Trying is Living.

As I type this post, I'm in the middle of a challenging creative project working alongside my ex-boss, S, the ex-Chief Creative Officer of an agency once called Ogilvy & Mather.

Working with someone like S has it's challenges. It's like going for a run with someone slightly faster than you or playing tennis with someone slightly more skilled. You have to either work to try to achieve their level, or you drag both you and him down. It's a choice you have to make.

A lot of people didn't like S when S was at Ogilvy. He wasn't the red-hot, burning-ardor football coach locker-room bonfire pep talk kind of boss. I spent a lot of time analyzing how S worked. And why so many people failed working for him, and why I was determined to not fail--to succeed.

What S did was set a standard.

There was no noise, excuses, or back-pedaling around S's standard. It just was. 

When you worked for him, you either had to meet that standard or you didn't. If you didn't, you were sent to creative Siberia. Especially if not meeting his standards was the result of not trying hard enough.

I was S's 'second' when we worked together. Often S would get the eight-page ad to write, in addition to over-seeing the entirety of the creative output on the account we were working on. Invariably, I would send S an email when he got that huge assignment (the one I wanted for my own portfolio and advancement.) "If you need any help on that ad, or even if you want to split it, you take four pages and I'll take four, just let me know."

I never pushed things. I just let S know I was available.

Invariably, he'd come to me somewhat hang dog. "Thank you. I'd love your help."

It was one of those things. My life might have been simpler had I kept my trap shut. But that's not really how life works. 

Before long, S had handed me the eight-page mantle. I'd start stuff and we'd trade "the pen" back and forth. It worked for each of us.

Now, as I said above, we're in the throes of a big assignment. We each went off an did our own thing, came back, tinkered and presented one collective response to the client. 

A lot of going off and doing our own thing is how problems get solved. When you're a writer--a writer in a competitive world where your livelihood depends upon pleasing clients and, therefore, getting more work from them, you solve problems not by talking about them. You solve problems by writing lines. By having ideas and testing them, through writing, to see if they work. If they are expandable. If they can hold a lot of ideas.

Yesterday, I had a phone call with another client. I said something like, 

"You've given me 2,000 words of briefing in four separate decks. The brief is big. Any brief of that size is going to have some logical inconsistencies in it. It's no different from the Treaty of Ghent or the Nicean Code. My job is to take those 2,000 words and conflicting thoughts, and turn them into eight-word units that provoke, excite and lead the viewer to want to know more. I call that a headline."

That might have been kind of dickish. But that's ok. The client said, that's right. That's why we come to you. To pull something out of a septic tank of too-much-information.

Not too many days ago, I read an article in the New York Times about the architect, Louis Kahn. I promptly ordered a book the article mentioned on Louis Kahn's notebooks, primarily because Kahn thought through his sketches. Here's a blunt example of that.

Moments later, I stumbled upon news of an upcoming exhibition at the New York Historical Society on the 50th Anniversary of my writing hero, Robert Caro's famous book, "The Power Broker." The article is my favorite kind. It had lots of pictures. Including this one below, that shows a bit of Caro's process when he writes. It ain't a walk through the park.

When S and I work together, or when I work alone, my head and desktop look like the above.

You solve problems by working to solve problems. Even when they're solved, you test them to make sure they were well-solved. Most writers do that through writing. 

That's why I write a blog post every day. Good thinking comes from good writing and good writing comes from writing. And good writing is a business advantage.

Alone or together, making it is working at it. 

It's scribbling. It's crossing out. It's trying again. It's not being content to do the same thing in the same way even if it's worked for you one-hundred or one-thousand times. It's saying 'how can I fuck this up and make it different? And by making it different, make it better?'

That's as life-affirming as I'm going to get.

I don't want anyone accusing me of being an optimist.