Boomer Wisdom From David Ogilvy

What you can learn from one of the greats

I’m not a huge fan of reading business books.

Most people who have stacks of them on their bookshelves are usually LARPers, wannabes, or midwits (sometimes all three).

You benefit a lot more from reading real books: fiction, philosophy, history, classics, etc.

For example, if the people from Paradise Media were familiar with Icarus they wouldn’t have flown so close to the sun and got themselves rekt.

But I will make an exception for a select few boomer business books. The way I see it, there’s probably at least some wisdom there if a book that was written decades ago is still in print.

I just finished reading Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy, written in the peak Mad Men boomer year of 1962.

Here are some of my favorite quotes.

"Advertising seems to sell the most when it is written by a solitary individual."

Let a lone genius do his thing and you’ll get something great.

Decisions by committee get watered down to the lowest common denominator, which always falls way short of genius.

Creativity by definition is the ability to take the vision of the world that you see so clearly inside your mind’s eye and transfer it (in whole) into an external medium so that other people can see things the way you see them.

You destroy the magic when you let a group of random people sit around a (real or metaphorical) conference table and chip away at that singular vision, two cents at a time.

"Few of the great creators have bland personalities. They are cantankerous egotists, the kind of men who are unwelcome in the modern corporation."

Anyone creative is going to ruffle more than a few feathers on their way to the top.

Being a likable people-person is a great trait that will take you far in some fields. But not when it comes to anything creative.

Note that I’m not talking about being a belligerent asshole for the sake of being a belligerent asshole.