A random piece of advice isn't supposed to stay with you for years, and yet it does.
In this episode we zig and zag into India (where I lived for a chunky part of my life) and then into New Zealand, where I had to start anew and with little or no help from anyone.
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Re-release: How Random Pieces Of Advice From Friends And Bosses Help Me Stay Focused
Original: How Random Pieces Of Advice From Friends And Bosses Help Me Stay Focused
Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
As you go through life, you read a lot of books, you attend courses, you go several levels up, but often the people around you, they give you good advice as well.
And today's podcast is slightly different in the sense that I'm going back in time with three different stories. The first starts with a boss that I once had and his name is Adi Pocha.
When I first started out in advertising, I considered myself to be a lot better.
Then I was being treated at that point in time in the sense that I left my first job Which was at Leo Burnett advertising I went to the second job. I Complaint to my bosses all the time that it wasn't getting the stuff that I really wanted to do and I decided to leave the second job as well which is when Adi came along.
He did a little workshop with us on the weekend and I decided I didn't want to do print anymore I wanted to just do TV commercials which is what Adi was doing.
So I joined Adi at this company script shop and of course I was hopeless. I didn't see that way but I was hopeless. One day Adi gave me a job to write a script and I said I don't think I can do this.
And he said, “Come with me.” This office was located in kind of the basement, so we walked through the corridor, we went outside. As you'd expect, there are a lot of people walking up and down the street.
And he said to me, “If I were to give 20 rupees, that's the Indian currency.” So he says, “If I were to give 20 rupees to that guy, and I asked him to write a script for me, what would he say.”
Even with that offer of 20 rupees, he would say, “I can't do that.” And you're saying exactly the same thing to me, and you're getting a salary that's way above that 20-rupee mark.
What's the difference between that random person and you?
And it struck me at that moment that what Arie was telling me was that pretty much everyone on the planet can say, “I can't do that.” Essentially what they're saying is we are not willing to put in the effort to learn a little bit, to ask a few questions, to do the work that's required to solve that puzzle.
And that kind of stuck in my head because every time I am faced with a situation where I go, “Can't be bothered.” That's when the episode pops in my head.
Now, this is not true for everything in life. I'm never going to build sheds, I'm never going to molones, I am never going to do a lot of stuff. Those are really in the Canby-Bothered List.
But there are things that are related to my work, there are things that make my life better, and I say, I can't do that. And that's when I remember Adize Words. So that's the first story. That first story told me that I have to dig further.
That I can't just say, “I can't do this,” and throw my hands up in the air, because anybody on the street can do exactly the same thing. So one makes me different from them. And that was lesson number one, which takes us to lesson number two.
In India, people don't leave home when they're 16.
They tend to leave home shortly after they get married. If they do. Anyway, I was probably around 23, and I was still at home at my parents' house. And the way I was running my business was I had a little desk in the corridor of one of the houses a Windows PC, a 386 with 3.5″ floppy drives, which is about the time I decided to move to one office and then finally to this office in Alvarus House.
Alvarus House was an old school building and it had very large rooms. So I used to sit right at the far end of the room and nine tenths of the room was completely empty.
But that's how every single room was built.
To my incredible fortune, everyone in their room was either a photographer, a designer, or involved in some sort of creative or advertising space. And the guy who was diagonally opposite me, his name was Tivina Ryan.
He was and probably still is a graphic designer and was once the art director for El Magazine. Then I was still drawing cartoons and one of my assignments was to draw the back panel the re-appanel for a newspaper.
The panel consisted of two parts, one was the graphic of the cartoon that I used to do in the someone wrote the script, but the guy who wrote the script had to do it before I could draw the graphic for it.
And he could have done a week's worth of work, two weeks worth of work, three weeks worth of work, and send it in advance, and then I would have time to do the drawings.
But no, he would insist on submitting it just on deadline, which meant that I had to get the script from him, do the cartoons, and then get it way across town.
This is not as simple as it sounds because I had to get to the train station, get on the train, get to the other side, walk from the train station to the newspaper, and then given the cartoon and I did do this five days a week.
After a while I got cheesed off with this whole routine.
And I guess it started to show in my work because one day TV and I called me a side and says, “Why am I seeing such bad work in the newspaper these days.” He was referring to my work, of course.
And I said, “Well, it's too much trouble. This is the problem. They pay me too little and he stopped me mid-sentence.” And he said, “You know, I know this and you know this. But the general public, they don't know it. All they see is your work. And when they see your work, they judge you based on the work that you put out.”
So you have two options here.
You're either going to do good work or you're going to do nothing at all. And that was the second piece of advice that I got. It wasn't about perfection. Don't get on the perfection bandwagon here.
