《Ignore Everybody》翻书笔记

作者：Hugh MacLeod
出版社：Penguin Group
发行时间：2009
来源：下载的 mobi 版本

Hugh MacLeod 十年如一日的在小卡片上作画，然后发表在自己的 blog 上：

他的漫画在微软全球的办公室挂起
他的博客每月有200万人次来访
他的电子书下载超过100万次
他的理念被世界500强追捧

这本不到200页的小册子，可以说是鸡汤，也可以说是作者对于人生、世界、成就的态度，最后作者自己的总结我觉得还是蛮到位的：
If I had to condense this entire book into a line or two, it would read something like, “Work hard. Keep at it. Live simply and quietly. Remain humble. Stay positive. Create your own luck. Be nice. Be polite.”

看到一半才发现国内有引进，书名是《要么拯救世界，要么滚回家！》，是湛卢出的书，所以质量应该可以接受~

每章的标题都是内容的总结，作者一共总结了40条获取「创新力」的核心：

1. Ignore everybody.
2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.
3. Put the hours in.
4. Good ideas have lonely childhoods.
5. If your business plan depends on suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
6. You are responsible for your own experience.
7. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
8. Keep your day job.
9. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
10. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
11. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.
12. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
13. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.
14. Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside.
15. Dying young is overrated.
16. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do from what you are not.
17. The world is changing.
18. Merit can be bought. Passion can’t.
19. Avoid the Watercooler Gang.
20. Sing in your own voice.
21. The choice of media is irrelevant.
22. Selling out is harder than it looks.
23. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.
24. Worrying about “Commercial vs. Artistic” is a complete waste of time.
25. Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.
26. You have to find your own shtick.
27. Write from the heart.
28. The best way to get approval is not to need it.
29. Power is never given. Power is taken.
30. Whatever choice you make, the Devil gets his due eventually.
31. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.
32. Remain frugal.
33. Allow your work to age with you.
34. Being Poor Sucks.
35. Beware of turning hobbies into jobs.
36. Savor obscurity while it lasts.
37. Start blogging.
38. Meaning scales, people don’t.
39. When your dreams become reality, they are no longer your dreams.
40. None of this is rocket science.

摘录：

The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you.

YOU DON’T KNOW IF YOUR IDEA IS ANY GOOD the moment it’s created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is. There’s a reason why feelings scare us—because what they tell us and what the rest of the world tells us are often two different things.
And asking close friends never works quite as well as you hope, either. It’s not that they deliberately want to be unhelpful. It’s just that they don’t know your world one millionth as well as you know your world, no matter how hard they try, no matter how hard you try to explain.
Plus a big idea will change you. Your friends may love you, but they may not want you to change. If you change, then their dynamic with you also changes. They might prefer things the way they are, that’s how they love you—the way you are, not the way you may become.
Ergo, they might not have any incentive to see you change. If so, they will be resistant to anything that catalyzes it. That’s human nature. And you would do the same, if the shoe were on the other foot.
With business colleagues it’s even worse. They’re used to dealing with you in a certain way. They’re used to having a certain level of control over the relationship. And they want whatever makes them more prosperous. Sure, they might prefer it if you prosper as well, but that’s not their top priority.
If your idea is so good that it changes your dynamic enough to where you need them less or, God forbid, the market needs them less, then they’re going to resist your idea every chance they can.
Again, that’s human nature.
GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE POWER BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS. THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.
Good ideas come with a heavy burden, which is why so few people execute them. So few people can handle it.

