Eric R. Kandel, Nobel-Prize-winner, doctor, professor at Columbia and author of the Age of Insight (which you can buy here) talks a lot about the power of the unconscious to think, imagine, unravel and even solve complex problems. To simplify: to get things done while we sleep.
While I am no Kandel or Coleridge, I write a lot in my sleep. Sometimes I write a joke. And I can barely wait until morning to tell my wife.
Humor, if you believe in it as I do, doesn't punch a timeclock. Despite the large swinging dicta from autocrats of the funnybone, I happen to believe in our benighted universe, anytime you make someone laugh, anytime you break the crushing evil and soul-sapping banality of life with a laugh, you've done something fine and noble and important. It's why, if you think about it, someone like Jerry Seinfeld has a reported $975,000,000 to his name.
Other times, more often, I continue writing chapter after chapter of whatever I am currently reading. Thereby, I turn biographies into picaresque tales and histories into quests.
Most often, I structure and start and last-line a piece of copy I have hanging over my head. Or find a way of introducing some work I'm slated to present. Or I write a headline or a dozen.
Monday night I went to bed with a C-5's amount of work hanging over me and, therefore, a C-5's amount of pressure.
This client, whom I had worked for when I worked at an agency, has always been demanding. And they are no less demanding now that I am a sole-proprietor. If they're anything, they're sneakier.
They'll say with nine-seconds left on a zoom call, "So maybe we can see things at 10 tomorrow." And before you can utter a word, the call is over and you're on the hook. It's a bit like a stay from the governor coming at 12:01 when they threw the electric-chair switch at 12. It's too late. It's over.
So on the hook I was. And for a manifesto aimed at explaining things that no one could really explain.
Explaining isn't what advertising agencies do anymore.
Today's agencies only make rectangles with bad stock photos, insipid headlines and call-to-action buttons. The real work of advertising is explaining. Explaining is the last value-add in the business, perhaps the only part of the business that hasn't yet been commodified--mostly because commodity providers simply don't do it.
Explaining:
What does xxxx do? What makes xxxx different? How can xxxx help you? What simple compelling promise does xxxx make to its potential buyers?
While that might seem simple if you're sentient, it's over-the-head, it seems, of about 99 and 44/100ths of all marketers. Instead, they'll hand you some palaver about saving the planet or being part of the conversation or influencing culture. To be frank, I'm 65 years old and I've never seen advertising do anything of those things.
I made a start at the beginning of a manifesto during the waning working hours of Monday, but I got nowhere with what I was writing. It sucked in fact.
I felt like my writing was labored and laborious. Everything I scribbled seemed baroque, complicated and ponderous. The words might have all been ok, but I felt like my writing itself was Soviet. I was thinking too hard. Feeling too much stress. So my words came out all wrong: Strict, imperious and without empathy. I went to sleep Monday night feeling the pressure and nervous over my lack of anything decent.
At around two in the morning, even the neighborhood rats were calling it a night, I started writing in my sleep.
That's good, I snored.
I wrote some more.
That's good, I wheezed.
So, I wrote some more.
Soon I had a couple hundred words in my head that I'd put up against anyone else's couple hundred words.
But then I got smart.
When you're deep into a REM state, one half of your brain tries to convince the working half that you'll remember what you wrote. That there's no need to tear yourself from the 9000-count bedsheets your wife bought on sale at the Frette factory outlet, where you can pick up a queen set for under $6,000.
But tear myself away I did.
I somnambulated to Mac and typed. And typed. And rewrote. And typed.
My manifesto wasn't due today at 10. But I was ready today at 10. And I presented it today at 10.
The point in all this is simple.
Trust your brain to do the work. But don't trust your brain to remember it.
Don't trust writing in the darkness or a bedside pad or texting your blather either.
Take the extra effort.
Get it down on what passes for paper.
Work it.
You'll lose some sleep.
But get a better night's sleep afterward.
G'night.
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