1. Climb Your Own Mount Everest 

Like I said in “Ignore Everybody”, everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.

Some kind of personal heroic quest, as it were.

For me, that meant getting good as a cartoonist. For others, it could have something to do with starting a business, getting a PhD in Linguistics, becoming the most kick-ass divorce lawyer in town or learning to play violin. It doesn’t matter what it is, what matters is that it’s a manifestation of our higher selves; it’s the one big deed that we want to be remembered for. It’s the thing you need to do if you want to eventually take leave of this world, knowing you managed to play your best game.

Most people don’t try to climb their own Mount Everest, or at least, they give up on it far too early. They get busy with jobs, family, TV, shopping, eating tacos, drinking beer and all the usual stuff.

And most people who end up never climbing it, do so because they didn’t realize it was there in the first place. Admitting that it’s there is a scary and uncertain business. Admitting that it’s there is half the battle.

2. "Learn How to Invent"

This is the advice I witnessed the esteemed CNN news correspondent, David Gergen give a small group of young entrepreneurs at a talk in Boston not long ago:

“Learn how to invent, that’s the only advice I really have to give you.”

Simple? Yes. Easy? No.

Gergen is a very clever and accomplished fellow. He could have suggested much more that evening; he basically chose not to. Why was that?

Because once you learn how to invent, the rest of the world’s opportunities open up to you in Glorious Technicolor. If don’t learn, there’s not much anyone can do to help you, except maybe help you lift some random rock to crawl under.

Harsh but true.

The good news is, you don’t need to be Albert Einstein, Picasso or some other god-genius to invent something. You can be anybody, and you can do it anywhere. On the job or after hours. Working as a cog in a big corporation or painting unknown masterpieces in a garret. Scale doesn’t matter, mindset matters. Decision matters.

To invent means to create a thing of beauty, large or small, in a place where beauty was lacking.

3. Don't Wait to be Told What to Do, Don't Wait for Permission

The world will always conspire to make you less than you are. Even the well-intentioned parts of it. The question is, do you let it?

You have to decide.

Generally, the real world doesn’t go out of its way to tell you to go create something useful and/or meaningful. Usually, it just tells you to keep your nose down and don’t rock the boat. The fact that the latter could quickly destroy your soul in the process is irrelevant to them.

So I’m afraid it’s you who must take the initiative; I am equally afraid that it’s you who has to take the heat if things go terribly wrong. The good news is, things don’t always go wrong forever. And a few bumps along the way is the best education known to man. The only alternative is crawling under that aforementioned rock. And you don’t want that. No.

4. Don't Wait to be Discovered

Before the Internet came along, I spent a lot of time sending my cartoons off to publishers, hoping to get the fish to bite. They didn’t, for the most part. Sure, I got a few nibbles here and there, but not nearly enough to support myself spiritually nor professionally.

So I did what all young, renounced starving artists do, I got a day job. In advertising.

Yes. It sucked. And quickly.

As much as I tried my best in that very interesting industry, I was never very good at it. Oh, well, live and learn. At least it gave me a GREAT education, and I met a lot of smart, lovely people along the way.

Luckily, the Internet came along and, no longer willing to wait around to be discovered by some hypothetical big-shot, I just started publishing my cartoons on my blog, gapingvoid.

Hey, it worked (EVENTUALLY).

gapingvoid became a pretty big success story. With the help of my business partner, Jason Korman and our team, I now make a great living, doing what I love, with a fantastic fan base. Happy ending.

My advice is, you’re much better off starting something yourself and, if you still need help scaling it, only then do you take it to the guys with the big offices.

Don’t go there until you don’t really need them anyway, until you can leave money on the table any time. Otherwise you’ll be little more than fresh meat to them.

5. "Good Ideas Have Lonely Childhoods."

This was the main thesis of Ignore Everybody: That great ideas don’t start out life being that obvious to most people. It’s only in retrospect that they take on that delicious, million-dollar obviousness that we all know, love and read about in the papers.

But knowing that it’s perfectly normal to feel isolated and ignored in the early days a new idea’s life, simply makes it more likely that it will happen (or at the very least, much easier to bear).

It’s when you feel “This should not be happening”, that’s when you’re most likely to give up.

People are far more willing to put up with unpleasant experiences, like the loneliness of a good idea, if they think it’s a normal part of being human.

Losing your shirt in the stock market is far worse if you’re the only one doing it. If millions of you lose out because of some massive world event causes the Dow Jones to plummet, that’s much easier to bear individually.