WE ALL SPEND A LOT OF TIME BEING IMPRESSED by folks we’ve never met. Somebody featured in the media who’s got a big company, a big product, a big movie, a big bestseller. Whatever.
And we spend even more time trying unsuccessfully to keep up with them. Trying to start up our own companies, our own products, our own film projects, books, and whatnot.
I’m as guilty as anyone. I tried lots of different things over the years, trying desperately to pry my career out of the jaws of mediocrity. Some to do with business, some to do with art, etc.
One evening, after one false start too many, I just gave up. Sitting at a bar, feeling a bit burned out by work and by life in general, I just started drawing on the backs of business cards for no reason. I didn’t really need a reason. I just did it because it was there, because it amused me in a kind of random, arbitrary way.
Of course it was stupid. Of course it was not commercial. Of course it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Of course it was a complete and utter waste of time. But in retrospect, it was this built-in futility that gave it its edge. Because it was the exact opposite of all the “Big Plans” my peers and I were used to making. It was so liberating not to have to think about all that, for a change.
It was so liberating to be doing something that didn’t have to have some sort of commercial angle, for a change.
It was so liberating to be doing something that didn’t have to impress anybody, for a change.
It was so liberating to be free of ambition, for a change.
It was so liberating to be doing something that wasn’t a career move, for a change.
It was so liberating to have something that belonged just to me and no one else, for a change.
It was so liberating to feel complete sovereignty, for a change. To feel complete freedom, for a change. To have something that didn’t require somebody else’s money, or somebody else’s approval, for a change.
And of course, it was then, and only then, that the outside world started paying attention.
The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will. How your own sovereignty inspires other people to find their own sovereignty, their own sense of freedom and possibility, will give the work far more power than the work’s objective merits ever will.
Your idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours alone. The more the idea is yours alone, the more freedom you have to do something really amazing.
The more amazing, the more people will click with your idea. The more people click with your idea, the more this little thing of yours will snowball into a big thing.
That’s what doodling on the backs of business cards taught me.

Well, as I’m fond of saying on my blog, don’t quit your day job. I didn’t. I rent an office and go there every day, the same as any other regular schmoe. When I was younger and had to remind myself that there was a world outside of my head, I drew mostly while sitting at a bar in the evenings, but that got old. Even after my cartooning got successful, I still took on corporate marketing and advertising gigs, just to stay attached to the real world.
Keeping one foot in the “real world” makes everything far more manageable for me. The fact that I have another income means I don’t feel pressured to do something market-friendly. Instead, I get to do whatever the hell I want. I get to do it for my own satisfaction. And I think that makes the work more powerful in the long run. It also makes it easier to carry on with it in a calm fashion, day-in-day-out, and not go crazy in insane creative bursts brought on by money worries.
The day job, which I really like, gives me something productive and interesting to do among fellow adults. It gets me out of the house in the daytime. If I were a professional cartoonist I’d just be chained to a drawing table at home all day, scribbling out a living in silence, interrupted only by frequent trips to the coffee shop. No, thank you.
Simply put, my method allows me to pace myself over the long haul, which is critical.

Second-rate ideas like glorious swellings far more. Second-rate ideas like it when the creator starts believing his own heroic-myth crap. “Me! The Artist! Me! The Bringer of Light! Me! The Creator! Me! The Undiscovered Genius!!!” It keeps the second-rate idea alive longer.

The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task at hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.
A good example is Phil, a New York photographer friend of mine. He does really wild stuff for the small, hipster magazines— it pays virtually nothing, but it allows him to build his portfolio. Then he’ll leverage that to go off and shoot some retail catalogues for a while. Nothing too exciting, but it pays the bills.
Another example is somebody like Martin Amis, the bestselling British author. He writes “serious” novels, but also supplements his income by writing the occasional newspaper article for the London papers, or making the occasional television appearance (novel royalties are generally pathetic—even rock stars like Amis aren’t immune).
Or actors. One year John Travolta will be in an ultrahip flick like Pulp Fiction (“Sex”), another he’ll be in some forgettable, big-budget thriller like Broken Arrow (“Cash”).
Or painters. You spend one month painting blue pictures because that’s the color the celebrity collectors are buying this season (“Cash”), you spend the next month painting red pictures because secretly you despise the color blue and love the color red (“Sex”).
Or geeks. You spend your weekdays writing code for a faceless corporation (“Cash”), then you spend your evenings and weekends writing anarchic, weird computer games to amuse your techie friends (“Sex”).
It’s balancing the need to make a good living while still maintaining one’s creative sovereignty. My MO is drawing cartoons and writing in my blog (“Sex”), coupled with my day job. (See tip # 3 for more details on the latter.)
I’m thinking about the young writer who has to wait tables to pay the bills, in spite of her writing appearing in all the cool and hip magazines . . . who dreams of one day not having her life divided so harshly.
Well, over time the “harshly” bit might go away, but not the “divided.”
This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.
And nobody is immune. Not the struggling waiter, nor the movie star.
As soon as you accept this, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career starts moving ahead faster. I don’t know why this happens. It’s the people who refuse to cleave their lives this way—who just want to start Day One by quitting their current crappy day job and moving straight on over to bestselling author—well, they never make it.
Anyway, it’s called “The Sex & Cash Theory.” Keep it under your pillow.

