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At any cocktail party, neighborhood get-together or client meetings, as soon as people find out that I'm a creative, I invariably hear the same thing: "You know, there are really only two kinds of creatives..." An account guy said to me on my first day at a new agency, "There are good ones and bad ones. The good ones," he said, " do what I tell them to do. And the bad ones don't." And then he fixed me with a steely stare and asked, "Which one are you?" A college art student took a different approach. She said, "On the one side, there are creatives who are true and honest and sincere - who listen to an inner voice and toil for a higher purpose. And on the other side," and here she looked me up and down with a disgust I found impressive for one so young, "are worthless hacks who sold out so fast and so long ago that they wouldn't know great work if it bit them on the ass." I didn't stick around to tell her which one I was. A client once divided creatives up this way: "There are the ones who just want to do something cool for their portfolios. And then there are the ones who have a clue about my brand." I remember him sighing after he said that and adding, "At least, I think there are ones out there who have a clue about my brand." I'll add one more pair. On the one hand, there's the kind of creative who has devised elaborate rituals and programs for generating new ideas. This is the guy who has little exercises - or the guy who ends up writing the books about little exercises - that help generate new ideas. This guy tends to be really calm because he has a system for being creative. He doesn't have to worry; if he doesn't have any ideas, he just has to keep trying exercises until he does. The other kind is the more frantic, more mercurial creative. This is the guy who lives in fear that the last idea he had - no matter who brilliant it was - was the last idea he'll ever have. This is the kind of creative who believes that his whole career has been built on being hit, out of the blue, by bolts of lightning that are pure genius. He feels he has no control over his creativity, and how nervous this makes him is directly related to how many creditors he has knocking on his door or how many account people he leaves in tears. Who's right? Everybody is. There really are two kinds of creatives, but both of them are in every creative I've ever met. The order-taker and the back-talker. The artist and the hack. The clued-in and the clueless. Mr. Process and Mr. Inspiration. In fact, I've only experienced one time when there weren't two types of creatives. An old art director at another agency and I had just been introduced to a couple of new interns. "There are only tow kinds of creatives," he said to me unexpectedly. "Those who will sleep with me and those who won't." Because by that method, there really was only one kind of creative. |
