Louie Giglio is a genius. I saw him years ago in Birmingham and I knew it instantly. He told the crowd of teenagers how powerful they were. In the middle of the massive blockbuster that was Titanic, he gave them the credit for creating the movement behind that movie and energized those kids in a way I did not think possible.
He is starting a church next year. After years of wild success with the Passion Conferences, he is striking out to do something new and different. In some way, we all are. Whether you're starting a new project at work today or beginning a church like my friend Kathy in Texas or just trying to have a better attitude at home, we are changing. And regardless of the size of the change, the core challenges when we try to "go new" are always the same.
Yesterday I heard Louie speak at North Point about the Prodigal Father. He didn't speak exclusively of starting something new, he didn't even directly cover the material I think this piece is going to touch on, but he did inspire me to finally organize and clarify a few things I've always thought about. Rules I think are easy to see alive and well in his organization. Here, in my opinion, is what I think the first rule of going new is:
1. Don't build your present in the past.
I heard a comedian once say that after a year or so he throws away his entire routine and starts fresh. He knows that if he's ever nervous on stage and needs a laugh, he'll just revert to old material instead of going through the uncomfortable process of coming up with new jokes and learning from the experience. He won't grow, so he essentially lights his old jokes on fire. The same thing can happen when we try something new in our own lives.
Granted, no one starts a fresh adventure by saying, "We're going to do it the exact same way it has always been done." We never do that. In fact we often do the opposite, saying that this new thing will be different and cool and original and nothing like what many of our predecessors did. But just like I touched on in the redundancy post, living in the past is pretty tempting. In some ways, we've mentally, emotionally and spiritually taught our bodies to react in certain ways to certain situations. So despite our new mission statements or hunger to go new, we find ourselves leaning back on old knowledge and old methods.
In some ways, we have to forget what we've done in the past. Louie touched on this yesterday when he mentioned the advantage people that haven't spent much time in church have when it comes to hearing a message. He used the word "inoculated" to describe what happens to someone that has been to church their whole life. It becomes harder in a way for them to hear the message because they've already heard it so many times and have built constructs about what it means over the years.
A book I am reading further cemented this idea in my head recently. In discussing a WWII Field Marshal named Erwin Rommel, perhaps the world's greatest tank commander, it mentioned that he once said, "Education is easier than reeducation." It went on to say:
"What Rommel meant was that education tends to burn precepts into the mind that are hard to shake. In the midst of combat, the trained mind may fall a step behind - focusing more on learned rules than on the changing circumstances of battle. When you are faced with a new situation, it is often best to imagine that you know nothing and that you need to start learning all over again. Clearing your head of everything you thought you knew, even your most cherished ideas, will give you the mental space to be educated by your present experience - the best school of all."
I don't know much about the church Louie is starting, but I promise you one thing, it won't just be a Passion Conference in the form of a church. Louie and his team are far too smart to ever do that. It won't be a Passion Conference that happens to stay in the same venue all year long. It can't be because a church presents new challenges and new opportunities. And if you meet those with old processes and old approaches, it just won't work.
Go new by letting go of the old. Identify your knee jerk reactions that happen naturally when you are in a moment of stress or excitement or frustration. Understand what worked for you in the past and then make a conscious effort to not have your current situation defined by it. It's like photocopying a photograph. Despite how amazing the original image was, it always loses something when it's photocopied. The colors aren't as rich, the lines aren't as sharp. And each time we photocopy that image, or in this case that past success, the beauty of it diminishes.
Start new.
Counterbalance
There are times when learning from the past can provide you a shortcut to the present. Just as Louie will learn from the successes and failures of other churches in Atlanta, we too must occasionally avoid pitfalls and mines by understanding the landscape of what we are planning to do. As I mentioned on SCL, yesterday my daughter jumped in the pool when I had my back turned and had to spend a few hours at the hospital getting stitches. It would be incredibly foolish if the next time we went to the pool I decided to forget everything the previous pool experience taught me. If you can, try not to get stitches more than once in the same place.
