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My Thoughts Enclosed…Rb

Have to admit, I’m kinda sad. Today and tomorrow the best web/tech conference in Europe is on in Paris… and for the first time in 4 years it’ll be without me. Since I had a good part in the sponsorship of the conference by Microsoft, the fact that I’m not even going this year makes the difference even bigger.

The first time I went to Le Web was in 2006. The conference just changed name from Les Blogs to Le Web 3 and MSN UK had been a sponsor for the first 2 edition of Les Blogs with Windows Live Spaces. With Le Web 3 we decided to sponsor from the EMEA budget and link it to Windows Live in general and not just Spaces… it wasn’t just about blogging anymore so that made sense. If you were there in 2006 you might remember that little piece of network cable in your welcome bag with which you could win a smartphone at our booth, it worked rather well I’ll tell ya

© Peter Forret

That was where I met Hugh MacLeod for instance (where he did this interview), our paths would cross quite often again… especially in Paris.

In 2007 we were back, this time with shared sponsorship from the European and the French team of Microsoft. This was the year that Le Web became big, like really big. It was a always a good conference, but in 2007 it changed into big. Hans Rosling, Philippe Starck, Yossi Vardi, … just look at some of the videos I selected back then and see for yourself. Made a lot of good new contacts that year, unfortunately our presence (Microsoft’s I mean) wasn’t really good that year.

Last year Microsoft BizSpark took over the lead in the sponsorship, just like it’s the case this year. And I made sure we had the Blue Monster in Paris, with Hugh as our guest. Good fun, I’ll tell you that much.

© Dennis Howlett

Good thing about Le Web though is that the event is broadcasted Live, check out this page from tomorrow morning to follow the livestream from the main stage (via Ustream). Or check out the Le Web iPhone app.

And let’s hope I can make it back to Paris next year. Greetings to all my friends in Paris and good luck to Loic and Geraldine for what will be most certainly another great conference

An old drawing but one that will forever appeal to me. I know I am a dreamer and an idealist and somehow this cartoon describes me.

Image Credit: Hugh Macleod

He then continues:

We are here to find mea­ning. We are here to help other peo­ple do the same. Everything else is secon­dary. We humans want to believe in our own spe­cies. And we want peo­ple, com­pa­nies and pro­ducts in our lives that make it easier to do so. That is human nature. Pro­duct bene­fit doesn’t excite us. Belief in huma­nity and human poten­tial exci­tes us. Think less about what your pro­duct does, and think more about human poten­tial. What sta­te­ment about huma­nity does your pro­duct make? The big­ger the sta­te­ment, the big­ger the idea, the big­ger your brand will become. It’s no lon­ger just enough for peo­ple to believe that your pro­duct does what it says on the label. They want to believe in you and what you do. And they’ll go elsewhere if they don’t. It’s not enough for the cus­to­mer to love your pro­duct. They have to love your pro­cess as well. Peo­ple are not just get­ting more deman­ding as con­su­mers, they are get­ting more deman­ding as spi­ri­tual enti­ties. Bran­ding is a spi­ri­tual exer­cise. These are The New Rea­li­ties, this is the Spi­ri­tual Repu­blic we now live in. The soul can­not be outsour­ced. Either get with the pro­gram or hire a con­sul­tant in Extinc­tion Mana­ge­ment. No vision, no busi­ness. Your life from now on pivots squa­rely on your vision of human potential.

The above choice is handed to us again and again in different situations. Knowing that the choice exists and price of each makes it easier for us to choose.

At Karma Routes, we give you feedback on your leadership style trend.

Gapingvoid

Nobody cares.  Do it for yourself.

Lovely tip from Ignore Everybody, Hugh MacLeod’s new book that’s full of refreshing and brutally honest advice on harnessing creativity in the business of living.  More -

If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

Hugh is a cartoonist.  His medium?  Business cards, of course.  What a great way to turn tired and boring into clever and snarky and so true it hurts!   But remember, we’re accepting the pain, so it doesn’t actually hurt. 

Merit can be bought. Pas­sion can’t.

Look at his art on gapingvoid.   I’ll wait.  

