I watched a BBC documentary on John McEnroe. I quite liked it, since I love tennis and I grew in a time when tennis players were as big as rock stars. Connors, Borg, Becker, Agassi and so on.
It has quite a lot to say about agencies and people in them to be honest. About the supposed truth that you can't have brilliant people who are easy to work with.
Because at the heart of the story was the tension between McEnroe's outrageous talent and his unpredictable temperament.
When he was great, he was stellar, when he was bad be was awful - and sometimes he destroyed himself in games he was winning.
Agassi and Becker are other examples of this. Players who, when on song, their tennis was like poetry.
But their talent was such, they should have won far more than they did.
Some say without waywardness let loose, they would never have won at all, and certainly not in the magical way they did.
And let's be honest, we remember these players, while mostly never talking about Lendl or Sampras.
But I don't accept accept it has to be one or the other.
Step forward Federer, Nadal, Borg. Legends, who let their racket do the talking. It's just that when their rackets spoke, it was Proust or Hemingway (or in Nadal's case, something more brutal)
And you may not know that Federer and Borg were badly behaved, temperamental young players who learned to channel, focus, their emotions into playing.
It was at this moment they started winning.
There's a deep truth in psychology that rarely gets discussed. Anger is a good thing, it delivers energy to help you fix what's creating the problem. Not by venting on someone, or throwing yourself into a furious run or whatever, because the problem will only come back.
Anger is great to fuel you dealing with a problem, changing things. Using the rage for positive action.
You can see where I'm going with this can't you?
Letting 'characters' in agencies rule the roost.
Making it OK for outrageous talent to treat others like dirt.
Excusing agencies who are sporadically amazing for their duds.
By all means, celebrate the bonkers brilliance of the agencies that tend to make the headlines.
Or the kind if work that get's into Campaign.
But you know you just did really well at Cannes this year? AMV. An agency who manage to be big, solid and totally brilliant. Founded by nice men who believed a company could be great at it's work while being great to work there.
They will dealt with the same stuff the rest of us do. Bad briefs, budgets getting cut, client's not buying great work. The fact your in service industry and your fate is the whim of others.
It's no use being brilliant some of the time.
No amount of talent excuses anyone being a dick.
Put another way, the problem with supernovas is that they burn out very quickly - and when they explode, destroy all around them.
New balls.
Posted by: John | July 08, 2019 at 11:50 AM
No such thing as too pink
Posted by: Northern | July 10, 2019 at 06:10 PM