Out and About
The 22 Rules of Storytelling, according to Pixar
#6 What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
#18 You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
#22 What's the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
The Greatness of Bernbach on advertising and creatiivity
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUs5-3Y6vxM]
"Another problem with our reluctance to think about or analyse failure – whether our own or other people's – is that it leads to an utterly distorted picture of the causes of success. Bookshops are stuffed with autobiographical volumes such as the one released in 2006 by the multimillionaire publisher Felix Dennis, entitled How To Get Rich: The Distilled Wisdom Of One Of Britain's Wealthiest Self-Made Entrepreneurs. It's an entertaining read, conveying a similar message to many of the others: that to make a fortune what you need is stubbornness and a willingness to take risks. But research by the Oxford management theorist Jerker Denrell suggests that these are just as likely to be the characteristics of extremely unsuccessful people, too. It's just that the failures don't write books. You rarely see autobiographies of people who took risks that then didn't work out."
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFzXaFbxDcM]
Michael Geismar's Blackjack Strategy
"The lesson here is that whether on Wall Street or the strip in Las Vegas, it’s easy to confuse increasing the chances of winning with shifting risk. Increasing the chances of winning improves the amount you should expect as payout. Shifting the risk makes it so that most of the time you get a good payout, but every once and a while you lose catastrophically. As a culture, we should be trying to ensure that the people making financial decisions are looking to do more of the former and less of the latter, especially given the systemic consequences of recent catastrophic market collapses."
"Dorsey is trying to create magic in an industry where people have not previously sought wonder and delight. In short, he hopes to pull an Apple on the entire financial world."
Photos: The Secret City that created the atomic bomb
Phil Dusenberry, Former Chairman of BBDO
"Insights as opposed to ideas. There's a difference. Ideas, valuable though they may be are a dime a dozen in business. That's certainly the case at ad agencies where ideas are the currency of the realm and even the mailroom people spit out ideas as if they were candy from a PEZ dispenser. Insight is much rarer – and therefore much more precious. In advertising a good idea can inspire a great commercial. But a good insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand commercials…more than anything else, an insight states a truth that alters how you see the world."