Next Lesson:
Be you, not who you are not.
p.s. These are ideas I came up with, although they're common sense dating back decades, so if you don't dig them, blame me, not Louie.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Respect or ignore those that came before you? Yes.
Are you doing something creative right now? Are you trying to change things or start something new or do something big? Are you trying to move this generation in an unexpected way? I think we all are on some level and it's a pretty exciting time to be alive.
One of the things we often do when we find ourselves in this position is seek guidance from the people that have done something similar before. We might rage against the notion that nothing is new under the sun, but it is usually not impossible to find someone with an experience we can learn from. So we turn toward the experts that we consider seasoned and smart, battle worn and storm tested. Whether in the form of a book or a lunch appointment, we find ways to probe what they did and learn from them.
I think this can be a critical part of growing something new and I am currently seeking guidance from a wide net of people as I work on my book. I truly believe there is much I can learn from the expertise of others. Wise counsel is not to be undervalued, but it is to be analyzed. It is to be questioned and studied and weighed and sometimes dismissed. We cannot blindly assume that those older than us have spent their years gathering wisdom and knowledge. Sometimes they have simply spent their years. I didn't understand this clearly until I read a passage in a book recently:
"You can gain experience, if you are careful to avoid empty redundancy. Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience – twenty times."
I love that quote but the flipside to avoiding people that have lived redundantly is to look at our own lives. I've written advertising for more than ten years, but if I am honest, I probably have far less years of experience. That's part of the reason I like trying new things and taking on new challenges. I still have almost half of 2008 left and the quote above challenged me to look at it in a different way.
I don't want to finish this year with only a few months experience gained. I don't ever want to live life redundantly.
One of the things we often do when we find ourselves in this position is seek guidance from the people that have done something similar before. We might rage against the notion that nothing is new under the sun, but it is usually not impossible to find someone with an experience we can learn from. So we turn toward the experts that we consider seasoned and smart, battle worn and storm tested. Whether in the form of a book or a lunch appointment, we find ways to probe what they did and learn from them.
I think this can be a critical part of growing something new and I am currently seeking guidance from a wide net of people as I work on my book. I truly believe there is much I can learn from the expertise of others. Wise counsel is not to be undervalued, but it is to be analyzed. It is to be questioned and studied and weighed and sometimes dismissed. We cannot blindly assume that those older than us have spent their years gathering wisdom and knowledge. Sometimes they have simply spent their years. I didn't understand this clearly until I read a passage in a book recently:
"You can gain experience, if you are careful to avoid empty redundancy. Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience – twenty times."
I love that quote but the flipside to avoiding people that have lived redundantly is to look at our own lives. I've written advertising for more than ten years, but if I am honest, I probably have far less years of experience. That's part of the reason I like trying new things and taking on new challenges. I still have almost half of 2008 left and the quote above challenged me to look at it in a different way.
I don't want to finish this year with only a few months experience gained. I don't ever want to live life redundantly.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
A beer commercial teaches us about church.
I think the next big trend in writing and communication is going to be honesty. It's weird to label the truth as a trend, but we haven't had much of it lately.
Advertisers like to sell us the ideal, who we could be or what we could do if we only purchased their product. Which makes complete sense. I don't want to buy a Mac laptop because of the specifics of the circuitry so much as I want to buy it because I think it will make me cooler or make me a more interesting writer. I buy it as a ticket into a lifestyle, not just because I want a new product.
But honesty is coming back and as a church, it behooves us to heed the signs heralding its return. Not that we have been dishonest in how we communicate to our communities. I just think we need to pay attention because when you invite someone to church you shouldn't focus on all the other churches they could go to instead of yours, you should think about everything else on the planet they could do on a Sunday morning instead of come see you.
