Making stuff up

My entire career has been made up.
I had help. But any success I’ve had has been a result of pure invention.
It started small. One tiny bending of a phrase.
It seemed innocent enough. But my creative director bought it.
And it went from there.
I’ve just kept on making stuff up.

Sometimes I’ve had the good fortune to have interesting things happen to me.
But, mostly, I just made it up as I went.

Luckily, people need people like me.
People who run businesses need stuff made up.
So, I make it up for them.
Or I work with other people to make stuff up together.
We re-purpose words or invent phrases or develop marketing ideas.
And, in doing so, we invent value.

It’s all made up.
We use emotional leverage to convince customers our product is worth more than the other guy’s.

But, in a world defined by ROI, “just making it up” just doesn’t cut it.
We insist on putting an intellectual structure beneath what we do.

We use strategy and logic and tactics. And this gives us comfort.
We’re not “making it up”, we’re “giving customers reasons to rationalise their purchase”.
As a result, we’ve become addicted to logic.
So much so, we’ve thrown away most of the tools in our tool box.

We’re so used to demanding reason, we’ve lost the confidence to talk emotionally. Despite knowing the power of emotion, we err on the side of logic because emotions scare us.

We want people to love us.
So we think we need to use words to ensure they don’t hate us.
But.
Love is not the enemy of hate.
Logic is the enemy of hate.
Be warned though. While the walls of reason are the first line of defence against a swarming tide of emotions, those steepling towers of intellect are our defence against more than fear. Keeping fear at bay means we also lock out love and joy and spite and whimsy.

Rather than trying to explain a deeply complex, white hot, soul-crushing emotion, we end up choosing not to say anything. And an opportunity slips silently between the cracks in the conversation.

Rather than trying to articulate our anger, we just spit out a terse, “He gives me the shits” and we move on to complaining about hipsters or taxes or why the damn bakery on the corner has had the same stale lemon meringue pies in its display case for the last seven weeks.

It happens in our friendships and it happens in our business life.

And we’re all doing it. We’re avoiding the interesting bits of life.

We’re all using the same kind of brand frameworks to create the same kind of brand promises to underpin the same kind of brand communications as everyone else. So all our ads and all our marketing ends up being vaguely the same as everyone else’s.

This sophistication is our industry’s honey trap.

We don’t want to be seen to be just making it up anymore.
We need to be able to justify the spend.
So, we engineer intellectual solutions.
And, we’re so proud of the logic we use, we insist on showing it to our customers.
Who really don’t give a damn about our thinking.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t think strategically.
I am saying we shouldn’t feel the need to make it so obvious.
I’m saying we use it to build a framework, but we don’t show the framework.

We need to go back to just making stuff up.
We need to rediscover the joy of invention. Of making people like us. Of risking an emotional response.
We need to give ourselves the confidence to use the emotional, the spiritual, the visceral and the sensual tools we have at our disposal.

It’s hard.
So, start small. Gain a little confidence. See where it goes.
Try this.
Try making up a phrase.
Try using the sentence, “He’s a massive thunder twat” in your conversations today.

(The strategic framework is “Show your disdain.” The execution is so much better than “Wanker.”
Or, instead of simply saying, “He gives me the shits” try saying, “Hearing his resolve crawling backwards out of the room is like feeling worms crawling over my soul.”

Or, if someone asks you why you’re smiling, try something like, “I’m not sure. I’m just happy. I’m more than happy. I’m happy-clappy. Days like this make me wish my life was a musical.” Better still. Try singing it.

Sure, people may look at you a little sideways at first.
But, the more you do it, the more they’ll come to expect it.
And they’ll like you all the more for it.

And their affection won’t be made up.