Rather, it was about not being sloppy. When you are sloppy, you know what you're up to. You know that you could do better work within the deadline and not be a perfectionist of any kind and still get really good work across.
And I was using all of those excuses. Yet again this is the kind of thought that comes to my mind every time I want to take a shortcut, every time I want to be sloppy.
I remember what TV said to me and TV said they don't know. They don't know what's happening to you, they don't know what situation you're in, all they can see is you work.
Which is why when I'm writing an article or creating a podcast, those words come into mind. It doesn't matter if you're tired, it doesn't matter if it's for you.
It doesn't matter whatever the reasons you think are important because the person listening to this podcast like you are listening right now is going to judge it based on the quality of the content.
It's going to base it on the way I speak. It's going to base it on the music that's in it. That's how they're going to judge it. Which of course brings us to the third piece of advice.
And this is in a different country in New Zealand.
Back in 2000 I got to New Zealand. But I had almost no connection here. The only connection I had was through a website called The Wise and Himer. And The Wise and Himer was a forum online where got uniced, showed up and there would have chats and talk about stuff.
And there was this guy Wayne Log. And if you've been listening to this podcast long enough, you'll know that I've featured Wayne in the past.
But Wayne got me a mobile phone before I got here. He got me a PO box. He paid for that. He rented a house for me, paid the down payment for all of that stuff.
Without knowing me at all, we just me interacting with him on the forum. And then he came to the airport, he picked me up, I stated his house for a week.
And then it was me who became like a baby.
I was following him all around, I was asking for endless amounts of favors. And I wanted the answer to all of the questions. Of course I did because I'd never been to New Zealand.
I didn't know anyone here. I just was brand new. And I kind of became to depend on him being around. At one point he said to me, “Okay, I've helped you a lot. I've set up stuff for you. Now you have to go out there and you have to get your own work.”
And the precise words he used was “pound the pavement”.
You said you have to go and pound the pavement. Shortly after he said “pound the pavement” I had a job. Then quit that job rather. They had no work for me.
So I had to quit. And then I went around trying to get work for cartoons. And you don't know where you're going to find this. People often ask, “Where do I find clients.” Well, you don't know.
You have to go out. You have to speak to people. You have to figure out this stuff. You can't sit behind a computer screen. And it was 2000. I was lucky.
I couldn't sit behind a computer screen unlike today where everybody thinks, OK, I will find this group online and everybody will come to my website and everything will be hunky-dory.
No, this was 2000. We couldn't do it. We had to pound the pavements. There's no we either. It was just me. And so I would go out there and meet with one art director, another art director, advertising agencies, graphic agencies.
Everything that I thought could somehow be connected with cartooning.
I met with schools where I could possibly teach all of those situations and the three words stuck in my head, which is pound the pavement. Not that it got any results to begin with.
But one day I walked into this agency and I showed them some of my work and they said, “Okay, can you do this little bit for us.” And that's what I did. And then a little bit became a medium bit, and a medium bit became a big bit.
And in a week's time, or maybe a couple of weeks, I was able to bill them over $5,000. That was amazing. I would have never gotten to those places if I sat behind my computer waiting for something to happen.
It was the same 3-8-6, that same 3-8-6, which was in the car door of my parents' place. I took it all the way to New Zealand, 40 kilos of it, that's almost 70, 80 pounds. But I couldn't depend on that screen, I had to go and pound the pavement.
So there you go, three pieces of advice from different people.
The first piece of advice was from my boss, Adi Pocher, and he said, “Anyone can say, I can't.” So what makes you different. From that I learned that I have to do what it takes to make that content to Ken.
The second one was from Art Director TV Narayan and his advice was that whatever your excuses, the public doesn't care. All they want is the good stuff that you put out. You cannot be sloppy. No one's asking you to be a perfectionist, but you cannot be sloppy. Your reasons don't matter. You cannot be sloppy.
And then the third one, which was from Wayne Logh, and it was pound the pavement.
And I think if there's one thing that you want to take from here, it is the third one, which is pound the pavement because the internet has trained us that somehow it is easier, that somehow we can hide beyond that screen, that somehow we don't have to speak to 100 people, that somehow we don't have to call 100 people email a thousand people, we just have to go on Instagram or Facebook or just do this one thing and then magical happen.
And it doesn't happen. So if you ask me of all of those three pieces of advice, would I rate one over the other. Well, yes, I would. I know it's unfair, but I would.
And that one thing is pound the pavement. If you want to find someone, if you want to find something, you have to call people right to people, Get out there if you can.
I know it's not always possible in today's world, but if you can't get out there. And that's how you will get things done, not by sitting behind your screen and getting things done. So Wayne's advice 20 years ago, 21 years ago, is still the advice that I would give to you today, pass on to you today.
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