Monster allows them to express both roles at the same time, allows them to navigate the blurry lines that separate the two.
I was just playing around with a cartoon idea at the time, not really expecting too much to come from it. I never expected the idea to get as big and well-known as it did. Life is full of surprises.
As the months went by and I started to see The Blue Monster story growing and growing, I had another insight: The Blue Monster wasn’t a one-off. The Blue Monster represented a fundamental shift in how marketing will be conducted in the future.

[One of the drawings I did for Seth Godin's latest book, "The Dip".]
[UPDATE:] In order to help me order my thoughts, I decided to put all my favorite social object posts onto a single blog page below. Enjoy.]
[From "KULA": June 15th, 2007]
The Guardian's Kevin Anderson [who also attended last night's screening] has a nice synopsis of Jaiku Founder, Jyri Engstrom's "Social Objects" idea.

Something about sites like Flickr that you will be using these sites for years to come.

The sites that work are built around social objects.

[...] MySpace. What is the real focal object? Music. Once they lose that focus, it is in trouble.
How does one build a useful service around social objects? Five key principles.
1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.
2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It's clear what the site is for.
3. How can people share the objects?
4. Turn invitations into gifts.
5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators. He learned this from Joi Ito. There will be a day when people don't pay to download or consume music but the opportunity to publish their playlists online.

Besides being a web 2.0 entrepreneur, Jyri is an anthropologist. So at the London Jaiku geek dinner last Tuesday, I asked him about the connection between Social Objects and its correlation with Malinowski's "Kula" [Malinowski was the father of modern Anthropology, by the way]. Jyri repsonded that this was very much the case. So much so, in fact, that one of his great friends and mentors, the aforementioned Joi Ito bought an island in Second Life and named it "Kula".
Kula. Social Ojects. Objects of Sociability. Call it what you will, I think so much of what we're trying to understand about the web, the future, and yes, MARKETING, stems from this very profound insight from Malinowski in the early 20th Century, that good folk like Jyri and Joi are now helping to shed new light on.
[Bonus Link:] Video of Jyri's talk on Social Objects at the geek dinner. One of the best talks I've heard for a while.
[Starbuck's Coffee Cup: June, 2007]
Somewhere along the line I figured out the easiest products to market are objects with "Sociability" baked-in. Products that allow people to have "conversations" with other folk. Seth Godin calls this quality "remarkablilty".
For example: A street beggar holding out an ordinary paper cup cup won't start a conversation. A street beggar holding out a Starbucks cup will. I know this to be true, because it happened to me and a friend the other day, as we were walking down the street and a guy asked us for some spare change. Afterwards, as we were commenting about the rather sad paradox of a homeless guy plying his trade with a "luxury" coffee cup, my friend said, "Starbucks should be paying that guy."
Actually, my friend is wrong. Starbuck's doesn't need to be paying the homeless guy. Because Starbucks created a social object out of a paper cup, the homeless guy does their marketing for free, whether he knows it or not.
Although I suspect he does. I suspect somewhere along the line the poor chap figured out that holding out a Starbucks cup gets him more attention [and spare change] than an ordinary cup. And suddenly we're seeing social reciprocity between a homeless person and a large corporation, without money ever changing hands. Whatever your views are on the plight of homeless people, this is "Indirect Marketing" at its finest.

