The love of bad ideas

Good ideas don't spring to life fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. They slip into the world incognito, often disguised as bad ideas.

Being afraid of having a bad idea is the surest way to shut off the flow of ideas altogether. So I welcome them.

I learned this lesson very early in my career. The Berlin Wall had fallen, Eastern European countries were exploring democracy and capitalism, and my guy had to speak about it. Every day, it seemed, saw the birth of a new nation. Aha!

"Birth is messy and bloody," I wrote. Then my fingers froze in midair. What are you thinking? (I thought.) This guy is a big, macho Wall Street exec. You're going to give him a placenta metaphor?

Ixnay on the placenta metaphor. But then what?

I stared at my computer. I stared at the walls of my cubicle. I squeezed my eyes shut real hard and snapped them open again. Nothing. Every thought in my head—every thought I would ever think for the rest of my life, apparently—was just a variation on that one, highly inappropriate, placenta metaphor.

So I gave in. I wrote the thing. I embellished it, added some (you should pardon the expression) color. I made it the placenta-iest paragraph anyone could ever imagine. Even a midwife would have said, "Enough, already!"

I printed out what I wrote and hung in on the wall in front of me. Having captured it for posterity (and my own continuing amusement in the months ahead), I deleted it from my computer.

And, whaddaya know? Getting the bad idea out of my head made room for good ones. The speech turned out just fine.

So if you can't get something out of your mind...get it out of your head. Post it or stash it in an "I Can't Believe I Tried to Write That" file. Share it with your friends over drinks. Just don't share it with your boss.

Speaking of bad ideas, here's the first title I came up with for this post:

You can learn a lot from a placenta

Creativity travels faster

One of the wonderful things about creativity is the way it pings around the world, each reader or listener finding some new angle of inspiration.

I am amused and humbled to be the object of such a "ping." Yesterday I received an email from Deborah Claire Procter, a Welsh artist and arts promoter I met through an online coaching group. She posted an amusing image on Facebook last week and I picked it up in this blog post. My blog post has now become the subject of Deborah's most recent newsletter.

In the pre-Internet days they used to say "Good news travels fast." Creativity travels faster. Where will yours go today?

Occasional Flashes of Brilliance

I've been in business for myself a long time. And maybe two or three times a year, a thought crosses my mind: "I really should start a newsletter."

Yep, I agree with myself, I really should.

And then I don't.

Today I finally realized why: I don't want to.

And why would I? "Newsletters" are boring; I am (mostly, I hope) not. I rarely read the newsletters that do make it into my in-box. It feels like a chore, and the last thing any of us need is another chore.

But I do have value I can add for people who want to know more about the creative process or improve their own writing. Ideas, tips, a good article or interesting blog post. So I will be sending out "Occasional Flashes of Brilliance." If you'd like to receive them, fill out the sign-up form on the left.

And if you have something in particular you'd like me to talk about, let me know.

Let's be occasionally brilliant together.

Of baseball and business (diversity edition)

Baseball Hall-of-Famer Monte Irvin just died. Never heard of him? He not only helped the New York Giants get to two World Series, he also mentored one of their up-and-coming players, an outfielder you may have heard of named Willie Mays. But Mr. Irvin played for nearly a dozen years before joining the Giants. Before that, he had been relegated to the "Negro Leagues."

A couple of decades ago, I had a client named Irvin. He happened to be an African American and I knew he'd been raised in the same town as Monte Irvin, so I asked if they were related. Yes, indeed—he was surprised I recognized the name, but I'm a baseball fan. So the elder Mr. Irvin made a guest appearance in a speech I wrote for his nephew. Here's an excerpt; you can read more of it on my website: 

Cultures change slowly. Let me remind you that nearly 50 years after Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, there's still not a single African American running a baseball team. And African American executives have been in the financial industry a lot shorter time than that.

My uncle was a major league baseball player—he played in the old Negro Leagues and later for the New York Giants. He could tell you that lots of African American players got hit by pitches—“accidentally,” of course—after the leagues were integrated. But it happened a lot less when a team had an African American pitcher on the mound.

