Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON ANGER AND REVENGE.

Well, I finished the book, so this will be the last quote -- or will it?

"At some point it doesn't matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it."

-- Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

 

All right, here are two more bonus quotes I loved too:

"The last thing you ever want to be is the old guy in the bar. There's no dignity in it."

 

And finally:

"Sixteen grand in a shopping bag feels like much more than sixteen grand in the bank."

 

Great book!

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON ATHEISM AND JEWISH PRACTICALITY.

A few years ago, I sat at brunch in my home with my parents, my brothers and my uncle. Religion came up, as it often does, and my mother asked, point blank: "Do you believe in God?"

Oh. Oh. I wasn't sure how to answer. It had taken me a little longer to come out as an atheist than it did to come out as gay, but it had been some time since I'd done either and I wasn't sure whether admitting it (my atheism) would bother my family. I looked at mom and thought to myself: "Fuck it."

"No, I don't," I said.

"Yeah," she replied, making a scrunchy face and sounding a little disappointed. "Me neither."

We looked at my uncle for his response. "Me too," he said matter-of-factly.

We didn't grow up in a particularly religious household but, still, these weren't responses I ever expected to hear. Sometimes people you know and love all your life still have a way of surprising you. I thought of that exchange this week as I read the following from This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper:

I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?"

"Not really," he said. "No."

"Then why do we come here?"

He sucked thoughtfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said.

And that pretty much summed up what theology there was to find in the Foxman home.

STOP FUSSING AND GET YOUR WEBSITE UP.

One of my first clients when I started my business was an internet startup. It was a smart idea and the guy behind it was gung-ho. So was I. But by the time he'd contacted me to write copy for the website -- which was essentially ground zero for the whole enterprise -- he'd already been working on his new business for months. A year later the site still wasn't up and in the end it never went anywhere.

What happened? He waited too long. The project got bogged down in technical issues. My client went back and forth with developers, designers and the writer trying to perfect everything in time for the launch date, which kept getting pushed back. In the end a couple of other startups launched with a similar idea and, though he probably had the idea first, my client now looked like the copycat with a me-too product.

This is not an isolated case. I'm feeling déjà-vu all over again with another client right now. She also has a brilliant idea but it's been in the works for over a year and it keeps expanding beyond the original focus. The website is still not ready and while I'll do whatever I can to help, I'm not feeling good about the odds.

When I first tried freelancing back in the early aughts, I had just been laid off and realized I needed to get a website up with my portfolio right away. With some programming help from my brother, I had the site up in three weeks. It wasn't perfect and it didn't have a lot of bells and whistles but it was elegant and featured what someone visiting the site needed to see most -- my work.

Granted my clients' websites were more complex than my portfolio site, but the underlying message cuts across any project large or small: GET THE SITE UP, get your Facebook page up, get your Twitter account up. A little shoe company had a line once, something about just doing it -- that would apply here.

A brochure or an ad lives forever once it's printed. If there's an error or you want to change the offer halfway through the campaign, you're up a creek. But funny thing about the online world: you can change stuff anytime you want -- but only if you actually have something up to begin with. Every day your site isn't live is one more day that customers can't discover you or buy your product -- and if they can't, your business is one day closer to being dead.

This isn't simply an online phenomenon. It's a people phenomenon. We all love to fuss, to analyze, to overanalyze, to change, to fix, to sleep on it, to ask for five, 10, 50 opinions. Great. Caution is good, it's the responsible thing to do -- to a point. But eventually, you need to make sure your parachute is safely fastened and jump out the motherf**king plane. Otherwise you're just going to watch everyone jump ahead of you, as you sit there cold, sweaty and nauseous.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON PORSCHES AND MODELS.

"Driving a Porsche is like fucking a model. It will never feel as good as it looks."

-- Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You

EH TOO, GEORGE CLOONEY?: 140 WORDS ON 'THE IDES OF MARCH'

On the Ides of March in 44 BC, Julius Caesar was stabbed in the Roman Senate 23 times by a group of co-conspirators led by Marcus Junius Brutus. While Caesar probably never saw it coming, we can't say the same about the course of events in the new George Clooney/Ryan Gosling "thriller" whose name references the historic assassination. After all, it's called The Ides of March -- you sort of expect there's going to be a betrayal or two.

Despite first-rate performances by an all-star cast including Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, the movie ultimately falls flat. While it has its moments, I couldn't help thinking how great it would have been 20 years ago, when we would have been just a bit less jaded about the sexual escapades of politicians. When the secret is revealed half-way through, my cynical reaction was: "that's all?"

That's all.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: MATT TAIBBI ON #OWS

"...it's extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility: Its worst crimes, from bribery and insider trading and market manipulation, to backroom dominance of government and the usurping of the regulatory structure from within, simply can't be seen by the public or put on TV. There just isn't going to be an iconic "Running Girl"* photo with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup or Bank of America – just 62 million Americans with zero or negative net worth, scratching their heads and wondering where the hell all their money went and why their votes seem to count less and less each and every year."