[October, 2007:]Anyone who has heard me speak publicly lately will know that I'm currently very focused on the "Social Object" idea, which I was turned onto by Jaiku's Jyri Engestrom. Here's some more thoughts on the subject, in no particular order.
1. The term, "Social Object" can be a bit heady for some people. So often I'll use the term, "Sharing Device" instead.
2. Social Networks are built around Social Objects, not vice versa. The latter act as "nodes". The nodes appear before the network does.
3. Granted, the network is more powerful than the node. But the network needs the node, like flowers need sunlight.
4. My overall marketing thesis invariably asks the question, "If your product is not a Social Object, why are you in business?"
5. Yesterday at the Darden talk I explained why geeks have become so important to marketing. My definition of a geek is, "Somebody who socializes via objects." When you think about it, we're all geeks. Because we're all enthusiastic about something outside ourselves. For me, it's marketing and cartooning. for others, it could be cellphones or Scotch Whisky or Apple computers or NASCAR or the Boston Red Sox or Buddhism. All these act as Social Objects within a social network of people who care passionately about the stuff. Whatever industry you are in, there's somebody who is geeked out about your product category. They are using your product [or a competitor's product] as a Social Object. If you don't understand how the geeks are socializing- connecting to other people- via your product, then you don't actually have a marketing plan. Heck, you probably don't have a viable business plan.
6. The Apple iPhone is the best example of Social Object I can think of. At least, it is when I'm trying to explain it to somebody unfamiliar with the concept.
7. The Social Object idea is not rocket science.
8. How do you turn a product into a Social Object? Answer: Social Gestures. And lots of them.
9. Products, and the ideas that spawn them, go viral when people can share them like gifts. Example: gmail invites in the early days.
10. Social Object can be abstract, digital, molecular etc.
11. The interesting thing about the Social Object is the not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them. The Blue Monster is a good example of this. It's not the cartoon that's interesting, it's the conversatuons that happen around it that's interesting.
12. Ditto with a bottle of wine.
13. Once I get talking about marketing, it's hard for me to go more than 3 minutes without saying the words, "Social Object".
14. The most important word on the internet is not "Search". The most important word on the internet is "Share". Sharing is the driver. Sharing is the DNA. We use Social Objects to share ourselves with other people. We're primates. we like to groom each other. It's in our nature.
15. I believe Social Objects are the future of marketing.
["Social Gestures beget Social Objects": Novemeber, 2007]

Chris Schroeder riffs on my whole "Social Object" marketing schtick with this very salient thought:

If your company wants to succeed, it needs to have a social object marketing plan.

Amen to that. But note what Chris also says:

I don't know about you, but when somebody walks by with an iPhone, I notice. If I see a kid stroll by me in some limited edition Nikes, that registers with me too.

Therein lies the rub. The Social Object idea is easy to get if your product is highly remarkable, highly sociable. An iPhone or the latest pair of Nike's are both fine examples of this.
But I can already hear your inner MBA saying, "Yeah, but what if you don't work for Nike or Apple? What if your product is boring home loans, auto insurance or... [the list of boring products is pretty long].
My standard answer to that is, "Social Gestures beget Social Objects."
Which is another way of saying, maybe the way you relate to somebody as a human being plays a part in all this. Maybe describing the product as "boring" is just one more bullshit lie we tell ourselves in order to make the world seem less complicated and scary. Hey, my product is inherently dull and boring, therefore I get to be inherently dull and boring, too. Hooray!
Nowadays, thanks to folk like Nike, we think of sneakers as "non-boring" brands. This wasn't true when I was a kid. Back then sneakers were those bloody awful $3 plimsolls we wore in Phys Ed. But it took companies like Nike and Adidas to come along and by shear force of will, raise the level of conversation in the sneaker department, before sneakers became bona fide global social objects, bona fide global powerhouse brands.
The decision to raise the level of conversation isn’t economic. Nor is it an intellectual decision. It’s a moral decision. But whether you have the stomach for it is up to you.
Like I told Thomas almost 3 years ago re. English bespoke tailoring, “Own the conversation by improving the conversation.” And hey, it worked. His sales went up 300% in 6 months.
It wasn’t the change in product that made Thomas’ suits Social Objects. It was changing the way he talked to people. The same applies to Stormhoek, which 3 years ago was an $8 bottle of South African wine nobody had ever heard of. Conversation. Matters.
So all you corporate MBAs out there, here’s a little tip. When you planning on how to embrace the brave new world of Web 2.0, the first question you ask yourself should not be “What tools do I use?“
Blogs, RSS, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook– it doesn’t matter.
The first question you should REALLY ask yourself is:
“How do I want to change the way I talk to people?“
And hopefully the rest should follow.
Think about it.
[Bonus Link: For a more academic take on social objects, check out this post from Anthropologist, Jyri Engestrom.]