It works the same way in the business world. The progress we make against racism in the workplace has a direct relationship to the positions that African Americans play on the team. As more African Americans take leadership positions and sit on Boards of Directors, more companies will stop throwing pitches at their African American employees.

Yes, it's an old speech: the corporate world doesn't throw pitches at its diverse employees anymore, not so blatantly. And it recognizes many forms of diversity, including LGBT people. But when it comes to leadership roles, are diverse professional relegated to the "farm team" longer than the majority folks in the pipeline? For some organizations, in some industries, the answer may still be yes.

Major League Baseball signed Mr. Irvin at the ripe old age of 30; the man considered perhaps the greatest pitcher in the Negro Leagues, Satchel Paige, was 42 when he joined the majors. Paige pitched for nearly a dozen more years, but his best games were behind him. So much talent, consigned to relative obscurity. And how many more potential baseball stars aged out of the game before the Major Leagues opened their doors to players of color?

There's a lesson there, and not just for baseball fans. Talent deserves to shine. And it's not an unlimited resource—businesses can't afford to waste the talents of their people, no matter who they are. We've made progress since I wrote that speech. But I can't help wondering how many Monte Irvins and Satchel Paiges the business world has lost: how many talented women and people of color never got the opportunities they deserved, the opportunities to shine—and to lead.

The Most Important F-Word

Speechwriters make our living with words, so we’re not usually at a loss for them. But recently I turned a group of speechwriters into a slack-jawed, inarticulate mess when I threw the F-word into a conversation.

No, not that F-word.

I asked them how they have Fun. “What do you do when you’re not working?” Four in a row had the same response: Startled silence, nervous laughter.

Finally one brave soul said he enjoys fly-fishing, “…though I haven’t had time to do it lately.”

Now, I know our clients are Important People who deserve our best work. But I also know that I cannot deliver my best work if work is all I do. So for me, Fun is not optional; it’s an essential part of my schedule. Just as I boot up my computer every morning, I need to boot up my psyche regularly.

It’s great to have a big hobby like fly-fishing (N.B.: the fish may disagree). But we can find plenty of joy in the smaller, less time-consuming things we do. My own list includes: Playing with the dog. Reading The New Yorker. Singing. Doing needlepoint. Going to the theatre. Watching a baseball game (preferably one my team wins). Hanging out with my sweetheart. Writing something just for myself, not my clients. Laughing.

Incorporating these simple joys into my life makes me a happier, more creative person. And ultimately a much better writer.

Where’s the fun in your life? And how does it feed you?

Public Speaking

A lovely walking path follows the curves of the harbor across the street from San Diego's convention center.  The path offers something for just about everyone: art (an arresting silver sculpture), nature (a small dog park with the prettiest dog-level drinking fountain I've ever seen), a reflecting pool (surrounding yet more art).  But the most interesting feature to me were the square granite plaques spaced every few feet along the path, with quotations engraved on them.

Now, San Diego is not the only city to do this: The public spaces in Manhattan's Battery Park City feature passages by Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara, celebrating what one web site calls "the exhilarating spirit of New York City."   But those passages are actually about New York City.  The quotations in San Diego's park were not created for or about San Diego; the man who wrote the words never lived there.

From the written word to the art inspired by it, the entire park - its official name is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Promenade - celebrates the spirit and the vision of this great leader.  And the fact that San Diego has placed this tribute in such a prominent location, across the street from its Convention Center, where tens of thousands of tourists encounter it every day, gives even casual visitors a real sense of the culture and priorities of this beautiful city.

I can't wait to go back.

Speech!

We always spend Thanksgiving in Northampton, Massachusetts - a quintessential college town. And I always check out the latest offerings in the store that sells dorm room kitsch, funky T-shirts and stationery, and - my new favorite item - fingerless gloves (great for writers too cheap to turn up the heat).

This trip, I found a new item in stock: a poster, probably four feet long and maybe a foot wide, bearing the text of the speech Barack Obama gave in Grant Park on Election Night.

Imagine that - a speech so inspirational that it's inspired a poster. It's been a long time since we've had one of those. What a wonderful time to be an American. And a speechwriter.