What Color is Your Mongongo Nut?

I think a lot about work. Not just what we're working on. But how we actually work when we're working.

Some years ago, I pie-charted how I spent my days when I was within a giant ad agency. Sure, you can say I'm bitter and angry and have an axe to grind.

That doesn't mean I'm not right. 

It seems to me--and this is based on a lifetime of seeing and living--we spend more time perseverating about work than actually working, actually getting things done. Fear eats our souls and sucks our creativity and saps our daring. 

That's on a good day.

Now and then, I'll read something by real anthropologists about how they might measure the affluence of a society. Often they don't calculate how many Mercedes-Benzs they have in how many driveways. They measure affluence by calculating how many hours a day it takes to gather the sustenance the people need to live.

By that measure, seemingly with more and more people working more and more hours for a more and more shaky livelihood, something is rotten in the state of the State. Last week alone there were a couple dozen articles about declining birth-rates, the pressures on parents and the rise in numbers of people living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Then there are the !Kung-San. 

They for live in what we would regard as an extremely adverse environment--on the western edge of the Kalahari desert. Yet they spend only a few hours a day gathering food. Mostly they sleep, chat with each other, gamble, tell stories and visit friends and relatives and carry out trance rituals.

The !Kung-San have such luxury, because they are blessed with something called the mongongo nut (Ricinodendron rautanenii schinz). An average daily intake of just 300 nuts provides 1,260 calories and 56 g (2 oz) of protein per person, five times the calories and ten times the proteins per cooked weight of cereal crops. They don't have to eat a lot or gather a lot to nourish themselves.

Lately, I've been working on a new client and I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how people work. Or, more specifically, how people spend their time at work. 

There's so much talk about innovation and productivity, but very little measurement of how much time we spend on either.

Microsoft tries to give you a calculus of how much time you spend writing whatever it is you're writing, but they're almost invariably off--usually by a factor of ten. I've never written anything this fast in my entire career:

These days, it's my belief, that the innovations in our world and in our business, don't come from the giant companies we grew up with. They come from the thousands of start-ups that are starting every year who are trying to breakthrough by breaking the hold of the status-quo.

Most everyone else spends their days not thinking or creating or gathering mongongo nuts, they spend their time fretting, worrying about when the footsteps down the hallway are coming for them, when the potentates who make an average of 300 times their median salary decide to toll the last ding-dong of doom and they're out on their adipose with no social safety net to break their fall.

There are those finding different courses. They're starting their own thing, or joining a start-up. There's a burgeoning of such companies, journals like the Economist report.

Many of these start-ups--not thousands, but dozens--call GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. Maybe because I seem to be working a little harder, a little faster, and a little more incisively than so many other agencies. 

Maybe I've found, somehow, somewhere, my own advertising mongongo nut. That's not to say I work only a few hours a day like the !Kung-San. But somehow, I have mongongo'd my working style.

I don't spend hours at a stretch worrying about the seventeen rounds of reviews I have to endure. Not to make work better, just to have the work under the control of a higher-up who's threatened. I don't spend hours on energy-sapping tasks that add nothing but an impecunious parsimony to the world. I don't spend days on end making fake work to win-over a fake jury in a fake award show and then spend more days on end making videos to promote the concocted videos that started the whole charade.

Further, somehow with the absence of fear, constipation--the bane of so many creatives--has disappeared. If earlier in my career I was tapped out after three ads or five, today I can sit down and write 50 or 100. I can keep trying something new, something upside-down, something different without the fear of being larfed at.

Somehow, lack of fear turns into a mongongo nut.

It's highly nutritious. It's tasty. It's satisfying. It's energizing.  

Those psychic mongongo nuts have sprouted since I started  working for myself. And they've allowed me to gain the ears of CEOs and CMOs and focus my energies and help dozens of companies figure out what makes them different, what makes them interesting, what makes them kick-ass. 

Maybe at the ripe old age of 66--almost five years after I was fired for making Ogilvy too much money--I've discovered not the Fountain of Youth, like the one de Soto searched for, but instead, the tree of mongongo of the !Kung-San.

I'm sticking with that for now.

Just call me !GeorgeCo.