[From “So What’s All This New Marketing Stuff, Anyway?”: December, 2007] Some people call it “The New Marketing”. Some people call it “Marketing 2.0″. Whatever name you care to give it, I get asked about it a lot. Here are some random thoughts, in no particular order.
1. “The New Marketing” came about because of two unstoppable forces: [A] The invention of the internet and [B] the beginning of the demise of what Seth Godin calls the “TV-Industrial Complex”. Thanks to the internet, as Clay Shirky famously stated in 2004, “the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.” While this was going on, large companies found out that people were starting to ignore their ads. We have too many choices, too many good choices, and we’ve gotten too good at ignoring messages.
2. Seth Godin is quite rightly the world’s most respected writer on marketing. That being said, a lot of people haven’t heard of Mark Earls yet. They’re both friends of mine, so I don’t want to compare them too much. Seth is a master of taking complicated ideas and presenting them in a way that any Average Joe can understand. Mark is more of a Marketing Geek’s geek. His stuff makes uncomfortable reading for anyone in marketing who hasn’t been stretching himself lately.
3. The most important asset in The New Marketing is “having something worth talking about”. This makes certain marketing people squeamish. A lot of us grew up in an era of flashy commercials for rather uninspiring products, and something in our DNA makes us believe that’s the proper way to go about things.
4. If I had one big insight from the last year, is how The New Marketing has everything to do with how your product or service acts as a “Social Object”. Kudos to Jyri Engestrom for turning me on to it.
5. My second big insight from this year was learning that, even with a fairly everyday product, you can create social objects simply by using your products to make social gestures. That’s what we did with Stormhoek. The message wasn’t, “Here’s why you should buy our wine”. The message was, “We think you’re kinda cool, and we like what you’re doing. We’d like to be part of it, somehow.” And much to everyone’s surprise, it worked rather well.
6. Blogs were the big story for 2005. YouTube for 2006. Facebook for 2007. What’s the big story for 2008? I have no idea. Nor do I think it matters. For the big story, really, is always going to be the same. Websites comes and go, but “Cheap, Easy, Global, Hyperlinked Media” will be with us forever, save for Nuclear Holocaust.
7. A lot of what fuels The New Marketing is quite simply, the most important word in the English Language: “Love”. It’s hard to get someone to read your website if you’re not passionate about your subject matter.
8. I’m trying to train myself to avoid “Microsmosis” i.e. mistaking of a microcosm for the entire cosmos. If you got all your news from blogs, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there are just two phone companies– Apple and Nokia. But Sony, Motorola, LG and Samsung sell a lot of phones, too. Just not to our friends.
9. My Definition of “Web 3.0″: Learning how to use the web properly without it taking over your life. I’m not holding my breath.
10. Why is it so hard to explain The New Marketing to large companies? Because the people who work there are simply not prepared to relinquish the idea of control. Live by metrics, die by metrics etc.
11. I find all this more interesting when I don’t take it too seriously. Like all things internet, it’s far too easy to get carried away.