You may never reach the summit; for that you will be forgiven. But if you don’t make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow line, years later you will find yourself lying on your deathbed, and all you will feel is emptiness.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN WROTE THE GETTYSBURG Address on a piece of ordinary stationery that he had borrowed from the friend whose house he was staying at.
Ernest Hemingway wrote with a simple fountain pen. Somebody else did the typing, but only much later.
Van Gogh rarely painted with more than six colors on his palette.
I draw on the back of small business cards. Whatever.
There’s no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership. None. Zilch. Nada.
Actually, as the artist gets more into her thing, and as she gets more successful, the number of tools tends to go down. She knows what works for her. Expending mental energy on stuff wastes time. She’s a woman on a mission. She’s got a deadline. She’s got some rich client breathing down her neck. The last thing she wants is to spend three weeks learning how to use a router drill if she doesn’t need to.
A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind.
Which is why there are so many second-rate art directors with state-of-the-art Macintosh computers.
Which is why there are so many hack writers with state-of-the-art laptops.
Which is why there are so many crappy photographers with state-of-the-art digital cameras.
Which is why there are so many unremarkable painters with expensive studios in trendy neighborhoods.
Hiding behind pillars, all of them.
Pillars do not help; they hinder. The more mighty the pillar, the more you end up relying on it psychologically, the more it gets in your way.
And this applies to business as well.
Which is why there are so many failing businesses with fancy offices.
Which is why there’s so many failing businessmen spending a fortune on fancy suits and expensive yacht club memberships.
Again, hiding behind pillars.
Successful people, artists and nonartists alike, are very good at spotting pillars. They’re very good at doing without them. Even more important, once they’ve spotted a pillar, they’re very good at quickly getting rid of it.
Good pillar management is one of the most valuable talents you can have on the planet. If you have it, I envy you. If you don’t, I pity you.
Sure, nobody’s perfect. We all have our pillars. We seem to need them. You are never going to live a pillar-free existence. Neither am I.
All we can do is keep asking the question, “Is this a pillar?” about every aspect of our business, our craft, our reason for being alive, and go from there. The more we ask, the better we get at spotting pillars, the more quickly the pillars vanish.
Ask. Keep asking. And then ask again. Stop asking and you’re dead.

“The first rule of business,” he said, chuckling at my naïveté, “is never sell something you love. Otherwise, you may as well be selling your children.”

