The Great List :: 090
Dear Friend,
I'm holding the phone number of a man who will change my life. And I'm scared to call. It's my senior year of college and I'm an intern at an ad agency in Los Angeles. Desperate to be hired as an art director, but at this point I would take any job in advertising. Wandering the creative department one fateful afternoon, I meet a freelance art director.
"You should work with my favorite teacher, Craig." She says. "He helped me get my first job. Here's his number."
And after a few days of nerves, I make the call. We talk for almost an hour and it's like he knows me.
On October 24, 2006 we met for the first night of PUSH, a weekly creative methodology class. I enter the office where he worked and am invited downstairs into a dark bunker-like conference room sitting around a glass conference table with 5 other aspiring creative-types.
After some brief introductions we pin 5 of our favorite pieces of creative work on the walls of the room. There are photography, music videos stills, billboards, greeting cards, tshirts, sculpture, street art...
Then, Craig's challenge to us is to make a list of everything they all have in common. What makes all great work great?
This month's refrigerator is a story about a list. Everyone from that class, many of whom I still keep in touch with, call this "The Great List." And the exercise was about turning something abstract and subjective into something concrete and objective. The point was to know for certain what we were working towards. Not just making something great by luck.
I still use this list today. Nearly every day. It's taught me to stop and define goals. What am I working towards? What would make this great? Whatever the "this" is.
This month's refrigerator is a story about The Great List, sure. Each chapter is something I believe is a part of all great work. But it's also about someone who changed my life. If you've ever had a teacher or friend who's changed yours, maybe you can relate.
All of the art this month is spec work I did in Craig's class.
"Doughboy" Crunch Gyms
A Simple But Non-Obvious Truth
I had a winning idea, I was sure of it. In the first class, we decided that at the core of all great creative work, at the very top of the Great List, is a human insight. A simple but non-obvious truth.
For two weeks, our assignment was to think about an insight for a brand of gardening seeds. And I had a great insight: "Gardening is relaxing." Boom! When I presented it to Craig and the class...Boom! It bombed.
"Well actually, think it's kind of annoying, being outside in the heat." one classmate said. "Yeah, I don't like getting all dirty..." another piled on. "Do you feel like it's relaxing?" someone else challenged.
Turns out a truth has to be true. It's better to say "Gardening might be relaxing if you're a stressed out middle-aged suburban mom" than "gardening is relaxing." The specificity and the language matter when you're building a whole body of work around one statement.
I spent nearly 8 weeks writing, interviewing, and learning. Just to arrive at one insight: "Growing a vegetable is sort of like raising a child–you're proud of all the effort and work it took to nurture. And you love it no matter how ugly it is."
It was specific. It was visceral. And most importantly, it was true.
Growing up, most people usually feel different in some way. From their friends, or their family, or their school. And finding a place and a group to belong to that's not for everyone allows us to grow with confidence.
The simple but non-obvious truth is that outsiders want to feel like outsiders together. And it takes one leader to bring those outsiders together.
"Beer Pong", Ketel One
Before there was You're Better Than Brunch, I made an ad campaign for Ketel One about growing up and out of the college era.
The Message Matches the Medium
For two years, class was intentionally slow. It felt like an archaeological dig for bones of insights and ideas. Lots of digging, not a lot of finding.
But that was the whole point. If it were fast and easy, there'd be a lot more great work out there. Great work requires meticulousness. Developing the skills to identify and foster a great insight takes time.
In PUSH, we were there to learn the process. And that's why the message was the same at the end of every class. We'd walk out the door and thank Craig. And every time he would say the same thing. "Keep going."
"Stop Complaining" Nike
During the last few miles of the 2006 LA Marathon, I looked for motivation anywhere I could find it. That insight inspired this Nike campaign.
See something in a new way
As I approach college graduation, I'm still working at the ad agency part time. I was desperate to get hired. The problem was that we had just entered the financial crisis. I should be lucky to have something, right?
Everyone was saying to just lay low. Ride out the crisis. Move back home if I had to. Craig had a different take.
The way to get ahead, Craig once explained to me, is that while everyone is pumping the brakes, I should keep my foot on the gas. Go faster.