Same with childbirth. If you were the only woman who ever felt pain doing it, it would be a problem. But you’re not, so it’s not, either.

Some things are really just bigger than we are, so there’s no point taking it personally.

Therefore, when the first pangs of lonely isolation hit you when you embark on your life’s great adventure, just remember that you’re actually not really alone; that you’re swimming in a great sea of normal…

And that it’s wonderful.

6. Avoid the Watercooler Gang

This was another tidbit from Ignore Everybody. In most organizations, not everybody is out to “make a dent in the universe”. Sadly, some people are only there for the paycheck. Their job is just a means to an end, not an expression of anything truly meaningful.

A lot of these people may be smart, nice, happy and productive enough, but be careful letting their worldview seep into yours. One day you’ll look back on your life and realize your life could’ve been so much more than just a stack of pay slips.

But by then it’ll be too late, sadly. By then a big part of you will feel empty inside, and will mourn bitterly forever.

7. Have Boundaries

The successful, creative life needs to know clearly where lies the red line, the one that separates what you’re willing to do from what you’re not.

Regardless of what specific compromises one is asked to make in order to pursue one’s dream, the likelihood is that there will be a lot of them; that they will be never-ending.

Personally, I’m more than happy to do work for large corporations, i.e. cartoon commissions. I am unwilling to do work I despise, no matter how much they’re paying. Luckily, I let my clients know this well in advance. It’s give and take.

It's too easy to let the easy path boil your life slowly, like a frog. Choosing not to is harder than it looks. Be forewarned.

8. "Be Secret, and Exult" –W.B. YEATS

This quote by William Butler Yeats is one of my all-time favorites. To paraphrase badly– Savor obscurity while it last, be joyful in the process; you’ll never have that opportunity to create such new work, new life, ever again.

It’s hard to be creative when everybody’s watching you, with everybody expecting ever more unlikely miracles from you. Fame and fortune opens a lot of doors, true, but it’s pretty good at closing some others, as well. Be careful.

9. Learn from Jiro

The best way to not suck is to MASTER something useful. Obvious, yes?

“I fell in love with my work and gave my life to it.” — Jiro Ono.

Like everybody else I know, I give a lot of thought to “Success”. What does it take to be successful, prosperous, happy, have a sense of purpose etc? What does THAT actually look like?

And by successful, I don’t mean “lucky”. I don’t mean people born rich, or the lottery winners. That kind of success never comes from within, that kind of success is too external and random to bother worrying about. That kind of success is something you don’t control.

Of course, the media LOVE success models of the outrageously fortunate– celebrity artists, celebrity businessmen, celebrity spiritual leaders, celebrity rich kids, lottery winners, not to mention the Reality TV, famous-for-being-famous crowd.

The thing is, I know TONS of super successful people, but none of them fit this extreme, celeb-lottery-winner-Reality-TV model. Some of them are actually pretty boring, to be honest. But they lead happy, friendly lives and do VERY well career-wise.

THAT is what most success looks like, if you think about it. The stuff on TV or in the movies just isn’t REAL enough for us to learn that much useful stuff from.

So I was thinking about this again, recently, HARD.

What model would work for folk like you and me? A model that didn’t mean you had to sell your soul to Wall Street, Hollywood, Washington or the tabloids? A success model that doesn’t rely solely on the unlikelihood of outrageously good fortune or acts of evil?

Then quite by chance, I saw a great documentary recently: “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”, a film about the world’s greatest sushi master, and a light bulb EXPLODED in my head.

Our man, 85-year-old Jiro Ono is the world’s greatest sushi chef– the only sushi master to ever have been awarded three Michelin stars. He’s also the oldest person to have ever been a recipient of that award.

The thing is, he doesn’t have a lot of money or own a fleet of trendy restaurants in all the world’s capitals, a-la Wolfgang Puck. No syndicated TV shows, celebrity-chef book deals or TV talk-show circuits, either.

He just has just a small, plain, dull, ordinary-looking, low-key sushi bar with ten seats in the basement of a Tokyo office building, near the subway, the kind of nondescript place you’d probably just walk by without stopping, if you saw it. Ten seats! Yet he REALLY IS the best in the world at what he does.

Jiro works seven days a week, over 350 days a year (he hates taking vacation), serves sushi and sashimi to people in very small numbers, and THAT’S IT. Just sushi. No salad, no appetizers, no deserts.

Like I said, JUST SUSHI. And by sticking to this minimalist, barebones formula, he’s become the best in the world.

