“Tell the truth without creating a noose for creative work”

One way to look at what we do.

“Swim until my chest bursts”

Some great stuff from NP:

“I’m watching a fair bit of swimming, which is bittersweet as it makes
me want to drop everything and everyone and swim and swim until my
chest bursts and my arms stop working. I can’t begin to describe the
pure joy in feeling your own strength and doing something you know you
were born to do. But it’s more than that.

“Once you reach a certain level of skill and fitness it’s incredibly
liberating to just go mental and tear into your chosen sport because
you can. The sensation of endless energy and incredible, unstoppable
momentum is more addictive that anything else I could possibly
imagine.”

Hemmingway on the truth

“Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples’ pasts and futures that
produced not people but damned marvellously faked case histories. You,
who can write better than anybody can, who are so lousy with talent
that you have to—the hell with it. Scott for gods sake write and write
truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly
compromises. You could write a fine book about Gerald and Sara for
instance if you knew enough about them and they would not have any
feeling, except passing, if it were true.”

via Letters of Note

John Steinbeck on Writing

“The basic rule you gave us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to
be effective had to convey something from writer to reader and the
power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of
that, you said, there were no rules. A story could be about anything
and could use any means and technique at all—so long as it was
effective.

“As a subhead to this rule, you maintained that it seemed to be
necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what
he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat
of a story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough
to enlarge it to three or six or ten thousand words.”

Via Letters of Note

New campaign for Powerade

We’ve just finished working on this
for Powerade.

Gladwell’s approach to research

“But the basic principles of research are the same–that is, I still
don’t have any basic principles. I just talk to lots of people and
hang around libraries and follow my nose and hope I come up with
something interesting.”

“Strategies shouldn’t be unique, creative work should be unique.”

The words of our ECD.

You are not my friend. You’re a napkin.

I think the “matey” tone of voice is getting boring now.

It started with Innocent. Then supermarkets. Now it’s ubiquitous.

I’m a bit bored of it.

It too smug and knowing for its own good.

You are not my friend. You’re a napkin.

“Take two seemingly opposite thing and jam them together.”

Jim Riswold on how he makes ads and art.

The W+K way?

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will
ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without
caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine
times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

C.S. Lewis