I’ve seen so many young people take the “Gotta do the drugs and booze thing to make me a better artist” route over the years. A choice that wasn’t smart, original, effective, healthy, or ended happily.
IT’S A FAMILIAR STORY: A KID READS ABOUT Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix or Charles Bukowski and somehow decides that their poetic but flawed example somehow gives him permission and/or absolution to spend the next decade or two drowning in his own metaphorical vomit.
Of course, the older you get, the more casualties of this foolishness you meet. The more time they have had to ravage their lives. The more pathetic they seem. And the less remarkable work they seem to have to show for it, for all their “amazing experiences” and “special insights.”
The smarter and more talented the artist is, the less likely he will choose this route. Sure, he might screw around a wee bit while he’s young and stupid, but he will move on quicker than most.
But the kid thinks it’s all about talent; he thinks it’s all about “potential.” He underestimates how much time, discipline, and stamina also play their part. Sure, like Bukowski et al., there are exceptions. But that is why we like their stories when we’re young. Because they are exceptional stories. And every kid with a guitar or a pen or a paintbrush or an idea for a new business wants to be exceptional. Every kid underestimates his competition, and overestimates his chances. Every kid is a sucker for the idea that there’s a way to make it without having to do the actual hard work.
So the bars of West Hollywood, London, and New York are awash with people throwing their lives away in the desperate hope of finding a shortcut, any shortcut. And a lot of them aren’t even young anymore, their B-plans having been washed away by beer and vodka years ago.
Meanwhile the competition is at home, working their asses off.

The only people who can change the world are people who want to. And not everybody does.
HUMAN BEINGS HAVE THIS THING I CALL THE “Pissed Off Gene.” It’s that bit of our psyche that makes us utterly dissatisfied with our lot, no matter how kindly Fortune smiles upon us.
It’s there for a reason. Back in our early caveman days, being pissed off made us more likely to get off our butts, get out of the cave and into the tundra hunting woolly mammoth, so we’d have something to eat for supper. It’s a survival mechanism. Damn useful then, damn useful now.
It’s this same Pissed Off Gene that makes us want to create anything in the first place—drawings, violin sonatas, meat packing companies, Web sites. This same gene drove us to discover how to make a fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow, indoor plumbing, the personal computer, the list is endless.
Part of understanding the creative urge is understanding that it’s primal. Wanting to change the world is not a noble calling, it’s a primal calling.
We think we’re “Providing a superior integrated logistic system” or “Helping America to really taste Freshness.” In fact we’re just pissed off and want to get the hell out of the cave and kill the woolly mammoth.
Your business either lets you go hunt the woolly mammoth or it doesn’t. Of course, as with so many white-collar jobs these days, you might very well be offered a ton of money to sit in the corner-office cave and pretend that you’re hunting, even if you’re not, even if you’re just pushing pencils. That is sad. What’s even sadder is that you agreed to take the money.

Picasso was a terrible colorist. Turner couldn’t paint human beings worth a damn. Saul Steinberg’s formal drafting skills were appalling. T. S. Eliot had a full-time day job.
Henry Miller was a wildly uneven writer. Bob Dylan can’t sing or play guitar.

Diluting your product to make it more “commercial” will just make people like it less.
MANY YEARS AGO, BARELY OUT OF COLLEGE, I started schlepping my portfolio around the ad agencies, looking for my first job.
One fine day a creative director in a big corner office downtown kindly agreed for me to come show him my work. Hooray!
So I came to his office and showed him my work. Frankly, the work was bloody awful. All of it. Imagine the worst, cheesiest “I used to wash with Sudso but now I wash with Lemon-Fresh Rinso Extreme” vapid-housewife crap. Only far worse than that.
The creative director was a nice guy. You could tell he didn’t think much of my work, though he was far too polite to blurt it out. Finally he quietly confessed that it wasn’t doing much for him.
“Well, the target market is middle-class housewives,” I rambled. “They’re quite conservative, so I thought I’d better tone it down. . . .”
“You can tone it down once you’ve gotten the job and once the client comes after your ass with a red-hot poker and tells you to tone it down.” He laughed. “Till then, show me the toned-up version.”
This story doesn’t just happen in advertising. It happens everywhere.
It’s hard to sell out if nobody has bought in.

