Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Think Opposite

Forum Mall on Hosur Road in Bangalore is the new destination for the city dwellers. Overcrowded on weekdays and jam-packed on weekends. You gotta be seen at The Forum.

Amidst the maddening crowd, I saw a little boy sitting on the footpath leading to the mall. He was selling books. My eyes caught on one particular book, "Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite" by the legendary adman Paul Arden. So, I picked up the book and started browsing the pages. Arden points out how counterintuitive thinking can bring sucess. What we think as 'Wrong' can be right. The book is filled with paradoxes and shows how 'Stealing' can lead to authencity. In one such paradox, he mentions "Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination." In another he says "Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable and originality is non-existent. So, Don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it."

The book got me thinking, how many times in our life do we actually steal an idea, execute it and celebrate it like the New Year Bash. It really doesn't matter where the idea comes from as long as we can make a Picasso out of it. So, a relevant insight can be used over and over to make an effective communication. If you need to steal the execution, so be it but only and only when you feel for it. Turn the wrongs into rights by asking yourself the question, is it relevant, is it worthy. You'll know the answer by yourself. Go ahead, start stealing!!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree, how many times in our work do we recycle the same idea..or sometimes we come across campaigns with a great insight but bad execution in that case use the insight...so there are many ads with similar insights...viola but each one is differnt..so whats wrong..good post..

pooR_Planner said...

Yes Dhivya it's sad but true ... if you look closely there's hardly anything called as original idea ... it's the execution that matters. Keep them coming. Well, I hardly get time to write this days ... will try to keep tissue-issues interesting in the near future. Cheers.

Kaj said...

hey.. interesting idea.. i think (leading on from BLINK) lots of times ideas and impressions come from a previous experience. so it may be linked, even tho we don't realise it.. so either you're genuinely inspired by sthg someone else said.. or it's possible that some iota of ur 'creative' generalisation comes from sthg else.. a useful skill for all planners i guess.. given that we're meant to think laterally =)

pooR_Planner said...

You know Fink, human mind stores everything. It remains at some corner of our brain and can be retrived as and when required. The Creative which follows a brief therefore always tends to bring out set patterns in the first draft. It's only after digging deeper that we find some amazing stuff coming out. So keep stealing the lateral way ;-) ...