A tiny little sushi bar in some random subway station. Yet Heads of State eat there, people wait in line, people book a stool at his sushi bar as much as a year in advance, at prices starting around $600 a head. People have been known to fly all the way from America or Europe, just to experience a 20-minute meal. In a basement!

I was lucky enough to have a similar experience first-hand when about eight years ago, I started working with the English Savile Row tailors. They make the best suits in the world; all hand-made, they go for about $5000 a pop.

The tailors have a similar shtick as Jiro. They’re generally not that rich, their businesses are tiny, yet the great and the good worship at their feet. With celebrities, captains of industry, people who are also world-class at what they do, (like Jiro’s customers) waiting as long as a year in advance to get their next suit.

Like Jiro, the tailors just get up every morning and do their thing, day-in-day-out, humbly, quietly, without a lot of fanfare, totally dedicated to their jobs. I’ve seen it. On the surface, it’s quiet, calm and kinda dull.

And like Jiro, from my observations they seem to have this sense of inner satisfaction my Wall Street trader friends (who easily make ten times as much, on a good day) can only dream of.

So as a result, Jiro and the Savile Row tailors are the people I really try to emulate. Because it’s doable. I can do that. I may never be as rich as Steve Jobs or Warren Buffet, I may never be literally a rock star like Bono or Jagger, I may not be as talented as Picasso or Whitman, but I can be like Jiro and the savile Row tailors… or at least, more like them.

So like them, I live quietly, I get up every morning and quietly get on with the business cranking out my product, my cartoons. Like I said, it’s quiet, calm and kinda dull. So what’s their secret? THE secret? What is the secret sauce that lets these otherwise quite ordinary people like Jiro and the tailors, lead such extraordinary lives?

In a word: MASTERY. They’ve MASTERED something. Something interesting and valuable. They are MASTERS of their craft. It may be an old-fashioned word that makes people uncomfortable, but that’s only because it’s something that eludes most people.
Though, having watched these masters carefully first-hand, I can honestly say MASTERY is more satisfying than money. If you’re up for it, yes, MASTERY MATTERS MORE THAN MONEY, MASTERY MATTERS MORE THAN SUCCESS.

And it’s portable. It travels with you, wherever you go. No landlord, no boss, no recession, no round of layoffs, no Wall Street analyst, no newspaper critic can take it away. It’s something that truly belongs to you, for always.

You earned it. It’s yours. Forever.

So when a young person asks me for career advice these days, I tell her, “Don’t worry so much about money, fame, success, rockstardom, whatever. Worry about achieving Mastery– that is something precious you can actually control. And yes, if you’ve truly achieved Mastery, you’re more likely to be successful and prosperous and rockstar, anyway.”

AGAIN, MASTERY MATTERS MORE THAN SUCCESS. So go for it.

10. Circumvent Your Own Limitations

Glasgow artist, David Shrigley is one of my favorite cartoonists. And I have very few of those.

Unlike a lot of my cartoonist heroes (Steinberg, Gorey etc) David can’t draw to save his life, at least, not in the conventional sense. His formal drafting skills (the ones he chooses to show the world, anyway) are just plain bad. I mean, REALLY bad.

And you know what? It doesn’t matter. Actually, it may even be a good thing.

You see, the whole point of Dave’s work is NOT about the drawing. It’s ALL about his ideas.

And his VERY crude drawings work brilliantly for that. In fact, I’d wager that if his drafting skills were more formally developed, his cartoons wouldn’t be nearly as sharp, as interesting or wickedly subversive.

His is a great example of what I like to call “circumventing one’s limitations”. Turning weaknesses into strength. Shrigley is a master of that, he really is.

And yes, I think if you’re to achieve mastery in your craft, your job or your career, you have to learn how to do what David did: Circumvent. You also have to be determined and relentless. David is all that as well, as this interview nicely demonstrates.

Even if you can’t draw to save your life. Even if you didn’t go to the right university. Even if you’re not that good at making money. Even if you have an average IQ. Even if you can’t get venture funding. Even if you weren’t born insanely talented at something. Even if you have to wait tables or bartend for a couple of years.

Circumvent, relentlessly.

11. Mastery is Boring

INTRODUCING THE 20,000 HOUR RULE… 10,000 TO MASTER THE CRAFT, ANOTHER 10,000 TO MASTER THE BUSINESS.

The 10,000 Hours Rule was made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, “Outliers”.

The book talks about how it takes 10,000 hours working at something to really master it. (10,000 hours means a couple of hours a day for decade, roughly). And he cites people like Bill Gates and The Beatles to prove his case. It’s a good read.

