*Typing*

If you're building McDonald's, don't pout when your food doesn't receive the same culinary recognition as a Michelin Restaurant.

If you're building The French Laundry, don't whine when your food doesn't enjoy the same astronomical sales quarters as a fast-food franchise.

They're two entirely different enterprises after two entirely different things.

One is a matter of quantity. The other, quality.

If you're lucky, you have one great idea a year.

They're not like good ideas. They're extraordinarily rare. For every hundred or so good ideas you have, you might have one truly great idea. Worst yet, it's difficult to recognize a great idea when it appears. Great ideas usually look like bad ideas.

They're offensive. They're outrageous. They're aggressive. They're polarizing. They're foreign. They're unearthly. They're uncomfortable. Great ideas scare the living shit out of you.

In fact, when a great idea enters your mind, your knee-jerk reaction should be to shake your head and say...

"There is no way we can get away with that."

If you run a creative agency, fear must become your playground.

Creative agencies rise and fall faster than ancient empires. It's a pattern as inevitable as the seasons. If you could bet agencies the way you bet horses, you would make a small fortune.

Your next best wager is to start a winning agency of your own. Once every few years, an extraordinary agency is born. It's ambitious. It's audacious. It's tenacious. It's red-hot. It's explosive. It becomes the bane of every other agency's existence. Before long, it robs accounts from its old, weathered predecessors who've been coasting on their laurels for far too long.

This is precisely the gamble I am making with Honey Copy.

Machinery is tremendous for execution. Less so for ideation. Make a list of your biggest ideas and attempt to recollect what you were doing when you had them.

Perhaps you were walking at dusk to an orchestra of cicadas or sipping sherry in a hot bath. Perhaps you were cutting the grass beneath a beating, unrelenting sun or nodding off beneath the snaking branches of a shade tree. Perhaps you were spinning vinyl whilst folding laundry or trying to fall asleep after watching 'Apocalypse Now'.

You were very likely doing any number of activities. But, what you weren't doing, was staring wide-eyed at a computer screen. Nor were you outsourcing your creative thinking to AI. Laptops. Phones. ChatGPT. This machinery helps us execute our ideas. But, it's not where we have our ideas. By unplugging, we open up a line to our creative subconscious.

Originality comes with the cost of certainty.

To be original is to try things that have never been done before. When you try things that have never been done before, you can't be certain they will work.

This is what separates the original from the unoriginal. It's not so much talent as it is a willingness to step into the unknown, over and over again. Everybody says they want to be original. But nobody wants to deal with the ongoing uncertainty that's required to be original.

If you are after originality, you must constantly challenge yourself to try things that might not work. In fact, 'this might not work' should become your mantra.