[From “Social Objects For Beginners”: December, 2007] As y’all will know, I’m fond of talking about “Social Objects” and how they pertain to “Marketing 2.0″. Even so, some people still get confused by what a Social Object actually is. So I wrote the following to clarify some more:
The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.
Example A. You and your friend, Joe like to go bowling every Tuesday. The bowling is the Social Object.
Example B. You and your friend, Lee are huge Star Wars fans. Even though you never plan to do so, you two tend to geek out about Darth Vader and X-Wing fighters every time you meet. Star Wars is the Social Object.
Example C. You’ve popped into your local bar for a drink after work. At the bar there’s some random dude, sending a text on this neat-looking cellphone you’ve never seen before. So you go up to him and ask him about the phone. The random dude just LOVES his new phone, so has no trouble with telling a stranger about his new phone for hours on end. Next thing you know, you two are hitting it off and you offer to buy him a beer. You spend the rest of the next hour geeking out about the new phone, till it’s time for you to leave and go dine with your wife. The cellphone was the social object.
Example D. You’re a horny young guy at a party, in search of a mate. You see a hot young woman across the room. You go up and introduce yourself. You do not start the conversation by saying, “Here’s a list of all the girls I’ve gone to bed with, and some recent bank statements showing you how much money I make. Would you like to go to bed with me?” No, something more subtle happens. Basically, like all single men with an agenda, you ramble on like a yutz for ten minutes, making small talk. Until she mentions the name of her favorite author, Saul Bellow. Halleluiah! As it turns out, Saul Bellow happens to be YOUR FAVORITE AUTHOR as well [No, seriously. He really is. You’re not making it up just to look good.]. Next thing you know, you two are totally enveloped in this deep and meaningful conversation about Saul Bellow. “Seize The Day”, “Herzog”, “Him With His Foot In His Mouth” and “Humbolt’s Gift”, eat your heart out. And as you two share a late-night cab back to her place, you’re thinking about how Saul Bellow is the Social Object here.
Example E. You’re an attractive young woman, married to a very successful Hedge Fund Manager in New York’s Upper East Side. Because your husband does so well, you don’t actually have to hold down a job for a living. But you still earned a Cum Laude from Dartmouth, so you need to keep your brain occupied. So you and your other Hedge Fund Wife friends get together and organise this very swish Charity Ball at the Ritz Carleton. You’ve guessed it; the Charity Ball is the Social Object.
Example F. After a year of personal trauma, you decide that yes, indeed, Jesus Christ is your Personal Saviour. You’ve already joined a Bible reading class and started attending church every Sunday. Next thing you know, you’ve made a lot of new friends in your new congregation. Suddenly you are awash with a whole new pile of Social Objects. Jesus, Church, The Bible, the Church Picnics, the choir rehearsals, the Christmas fund drive, the cookies and coffee after the 11 o’clock service, yes, all of them are Social Objects for you and new friends to share.
Example G. You’ve been married for less than a year, and already your first child is born. In the last year, you and your spouse have acquired three beautiful new Social Objects: The marriage, the firstborn, and your own new family. It’s what life’s all about.
There. I’ve given you seven examples. But I could give THOUSANDS more. But there’s no need to. The thing to remember is, Human beings do not socialize in a completely random way. There’s a tangible reason for us being together, that ties us together. Again, that reason is called the Social Object. Social Networks form around Social Objects, not the other way around.
Another thing to remember is the world of Social Objects can have many layers. As with any complex creature, there can be more than one reason for us to be together. So anybody currently dating a cute girl who’s into not just Saul Bellow, but also into bowling and cellphones and Star Wars and swish Charity Balls as well, will know what I mean.
The final thing to remember is that, Social Objects by themselves don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it’s nice hanging out with Lee talking about Star Wars. But if Star Wars had never existed, you’d probably still enjoy each other’s company for other reasons, if they happened to present themselves. Human beings matter. Being with other human beings matter. And since the dawn of time until the end of time, we use whatever tools we have at hand to make it happen.
[Afterthought:] As I’m fond of saying, nothing about Social Objects is rocket science. Then again, there’s nothing about “Love” that is rocket science, either. That doesn’t mean it can’t mess with your head. Rock on.
[Link:] Mark Earls has some nice thoughts on this, as well. “Things change because of people interacting with other people, rather than technology or design really doing things to people.“
[N.B. “Social Objects” is a term I did not coin myself, but was turned onto by the anthropolgist and Jaiku founder, Jyri Engestrom.]

[From “Why The Social Object Is The Future Of Marketing”: January, 2008]From my previous post:

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.