-- Journalist Matt Taibbi on the challenge of challenging Wall Street

 

* The photo of which Taibbi speaks is that of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a girl running naked and burned from a napalm attack in 1972. The iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning shot helped turn public opinion decisively against the war.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: SUZE ORMAN ON THE 99%.

"...Families have been taking on crushing debt to help the kids get ahead for a few decades, as the cost of school has far outpaced inflation. It's just come to a painful head now: graduates with no jobs, or low paying jobs are justifiably panicked that they will never be able to get the loans paid off. Meanwhile, many well-meaning parents who only wanted to help their kids by taking out loans for college, are now laid off, or in new jobs that pay less. Yet where's the relief for these borrowers, who took out loans so their kids could compete in the workplace, or better yet, we collectively could compete in the global marketplace? Far from relief, here's what we have: a bankruptcy system that does not allow student loans to be discharged. Many other debts can be discharged, but not student loans [...] We bail out the banks, but offer nothing to American families that borrowed to become more educated and competitive?"

-- Financial advisor Suze Orman on why she supports the 99% occupying Wall Street.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: ON STEVE JOBS.

"Big wins happen when you go beyond better sameness. The best daisy-wheel printer companies were introducing new fonts in more sizes. Apple introduced the next curve: laser printing. Think of ice harvesters, ice factories, and refrigerator companies. Ice 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Are you still harvesting ice during the winter from a frozen pond?"

        -- Guy Kawasaki, former Chief Evangelist of Apple, on what he learned from Steve Jobs

More on what Guy learned from Steve here.

STEVE JOBS.

I think the personalities I admire most in the world are those who are able to reinvent themselves -- Salman Rushdie, a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather who became a novelist, recently Tom Ford who has transitioned from a talented fashion designer to a movie director, Madonna, who has reinvented herself and her music countless times, and of course Steve Jobs, are just a few who come to mind.

When you become successful the first time -- and I speak from whatever relatively tiny measure of success I've had so far in my life -- there's always a sneaking suspicion that it was all simply luck. But when you have success after success after success, no matter what you try your hand at, the conclusion become inescapable: you're a success because you're talented.

Steve Jobs was damn good at what he did. What he did, however, wasn't simply invent new technologies -- in fact, many of the technologies he introduced us to had already appeared in one form or another in other products. What Jobs was a genius at was bringing together technology with artistry and marketing to create products that people wanted, not only because they made our lives function more efficiently, but because they were beautiful and made us feel good.

It's not an easy feat. Anyone who has seen the inner workings of a big company knows that many are dysfunctional, manned by petty, political, uninspired, small-minded, risk-averse fraidy cats who would rather stick with what they know than take a chance on something new and inspired. For a long time, for instance, US car manufacturers were experts at mastering function and design and marketing, creating vehicles our grandparents and parents dreamed of driving. In the 1980s and 90s they lost their way, too afraid to change with the times, offering us poorly made, uninspired garbage they figured we'd buy because it was functional enough and, heck, because we'd always bought a Ford or Buick. But what car companies like BMW and Volkswagen and others understood -- and Steve Jobs did too when it came to the computer and the phone -- was that a whole lot of us don't just want something tried and tested to get us there. That's the price of admission. What we really want is something new and amazing to get us excited.

There's hardly been a day that's gone by, from the first time I tapped on an Apple IIe in 1984, that I don't use an Apple product and feel like I'm living in the future I dreamed of as a kid.

Steve Jobs did that.

ON BRAINSTORMING.

On mornings where I want to write a post for my blog, I notice something funny happen. I turn on my Mac and begin brainstorming, usually by surfing to my favorite sites -- I read a New York Times article about the Arab Spring, another on Seth Godin's blog about hunters and farmers, one on HuffingtonPost about the recession, something on DListed about Siegfried & Roy blowing something or someone. An idea pops into my head, I go into my TypePad application and write a blog post about something completely unrelated to the Arab Spring, hunting and farming, the recession or sexually ambiguous (please) lion tamers.

What just happened? At least with me, I've discovered that simply initiating the act of brainstorming about anything helps me come up with an idea for something. In other words, I don't necessarily have to brainstorm about advertising to think up a really good ad idea. I just have to open up some part of my brain where a soup of ideas seem to be floating around.

It may also be why I can be tying my shoelaces, getting in an elevator or walking down the street and I suddenly get a blog idea about punctuation or peace in the Middle East.

I'm not sure what exactly to call this technique, if it actually is one. It's not quite letting your mind wander -- though that's helpful at times. It's more like a focused wandering. My ultimate goal -- a blog post, a direct marketing mailer, a magazine ad -- is back there, but up front I'm juggling seemingly incongruous ideas till -- plop -- an egg of an idea appears, as if out of nowhere.

I can't quite use today's post as a good example of this. This one was generated quite clearly from an article I read at inc.com about, well, brainstorming.