Ten thousand sounds about right to me… though I prefer “The 20,000 Hour Rule”.

It took me 10K hours to get good at cartooning, but then it took me the same amount of time again to figure out the business.

Even then, I still feel I have a long way to go.

It takes about 10 years to become a Savile Row tailor, that is, assuming you have both the talent, the will and the stamina to go the entire apprenticeship. Most kids don’t, which is why the trade is slowly dying out: They can’t find enough young talent to replace the old ones when they retire.

Coincidentally enough, according to the movie, that’s also how long an apprenticeship at Jiro’s lasts.

I once met a master gunsmith from Holland & Holland, the makers of those famously exquisite, $100,000 English hand-made shotguns.

For his first assignment as a young apprentice, he was given a two-inch steel cube and metal file. He was told from the guy training him, that as soon as he could turn the two-inch cube into a one-inch cube, using nothing but his file, he could have his second lesson.

It took him two years to get to Lesson Number Two.

Two years of filing that same damn cube, eight hours day. Until the Master said OK.

It was “Wax-on, Wax-off” for only a couple of days in the movie. The gunsmith apprentice did it for two whole years. Think about it.

12. There is No Secret Sauce

WORK HARD. LIVE QUIETLY. BE FRUGAL. SIMPLIFY. NEVER COMPLAIN. CONSTANTLY ELEVATE YOUR CRAFT.

Sure, a bit of talent and good fortune comes in handy. It’s nice that you could draw better than any other kid in your small town, or that your parents had the money to afford tennis lessons after class.

But that just gets you to the starting line. The actual race is what happens after that, day in, day out, for many years to come.

And the ones who win, the ones who really elevate their craft, are generally the ones who work the hardest. Life is unfair.

13. Your Brain is a Filter. Use It Wisely.

As my friend, Austin Kleon brilliantly pointed out, your work is a mash up of everything that you allow into your brain. If you fill your head with junk, you will produce more junk. Even if it’s postmodern, ironic and hipsterish, it’s still junk.

14. Marketing is Important

It’s too easy to easy to put marketing in the “Sleazy & Cheesy” box, it’s too easy to just dismiss it because it isn’t “My Art” or whatever, or that it’s something only “the suits” do.

But the thing is, marketing does matter. Heck, if you’re Seth Godin (one of my personal heroes), you can make the case that, in fact, marketing is one of our most important activities.

Why? Because the best idea, product, skill, service or cause (or whatever you decide to master) isn’t much use, if nobody knows about it. This is true whether you’re selling something pretty trivial or trying to save the world though some noble effort.

Seth defines marketing not so much in terms of sales and selling, but the art of getting ideas to spread.

“The ideas that win are the ideas that spread.” That’s probably Seth’s most lucid sentence ever, and he’s already got a ton of those.

Trivialize marketing at your peril.

[PS: To learn more about my philosophy on marketing, well, there’s always my books, but I would also recommend Seth Godin’s “Tribes”, Mark Earls’ “Herd” and The Cluetrain Manifesto. That’s enough to get you started.]

15. A Successful, Meaningful Life Makes a Lot of "Art"

For a lot people, “Successful” just means having a lot of stuff, of having a lot of worldly appetites indulged.

For a lot of people, “Successful” just means helping rich people get even richer, in exchange for a piece of the action.

And yet…

We all know there’s more to life than that; that if all we care about is all that material, carnal, consumer crap, life would dry up and turn grey really quickly.

And we don’t want that, we want to feel as alive as we possibly can.

We want a good life.

Deep inside our frail, little selves, we know that’s true.

And the way to have a good life is to do stuff that matters. With people who matter. Day in, day out.

What some people call “Art”.

Art is: The stuff you do that matters.

How do you know if the stuff you do is “Art” or not? You don’t. Not at first. But you carry on, regardless. And maybe one day your equally frail and fragile hunch will pay off.

Because you know in your deepest self, that’s the right thing to do.

Because it matters. And if it doesn’t, God help you.

16. Be Nice. Karma is More Ruthless Than You Are.

What goes around comes around, so they say. What they don’t tell you so much is, when it does come around eventually (as it must), it’s had plenty of time to build up momentum, like a wave, so it comes at you even harder, good or bad. Compound Karma. Wave Karma. Exactly.

I like to live my life with the belief that karma last for eternity, that small events in the present will cause titanic events in the future, good or bad. Compound Karma. My own private Butterfly Effect. So I’m careful. And humble. I try to keep my head down.