For instance, if 80% of the people in your town don't attend church because they go to a park where their kids can play and enjoy friends, it might be good to focus on your programs for children. If 40% of the teens in your town bail on youth group because they like going to the movies, it might be time to think about incorporating film as a medium into how you communicate. The point is that other people spend billions of dollars researching, studying and mastering how to talk with the very same people you are trying to talk to. Let's learn from what they learned.
To that point, the strongest commercial on television right now is the Dos Equis beer campaign. It's a series of spots that focus on "The most interesting man in the world," a bearded, borderline mythological man that happens to drink Dos Equis. (I posted a video clip example below.)
Big deal, there are a million beer commercials in the world. But this one has some very subtle, but very important differences that really speak to our culture's return to honesty.
1. The feats of the man are wildly over the top.
In the past, advertisers didn't always show you an activity that was so big and grand you'd never be able to do it. They showed you a guy kayaking with a Lenny Kravitz song in the background thanks to his Nissan SUV. "Hey," I thought, "I might be able to do that too if I got an SUV." The aspiration was high, but not impossible to reach. But in this commercial, the feats of the most interesting man in the world are clearly a spoof. One of them is that "his blood smells like cologne" and another that "his organ donation card also lists his beard." Those are silly, but I feel like I am on the inside of the joke. They use humor to say, "There have been some ridiculous beer commercials in the past, haven't there?"
2. I don't always drink beer.
Years ago, there was an unwritten rule that you never showed a spilled beer in a commercial. It was too insulting to the product. But in this commercial Dos Equis throws a wrench into the whole "respect the product above all else" machine. Can you remember the last time someone in a sneaker commercial said, "I don't always wear sneakers" or someone in a car commercial said, "I don't always drive cars?" But that is what he says here. The character closes the commercial by admitting there are lots of drinks in the world and sometimes he drinks those instead. This might not seem like much, but in the highly fake world of beer advertising this is a stunning statement of honesty.
Furthermore, Dos Equis does a brilliant job of juxtaposing the fakeness of the first half of the commercial with the realness of the last half. The parody of the man donating his beard as an organ only serves to amplify the truth and simplicity of him admitting he doesn't always drink beer. I am sure we will talk more about this down the road, but for churches, this is a great example of how to balance humor with truth in a message.
3. I prefer Dos Equis
As this point, I want to side hug this guy. Seriously. He doesn't do the typical commercial thing which is to say, "I love this product! I live for this product!" Not at all, he says "I prefer it." That's such a real thing to say. You get the sense that he is admitting, "sometimes I have other beers. Sometimes I drink wine instead. That's OK." I like this because often, the church is accused of being fake. Of being too happy or too sunshine rainbowy. I have written about that a number of times. But here, in a beer commercial of all places, we see a fairly honest confession of reality. I'd love to have a friend that was pressuring me to attend church say, "Sometimes I don't want to go on Sunday morning. I mean I wake up and just want to stay in bed. But most of the time, when I get there and experience the music and the message and everything else, I really enjoy it. I think you would too."
The truth is that Dos Equis wants you to buy more Dos Equis. That is the nature of advertising, that is how that machine works. But the church is different. We can actually be the ones to usher honesty back into communication. In a world where the average person sees up to 5,000 marketing messages a day, we can be different. We can be honest and funny and real. We can balance humor with truth in fresh ways.
And I don't think it's wrong to be reminded of the need to do that by a beer commercial.
Advertisers like to sell us the ideal, who we could be or what we could do if we only purchased their product. Which makes complete sense. I don't want to buy a Mac laptop because of the specifics of the circuitry so much as I want to buy it because I think it will make me cooler or make me a more interesting writer. I buy it as a ticket into a lifestyle, not just because I want a new product.
But honesty is coming back and as a church, it behooves us to heed the signs heralding its return. Not that we have been dishonest in how we communicate to our communities. I just think we need to pay attention because when you invite someone to church you shouldn't focus on all the other churches they could go to instead of yours, you should think about everything else on the planet they could do on a Sunday morning instead of come see you.
