IF IT’S IMPOSSIBLE DO IT ANYWAY. The world’s best article on PAUL ARDEN. By Dan Bergevin
Copyright Š 2009 by Dan Bergevin
Paul Arden is one of those authors who can change the way you think with only a few words or a single image. That seemed to be the point behind his two books Its Not How Good You
Are Its How Good You Want To Be and Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite. If you went to a bookstore you’d probably find these books categorized as “business motivation” books, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. They are actually very powerful tools for getting what you want in life, whether you are in the business of advertising or the business of making salad dressing in your tool shed. They were written for anyone who thinks, and wants to use thinking as an art form instead of just a form of data processing. For me, reading his books is like tapping into some innate power supply that I forgot I had. They are more than just creative inspiration – they are instruction manuals for a mindset that is a prerequisite to getting outrageous results out of everything you do in life.
So who was Paul Arden?
His work biography includes many impressive credits: he was Executive Creator at Saatchi & Saatchi for 14 years. He started the film company Arden Sutherland-Dodd in 1993, and directed numerous commercials and short films. He later opened the photo gallery Arden and Anstruther with his wife Toni to display over thirty years of collected pieces, both from famous photographers as well as found images from various sources. After writing Its Not How Good You Are Its How Good You Want To Be, published in 2003 by Phaidon Press, he then wrote a weekly column for The Independent. He then wrote Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite, published in 2006 by Portfolio (Penguin Books). His third and final book was titled ‘God Explained in a Taxi Ride’ and was published in 2007 by Penguin Books. Paul died on April 2, 2008, at the age of 67.
I interviewed Paul Arden sometime in 2006 because I wanted to. At the time, I had just read his two books, and it seemed like a good idea to talk to him. His ideas were leaking into everything I did, and I wanted to personally thank him for the unexpected and highly useful intrusion into my normalcy. I needed to know that I had spoken with him directly. He didn’t have to talk to me. He certainly didn’t have a reason to. He didn’t know me, and I wasn’t a journalist or author or advertising executive. I was just me. But he took the time to speak with me, and it’s fair to say that this conversation changed the course of everything that came after it. Paul lived the words he wrote. His experiences he shared with me were like case studies of the ideas in his books. More accurately, his ideas were distilled from his many experiences and provided in highly concentrated form as the contents of his books. These books were written to be more than just fun and inspiring. They aren’t like your typical “creativity textbooks” that are no more than catalogs of clever (and not-so-clever) ideas. Paul’s books were created as operating manuals for getting what you want in life. They were not meant to be read. They were meant to be used.
As a tribute to Paul and his ideas, I present this article. Paul’s direct words have been fused with his published thoughts and ideas from both Its Not How Good You Are Its How Good You Want To Be and Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite and my own elaborations on Paul’s ideas. Quotes directly from Paul Arden are in blue. Quotes from Its Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want To Be (Copyright © 2003 Phaidon Press Limited) are in green. Quotes from Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite (Copyright © 2006 Paul Arden, published by Portfolio) are in purple. All black (and the occasional white) text is my own doing. Enjoy.
If you want to know how your life is going to turn out, you just have to know where you’re heading.
No matter what you want in life, there is a way to get it. But first you have to decide what you really want. Then you have to decide that you really will get it.
Your vision of where or who you want to be is the greatest asset you have. Without having a goal it is difficult to score.
There’s only one sure way to get what you want – know what you want. Oh yes. And you have to act on it too.
You can achieve the unachievable. Firstly you need to aim beyond what you are capable of. You must develop a complete disregard for where your abilities end. Ambition will take you further than talent. Talent is based on your past experience and accomplishments. Ambition is based on your idea of who you want to be. Experience counts for something but cannot lead you to the life you want to live all on its own. What you are capable of achieving is only limited to what you are capable of imagining.