Truly understanding that there’s no way out or the karmic equation, that Karma does its thing with or without my permission, is actually quite liberating.

Because then you’re not trying to outsmart it, not using up precious bandwidth trying to in vain to find a new angle, freeing you up to just get on with things in their proper order, not futzing around, looking for shortcuts.

You may not be able to control the universe, but you can control your actions within it.

That is the best kind of freedom there is, no?

17. You Will Die.

“To study philosophy is to learn how to die.” –Cicero.

“Be happy while you’re living, for a you’re a long time dead.” –Scottish proverb.

“Life is short. Make it amazing.” – gapingvoid cartoon.

The British author, John Mortimer once described Life as “A tiny blip of time, separating two vast expanses of eternity”.

Ain’t that the truth…

The insanely brilliant stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius famously coined the phrase, “Live every day as if it were your last, for one day it will be.”

The great mythologist, Joseph Campbell thought that religion came about once human beings first became aware of their own mortality.

I believe all these great thinkers were right on the money, in their own way.

Without death, life would have no meaning. It is death that gives life its edge.

And it’s that edge that gives life its meaning.

That gives us the experience of being alive.

Which is what the meaning of life is really all about.

To know life, is to know death. And maybe, just maybe, be OK with it.

Now go do good work, with all your heart. Yes.

18. Love is the Only Thing that Matters, in the End.

You lose everything eventually. Your looks, your career, your possessions, your libido, your health, your memories, your family and friends, your life. But as the poet, Philip Larkin once said, Love is the only thing that outlives us.

It’s also the only thing that truly makes us happy.

“Without Love, I am nothing….” Saint Paul knew what he was talking about.

19. Anything Worth Doing Will Cost You Your Life.

By the time you’ve figured all this out, figured out how “not to suck”, figured out how to master your calling, figured out the real meaning of it all, you’ll most likely be old and close to death.

But that’s OK.

That’s what Life is for.

20. We're All Connected.

I know that’s old news. We all know that, thanks to the Internet, everything is just one click away. But do we actually act like we know that; are we actually living it?

21. The Old Jobs Simply Aren't There Anymore.

And yet the schools still act like they are. That’s partly the fault of the schools, sure, but it’s also part the fault of the parents.

22. It's Not Enough to be Good at Doing the Work, You Have to be Good at Creating Your Own Platform.

If you think of your job as just a paycheck, and not as a platform, you’re doing something wrong.

If you think of your job as just a paycheck, and not as a platform, you will probably never be successful.

23. Own Something.

When I was just starting out, looking for my first real job, I was just one more piece of paper in a tall stack of resumes. Though really, I didn’t have to present myself that way, I just assumed that was the done thing, and that’s what I did in the end. That was an expensive mistake.

24. Everybody is Just as Scared as You.

Nobody knows the future, especially our current future. Google, Facebook, Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood, Madison Avenue… they’re all as clueless as we are. The Internet changed everything. The rise of China, India and Brazil changed everything. And one day this future will be something we’re thankful for.

25. How to be Successful: Find Out What Matters, Find Out Who Matters, Then Carry On.

It isn’t rocket science. If you have something that you care about, chances are there are other people who also care about it. These people are easy to find, on the Internet. Try to find out what they’re hungry for, and try to feed that hunger. It shouldn’t be too hard, if you keep it simple.

26. It's Either a Platform, or It's Something That Will Eventually Drown You.

I loved my first job, working in a bar. Sure, it was low paid and noisy and stressfuland all that, but I didn’t care. I was only eighteen years old, and even then I knew that this job was giving me something I would never get in school– access to adults. I saw it as something much bigger than a meager paycheck, I saw it as my platform into adulthood… which is was.

27. Have One Eye Looking Out, One Eye Looking In.

You have your inner life, you have your outer life. Art and religion, meets business and science, or whatever. Both need to be talking to each other in a constructive way, or your life will just end in failure.

28. Be Nice. Be Helpful. The Alternatives Won't Make You Happy.

“Nice guys finish last” might work TEMPORARILY on Wall Street or in the court of Emperor Nero, but for 99.99% of humanity, we’re simply not made to act that way. We’re made to be nice to each other.

29. You Were Born to be Happy.

Unless something truly wrong is going on– war, plague, famine, pestilence etc– nature made us to enjoy our lives. So if you’re not happy in spite of everything happening around you, it’s probably because you’re doing something wrong, and probably something to do with your relationships.

30. Fail Like a Child.

And keep on failing like a child. Until you die. Enough said.

