I was around seventeen years old, sitting next to a girl in her early twenties – she reminded me a little of a young Catherine Zeta-Jones, in a booth not much bigger than the average bathroom. She’d brought along her laptop, and showed me the best television series I had ever laid my eyes upon until that point: Dexter. Absolute heaven. The best part? I was being paid for it.
The mornings and late afternoons were usually pretty busy, but really, my first summer job mostly involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for people to show up. And whilst I took the ‘waiting around’ part very seriously at first, worried the manager would catch me slacking off and fire me, she’d done this job for quite a while, for about six or seven years by then, and she was determined to binge watch entire television series during her time on the clock. And with plenty of dead quiet moments, we watched a TV series about a serial killer who kills off all of Miami’s bad guys.
I was hooked. I loved Michael C. Hall’s monologues as Dexter, adored Miami’s scenery, felt intrigued by the whole cat-and-mouse game – with Dexter staying two or three moves ahead of everyone else, and so on. As far as I was concerned, they were leagues ahead of whatever we had here on television. Lately, I’ve been watching it again, which is why I’ve brought it up. It’s still a fine TV show.
Let’s just pretend the last two seasons or so didn’t happen, okay? Anyways, I was happy to discover that it still packs the same punch it did all of these years ago. But that’s the thing about delivering great work: it tends to stand the test of time.
Which brings me to this podcast I’ve been listening to again, lately. So, here’s this guy, a protégé of a well-known marketing guru from when people still listened to cassette tapes in their car. Now, the first episode of his podcast was a mess. He rambled away, and rightfully got criticised for it. I mean, it shouldn’t take you over twenty minutes just to tell people to try out bullet-proof coffee. Someone wrote him a review saying as much, which sparked off a whole tirade.
So, guess what happened when he got together with some musicians, and put out his own album? Sure, he wasn’t a professional musican, but it was on his bucket list and he did it anyways. Well, he got criticised, got upset over it, and put out a podcast episode, talking about how everyone loves to dish out criticism, failing to create anything of value themselves. And while there’s some truth to that, people in his circle tend to believe in just putting as much stuff out there as possible. Don’t care if it’s junk, just go and put it out there. “Motion beats meditation”, right?
Well, I’m all for beating perfectionism, and for doing away with paralysis by analysis, but let’s keep it real here. This whole notion of dumping a boat load of garbage out there, believing your time will come just because you’re uploading on a regular schedule, is the biggest pile of nonsense I’ve ever heard of in my life. But it’s part of the dogma these guys believe in. They believe great titles and headlines will do all of the heavy lifting – to the point of neglecting the content, and they believe that once you’ve got a great brand, you can sit back and relax.
Their world crumbles as soon as you start asking questions. The real reason why he doesn’t like criticism: it reveals that his philosophy doesn’t work. But guess what? Dexter didn’t need some fancy title, did it? Nor did it need an advertising campaign to bring me back to it, all these years later. Great work tends to stand the test of time. My friend, it’s all about a long term vision. Food for thought.
Kind regards
Vincent J. Dancet