When your dreams become rea­lity, they are no lon­ger your dreams.

Then read the first 25% of Ignore Everybody here.   Now go eat a cookie.  Do it for yourself. 

But don’t ignore me.

-Linda 

A fantastic print by Hugh MacLeod, one of the most original marketing minds, has been decorating my home since September. Anyone who is familiar with Hugh’s blog Gapingvoid is also familiar with Hughtrain (pictured below).

Yesterday the artist made this interesting tweet, which inevitably got my attention.

If Hughtrain is my advertising, is “The market for something to believe in is infinite” my slogan? If that’s what my brand stands for — an idea not at all bad — it seems I have lived up to it pretty well by paying for the advertisement to boost belief in myself. Talk the talk, walk the walk, y’know.

Be it how it may, the piece of art truly inspires me.

One has two retirements in one’s career: Creative retirement precedes the actual one. The Question is how soon it occurs in one’s life – Sujith Nair, Sr. Con, EY

I guess life is not about how far you go in one dimension but about how many dimensions you add to it – - Sujith Nair, Sr. Con, EY

The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props – Hugh Macleod

Descubro en Ptqk_Blogzine (¡todo un descubrimiento por cierto!), la guía definitiva para superar los problemas existenciales, de la mano del genial Hugh MacLeod. En este “manual de auto-ayuda para creativos contemporáneos“, encontraréis las respuestas que tanto ansiabais, escritas a la manera de un maestro Yoda digerido y regurgitado por las fauces del gran consumo. La primera de sus reglas es:  “Ignora a toda el mundo” y hay otras 36 que te aseguran, si no la receta de la felicidad, por lo menos un cóctel de lucidez con unas gotitas de sarcasmo. “El poder nunca se da. El poder se toma“; “Lo peor de ser creativo es acostumbrarte a serlo” o “Ser pobre da por culo” son algunos de los lemas de MacLeod. Agita la coctelera y disfruta.

Aquí os dejo algunas de sus perlas y aquí podéis leer las 37 reglas completas.

Y mi favorita, que traduzco rudimentariamente: “Cada vez que me enfrento a la oscura realidad de la vida, siento la urgente necesidad de vivir experiencias llenas de sentido, con mis marcas favoritas“. Uau.

I’m reading a new book about creativity called Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod.

Hugh MacLeod is a cartoonist who began doodling on the back of business cards in 1997. Many many doodles later, he published Ignore Everybody and continues to publish a great blog called gapingvoid.

So far my favorite chapter is #6:

#6 Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

So true! Too often I hear people say “I’m not creative,” but is that really true?

Everyone is born creative. However sometime between kindergarten and today, perhaps during the tumultuous time called adolescence, doubt creeps in and we may think we aren’t creative. Fear kicks in. Our comparative brain decides that what we created wasn’t as good as what Johnny created. Creativity stops.

I find myself doing this – stopping the creative process because I think that I’m not good at something. To combat this thought, I’ve been reading about creativity, writing a blog and dabbling in photography.

We didn’t fear crayons in kindergarten, so why fear them now? 

Want to create something great?

• Believe that you are creative
• Follow your passion
• Put in the hours

And don’t forget to grab your crayons.

#32 on Hugh’s list of creativity tips: Remain frugal. The less you can live on, the more chance your idea will succeed.

Living a frugal life makes it possible for you to follow your passion and create something great. So be frugal and create.

What do you create? Please leave a Comment.

The view from Hugh MacLeod from his gapingvoid.com world:

Have you read his new best-seller book?

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

You can buy limited edition prints from Hugh’s gallery website.
They originally started out as drawings on business cards.

Muito bom esse cartoon do Gapingvoid. Uma maneira muito divertida de te relembrar que você pode estar tentando vender alguma coisa bem improvável de ser comprada.

Nesses casos, o melhor a fazer, não é se esforçar mais, mas mudar o produto e/ou o cliente.

