Klout is one of the worst ideas ever put online. Klout annoys me for the same reason that search engine optimization annoys me: It’s an enormous amount of effort designed to game an arbitrary and often-changing system. Imagine if all that time went into actually making interesting things, or caring about the people around you.

- Tom Scott, founder of Klouchbag.com

via Digiday

And that’s what we should be doing.
Not worrying about changing the product.
The price, the quality, the size, the shape, the name, the distribution.
Not changing the facts.
But changing the direction they’re viewed from.
Bernbach, McCabe, Ally, Wells, Lois, Saatchi, and Webster knew that.
And Shakespeare knew that, 400 years ago.
He said “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

That’s our job.
Thinking.

- Dave Trott, Control Context and You Control the Mind

In all my years in the business, everyone has joked about the tempermental copywriter. But there’s a reason that the writers are so abrasive. Where the art professionals may get annoying requests for color changes and logo size increases, they essentially have a skill that is obviously beyond every account executive or marketing manager. An AE can ask for an art change, but most can never hope to go into Photoshop and makes those changes themselves.

But everyone can write. And thus is born the delusion of grandeur that makes everyone believe that because they can write, they are qualified as a writer.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

- Bob Knorpp, DeathByAdvertising.com

And if I’m being brutally honest [copywriting]‘s not really writing. It’s more about taking some pre-digested copy points, realigning some verb noun agreements and sprucing it all up with a well-chosen adverb or adjective.

It’s not something a well-trained monkey couldn’t do. And if you’ve spent anytime inside an ad agency you know that metaphor has not been stretched.

- Rich Siegel, http://roundseventeen.blogspot.com/ (congrats on three years)

A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb may play another ball from the same place. Penalty, one stroke.

- Richmond Golf Club in Surrey, England (1940)

via

Because there’s nothing as perfect as the initial idea. And the only reason I write and direct is to protect the writing, because that’s what’s most precious…

You can be as good as anyone that ever lived. If you can read, you can learn everything that anyone ever learned. But you’ve got to want it.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/man-at-his-best/q-and-a/ricky-gervais-interview-0212-2#ixzz1kyRHVsfZ

- Ricky Gervais, Esquire Magazine

Soccer is, in other words, both romantic and tragic, and the soft agony of a bad game is an inescapable part of this. You spend all your time hoping something will happen, and it never does. You get a surge of adrenaline every time the ball flies anywhere near the goal, and you’re always disappointed. But then, every once in a while, James McFadden will score from 30 yards at the Parc des Princes to give Scotland an impossible 1-0 lead over France, and a ponderous game will go all kinds of nervous-breakdown crazy. And for fans it’s practically an out-of-body experience — not just because it was a great play, but because it was so unlikely that this match could have been graced with a great play to begin with.

- Brian Phillips, via Grantland.com

- Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted…

- Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity…The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure.

- If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.

Amen.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

- David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College commencement address