Thursday, April 13, 2006
Study with the Masters
Step 8. Find a Master
I found many. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi found one - Guru Dev, a nickname for the Universal Guru Shankaracharya Jyotirmath, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati Maharaj.
The Transcendental Meditation people make you kneel before a picture of the "Maharshi" (the correct pronounciation) standing surrounded by flowers looking up a hill toward Guru Dev and up above him were other hairy men in dresses, obviously gurus and gurus of gurus.
If you are to become a guru, ya gotta get a guru.
My first guru was Dale Carnegie, who wrote How To Win Friends and Influence People - a book given to me by a 'friend' as a kind of insult, as one would give another a bar of soap. By the time I read it, Dale was long dead, but his teaching lived on in the form of his courses. I did one. It transformed my life.
He taught me to expect ingratitude, that humans are self-conscious and self-obsessed, and that the way to get what you want is to help other people get what they want.
The next guru I attached myself to was David Ogilvy. I joined his company and worked for it and no other except my own. I encountered DO while waiting for a bus during rush hour in Sydney's Pitt Street. He was in the window of a book shop in the form of a book called "On Advertising". He taught me that advertising could be a business for 'gentlemen with brains' and that it paid to have a 'well-furnished mind'. He taught me that if I worked twice as hard as the next person I would get ahead three times as fast. He taught me always to give my client's product a first class ticket. He taught me that a penniless copywriter could wind up living in a chateau in the Loire Valley and commanding the world's largest advertising agency and still be an interesting person . He taught me that real copywriters knew how to write direct response copy.
So I badgered the creative directors of the local office of Oiglvy & Mather Direct* until they gave me a job. It took 18 months.
After that I learned from giants like John Hancock (who called what we did for a living "flogging stuff" and who loved it when our work got 'down and dirty'). Giants like Brian Walker, recently deceased, who blue pencilled my copy until one day when I brought my copy to him, he told me "I don't want to see it. You're now flying solo." Giants like Mike Birmingham, who looked like a street person, spoke like an Oxford scholar, and wrote copy that sang; long copy ads for Mercedes Benz and long letters for the accursed American Express. When I was made Creative Director 18 months after joining the company as Trainee Copywriter, I inherited a bunch of young turks ready to wreck the joint and two 60-year-old getlemen writers who would spend time discussing with me the correct use of a semi-colon and the neccessity of the serial comma.
I was attracted to wisdom. As the editor of Marketing Magazine I put well-known industry personalities on the cover - taking my lead from the womens' magazines who know that people are interested in people and especially celebrities.
So I did this deal with the magazine - I'd put a marketing celeb on the cover and they would speak at our monthly luncheon to launch the issue. Celebs in an industry are usually celebs for a reason. They are either high achievers or self promoters. I learned something from all of them.
And a guru learns from ordinary people and children and nature, especially nature... ¶ 8:58 PM
Step 8. Find a Master
I found many. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi found one - Guru Dev, a nickname for the Universal Guru Shankaracharya Jyotirmath, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati Maharaj.
The Transcendental Meditation people make you kneel before a picture of the "Maharshi" (the correct pronounciation) standing surrounded by flowers looking up a hill toward Guru Dev and up above him were other hairy men in dresses, obviously gurus and gurus of gurus.If you are to become a guru, ya gotta get a guru.
My first guru was Dale Carnegie, who wrote How To Win Friends and Influence People - a book given to me by a 'friend' as a kind of insult, as one would give another a bar of soap. By the time I read it, Dale was long dead, but his teaching lived on in the form of his courses. I did one. It transformed my life.He taught me to expect ingratitude, that humans are self-conscious and self-obsessed, and that the way to get what you want is to help other people get what they want.
The next guru I attached myself to was David Ogilvy. I joined his company and worked for it and no other except my own. I encountered DO while waiting for a bus during rush hour in Sydney's Pitt Street. He was in the window of a book shop in the form of a book called "On Advertising". He taught me that advertising could be a business for 'gentlemen with brains' and that it paid to have a 'well-furnished mind'. He taught me that if I worked twice as hard as the next person I would get ahead three times as fast. He taught me always to give my client's product a first class ticket. He taught me that a penniless copywriter could wind up living in a chateau in the Loire Valley and commanding the world's largest advertising agency and still be an interesting person . He taught me that real copywriters knew how to write direct response copy.So I badgered the creative directors of the local office of Oiglvy & Mather Direct* until they gave me a job. It took 18 months.
After that I learned from giants like John Hancock (who called what we did for a living "flogging stuff" and who loved it when our work got 'down and dirty'). Giants like Brian Walker, recently deceased, who blue pencilled my copy until one day when I brought my copy to him, he told me "I don't want to see it. You're now flying solo." Giants like Mike Birmingham, who looked like a street person, spoke like an Oxford scholar, and wrote copy that sang; long copy ads for Mercedes Benz and long letters for the accursed American Express. When I was made Creative Director 18 months after joining the company as Trainee Copywriter, I inherited a bunch of young turks ready to wreck the joint and two 60-year-old getlemen writers who would spend time discussing with me the correct use of a semi-colon and the neccessity of the serial comma.
I was attracted to wisdom. As the editor of Marketing Magazine I put well-known industry personalities on the cover - taking my lead from the womens' magazines who know that people are interested in people and especially celebrities.
So I did this deal with the magazine - I'd put a marketing celeb on the cover and they would speak at our monthly luncheon to launch the issue. Celebs in an industry are usually celebs for a reason. They are either high achievers or self promoters. I learned something from all of them.
And a guru learns from ordinary people and children and nature, especially nature... ¶ 8:58 PM
