It doesn’t take a lot of words to move people. It’s finding the right ones and putting them in the right order that’s tricky. Take these six words often attributed to the famous writer Ernest Hemingway. He wrote them in response to someone asking if he could write a book in just six words.
There’s not only a story here, but one that paints with curious emotion.
I enjoy reading Hemingway. He never wasted words. Like in his 1952 classic, The Old Man and the Sea, I was alone with the old man drifting on his weathered boat in the middle of the ocean, hanging on every word like precious rainwater. A master craftsman, Hemingway carefully and thoughtfully worked, hard—just like the people he wrote about.
Hard work and humility seem to go together, just like good writing and loneliness.
“For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.” That was Hemingway, humbly searching beyond his reach.
In my company’s line of business, creative marketing, we produce words and pictures. It’s really quite simple in theory. Today, most people can do that with the click of a few buttons. Kids better than adults in some cases.
So why do smart people, visionary leaders in fact, pay us good money to do what so many others can do?
Maybe it’s because creative marketing people, whether writers or artists, work to create something others can’t or won’t. Some creative people have a well so deep of ideas and creativity, that it sometimes feels like just dipping into an ocean. My wife once asked why I give away so many ideas to potential clients before they engage us. I tell her it’s because of the deep well, a gift I believe I was given.
Creative people, from writers like Hemingway, artists like Picasso, moviemakers like Spielberg, etc., fish in their ocean of ideas, where stories and creativity that are just waiting to be drawn to the surface.
It’s common for people like us working in creative agencies to hear business stories and goals that seem beyond attainment. So ideas, like words and pictures truly are a dime a dozen when just thrown together. In those cases, you really do need “great luck” to succeed.
If having the right ideas and putting them in the right order was easy, everyone could do it.
I’ll admit, some days are harder than others. But like wrestling with a giant fish, it makes for some of life’s greatest stories and successes.
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
—Ernest Hemingway