I already had a foot in the door. So I sat in on pitch meetings. I wrote up ideas for campaigns to briefs I was never officially briefed on. I shadowed the an executive assistant for two months helping to book travel and do expense reports for the creative directors I wanted to be my bosses.
And less than a year after graduation, I got my first job offer.
Great work makes you see something in a new way. And I suppose a great teacher does too.
"Be Fearless", Kleenex
This never made my final portfolio but I always think about it when I reach for one.
Clever
I'm almost 5 years into a career in advertising, working on Samsung phone commercials. And my writing partner and I are stuck. How many ways can we talk about sharing files or connecting with friends before we tell the same boring story over and over?
Great work is clever. There's something missing in the story. There's an idea or context that the viewer has to bring to the work to fill in a gap that makes it make sense. And in spending years learning about the creative process, that is usually a result of the creators having fun.
"Distractions are only a problem when we're not having fun..." Craig said in an email. "Play play play! I know I sound like a broken record. But isn't it funny how I have to tell you that? Shouldn't I have to keep telling people to quit goofing around?"
So sitting there working on Samsung, I made up a game. What's the worst possible idea for this assignment?
I pitched the idea of friends sharing pornography by tapping their phones together. Funny, but surely we could never make it. But it unlocked something. What if we never showed it? What if it was just implied? Better than two creepy high school boys, what if it became a couple sharing a sexting video. Wait, even better– they're parents and we escalate from a kid's video to one from the wife.
It was Samsung's most watched commercial without a celebrity. 3 months later we parodied our own spot with Santa and Mrs. Claus and two elves for the holidays. The spot was parodied on The Tonight Show.
Are we having fun yet?
“Work Trip” and “Santa’s Work Trip” Samsung
Speaks the language of the audience
I happen to be in LA in November of 2022 and had lunch with Craig. The conversation quickly gets into family and getting old.
We spend so much of our time with people at work, he laments. We barely have time with the people we love and want to see more. But! We're at a point in our careers where we choose who we work with. We get to choose to work with the people we want to spend more time with.
I brought him in to work on a Caveday project and we became co-workers. I got to see him weekly for almost 6 months.
Our time is finite and we have the ability to choose who to spend it with. That's speaking my language.
"I miss him even though I hate him." Lexar
In a campaign for SD cards primarily used for photography, my partner and I landed on an insight about capturing complex emotions.
Evokes Emotion and Memorable
A few months after I saw Craig, he was diagnosed with neck and throat cancer.
For the last almost four years our relationship changed from teacher/student to friends. We texted a few times a week sharing stories and inspiring articles.
In one of our final exchanges, he shared:
"Strangely, and this is an odd thing to say, but I went to bed last night feeling grateful to cancer for thrusting upon me the conditions, the necessity and the urgency to become a much stronger person. I am proud who I have become in these last 2.5 years. Sometimes I think the universe gave me 55+ years to evolve and I just wasn’t going fast enough to reach more of my potential and I needed cancer to help me accelerate."
Craig Joiner died on April 26. He filled his hospital room with love and gratitude. He filled his days with curious questions and creativity. He filled his life with inspiration.
And because of him, so many of ours were filled, too.
When someone so big in your life is gone, what are you supposed to do? When you feel stuck and lost and like a child, what then?
I'm back in PUSH. Stuck. Lost. Confused. Like a child in the early days of my career, not sure what to do next. And Craig is walking me out the door.
I look back and he stands there, smiling.
"Keep going."
Thanks for spending time with me this weekend. Now go thank someone who changed your life. Until next month. Refridgeyalater,
Jake
A Great List (of references)
One more list
1 If someone forwarded this Email Refrigerator to you and think it's second to none, sign up here.
2. You can read the last 89 issues here. My goal is 100 monthly emails in a row without advertising or monetizing.
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4. A few topics I cut from this month: The process of Plan, Execute, Evaluate. And his philosophy on two kinds of people– people that make excuses and people that get shit done.
The Email Refrigerator is a monthly delivery of essays, poetry, imagery, and thoughts, written and curated by Jake Kahana. Why a refrigerator? Well, it's where we look for snacks, a little freshness, and where we hang the latest, greatest work. And besides, "newsletter" sounds like spam.