I’ve often gone on record with the statement, “Social Objects are the future of marketing”. This post will attempt to explain further why i believe that.
THE BAD OLD DAYS: MARKETING IN THE AGE OF HYPER-CLUTTER.
We have just come through a hundred-year long era, called the “Mass Era”.
Mass Media and Mass Production came of age at the same time. We try to separate the two, and we cannot.
A few decades ago, the local car dealers in town gave you a choice of four or five models. Now your choice is in the many dozens. There are well over a dozen varieties of Coca Cola. And thousands of different drink combos you can buy at any Starbucks on any given day.
I can sing you jingles for Nestle chocolate bars, from commercials I haven’t seen in over twenty years. That’s how cluttered my mind is. And yours is probably not that different.
Why would any sane person think that swimming in a polluted sea of commercial messages was fun for people? Messages are not information.
In this hyper-cluttered landscape the mediocre marketer will say, “I know! Let’s add another item of clutter to the cultural landfill! Lets increase the noise-to-signal ratio!!!”
And then he wonders why it doesn’t work.
It doesn’t work because we’re ignoring you now. You had our attention for a while, but as you know, it was more a cultural accident than anything you really had any true control over.
The world has moved on, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Your boss also suspects this may be the case, but thankfully for your career, he hasn’t brought it up in a meeting. Yet.
THEN ALONG CAME THE INTERNET…
I can’t help wondering if the internet coming along at the same time as the Hyper-Clutter Era reaching critical mass was a historical accident, or did the internet evolve as fast as it did in order to circumvent the Hyper-Clutter? I’m guessing the latter. If the purveyors of one-way conversations had offered something more sustainable and satisfying, maybe our need to “talk to real human beings” again would not have been so pronounced.
Now, when you buy something, you don’t phone up the company and order a brochure. You go onto Google and check out what other people– people like yourself– are saying about the product. In terms of communication, the company no longer has first-mover advantage. They don’t ask your company for the brochure until your product has already jumped through a series of hoops that SIMPLY WERE NOT there twenty years ago.
YOU NO LONGER CONTROL THE CONVERSATION. THEN AGAIN, MAYBE YOU NEVER DID.
Human beings are much better at recognizing the linear, rather than recognizing the random and exponential.
1 Oh No! There’s a sabre-tooth tiger heading my way!
2. Run!
That is linear. Our caveman ancestors found it a most useful quality.
We run an ad. Sales go up. So taking the Caveman cue, we frame it in a linear fashion to explain to ourselves the cause and effect.
“People liked our ad so much, they dropped what they were doing, sped down to Wal-Mart and bought our product!”
If only.
What happened was probably more random. You saw an ad for Brand X. A few days later you’re having coffee over at your friend, Pam’s house. She has Brand X on her kitchen counter.
“I saw that ad for it the other day,” you say. “Is the stuff any good?”
“Yeah,” she says. “It’s not bad.”
So the next time you’re in the supermarket, you see the product, and buy it. Ker-chiing.
The ad didn’t make the sale. Your friend made the sale, not the ad. The ad merely started a conversation.
This is what they call “Word-Of-Mouth”. When it works, it works very, very well. The main problem is, it rarely does. The marketer has little control of the outcome.
But the marketer’s boss doesn’t want to hear it. The marketer wants to tell his boss this, even less. So we construct mythologies to disguise the fear. Disguise the unknown. Disguise the random, in the world where UNCERTAINTY AND RANDOMNESS MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO TAKE OVER THE MATRIX. EVER.
YOU AND PAM, HAVING COFFEE.
Pam just sold you a box of Brand X. Pam doesn’t work for Brand X, Pam gets no commission from Brand X, so why did she make the sale, inadvertently, or otherwise?
Go back to what I said in my last post about Social Objects:

The final thing to remember is that, Social Objects by themselves don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it’s nice hanging out with Lee talking about Star Wars. But if Star Wars had never existed, you’d probably still enjoy each other’s company for other reasons, if they happened to present themselves. Human beings matter. Being with other human beings matter. And since the dawn of time until the end of time, we use whatever tools we have at hand to make it happen.

When you and Pam met for coffee, you interacted with each other in the context of what anthropologists call “Object-Centerd Sociality”. In other words, you did not socialize in a vacuum, you socialized around objects, you socialized around things. You talked about the Cubs game last week. You talked about how Billy was doing in Third Grade. You talked about this great movie you just saw. You talked about great Pam’s coffee was. And yes, you talked, however briefly, about Brand X. All these things you talked about, an anthropologist would call “Social Objects”. And the thing is, you came over just to chew the fat with Pam. Talking about Billy or the movie or the Cubs game was not part of any pre-agenda. You could’ve talked about other things– books, records, home furnishings, it doesn’t matter– and you would’ve enjoyed your coffee with Pam just as much.
Yes, a lot of socializing is random. Ergo, yes, a lot of marketing is also random.
SO WHERE DOES SOCIAL OBJECTS FIT IN, FROM NOW ON?
From now on you won’t have the TV Commercials to rely on to start your conversations. People are ignoring you. Mass media has simply gotten too expensive. The only way your product is going to spread is by word of mouth. The only way it’s going to get word of mouth is if there is something in it for the person talking about it.
The person you want talking about is not doing it for the money. She’ll only talk about it if it serves as a Social Object. A “hook” to move the conversation along. A hook she can use it as a way to relate to her fellow human beings.
THE BAD NEWS IS, MOST PRODUCTS ARE BORING. THE GOOD NEWS IS, MOST WORD-OF-MOUTH IS BORING.
If you’re an average marketer, chances are that Alas! you don’t sell Mercedes’ or Apple iPods for a living. You probably sell some fairly prosaic, utilitarian product. Like Brand X.
Obviously, if your product is more conversation-worthy, like a Mercedes or an iPod, your job will be easier. Nice work if you can get it.
But let’s face it, average people are never going to sit down and have a deep and meaningful conversation about Brand X. But hey, maybe over coffee, a couple of little soon-forgotten sentences from somebody like Pam, is enough to make the sale.
I’m fond of saying, “If your product is not a Social Object, why are you in business?”
But of course, as Pam just proved, your product, Brand X, IS INDEED a social object. Just maybe your team needs to hone its thinking a little bit.
[Bonus Link from Jyri Engestrom:] “Why some social network services work and others don’t — Or: the case for object-centered sociality.“

