I've often written in this space that I don't read books on marketing or advertising or whatever it is we're currently calling the dying business we're in.
I read books, instead, on life. Then I relate them back to the life I'm trying to lead and the work I do.
I won't suggest my course to anyone else. I'd just rather read a writer like Robert Caro--two national book awards, two Pulitzer prizes--than lightweights like Seth or Simon or the oh-so-trendy (and slightly rancid) flavor of the month.
In trying to figure out life, I read a lot of books on science. I'm not looking to become a chemist or a physicist, but I like to see how ideas are developed, tested, put forward, accepted, spread and then, how we move on from them. I like the idea that as a species we rarely figure anything out--but life, both macro and micro, is instead trying to figure things out.
I'm reading the above now, in which I read the passage above the other night. Everyone and his cousin is pontificating on AI, advertising, the election, Biden's cognitive condition, who will win the All Star game, what will become of the Left or the Right based on this election or that. It's what precipitated this post.
Everybody is proclaiming someone dumb because of something they were brought up believing. Forgetting that what's considered "normal," or "ok" or even plain-old "right" is fleeting and subject to changing beliefs and mores.
In other words, life is gerundive, not settled. It's an "ing," not an "ed". We're learning. Not learned. We're an ongoing, not a finished, moment in time.
One of the best things I've ever read on science--and by application, advertising--was "A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds." By no means am I a birder. Yes, I spend a lot of time up on the Gingham Coast. And I often from my bedroom or living room see the intense drama of an osprey talon-ing a fish and flying back to its aerie to feed its family. And yes, I read a great book called "Owls of the Eastern Ice," but that's about it.
"Wing"--beyond ornithology--was about how amazing life-forms are and how little we know about them. If we think human technology is amazing--like GPS--it's only because we don't recognize shit about avian-abilities. They can out-think, out-smart, out-find-their-way, out-adapt, and will probably out-last our benighted species.
That's the passage of "Wing" that I haven't stopped thinking about since I read it three years ago.
So much of what's gone wrong in our world--and in the advertising business is because we look for certainty. Because we say, "we used to think, but now we know." When we should be saying, "we used to think, but now we think."
When I think of all the new things that were going to "change everything," supplant everything, make everything that went before them "dead," it fairly makes my head swim.
As if our learning based on some cockeyed study paid for by some cockeyed vested-interest discovered something as absolute as the undiscoverable Grand Unified Theory.
Then the legions of (continuing the bird leit-motif) blind parrots repeat whatever finding until it becomes an absolutism and the final solution, no matter what the problem. It's somewhat--to be extreme--the Sovietization of thought. In the past six months alone, we've had a Lazy Susan full of miracles spin around to proffer solutions to everything, from Jora to Chat or something else.
Even the original holding company reason for being, that enormousness was a benefit has backfired. Not too long from now, my guess is more and more holding companies will start divesting themselves of constituent parts. And there will likely be a holding company merger before long, if only to attempt to show shareholders that something is happening.
The more you circle the sun the more you realize that no one really knows anything. The only course is to work hard, try a lot, and cross your fingers. Those things aren't miracles, but they help.
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