31. You Must Discover What Your Real Joy is.

Nobody discovers what their real joy is right away. It’s an ongoing dialogue, even with super-talented people.

32. Small Art Can be Just as Powerful as Big Art.

Summer, 2011. A friend of mine was in Paris, where she went and checked out the massive Anish Kapoor sculpture, Monumenta 2011, on exhibit at Le Grand Palais.

This got me thinking…

I like Kapoor’s work. He makes very big art.

I, on the other hand, make very small art i.e. the “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”. And the prints aren’t too large, either.

Though I like a lot of “Big Art”- Kapoor, Serra, Gormley, Smithson etc etc– I’m pretty happy I stuck with “Small Art”.

Small Art can impact another person on a meaningful level, just as powerfully as Big Art. Fifteen lines from Shelley’s Ozymandias had as much impact on me as fifteen hundred pages of Tolstoy’s War & Peace did, as much as I loved the latter.

And Small Art is A LOT less hassle to make.

And you can make more of it. More often. Without bankrupting yourself or putting your life on hold for months on end.

And perhaps more importantly, there’s the “Personal Sovereignty” angle. With Small Art, there’s no need to wait for someone else to deem it worthy beforehand, no need to wait nervously for the rich patron, the movie studio exec, or the illustrious museum director to
give it the greenlight. There’s no need for the politics or the schmoozing or the bureaucracy.

Or the sleaze and corruption. The Big Art world is rife with that, as we all know full well.

With Small Art, you just go ahead and make it, and then it exists, and the rest is in the hands of the gods. Your work is already done, and you can get to bed at a decent hour. And not lose any sleep over it, either.

Hey, it worked for Joseph Cornell, Saul Steinberg and Edward Gorey… three artists who I rate WAY higher than Kapoor or Serra.

And what is true for Art is probably true for your thing, as well. Worry less about how BIG you want your business to be, instead think about how much LOVE you actually want to give out while your still have time left on this earth. “Meaning Scales”.

Exactly…

33. Make Every Work of Art like it's Your Last.

Another riff on Marcus Aurelius’ “Live each day as if it were your last, for one day it will be.”

In Robert Altman’s 1992 movie, “The Player”, David Kahane, an unsuccessful screenwriter is randomly murdered. At his funeral, his friend Phil reads out the last words he ever wrote:

Blackness.
A mangy dog barks.
Garbage can lids are lifted as derelicts in the street… hunt for food.
Buzzing, as a cheap alarm clock goes off.
Interior. Flophouse room.
Early morning.
A tracking shot moves through the grimy room.
Light streams in through holes in yellowing window shades.
Moths dance in the beams of light.
Track down along the floor.
The frayed rug.
Stop on an old shoe. It’s empty.

That’s as far as he got, said Phil…

If David Kahane knew these words were goingto be the last ones he would ever write, do you think he would’ve have chosen them? No, of course not, he would’ve written something else, somethiong far more meaningful and timeless.

The fleetoing inconsequentiality of Kahane’s last words is what makes the scene so memorable, so tragic. As a storyteller trying to make a point, Robert Altman knew what he was doing.

That scene always stuck with me. It told me, “Make every word you write count, Boy, for one day those words will be your last”. The fact that I was watching the movie for the first time in a crowded cinema in West LA, made it seem even more tragi-comic than usual. A lot of other un-dead David-Kahane-types were in the audience, all laughing nervously at the in-joke.

It’s too easy to just laugh at all the in-jokes, isn’t it? It’s too easy to think one is immune, isn’t it?

Too easy to be inconsequential…

34. "My Work Doesn't Belong in Galleries, it Belongs in the Office..."

I get asked all the time: “Why don’t you show in art galleries?”

And I always answer the same: “Because my work doesn’t belong in art galleries, it belongs in office cubicles.”

Even if you go back to the 1990’s, back when I was starting out, it was the same story. I always liked making art SPECIFICALLY for the workplace. I always liked making work that pushed that aspect of human existence further in the right direction.

After family, the time you spend in your place of work is the most important arena of your existence. That is where you go to find out, over time, who your true self really is.

And your true self needs art around it, your true self needs constant reminding that your true self ACTUALLY exists.

Your true self needs TOTEMS around that INSPIRE it on a daily basis.

That’s what I hope the cartoons help articulate, help bring to the surface. Unlike most of the knucklehead art you see around the gallery scene…

Besides, it’s a niche most other artists don’t really think about– they’re too busy trying to conquer other worlds. Which is fine, even if those other worlds are already too crowded; already SATURATED with the froth of other knuckleheads.