For instance, if 80% of the people in your town don't attend church because they go to a park where their kids can play and enjoy friends, it might be good to focus on your programs for children. If 40% of the teens in your town bail on youth group because they like going to the movies, it might be time to think about incorporating film as a medium into how you communicate. The point is that other people spend billions of dollars researching, studying and mastering how to talk with the very same people you are trying to talk to. Let's learn from what they learned.
To that point, the strongest commercial on television right now is the Dos Equis beer campaign. It's a series of spots that focus on "The most interesting man in the world," a bearded, borderline mythological man that happens to drink Dos Equis. (I posted a video clip example below.)
Big deal, there are a million beer commercials in the world. But this one has some very subtle, but very important differences that really speak to our culture's return to honesty.
1. The feats of the man are wildly over the top.
In the past, advertisers didn't always show you an activity that was so big and grand you'd never be able to do it. They showed you a guy kayaking with a Lenny Kravitz song in the background thanks to his Nissan SUV. "Hey," I thought, "I might be able to do that too if I got an SUV." The aspiration was high, but not impossible to reach. But in this commercial, the feats of the most interesting man in the world are clearly a spoof. One of them is that "his blood smells like cologne" and another that "his organ donation card also lists his beard." Those are silly, but I feel like I am on the inside of the joke. They use humor to say, "There have been some ridiculous beer commercials in the past, haven't there?"
2. I don't always drink beer.
Years ago, there was an unwritten rule that you never showed a spilled beer in a commercial. It was too insulting to the product. But in this commercial Dos Equis throws a wrench into the whole "respect the product above all else" machine. Can you remember the last time someone in a sneaker commercial said, "I don't always wear sneakers" or someone in a car commercial said, "I don't always drive cars?" But that is what he says here. The character closes the commercial by admitting there are lots of drinks in the world and sometimes he drinks those instead. This might not seem like much, but in the highly fake world of beer advertising this is a stunning statement of honesty.
Furthermore, Dos Equis does a brilliant job of juxtaposing the fakeness of the first half of the commercial with the realness of the last half. The parody of the man donating his beard as an organ only serves to amplify the truth and simplicity of him admitting he doesn't always drink beer. I am sure we will talk more about this down the road, but for churches, this is a great example of how to balance humor with truth in a message.
3. I prefer Dos Equis
As this point, I want to side hug this guy. Seriously. He doesn't do the typical commercial thing which is to say, "I love this product! I live for this product!" Not at all, he says "I prefer it." That's such a real thing to say. You get the sense that he is admitting, "sometimes I have other beers. Sometimes I drink wine instead. That's OK." I like this because often, the church is accused of being fake. Of being too happy or too sunshine rainbowy. I have written about that a number of times. But here, in a beer commercial of all places, we see a fairly honest confession of reality. I'd love to have a friend that was pressuring me to attend church say, "Sometimes I don't want to go on Sunday morning. I mean I wake up and just want to stay in bed. But most of the time, when I get there and experience the music and the message and everything else, I really enjoy it. I think you would too."
The truth is that Dos Equis wants you to buy more Dos Equis. That is the nature of advertising, that is how that machine works. But the church is different. We can actually be the ones to usher honesty back into communication. In a world where the average person sees up to 5,000 marketing messages a day, we can be different. We can be honest and funny and real. We can balance humor with truth in fresh ways.
And I don't think it's wrong to be reminded of the need to do that by a beer commercial.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Eddie Vedder, the Nappy Roots and Ideas.
I once read a definition of creativity that changed the way I live.
That is a big sentence but I think the definition is worthy of bigness. Here is what an unnamed writer once said:
"Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye."
