“I bet Shakespeare and Poe spent a lot of time worrying about efficiency.” Actually, they probably did, they just weren’t quite so insufferable about it.
Fear of digression is core feature of modern man. We hate going “off topic,” because we think it’s not efficient and everyone knows that efficiency is really the only reason we should be communicating in the first place.
Marketers and Strategists, like myself, don’t help matters much. It’s our job to create neat little boxes out of intellectual chaos so that our clients can at least say something. What we’ve ended up doing is creating a world where people assume good, successful work can only exist if it exists within one of these boxes. It’s six sigma or bust in content town and if you want to argue about it I’ll be sure to throw you some bread crusts in the food stamp line.
As you may have been able to divine, this line of reasoning is a monumental load of bull hooey. Every really memorable piece of content, every interesting business, every successful creator has done well not because of how closely he has managed to match existing forms but because fundamentally he didn’t care one way or another about what anyone else was doing.
Successful creators aren’t the jaded artist types trying to recreate every tiny detail of the world in their own image, but they also aren’t the starched suit, pleated skirt corporate types who drone on about market size and value propositions. The people who end up truly changing things are those who understand the rules, why they are there, and when they should be used but aren’t so hamstrung by them that they aren’t willing to do something interesting and different.
They put themselves out there and leave it to the world to judge them.