Fácil falar, muito difícil de conseguir fazer. Em especial quando o meteoro que você vende, foi feito por você mesmo.

cartoons drawn on the back of business cards by Hugh McLeod

One of the perks of being unemployed is that you actually have time for a few things that you didn`t really have time for before… like reading books for instance, so that`s what I`m doing… well one of the things I`m doing – looking for work is another one One book I read a couple of days ago was Hugh MacLeod`s upcoming “Ignore Everybody” of which I had received an advance copy thanks to Hugh and the fine people at Penguin Group.

Long time ago – while reading something on Hugh`s blog – I stumbled onto a series of posts/writings that were all tagged with “How to be creative”. It was a good read, so finding out it the content was also available on a free PDF on changethis.com made it even better. More than 1 million downloads don`t lie of course, I still have a printed copy of that PDF right here. When Hugh mentioned he got a book deal on this which involved writing some extra chapters I was a bit sceptical though. I totally loved the series but all of that stuff had come about quite organically, there`s a difference when you write things when you think about them basically whenever you feel like it… or when you have to write chapters for a book. Hugh proved me wrong about being sceptical, there`s now way you could tell which chapters where there first or which ones are new, the book is rock solid. It`s an easy read in the typical style of Hugh MacLeod – unique, smart and funny – and with a good dose of cartoons in them. My favorite one in the book? Especially while jobhunting… is this one (from 2006):

So pre-order the book now, you won`t regret.

I’m the proud owner of a limited edition Hugh MacLeod print.  It’s now sitting above my desk and has a lot to say about heroism, I think.

Like the choice between wolf and sheep, every day we choose between hero and bystander.  Heroism can come in tiny form as well as enormous.  Whenever our internal set of values sees something that jars with them, we have a choice.  Do we correct the situation, regardless of risk, or do we stand by, allowing it to continue?

• When you see a kid at school call someone gay, does that register as wrong to you?  What do you do?
• When you see someone fallen on a railway track, is that a bad situation?  What do you do?
• When you are told you have to marry someone at age eleven, does that seem wrong to you?  What do you do?
• When someone at work is stealing small amounts of money, how does that sit with you?  What do you do?

With heroism comes risk.  With bystanding comes guilt.
Choose one or the other with great care.

An Interview with Hugh MacLeod, Cartoonist

Lateral Action asks Hugh MacLeod some questions. He’s the cartoonist and the man behind the Gapingvoid blog. I particularly liked what he had to say about the belief that artists that market themselves are “evil”:

“Artists cannot market” is complete crap. Warhol was GREAT at marketing. As was Picasso and countless other “Blue Chips”. Of course, they’d often take the “anti-marketing” stance as a form of marketing themselves. And their patrons lapped it up.

The way artists market themselves is by having a great story, by having a “Myth”. Telling anecdotal stories about Warhol, Pollack, Basquiat, Van Gogh is both (A) fun and (B) has a mythical dimension… if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have had movies made about them. The art feeds the myth. The myth feeds the art.

(Edited)

This post is about somebody I’ve had the pleasure to chat with. You can find Tim Clague at www.timclague.com though he hasn’t seen fit yet to join twitter.  Tim’s blog has proved a constant source for me, and I’ll be sharing with you some of my personal favourites.

Here I present one of my favourite of his films, It feels like a dramatisation of my brain.

 PS

In Tims blog dated Thursday, February 16, 2006. he stats that all writers feel this way about the short. not sure if i should feel good or bad about that!

(Part of) The Blue Monster back story. The invention of Hugh

Fresh from the framing store, it’s one of just 85 signed Hugh McLeod prints from the first in a series of limited edition prints he’s doing. This was always my favorite cartoon of his. I used to have a b/w printout of it on my office wall. It pretty much sums up how I feel generally. And I love the wildly optimistic yet utterly truthful tone. The text reads: THE MARKET FOR SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN IS INFINITE.

Hugh McLeod is a force of nature. I first came across his website back in 2000 and have read his blog for years now and have gotten to know him fairly well. He has a book coming out this year. And I predict it will be a smash hit. You will buy a copy at the airport one day. I promise you that. Hugh has single-handedly created a culture around his art and his ideas. And it’s about to pay off.

And apparently Hugh is available for interesting poster-making opportunities I found out recently. Contact him if you have an idea you’d like to see brought to life in his truly inimitable style.