When I was growing up, creativity wasn’t as important
Here’s an interesting video I found from Beyond Madison Avenue.
Sir Ken Robinson delivers an entertaining and captivating lecture on how creativity should be treated just as important as literacy in our education system.
Here is one of my favourite parts of his lecture, which I thought reflected how my friends and I were growing up:
… kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same as being creative. What we do know is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They’ve become frightened of being wrong and we run our companies like this by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re not running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make and the resuls is that we’re educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artist - the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it.
April 19th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
So, it looks like you’re teaching yourself creative advertising? Or are you taking classes?
Going to a great school (you forgot to mention The University of Texas at Austin
) helps in that it helps lay a very strong foundation. But, at the same time, some of the ECDs out there were self-taught. Alex Bogusky didn’t even go to college. Gerry Graf was working as a stocktrader (from ihaveanidea).
Another thing about the advertising industry is that it’s not always glamorous. Here’s a link to what Geoffrey Roche had to say…
http://www.thepreparedmind.com/pm/index.php/2005/04/20/gd-industry-stop-eating-your-young/
April 20th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Hey David,
Thanks for taking the time to visit my blog. I really appreciated the comment and links you left. I’ve added UT in my blogroll and I’m thinking about writing an entry later about the not-so-glamourous part of advertising. Jancy’s book “Pick Me” was the first source that told me the harsh realities juniors will experience, so the link you sent actually reminded me that I should write about this on my blog, so thanks
I do believe that going to a great school will give you a very strong foundation, and I was considering switching to another school, but I only have a couple of credits left until I earn my BA. (And Canada’s ad schools don’t really seem up to par with those in the States and other countries.) But this is what I like about the ad industry: everyone can get their start in their own way.