It seems everyone today sings from the same hymn and hyr books.
Everyone is blathering on about how fast this technology or that technology can do this or that.
They're not, they're never talking about how things can be done better.
Instead they're talking about how things can be done faster.
We spend so much time talking about how fast we can do things that I believe in aggregate things that longer because of all the time we fiddle away talking about how fast we can do them.
Not too long ago, I was asked to work on a pitch for a giant holding company ad agency.
Our meetings sounded more like a track-practice than an ad agency.
The pitch was a marathon punctuated by a series of sprints. Along the way there were heavy lifts and of course the inevitable hurdles.
A friend of mine worked on the pitch, too.
We IM-ed (it's instant, after all) when the whole thing was over.
To re-write Yogi Berra, "It ain't over till you get paid."
We each had the prevailing sensation of underwhelmed-ness.
There were hundreds of pages of deck.
But not a single scintillating idea.
Or even a simmering one.
It all reminded me of that old Peggy Lee song, writ by Lieber and Stoller, "Is That All There Is?"
I had the distinct feeling that my friend and I, if left alone for three days, could have come up with more and better work without subjecting ourselves to the throes of constant racing.
We could have had ideas. Thought them through. Penciled and pensived them. And could have do better work, more efficiently. As the Romans aphorismed, we could have Festina Lente. Made haste, slowly. And everybody, especially the agency and the client would have been better off for it.
Talking about how fast you can do something is an odd measurement. Usually, human calculus of time is off by about 25 to 50-percent. If you claim your commute takes an hour, it likely takes an hour-and-a-half. Likewise a flight to LA, a twenty-minute recipe, or the "just one more story" ten-minutes before bed-time.
I read somewhere that in the 15th Century you could make better time on the Inca Trail from today's Lima to Machu Picchu than you can today. I think taking the train from New Haven to New York is slower today than it was a century ago. If I were smarter about physics, I could probably bring in some Einsteinian relativity here.
At my elbow right now as I write this is this book.
Which I bought having read this review in The Wall Street Journal.
Let me ask you something.
Can this really be a blog on advertising, can this really be a book review from The Year of Our Altman, 2026, if AI is not mentioned? 2700 years ago, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras said, "Man (meaning humans) is the measure of all things."
That belief is wholly abrogated and abnegated today, when in essence we hear and spout and link and post and proffer and pontificate "AI (and its accompanying hype) is the measure of all things."
The review, which I'm pasting in its entirety below is short. It's just 381 words long. Which at an average reading speed of 250 wpm, should take you about one-hundred seconds. Less than two minutes.
Since I know you're pressed for time, rushing someplace, on a deadline or in the middle of a sprint, I've highlighted some bits for you:
A waterway splits the earth in Ginger Riley Munduwalawala’s painting “Nyamiyukanji, the River Country” (1997). Mottled green daubs represent grass; lounging amoebic growths stand in for rocks, perhaps mountain peaks. Above the fracas of color float three white clouds, from which raindrops hang like strings of beads dressing up a doorway.
Noticing every detail of a work of art, and of the world in front of us, is what Olivia Meehan urges us to do in “Slow Looking: The Art of Nature” (Thames & Hudson, 320 pages, $60). The author is far from the first to decry the “din of 21st-century life” or to worry that a digital deluge threatens to dull our senses, but she begins her book more pointedly, asking: “Have you considered your looking practice?”
Probably not, since for most of us looking isn’t so much a practice, a la prayer or meditation, but a necessity of life. The average time a museum visitor spends taking in an artwork matches the average social-media “swipe-away mark of 2-3 seconds,” Ms. Meehan laments. She has gathered nature-inspired artworks in “Slow Looking” to draw us in and get us to look for longer, though she dangles the rewards at a distance: “The beauty will not automatically reveal itself.”
The author promises discoveries as well as a fresh take on the familiar, including 19th-century paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny, a violet Caspar David Friedrich moonscape and plenty of Georgia O’Keeffe. The volume isn’t meant to be read in a linear fashion, nor to be shut with finality when you turn the last page. It’s more like a museum: Aimlessness is welcome, lingering encouraged. Ms. Meehan guides us through a slow-looking exercise before releasing us into the curated wilds.
Some of the book’s best advice might seem laughably obvious. When looking at an artwork, “try not to take your phone out.” Museum labels may distract as much as they inform. But Ms. Meehan writes touchingly about the fruits of attention—surprise, imagination and wonder among them—which can be so difficult to find in “an ‘on-demand’ world.” And she reminds the reader: “There is no immediate need to share your reaction or response with others.” The looking is the point.
Years ago, I read a book about one of my favorite film directors, Preston Sturges. Sturges--in less than a decade--wrote and directed four movies on the American Film Institute's One-Hundred Funniest Movies of all time. Considering Sturges has been dead for 80 years, had his short heyday in the 1940s and lists of this sort are afflicted by grievous recency bias, four out of one-hundred is an incredible mark. Only Woody Allen with five movies has more. Not Mel Brooks, not Billy Wilder.
The tyranny of "do it fast," is worse than the imperative to sprint. What it really means is "do it my way."
Sturges was not trusted, of course, by Paramount, his studio. Often producers would come by the set on day three of shooting only to find Sturges had shot zero feet of film. They would be apoplectic.
Sturges was instead rehearsing his cast.
On days four and five he would shoot tens or dozens of scenes. Catching up.
The studio said he was slow.
He was fast.
Today everyone wants not really speed, they just want it their way. They want to see where you are every eleven minutes, and eleven minutes after the original eleven minutes and eleven minutes after that. They want to see that pages in phantom deck are being filled, never considering what they're being filled with.
Somehow I write this blog every day.
And have for 17 and a half years.
91-percent of the time, I post within fifteen minutes of 7AM.
As Mussolini might have said, "I made the trains run like george."
I don't have project managers chasing me down.
I don't have thrice-daily check-ins.
I don't have tissue sessions.
And generally speaking, the quality of output is pretty high.
I'm not sure speed as such should be a barometer.
I think good should be.
Four selections. Random. Like life. (Ten-seconds' worth.)
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