[From “The Social Marker– The Social Object on Steroids etc.” January, 2008] You all will be familiar with my writings on Social Objects by now.

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.

Increasingly I’ve been using a term, “Social Marker” to describe a certain type of Social Object. I’ve found it especially useful for explaining certain ideas to marketing folk.
When two people meet, the first thing they try to do is place each other in context. A social context. So they insert some hints into the conversation:

“I used to know your Uncle Bob.“
“I work at Saatchi & Saatchi’s.
“I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell for years.“
“I’m a member of Soho House.“
“I was reading Doc Searls’ blog the other day.“
“I was college roommates with your ex-girlfriend.“
“I was sampling some fine Islay single malts the other evening.“
“I bought some Versace shirts from Barney’s last week.“
“You’re a Red Sox fan too?“
“I think Andy Warhol is overrated.“
“I think Led Zeppelin is underrated.“
“I was having dinner with some guys from Goldman Sachs.“
“My wife thinks the Upper West Side is really good for schools.“
“San Tropez is too expensive in February.”

Let’s say, for sake of argument, that you never heard of me before, but I knew all about you. And let’s say, for example, you were also the world’s greatest Boston Red Sox fan. And let’s say I saw you in a coffee shop. And let’s say I went over to your table, like a stalker [You don’t know me from Adam, remember].
And let’s say the first thing out of mouth was a short list of five names:
“Carl Yastrzemski. Carlton Fisk. Rico Petrocelli. Fred Lynn. Dwight Evans.“
Yes, granted, that would be pretty strange behavior. That being said, because you knew every single factoid about the 1975 World Series there was to know, you would know exactly who and what I was talking about. Right away, you would know that we shared a context, even though I had only given you five names and nothing else. Which would make you more likely to invite me to sit down at your table and start a conversation.
Every ecosystem has its own, unique set of social markers– nouns that serve as social shorthand, stuff you use to let other people know ASAP that you know what you’re talking about, that you are a fellow “citizen” in a certain space.
When I visit San Francisco I am always surprised how often the name of my friend, Robert Scoble comes up in random conversation, unprompted by myself. Why is that? Why is he so well known? Is his blog REALLY that good? Is he REALLY that smart and interesting?
Well, I could give a whole stack of reasons to explain why I think Robert’s success is well-deserved. But one major reason that his blog’s traffic is so high, and his name so well-known, is that his personal brand has somehow managed to become a Social Marker inside the Silicon Valley ecosystem. The same could also be said for Mike Arrington, Loic Le Meur or Mark Zuckerberg. Dropping their names into random conversations allows people to quickly and efficiently contextualize themselves.
Something similar happened to me a couple of years ago. A artist friend of mine was hitting on a girl, another artist, in a bar in New York’s Lower East Side. For whatever reason, the subject of “Art and the Internet” came up. So my friend started telling the girl about this other friend of his, this guy living over in England, who drew these weird little cartoons on the back of business cards…
“That is SO unoriginal,” the girl interrupts, rolling her eyeballs. “Who does he think he is, Hugh MacLeod?“
Heh. Small world. Yes. She was using me as a Social Marker.
Social Markers are a prime form of social shorthand, that people use to STAKE OUT the ecosystem they’re occupying. So why do I find this such a useful term for marketers? Because obviously, if your product is a Social Marker in your industry ecosystem [the way the iPhone is in the mobile world, or Starbucks is in the coffee world, or Amazon is the book world, or Google is in the search world, or Whole Foods is in the supermarket world, or Virgin is in the airline world, or English Cut in the bespoke world etc etc] you will have an AMAZING competitive advantage to call your own.
And if the product your company makes is not a Social Marker, I guess the first question would be, “Why the hell not?” Quit your job and start over.
[Update:] Neal makes a really good point in the comments: Really interesting thought, Hugh, but bad products could also be a social marker — “ah, yes, I was ripped off by that building company too” or “oh — you’ll be disappointed by that mobile phone as well”. I’d suggest there’s also a variable here about positive v negative that you should think about before quitting that job
[Bonus Link] US News & World Report: “Selling in a Post-Meatball Era– The quest for ‘social objects’ that create their own Web buzz.” Seth Godin in a great interview to plug his new book, Meatball Sundae. “Social Object” given a small mention etc.