“My work doesn’t belong in art galleries, it belongs in office cubicles.”

It’s not a bad life, I suppose…

35. "Only Connect."

As artists and/or marketers and/or business people, it’s not enough to just think about the money and the ROI. We need to know that we “connected”, somehow. Deeply so, sometimes.

Or else we just become very dull, making very dull stuff for very dull people, living very dull lives.

Which except for the occasional faceless corporation, is not much of a sustainable business model.

E.M. Forster’s very famous advice to aspiring authors had a mere two words: “Only connect.”

Exactly. In both art and business.

Only connect.

Think about it.

36. You Can't Plan for Creativity. You Can Only Plan to do the Work.

Kids come up to me and ask me all the time…

Kid: How do I get a “creative” career-thing going like yours?
Hugh: Make something. Grab a piece of paper and a pen or whatever and get cracking…
Kid: What if it isn’t any good?
Hugh: Then you’re screwed.
Kid: Ok, what if it’s pretty good, but it’s still going to take me another twenty or thirty years before the world understands it?
Hugh: Then you’re slightly less screwed.

At that point, they’re already sick of asking me any more questions and so they move on, unhappy. Oh well…

The thing is, people think there’s some set of ideal conditions out there, floating independently in space, that somehow have be met, some magic fairy boxes that need to be ticked off, before you can go and “be creative”, whatever that means.

“I’ve got to quit my job, leave my wife, move to India and become an opium addict yada yada yada…” “I’ve got to drop out of college, move to New York and carry on a forbidden and tumultuous lesbian affair with a Japanese novelist twice my age yada yada yada…”

Actually, no. The way to be creative is to make stuff. You wake up in the morning, have some breakfast, hit the work bench and get on it with it.

Or not. Maybe you’d rather just hang out, light a joint and watch Star Trek reruns. Your call.

Whether it ends up being “creative” or not, is decided later. Long after you’ve finished the thing and moved on to something else.

That’s what I mean by it coming “after the fact.”

And so there we are.

37. The Era of Career-on-Autopilot is Over.

Hardly a morning goes by these days without me hearing some story on NPR Morning Edition about American economic woe. People who’ve been working hard all their lives, suddenly can’t afford presents for their kids. Those kind of stories. They’re sad as hell, and they seem to be getting more and more frequent.

At the same time I keep seeing news stories like this one from the WSJ, Christmas 2011: About how competition in Silicon Valley for engineering talent is so fierce, they’re fighting over interns now:

Silicon Valley’s talent wars are going younger.
Bay Area tech companies, already in a fierce fight for fulltime hires, are now also battling to woo summer interns. Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response—sometimes even luring candidates away from college.

And then there was another 2011 story from the BBC, about how Brazil has now overtaken the UK as the world’s sixth largest economy.

A lot of the world is in flux, so it seems. And to this cartoonist, it has a simple enough explanation:

The Great Convergence is upon us, and our friend, the Internet is accelerating the process. This would be happening with our without “The 1%” misbehaving themselves– whatever the mainstream media and the Occupy Wall Street crowd might say.

The good news is, if you have a talent, the world wants it, and it has never been so easy to show your talent to the world.

The bad news is, especially for us fat & lazy Americans, is that the great, century-long era of Prosperity-on-Autopilot is over.

The world still wants serious talent. And it still wants people doing the grunt work: pushing mops, digging ditches, waiting tables, answering phones, flipping burgers etc..

It’s the people in the middle that nobody knows what to do with anymore. And the politicians who claim that they do, are lying.

It’s probably too late for my generation, that ship has already sailed. But for the kids out there reading this, who are just starting out?

Learn how to work hard, work long hours. Find something you love, and then excel at it. Above all else, learn how to create, learn how to invent. That’s your only hope, really.

Like I said, no more Autopilot.

38. Find the Holy in Everyday Activity.

My friend, Euan Semple is probably the guy who convinced me to switch from PC to Apple, about five years ago.

“Even opening up the cardboard box is a religious experience!”, he said.

Heh. A slight exaggeration, certainly.

But then I’m thinking… Perhaps not?

As somebody who likes to study religion, I’ve always thought that one of the more interesting questions in the world to ponder is, “What is Holy?”

Exactly. Holy. What does it actually mean?

And the same with Unholy…

When a mundane act (such as the opening of a cardboard box) is elevated (in this case, by great package design), we experience what the mystics call “The Divine”.

