NORTHERN PLANNER

 New T-shirt from Howies that I would buy if I needed a new t-shirt but I don't and want to spend money on doing rather than owning or wearing.

Anyway, the reason is I like the sentiment:

We like wooly.
We like ‘a-bit-out-there’.
Or slightly ‘away-with-the-fairies…’
Those are interesting and limitless ways of thinking.
The genius that comes from dumb.
The crazy smart and the stupid good.

Life in Cloud Cuckoo Land ain’t at all baaaad.

Amen and for the day job especially. There's an art to knowing when to move, knowing the point when the gently bubbling soup of half formed ideas is beginning to coagulate into something really good and really right. You can't explain it yet, you don't know how to put it into a few words and trying to do so before would have killed it – it's just emerged.

 Now's the time to apply some compression and logic to make it work. Not too soon. not too late. Call it the Goldilocks moment if you like – from being open to everything to making something work.

There are few moments of inspiration, you don't get many Eureka moments, you have to work hard, read lots of stuff, have lots of conversations, play around, act and think stupid. Density of madness.

I used to work with an account director who used to drive me mad. A soon as you uttered a half formed thought about direction, you'd get, "What would the ad be?". I didn't bloody know,  I didn't know it was an ad yet, I didn't even know if it was worth pursuing, but interesting stuff us usually fuzzy and complex and should remain that way for a while.

One thing to remember as a planner, which to be honest I could get better at, is to make something, or find and example. Your best stuff makes sense to you , but it can be really hard to persuade other people without examples or something that shows what you mean. Find what the people around you tend find helpful and do that.

That's the worse thing you can do with creatives too, killing an idea before you've had a chance to live with it a bit. You have to let stuff breathe for a while.