[From “Free Cartoons As Social Objects”: May, 2008] When I first started putting up cartoons onto gapingvoid in 2001, they were in a small, 400-pixel-wide format, just like the “Love Letter” cartoon you see above.
Then about 2 years ago, I started posting them in high-resolution, like the “Dinosaur” cartoon below [Click on the image and the high-res version will pop up].

This meant people could actually download the images and start using them for their own stuff. Like I said in my licensing terms,

Hey, if you want to put the work up on your website, blog, or stick it on paper, t-shirts, business cards, stickers, homemade greeting cards, Powerpoint slides, or whatever, as far as I’m concerned, as long as it’s just for your own personal use, as long as you’re not trying to make money off it directly, and you’re giving me due attribution, I’m totally cool with the idea.

As a “Social Object”, a cartoon that one can actually print out and hang on their cube wall, or put on a t-shirt, a business card etc is far more powerful and useful than say, YET ONE MORE IMAGE you can find on the internet and e-mail en masse to your friends.
i.e. The cartoon itself hasn’t changed, but the interaction between it and the “End User” is suddenly far more meaningful.
So of course, the next layman’s question is, “Yes, but… how do you monetize it?“
And of course, the answer is, “Indirectly”.
For example, in October, 2006 I post the Microsoft Blue Monster cartoon. Within a few months Microsoft is somehow paying me a lot of money to do other drawings for them. Without the former, the latter would never have happened. And without the latter, Sun Microsystems would never have approached me. Everything feeds into everything else. Exactly.
In other words, I don’t create the online cartoons as “products” to be sold. I create the cartoons as “Social Objects”, i.e. “Sharing Devices” that help me to build relationships with.
As with all things, the REAL value comes from the human relationships that are built AROUND the social object, not the object in itself.
I’ll quote my friend, Mark Earls one more time. This is from his second book, “Herd”:

“Cova is surely right to suggest that much of modern consumer behaviour is social in nature. We do it not just in a social context (tangible and immediately present or over distances) but for social reasons — that is the object or activity is the means for a group or tribe to form or interact. This also echoes a lot of what Douglas Atkin describes in his study of cult brands — brands which have developed a cult status (like Apple, and Ford’s bestselling pickup) seem to serve an underlying social need within each individual (just as religious cults do): a need to belong. The real draw is probably not the brand but… other people.”

And I’ll also ask my favorite question, one more time: If your product is not a “Social Object”, how on earth do you manage to stay in business?

(Cartoon taken from The Hughtrain etc.)
Like I said in my interview with Mark Earls, The Blue Monster is a “Purpose-Idea”. As Mark, the man who first coined the term explains it:

Put really simply, the Purpose-Idea is the “What For?” of a business, or any kind of community. What exists to change (or protect) in the world, why employees get out of bed in the morning, what difference the business seeks to make on behalf of customers and employees and everyone else? BTW this is not “mission, vision, values” territory — it’s about real drives, passions and beliefs. The stuff that men in suits tend to get embarrassed about because it’s personal. But it’s the stuff that makes the difference between success and failure, because this kind of stuff brings folk together in all aspects of human life.

Real drives, passions and beliefs. Exactly.
The Blue Monster line, “Change The World Or Go Home” is not rocket science or literary brilliance. It just articulates a simple belief, a simple passion, a simple drive THAT ALREADY EXISTED, long before The Blue Monster ever came on to the scene. That’s all it was ever meant to do.