This doesn’t have to mean a strong belief in God, either way. They’re called mystics for a reason: the whole thing is indeed a mystery. Call it “God” if you will, call it something else completely. The mystery remains, either way.

Work, whether business or craft or just plain hard, sweaty labor, is far more interesting, fun and meaningful when one can channel one’s own sense of divinity into it, religious or otherwise. This is how we find the Holy in everyday life, religious or otherwise.

This is how we plug into “The Mystery”.

Steve Jobs knew this, instinctively. It was glaringly obvious.

39. "Culture Hacking" is the Next Trillion-Dollar Industry.

SO WHAT COMES AFTER ADVERTISING? The Golden Age of advertising– the “Mad Men” era– started about 50 years ago, with people like David Ogilvy, George Lois, Bill Bernbach leading the way, and shops like Weiden & Kennedy, BBH, Fallon, BMP, GGT, CDP and Goodby following in their wake.

This golden age came to an abrupt end, when our friend the Internet came along, with a lot of people on Madison Avenue suddenly starting to fear for their jobs.

So if traditional advertising is “dead”, what comes after it? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for the last ten years, ever since I launched gapingvoid back in 2001.

Though I wasn’t paying too much attention at the time, the answer kinda-sorta came to me back in 2004, in a line I wrote in The Hughtrain:

The hardest part of a CEO’s job is sharing his enthusiasm with his colleagues, especially when a lot of them are making one-fiftieth of what he is. Selling the company to the general public is a piece of cake compared to selling it to the actual people who work for it. The future of advertising is internal.

You can call it “Internal Advertising” if you want; I find that a bit oldschool, frankly. I prefer the term “CULTURAL HACKING”- changing your company’s fortunes NOT by trying to directly change what the general public thinks of you, but by trying to change what YOU
think of you.

Improving the company by improving the culture, by subverting the culture via counterintuitive means. Exactly.

And yes, Culture Hacking also drives the Occupy Wall Street movement and AdBusters. Same idea, different aims (And if you read Greil Marcus’ “Lipstick Traces”, you’ll learn that the same riff goes back to punk rock, 1950s French Marxism, early 20th-Century Dadaism, even back to the Middle Ages…].

The new business model will be the intersection of the three following things: Purpose, Company Culture and Media.

1. Purpose: It’s the “Why” of what you do, it is not the product, it is the Purpose-Idea, as expressed by Mark Earls, or “The Why” as expressed by Simon Sinek.
2. Company Culture is informed by “Purpose”, it is that actions that a business takes each and every day to remind people of their purpose. Purpose is a set of beliefs, and Culture is the expression of those beliefs in business (Action).
3. Media: Advertising, PR, earned media, paid media, call it what you will. Once you have a “Purpose” and a company “Culture”, those two things inform all of your advertising, PR, communication, social interaction and points of contact with the outside world. From your logo, to your ads, Social Media, How your planes and trucks are painted, etc. It all informs, reinforces and feeds each other.

Culture Hacking is why “Delivering Happiness” became an international best seller. Culture Hacking is why people flock to Nevada in droves to take the Zappos tour. Culture Hacking is why people will one day pay Jenn Lim and Tony Hsieh millions of dollars for the services
of the “Delivering Happiness” company.

This is also why Rackspace, Intel, Hewlett Packard and Babson College hired us (gapingvoid) to draw cartoons for them. This is why we produce Cube Grenades. This is why big PR firms like Weber Shandwick or Edelman, if they get it right, will steal millions of dollars’ worth of business AWAY from traditional Madison Avenue agencies.

Culture Hacking is all about creating social objects. Exactly.

[One more time:] Stop wasting your life in the traditional advertising-era quicksand. There’s a new game in town. Culture Hacking is a multi-billion dollar industry, still in its infancy. Get in early if you can…

40. Never Go Mainstream.

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41. People Must Treasure You.

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42. Blogs are like Hammers.

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43. Beware of Guru-Nomics.

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44. How to Really Use the Internet.

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45. Learn How to Present.

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46. Avoid Drama.

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47. Keep it New. Keep it Fresh.

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48. To My Jaded Veteran Blogger Friends: Get Over Yourselves.

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49. Winning is for Losers.

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5o. Beware of the Big Moments.

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51. Avoid Frivolous Complexity.

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52. The Product Doesn't Get to Kick Ass Until the User Kicks Ass, First.

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53. Food is Medicine. So are People.

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54. Follow Your Bliss.

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55. Make Sure to Leave a Meaningful Body of Work Behind.

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56. All Art is Religious Art.

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