When it can’t be done, do it. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t exist. The last (commercial) I made was for Volkswagon. The agency wanted to do it one way, I wanted to do it another. I got the job, but the way the shoot was planned up is they wanted to start somewhere and I wanted to start somewhere else. There was two ways to do it… but I couldn’t do it two ways. I didn’t have the time to do it two ways. I wanted to do it two ways then sort it out, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have time. And then I was going to do it the agency’s way. Then I thought, heck, wait a minute. And then I thought of my own book. And it says if you don’t do it you’ll never get it done. (He paused, and I could hear pages turning as he looked through a copy of ‘It’s Not How Good You Are It’s How Good You Want To Be.’ He then read from page 46.) “When it can’t be done, do it. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t exist.” So I did do it two ways. I just forced myself to do it two ways somehow. And I won, I got my way. And I pleased myself because I thought I can’t do it. Logic, everything was against me to do it. But somehow I geared everyone up and we did it. It’s as simple as that.
Here’s something I have on my wall – “I have worked with wonderful, clever, and talented people who when they were young had good new and exciting ideas. These ideas then became principles. These principles then became doctrines. The wonderful, clever, and talented people became victims of their own belief. Experience, they call it.” So we all suffer from experience. Experience is supposed to be a good thing, but in the end it clouds you. Whether you want it to or not your experience stops you from being fresh. Experience is built from solutions to old situations and problems. The old situations are probably different from the present ones, so that old solutions will have to be bent to fit new problems (and possibly fit badly).
What is common sense to some is nonsense to others.
It doesn’t make sense to allow others to determine what makes sense for you. If this is how you separated good ideas from bad ones, then you’ll merely be following in old footsteps that may have no bearing on what you really want, and will therefore lead you nowhere you want to go.
Anything you think of that is creative is doing something sort of wrong. It’s considered unbusinesslike and impractical. And you’re difficult. You make things difficult. And most people don’t want to work with difficult people, no matter how clever they are. Good people are often difficult because they know what they want and don’t want to change their desires for anyone. Because of this, they are likely to be respected later rather than sooner. But this is less important to them than getting what they have set out to achieve.
Great people have great egos; maybe that’s what makes them great. So let us put it to good use rather than try to deny it. Modesty won’t get you what you want, but a belief in your own ability will.
Question: How do you shape reality in the
likeness of your vision?
Answer: You ignore reality. You ignore reality
and you decide which course you’re going to take. Your art of how you’re going to live your life, really. Or how you’re going to balance your life. Sometimes you become realistic, sometimes you don’t. And that depends on the individual. My tendency is to be unrealistic so to do what I think is right I have some belief in it, rather than going by what is common sense. Because everyone is latching onto what is common sense. Your idea is so strange on paper or in your head no one will understand you. So you have to decide what attitude you’re going to take. Whether you’re going to be a company man, a corporate man, and do things for money, and do things that are probably a bit dull, or whether you’re going to try and do it differently. They both have their merits. And I’m not saying which is the best. It’s just different. We all have our lives to live. Do you want to live it with a big fancy house and a helicopter or do you want to live it in a quality way? A quality thinking way. It’s just a choice we have to make.
What you choose to see defines reality. Your point of view is reality, albeit a subjectively interpreted sliver of it. But you can shape the world to your viewpoint, and if you can do this then you can get what you want on your own terms. Shaping your viewpoint to conform to the popular perspective may be a sign of maturity and experience, but it is also a sure way to get mediocre results instead of outrageous ones.
My son (Christian Arden) used to have a chain of nightclubs that were very successful... But he opened up another club very recently and he asked me for some names for the club. I came up with some various names, like The Blue Coconut or various clubby names, but I got bored with them. They sounded like I had heard them before. So I said “call it Parker McMillan.” And my son said, “Don’t be stupid.” And I said “no, it sounds alright to me. It’s different.” And he went to his board, his financial people, and they all liked it. And now it’s quite a name – Parker McMillan. But if you’d tried to research for that you probably wouldn’t have gotten anywhere because it doesn’t sound like a club – you’d wonder is it a stock broker or…? But it’s a club. And it’s just different. I just thought (of it) and wrote it down. I didn’t know why. It just sounded nice. There was no reason, there was no logic to it except… It’s in the city of London and it’s also on a place called London Wall. So I thought about London Wall Street – Parker McMillan, London Wall Street – which makes it sound international. So he had it done like that and it’s very good. It sounded very American and dignified, businesslike. Slightly Ivy League. An Ivy League night club, whatever that is.
If you have a good idea, but you don’t use it because you think it might fail, then it’s not a good idea. If you don’t have the courage to bring the idea out of your head and into the world, it doesn’t even matter that you had the idea in the first place.
