Ignore Everybody and 39 other keys to creativity, by Hugh Macleod

Posted on | August 17, 2010 | 4 Comments

This is part of an occasional series on creativity.

I like to think of myself as a creative person – the people who read my creative work always tell me it’s very imaginative. But every once in a while I need some advice on how to carry forward, and it can only come from the most successful in the field. MacLeod has a career as an advertiser, and has also built a name for himself in web comics. Ignore everybody is his advice to would-be creatives of the world, (or creative people looking for their career path) (or non-creative people who want to be more creative.)

That said, it’s a short book – I read it in about a day, and it was a day in which a lot of traveling by car occurred. Which is to say I read it in about 6 hours. There’s a lot of white spaces on the page. I think Hugh may be a master at brevity – as should all web comic writers should be. The comics that he uses in this book are a combination of sarcasm, insight, and what I can only describe as one-line character anecdotes. A few of them, such as “The market for something to believe in is infinite” is a zen meditation for the marketing era.

But if you picked up this book, you’d be looking for the advice, not the comics, and the advice is really the reason to read it. What really impressed me was that this was different advice. Advice for creative writers usually consists of two versions: write more and write better. MacLeod has actually thought about the specific challenges of holding onto a creative life while at the same time maintaining work and normal life. Key #2, “It doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be yours,” is a very pertinent rule for young artists, and a powerful one today. Awkward family photos, for instance, is not a big idea, but it is becoming a famous one. Another useful tip is “Avoid the watercooler gang,” which is another version of my father’s advice “Don’t waste your time flying with the turkeys.”

Macleod does give some time to obvious tips like “start a blog,” which is great advice, but rather specific. And then there’s his business card comics. He mentions them over and over again as an example of ways to express creativity. It’s excruciatingly repetitive if you read the book in hurry, which the writing encourages you to do.

“There’s a word for what happens to people like you – ‘nothing’” is a hard piece of advice to give, but you get the sense that MacLeod is will dish it out if he saw you doing what he says you shouldn’t. Sometimes this hard-hearted edge is really just what the creative needs to wake up and put their work out there. And I think there’s plenty of that in the book, I just wish he had used more than just himself as example.

Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity