Influences: Choose your heroes, choose them well

Of course in a creative life, we all have influences - people we copy or emulate or just hold up in high regard. Sometimes they have been teachers but most times not. In reading an interview with author John Irving from 1986 he had this to say about his student days at the Iowa Writer's Workshop with Kurt Vonnegut and Vance Bourjaily: "I was not necessarily “taught” anything there as a student, although I was certainly encouraged and helped." And this is how I seem to regard the majority of my educational experiences as well. What seems to be able to be taught are literal and technical things - but what can never be taught are heart and spirit. An acquaintance of mine holds my writing almost equally in both reverence and disdain and vows she will one day write too. But she hasn't yet - at least not for anyone else to read. Maybe she has the talent, the technical where-with-all to get it done - but maybe not the heart and spirit. Those are things to be followed and respected, but cannot necessarily be learned.

So I thought today I'd go back, and look at the influences in my life, and see if I could uncover what my father has described my dyspepsia as: "He has had very good jobs through the years but does not like to work for someone else as he always thinks he knows more than they do. He has excelled in his positions but it is very hard for him to listen to what others are saying and to do what they request as he always thinks his ideas are better." My father described himself once as not one who fit in with his corporate management crowd because, as he in his own words stated, "I tell them what I think, not what I think they want to hear". And in his career he was rewarded as an electrical engineer with the most challenging projects in the firm - a Special Projects Engineer they called him, working on things like the Seattle Space Needle, St. Louis' Gateway Arch (designed by Eero Saarinen) and the Disney Haunted House in California. Other kids might have felt it was a big deal for their dad to have been a project engineer on the latest, greatest suburban shopping mall. But my dad did the Haunted House at Disneyland. How cool was that? And although I would never succumb to the lures of an electrical engineering job, certain parts of his career and behavior in that career stuck with me. His biggest accomplishments all had a picture associated with them. That stuck.

And I recall being influenced by Sr. Rose-Joseph at St. Mary's Catholic school in the second grade. In response to my seemingly fidgety and disinterested behavior in class, rather than reprimand me, she suggested that I could go into the coatroom during "quiet time" in the afternoon and prepare a science experiment for the class using my shiny new chemistry set with beakers and stuff you could set on fire or make Hollywood blood with. There were many things one could do with a chemistry set - but what I learned most from her, was that is was okay to be different - okay to be interested in things that other kids weren't. At least it was okay with some people - and that was okay by me.

Theatre, at the age of 13 was a huge influence as well. But not the kind you might think. As opposed to my being a big ham and lost in a world of fantasy, the theatre taught me a work ethic that did not discriminate between teenagers and adults. Director Bob Sonneville at Playcrafters Barn Theatre, a community theatre in Moline, Illinois would have no shenanigans from anyone on cast, be it drunk performances, late rehearsal arrivals or ad-libbed lines the actors thought were more inspired than the given script. The influence from this experience was that no matter what our age, were all still held responsible to what he considered professional behavior. And we were all treated as equals. This was not to be the same in school or the Boy Scouts. It's hard to learn to be lesser when you've already been encouraged to be more.

As I grew older school became less of an influence over real life. The work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, the Beatles, Bill Cosby as a story teller, Broadway musicals, literature, newspapers and eventually Todd Rundgren would infiltrate my suburban life. More would come later but these were pubescent adorations that scarcely any other teenager could share with me, except for maybe the Beatles (Thanks mom). I recall sometime around 1970 clutching my six dollars at the local department store and a copy of the Beatles "Abbey Road" album. My father told me not to waste my money as that record would be on sale in the dollar bin in six months. I chose not to head that advice and I don't believe that record has dropped in price since. Sometimes it's the things you don't do that stick with you - the advice not taken. Influence can work in two ways - for and against. There must be something good in that. That taught me choice.

Teachers from middle school had always recommended that I be a writer and so I did, in newspapers and magazines, from that time through university and on to to the present day. There has never been much money in that but it's an enjoyable spending of time - and then there are the reader's reactions, the high-fives in high school hallways, the Facebook kudos of today. There's an interesting oddity to being a writer. Nobody can quite figure out exactly what it is that you 'do'. But the analysis of that world just bores me shit-less. The breaking up and over-intellectualization of words, and groups of words and pages of words - as if professors have logically discovered some technical mathematics that will allow all of us to write like Shakespeare by following just a few simple rules. I find a great deal of literary criticism quite tedious. I must have better things to do with my time - like reading, and I've recently vowed to start reading more again. Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Tom Wolfe, Ayn Rand, Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski have done okay until now. Dan Brown anyone? I don't think so.

But I don't recall ever really looking up to any of the writers I worked with in the newspaper business. They were all sort-of news cats and I was writing satire and finding, Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken, The Firesign Theatre, Cheech and Chong and George Carlin to be the true journalists of the day - what John Stewart or Stephen Colbert may be today. But my influences were all well out of school almost as if few people in the school had much to teach me. With such a big world outside, why restrict oneself to the confines of those small academic words? None of my college professor's ever had a one-man show in New York, none were rock stars, and only one wrote a book of any note. One of my middle school teachers actually became a celebrated children's author. He was the one who encouraged me to write in the first place. He passed away in 2001 at the age of 61. I wish we had had Google before then.

But there was Tom. My best friend in high school. Tom was tall, good looking, sang in a barbershop quartet and was an artist - and chicks dug him. Recognized as the best artist in school, he had an easy-funky cartoon style that I spent hours on end trying to imitate, and never quite did. I have always said that any drawing skill I might have acquired has been a learned one as opposed to a natural one. My best work tends to be freehand and unstructured but teachers seemed to react most to things that were more disciplined and refined - and so I learned that, got better grades but never really became an artist in the traditional sense. My painting skills are dreadful. But Tom seemed to have been able to have done it all in a way that was 'commercial' enough for the critics to have pronounced it 'good'. And he had the pedigree for it as well. His mother had been an art teacher, his father, an advertising executive and his three brothers were all gainfully employed in the creative arts in some way. One a graphic designer, another, a toy designer and another, a lighting designer. Who knew you could find good jobs and live in nice houses with jobs like that? I didn't - until Tom. And so on my list of career influences, at least up to mid-university, Tom stands the highest. He and his family taught me what an art director was and what one avenue to the business of creativity was. They showed me a career which I might never have found without them. And Tom and I helped each other through that awkward stage of going from boys to men, with all the missteps, hilarity and heartbreak that one might expect of two idealistic kids, fresh off the farm. Somewhere, about 10 years into our professional careers, Tom and I would share a quiet moment on a dock at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin one evening and he would tell me that the difference in our careers up until that point, with mine at big agencies winning big awards, seemingly more successful than his at a smaller design company, was a difference of passion and drive. What I lacked in talent, he thought was made up for by my energy, ambition and selling skills. He confessed that a lot of his introduction to the artistic world had been a feeling that he had to be following in his family footsteps and not pursuing a true vocation. I, he thought, had taken it as a vocation. And at that point, I certainly had. Tom left graphic design and has built custom homes for any number of years now. So long as we find our vocation, nothing is lost. It's in not finding it, that we loose a part of ourselves - the ability to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

And higher standards were in no short supply as I entered university but I must say, I found no contemporaries in the graphic design department there. My roommates were my closest contemporaries and they were in the radio and TV and photography departments. The typography and design of Herb Lubalin, Saul Bass, and Helmut Krone decorated my dorm room walls but not a one of them had been introduced to me in school - rather, I bought a reasonably-expensive-for-a-college-kid subscription to Communication Arts magazine and began to teach myself - sort of like a kid going to a corn-fed college with a subscription to the Wall Street Journal thinking he was really going to be working on Wall Street one day. But I was the only kid in school who did that, because without it, I could never have withstood the technical drills we were run through without having first, fallen in love with the theory of it all. Bill Bernbach, Stan Richards and Leo Burnett would follow as influences, and I would work with one and another's ghost in my career to follow, but this was a nuts and bolts 'technical career' college, as my university explained it, and there was no 'advertising' program to be had. And so I enrolled as an 'independent scholar'. Armed with a full-ride scholarship from my state congressman, I took full advantage of having a politician behind me and proceeded to get busted for 'suspected marijuana smoking' the first week of school (with no conviction) and leveraged that into doing whatever I wanted in school for the next three years - the price being, that I had to interview business professionals in advertising and design fields and then write a curriculum for myself based on their recommendations and the courses available at the school, from no matter what department they might be from. To my knowledge, I was the only person in my, or many programs, to have chosen to have done that, but I was allowed to - just like Sr. Rose-Joseph allowed me to prepare my own experiments in the coat room while the other students took a break. I was on my way to learning that others would do whatever I needed, so long as I stated my case intelligently enough and enough times for someone to buy it. John Yack was our department head at SIU and although I can't recall a thing he ever taught me about design itself, I can tell you the almost military dedication he thrust on his assignments and the idea that it was going to be done to spec, on-time and with no BS was legendary. He also made us do 35 thumbnails for every design project before even allowing us to speak with him - a fantastic influence, I think every young designer or adman could follow. And a special note to Harlan H. Mendenhall, for giving me an "A" in public relations - I, having failed most of his weekly assignments and monthly drills - because I threw a free pizza and beer party for the Barnum and Baily Circus press corps. He taught me prioritization. "Nobody gives a shit if you fill out all the reports and don't get the job done", he said. "That pizza and beer party got the press out, and that's all we cared about!"

(For any aspiring adfolk, designers or writers who may be following this and wondering why I don't put links on all the people I mention, I can say this: "I can't be the only one doing all the frigging work around here!" Google em'!)

For me the working world proved a goldmine in influence. I was influenced by Mike Tesch and Ally and Gargano and Chiat/Day and Fallon/McElligot/Rice and Jerry Herring, Woody Pirtle, Pentagram, Sibley/Peteet, The Art Center in L.A. and too many more to count - but I ended up going to work for Stan Richards after more than cursory tutorials from Maxine Goldberg, Sharon Baca, Dave Dozier and Pat & Gail Beckman. And The Richards Group (TRG) was like I had just hit heaven on a low budget. Stan declared that my salary would need to be cut by about five thousand dollars, because I had lost my previous job and didn't really make that much anymore - in fact, I made nothing. When I told him I needed to think about it and spent the afternoon calling my old boss, Pat Beckman, and asking him if I should take the job, Beckman responded, "You moron! You're out of fucking work and Stan 'the man' just offered you a job? Take it you idiot! Before he changes his freeckin' mind!"

TRG turned out to be like working at the Library of Congress of advertising. All these guys, Glen Dady, Gary Gibson, Melinda Marcus - they were just words printed on pages for me - the pages of Communication Arts Magazine and that had been my college bible. And now I worked there. Who cares if I cleaned windows or not? I had made the grad school of creative degrees just by getting a job there. You can't believe how cool that was, and some days, I couldn't. But one of my greatest influences there was Pat Scullin. Pat is just a funny as hell writer and had once even held a job as an advance man for a circus.

Pat and I worked at TRG and then went on as partners at Bozell, on the American Airlines account. Most of the work on that business had been complete rubbish, thanks to our predecessors (save Artie Megibben) but the influences were there: from Ron Fisher, just being straight as an arrow on strategy and creative, to Mike Slosberg, swearing us off any advertising oriented storyboard routine and making us write screenplay introductions to 60 second television commercials - we got our dose. Other influences would be Ridley and Tony Scott and any other film director we could think of. Bad job? Not in a million. Pat and I got a Super Bowl commercial out of that deal, shot by Ridley's company. Was it any good? Who cares. We shot with Ridley friggin' Scott. Pat left that job, almost in the middle for a 'made to order' position, and I left shortly thereafter. Our American Airlines work was nominated for 4 CLIOS. We felt good, and moved on. Dennis McClain, later a partner there in what would become Temmerlin/McClain, also influenced me by telling me how he kept his shoes looking so new. "Buy four pairs of the same shoes", he said. "And then rotate them." I'm still thinking about that.

After that I moved to Earle Palmer Brown in DC. Doug McClatchy, who hired me, was a wonderful boss. He grew me up quickly and taught me how to lead a team. His replacement, Bill Westbrook, a famed CD at the time, could have been better. And so I learned about lesser influences at that time as well. My most positive influence at EPB was Joyce Rothenberg. Joyce was my client at Marriott and she taught how great client/agency relationships could yield fabulous work. We were partners, friends and just eager business people - and we did some of the proudest and most successful work of our careers up until that time.

At Leo Burnett the greatest influence, Leo himself, was already dead - and I can't say that any of my senior management were particularly inspiring in any creative way. I remember big fights about money and power and rumours of drug addiction and affairs amongst senior management and all the rot of a big ingrown institution - but not much about creativity. Those who had done well, the McDonald's creators of Michael Jordan and Larry Bird spots and the United Airlines people, never seemed to rise very high in management - but there was an influence there alright. The influence that told one to look outside that company for better influences. And so I did.

Enter CarlsonCreative, Inc. in Seoul, Korea. Towards the late 90s my big influences came from the dot-com boom and a raft of start-up advertising companies that were giving the big boys a run for their money. So my brilliant idea? Do the same thing, only do it in a place where nobody was doing it - and that turned out to be Seoul. But the problem in doing something that nobody's ever done before is that you run out of influences pretty quickly. You're on your own. And that means, that you must influence yourself. My lawyer was a great influence. He kept me on a business trajectory. And my financial planner was a huge influence. He approved our business plan. But after that, it was slim pickins. All my pals in the adbiz worked for big corporations and really had no idea what we were doing - and nobody else was doing what we were doing, not even the Koreans. But then, we became an influence. Our designer, Nam Mee Hyun won a New York Art Directors show award, and we rented a gallery to put the whole show up in Seoul. We were covered by ADWEEK magazine and even courted by some of the big agencies for purchase. But then we won business, big business, and continued to influence the industry. Going from looking for influences to being one was an interesting transition - but one, one can never retreat from.

These days my influences tend to be other people in business daring to tread their own path. Hugh MacLeod at Gapingvoid.com, Mads Monsen at his own studio, Nathalie at East&West, our client in Berlin and of course, Todd Rundgren, still, who has made an entire career out of treading his own path. So where I've gone is from my influences being further away to those being closer and much more tangible. Yes, of course, I'm influenced by Steve Jobs still, but that's almost like saying you're being influenced by Jesus these days. My point here, is that it's most important to have influences - secondly, to hopefully meet a few and learn from them, which I have - but most importantly, to eventually become one, and to become comfortable with that - and cluster those around you who are comfortable with that as well.

My father, and many others I'm afraid, take some issue with the idea that I have high standards and dislike working with those who don't. I've been told, more times than not, that I should dumb myself down a bit and I would get along better in our homogenized world. And where I've come out on the whole thing is that I'm just not very happy doing that. I'm a whole lot happier holding up my standards, holding up my heroes and trying to be better. It's not that I am better. I just want to be better. And that's what influences should encourage us all to do - every waking moment of our lives - Thanks Dad.