A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway.
A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else’s voice but your own.
EVERY ARTIST IS LOOKING FOR THEIR BIG, definitive “Ah-Ha!” moment, whether they’re a master or not.
That moment where they finally find their true voice, once and for all.
For me, it was when I discovered drawing on the backs of business cards.
Other, more famous, and far more notable examples would be Jackson Pollock discovering splatter paint. Or Robert Ryman discovering all-white canvases. Andy Warhol discovering silk-screen. Hunter S. Thompson discovering gonzo journalism. Duchamp discovering the found object. Jasper Johns discovering the American flag. Hemingway discovering brevity. James Joyce discovering stream-of-consciousness prose.
Was it luck? Perhaps a little bit.
But it wasn’t the format that made the art great. It was the fact that somehow while playing around with something new, suddenly they found they were able to put their entire selves into it.
Only then did it become their “shtick,” their true voice, etc.
That’s what people responded to. The humanity, not the form. The voice, not the form.
Put your whole self into it, and you will find your true voice. Hold back and you won’t. It’s that simple.

The best way to get approval is not to need it.
This is equally true in art and business. And love. And sex. And just about everything else worth having.
ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO I WAS HANGING out in the offices of Punch, the famous London humor magazine. I was just a kid at the time, but for some reason the cartoon editor (who was a famous cartoonist in his own right) was tolerating having me around that day.
I was asking him questions about the biz. He was answering them as best he could while he sorted through a large stack of mail.
“Take a look at this, sunshine,” he said, handing a piece of paper over to me.
I gave it a look. Some long-established cartoonist whose name I recognized had written him a rather sad and desperate letter, begging to be published.
“Another whiny letter from another whiny cartoonist who used to be famous twenty-five years ago,” he said, rolling his eyeballs. “I get at least fifty of them a week from other whiny formerly famous cartoonists.”
He paused. Then he flashed a wicked grin.
“How not to get published,” he said. “Write me a bloody letter like that one.”

There’s a famous old quip: “A lot of people in business say they have twenty years’ experience, when in fact all they really have is one year’s experience, repeated twenty times.”

Beware of turning hobbies into jobs.
It sounds great, but there is a downside.
THE LATE BRITISH BILLIONAIRE JAMES GOLD-SMITH once quipped, “When a man marries his mistress, he immediately creates a vacancy.”
What’s true in philanderers is also true in life.

Words Review List:

words	sentence
doodling	I got into the habit of doodling on the backs of business cards
gig	a ten-day freelance copywriting gig at a Midtown advertising agency
Bristol board	or bristol board cut to the same size
ballpoint	I’ll use other things—pencil, watercolor, ballpoint, tablet PC—but not often
potty-mouth	and replacing certain potty-mouth words with something more palatable
stamina	Ninety percent of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort, and stamina
schmoe	I rent an office and go there every day, the same as any other regular schmoe
groovy	The groovy cats publishing this book, for example, are lovely people
squelch	Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
bully	Nor can you bully a subordinate into becoming a genius
nonautonomous	So now corporations are awash with nonautonomous thinkers
ecology	The ecology dies
critical mass	What happens to an ecology when the parasite level reaches critical mass
dust off	So dust off your horn and start tooting it
tooting	So dust off your horn and start tooting it
Mount Everest	Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb
metaphorical	this metaphorical Mount Everest doesn't have to manifest itself as “Art.”
props	The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props
deli	Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me
fountain pen	Ernest Hemingway wrote with a simple fountain pen
yuppies	sell them at vast profit to yuppies
whiff	So I sort of got the whiff of opportunity just by talking to people in my antiques shop
inventory	I always loved antiques, so I was always falling in love with the inventory
naïveté	he said, chuckling at my naïveté
mammoth	get out of the cave and into the tundra hunting woolly mammoth
rookie	as a young rookie
Turner	Turner couldn’t paint human beings worth a damn
Art Majors	I knew some Art Majors who were absolutely brilliant
shtick	You have to find your own shtick
Beethoven	A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony
found object	Duchamp discovering the found object
biz	I was asking him questions about the biz
quip	There’s a famous old quip
stadiums	he’d been playing stadiums for a while