[The Microsoft Blue Monster etc.]
Whether you agree or disagree with it doesn’t matter, the important bit is that people within Microsoft believe it. Unlike a conventional ad campaign, it’s not about you. It’s about them.
Why is something like this potentially valuable to a business? Simply put, if you believe something passionately enough, for long enough, articulate it well enough, and your actions are aligned, credible and consistent with your belief for long enough, it’s just a matter of time before other people start believing it, too. And next thing you know, you have an interesting conversation going on, both inside and outside the company. And as Doc Searls famously said, “Markets are conversations”. Ker-Chiing.
Again, none of this is rocket science. Talking to people never is.
When people ask me what exactly is a Blue Monster, I tell them, it’s not necessarily a cartoon. It’s simply a social object that allows one to more easily articulate the Purpose-Idea. No more, no less.
I’ve been asking myself for years, what comes after conventional, Madison-Avenue-style advertising, now that we live in a post-TV, post-advertising, post-message world? “Creating Blue Monsters” is the closest I’ve ever come to finding an actual answer.
Besides drawing the cartoons, helping other companies create Blue Monsters is how I intend to spend the remainder of my career.
Cartoons and Blue Monsters. I really do have the world’s greatest job. Rock on.
[To Be Continued.…]

Inevitably, this leads to another question, also always the same: what’s the role of the gallery in this environment? And, as always, I argue that it doesn’t have one. Or as I put it in Art Is Moving: “It deserves to die. It’s an anachronism that’s outlived it’s usefulness. I think there is still a role for individual curators or even ‘show producers’ but they need to work in a more individualised, specialist way within a networked ‘virtual’ paradigm …“
To be more precise, I still see value in public exhibitions and installations but not produced, promoted or managed in the way they are today – the same way they have been for a hundred and fifty years – by dithering, technologically inept, socially aspirational and unadventurous commercial ‘bricks and mortar’ gallerists.

I’ll be watching what she has to say in the future with great interest, to be sure.
9. It took me a few years of blogging my cartoons, before I finally accepted the idea that my audience would always come mainly from reading my blog, and not from being published in the newspapers, magazines, books etc. Even though I have a book coming out in June, I still believe this is the case– just because I’m now an “author”, doesn’t mean the day-to-day reality has changed very much.
10. And now I’m realizing that if I want to sell paintings, I don’t need a gallery, I can just do it all online. Nor do I need critical approval from the art establishment– the media, the curators and the critics. I can just do it all myself, if that’s what I indeed do want. It’s a great feeling, sure, but it’s a new one. Taking its time to really sink in.
11. My paternal grandfather was a Scottish Highland “crofter”. He lived on a “croft” i.e. a very small holding of land, where he raised sheep and grew potatoes. I used to spend my summers there as a boy. We were very close.
Crofting is a good life, but not a very financially rewarding one. It’s very self-sufficient, though. The interesting thing for me looking back, is that crofters never did “just one thing”. Every day they had something else going on. One day it might be sheep. The next it might be a job working on the roads for the local council. I knew one crofter who drove the mail van. Another who ran the local post office. They would do their jobs, but after work they’d still have their sheep, cows and potatoes to attend to.
As my dad is fond of reminding me, I seem to have inherited the crofting mentality. I DON’T like waking up in the morning and doing the same thing every day. I LIKE having all these different balls in the air– cartooning, painting, consulting, writing, marketing, blogging etc. Sure, part of me would like nothing better than just “retiring to the desert and making paintings”, but another part of me likes all the running around in different directions. And all this running around DOES get tiring, I can tell you that. Sometimes I LOVE the feeling of being constantly overwhelmed. Other times I utterly despise it.
12. Something in me is changing. I came out to live in the West Texas desert for a reason. I’m just beginning to find out what that reason may be. Sometimes I can clearly see what the reason is; other times it proves more elusive.
13. It’s a good life. It really is.

[Bonus Link:] James also has a nice post on the subject, “Whose Cloud Is It, Anyway?”.
[UPDATE:] JP Rangaswami comments over on his blog, advocating Open Source as the antidote to Cloud Monopolies:

I have always had this sense that there is no longer any room for artificial monopolies, that the market will provide a self-correcting mechanism. But I have always been wrong on this. We can argue about why this is so, but not about the fact. Microsoft, Google and Apple are facts.
Open standards, open platforms and open source are ways to prevent this happening. Ways to guarantee that history won’t repeat itself. But this needs coherent communal action, something that is hard to achieve in emergent environments.

[PS: That “Power Laws” link is highly, highly, highly recommended reading. Just so you know.]