What is a good idea? One that happens is. If it doesn’t, it isn’t.
Become what you want to be before you can prove you can do it. You can’t become something before trying to be it first. And trying requires testing your limits - or even better, pretending you don’t have any. Yes, you will make mistakes and even fail. But soon you’ll have failed enough to know what you’re really doing.
Too many people spend too much time trying to perfect something before they actually do it. Instead of waiting for perfection, run with what you’ve got, and fix it as you go. The person who doesn’t make mistakes is unlikely to make anything.
Everyone says it’s more difficult now, but I’ve never known a time when people didn’t say that. It’s always been better (back) then. Even when we want to be timid and play it safe, we should pause for a moment to imagine what we might be missing.
How you perceive yourself is how others will see you.
How you present yourself is how others will value you.
Your personal point of view is more valuable than trying to keep up with the popular point of view, because it is yours. You are far better off honing your own perspective than trying to adopt the perspectives of others. You will achieve unique results without compromising your vision.
Having an original point of view or angle is a novelty. Recognizing its value is intelligent. Having the courage to stand up for it in the face of public opinion is what makes you a winner.
Getting what you want means doing what needs to be done to get what you want, regardless of what may seem possible. What you want and how you want it are both irrelevant if you don’t have the audacity and will to get going and see it through. Of course, in the course of things, you will make mistakes. They are exactly the feedback you need in order to improve. Truth hurts, but in the
long run it’s better than a pat on the back. This of course means you’ll have to risk your ideas by removing them from their protective packaging and subjecting them to the real world. Do not covet your ideas. Give away everything you
know, and more will come back to you. Sometimes you will find that others don’t want to do it your way. So do it their way and your way. When you make your opening
negotiations with the client, you say 95% of the work we will do in the way you want. But the way to get the good will from us is to give us 5% to do what we want. So it’s part of your contract. So you might be wrong, but you also may be very right. And (the client) picked up that rightness for a small amount of money. Other times you will find that no one supports your ideas. Then you’ll just have to find a way to do it yourself. It is unlikely that anyone
will sanction the cost of something they don’t understand, therefore you have no choice but to do it yourself. At any cost.
The name of the game is persistence and charm. Sometimes you won’t have an idea. I just believe in the truth, frankly. Go with what you believe, and if you don’t know, have it their way. If you really believe something, you go with it all the way.
This is all part of a fundamental wrongness that, ultimately, is your greatest weapon.
Be insensible. Sensible decisions are exactly what everyone else is making. So being sensible almost never creates spectacular results or anything dramatically different than the status quo.
Be naïve. Knowledge is safe because it is easy to agree with.
But knowledge is based on the past, not on the present or the future. Being original is thus incompatible with being knowledgeable. You must be willing to ignore reality to create something unique. If you base what you do on what you want to do, you are only limited by the boundaries of your imagination.
Be risky. Safe decisions are inherently dangerous because they
cannot lead to anywhere new. By “playing it safe” you sacrifice the discovery of new opportunities for the apparent security of what you already have. But if you want to move forward you must push yourself into the unknown.
Of course, you’ll survive if you don’t do these things. You might even move up. But you’ll do it on other peoples’ terms and not your own. And you’ll be more likely to only move sideways.
Last but not least, whatever it is you do, regardless of how impossible or just plain silly it may seem, have no regrets. There is something to be learned from everything, and your energy could be put to far greater use by capitalizing on your mistakes rather than regretting them.
Whatever decision you make is the only one you could make. Otherwise you would make a different one. Everything we do we choose. So what is there to regret? You are the person you chose to be.
Credits and End Notes Special thanks to: Toni Arden for biographical assistance and for the use of the color photos of Paul (pages 3 and 27). Lucinda Roberts for arranging my telephone interview with Paul in 2006 and for the use of his photo on page 1.
Other photo credits: Gary Scott: Soccer goal on page 6. Chutiporn Chaitachawong: Archer on page 7. Carlos Sotelo: Walk, Don’t Walk sign on page 10. Sufi Nawaz: Lightbulb on page 15. Stephanie Schleicher: Cookie cutter on page 24.
Biographical information on Paul Arden obtained from www. ardenandanstruther.com, www.brandrepublic.com, www.independent.co.uk and www.creativereview.co.uk.
1940 - 2008
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