Learn, Baby, Learn.

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal not long ago about a new museum that's opened at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--just about 200 feet from this sculpture. Its inscription may be a bit arrogant, but if measured by overall patents or things that have changed things, it's probably accurate.

As someone who's spent his entire life in or around the advertising industry--as the last person in a family who's been involved in the industry since 1946, much of what I see, read, learn and feel, I relate back to advertising.

It might seem a leap to find advertising advice from a technology museum, but I don't really think so. At its most basic, advertising like science is finding new ways to look at things. Scientists might be looking at stars billions of miles away while we're looking at tomato soup, but seeing is seeing and real seeing is never easy.

Rainer Weiss' quotation above seems apt to me somehow. A good ad, a good communication, a good scientific discover sees something differently.

The other thing I learned while at MIT is summed up with the second quotation. This, too, is certainly true for advertising--at least when things are working well on a team or within an agency and everyone is carrying their weight and keeping their voices down and their egos in check.

GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company just shipped a spot for a large and prestigious investment advisory. We had a team of people working on the commercial that included the production company, animators, the clients, executive management at the clients and the team I had assembled of art, production and audio. Everyone pushed everyone else. Everyone made everyone else better. Everyone served everyone else.

I don't know what scientific discovery is like. I only know how to make ads.

But I do understand the thinking of Martha Gray above. Not everybody does the same job, not everybody is sweating equally every day, but the whole kit and kaboodle couldn't have happened unless everybody showed up when they were needed.

No matter what field you're in, if you can get up to Cambridge, MA, it wouldn't hurt to spend an hour or two in MIT's newest museum.

It's amazing what you can learn when you decide to learn about learning.