This week has been fairly difficult for me to come up with blog posts. I’m doing some insanely monotonous, yet essential work, and it seems to have turned off the creative part of my mind. So, I have to apologize for continuing to point to Seth Godin rather than coming up with anything new.

Today, he has a post entitled “The two things that kill marketing creativity.” From it:

The first is fear.

The fear that you’ll have to implement whatever you dream up.
The fear that you will fail.
The fear that you will do something stupid and be ridiculed by your peers for decades.

Sound familiar?

Picture yourself in a conference room with your marketing committee if you have one. You have something that you really believe in; an idea that will get your firm noticed. It is clever, creative and smart. It stands out. It talks to your clients.

You’re really excited about it and you give a high-energy pitch to the room. And when you’re done?

Crickets.

And you hear the chorus of doubt:

• I think it’s a great idea…..just not for us.
• That’s cute.
• No one has ever done that before. Must be for a reason.
• Maybe some other time. Let’s go with what we’ve done before.
• Interesting idea. Let’s think about it. So, what was I talking about?

One of my favorite quotes of all time was something I read in Sally Hogshead’s “Radical Careering.” It’s great: It has a picture of the ugliest camel you’ve ever seen, and it says “A Camel Is A Horse Designed By Committee.”

It seems as if the committee is a machine that takes in a raw material called “creativity” and outputs something called “safe.”

But to be fair, it’s not the idea of the committee that’s the problem. It’s the fear. Why take a risk when you can compromise and get mediocrity?

Popularity: 8% [?]