That is, being creative means you fill your head with millions of different ideas. You read magazines and watch movies and have long conversations and read bathroom walls and disclaimers on sneakers and stare at trees and listen to the logic of little kids and look at limericks and listen to songs from Sweden. You put everything into a jumbled, tangled collection of colors and words and shapes and sounds into your head.
And then you have the discipline to see the relationship between previously unrelated things. With your eye, you create new connections between different things that are not used to being connected. Like GI Joe characters and versions of the Bible or a scorecard and how much product worship leaders put in their hair.
That is what I try to do when I write and it starts with the gathering of ideas.
Here is a brief list of some of the things I will put in my head today:
The line, "The truth is generally seen, rarely heard" from the book, "The 48 Laws of Power."
The description of a writing journal called the "BBlessing" in the magazine, Men's Journal.
A video clip from the Onion titled, "Tiny dog has been barking non stop for six years." (Best line was that the dog "surpassed the previous record, which was 8 minutes.")
A few dozen magazines.
The song "Good Day" by the Nappy Roots.
Every conversation I had
The song "Clumsy" by Our Lady Peace.
The video I have posted below.
Lots and lots of other things.
And I don't know if I'll ever use any of them. Maybe in a month I'll do a post about how being happy is a decision sometimes (Nappy Roots) and when I am, my happiness is undeniable and raises more faith based conversations than all the Bible verses I sometimes force our coworkers (Law of Power) and that in the video, Elisa's lyrics feel spiritual but not as much as Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam when he sings what sounds like a confession to the father in the prodigal son story:
I swear I recognize your breath.
Memories, like fingerprints, are slowly raising.
Me you wouldn't recall for I'm not my former.
Or maybe I won't use any of it, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that I've filled my head. There are more notes in my instrument, more ways to fill the page, more colors with which to paint.
So the first thing I suggest is that we all fill our heads with the pure and the beautiful and the interesting.
p.s. This is in response to the questions I get from people that are curious about "how I do what I do." I am by no means wise or tall, but this is what I do, so I thought I would share.
That is a big sentence but I think the definition is worthy of bigness. Here is what an unnamed writer once said:
"Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye."
That is, being creative means you fill your head with millions of different ideas. You read magazines and watch movies and have long conversations and read bathroom walls and disclaimers on sneakers and stare at trees and listen to the logic of little kids and look at limericks and listen to songs from Sweden. You put everything into a jumbled, tangled collection of colors and words and shapes and sounds into your head.
And then you have the discipline to see the relationship between previously unrelated things. With your eye, you create new connections between different things that are not used to being connected. Like GI Joe characters and versions of the Bible or a scorecard and how much product worship leaders put in their hair.
That is what I try to do when I write and it starts with the gathering of ideas.
Here is a brief list of some of the things I will put in my head today:
The line, "The truth is generally seen, rarely heard" from the book, "The 48 Laws of Power."
The description of a writing journal called the "BBlessing" in the magazine, Men's Journal.
A video clip from the Onion titled, "Tiny dog has been barking non stop for six years." (Best line was that the dog "surpassed the previous record, which was 8 minutes.")
A few dozen magazines.
The song "Good Day" by the Nappy Roots.
Every conversation I had
The song "Clumsy" by Our Lady Peace.
The video I have posted below.
Lots and lots of other things.
And I don't know if I'll ever use any of them. Maybe in a month I'll do a post about how being happy is a decision sometimes (Nappy Roots) and when I am, my happiness is undeniable and raises more faith based conversations than all the Bible verses I sometimes force our coworkers (Law of Power) and that in the video, Elisa's lyrics feel spiritual but not as much as Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam when he sings what sounds like a confession to the father in the prodigal son story:
I swear I recognize your breath.
Memories, like fingerprints, are slowly raising.
Me you wouldn't recall for I'm not my former.
Or maybe I won't use any of it, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that I've filled my head. There are more notes in my instrument, more ways to fill the page, more colors with which to paint.
So the first thing I suggest is that we all fill our heads with the pure and the beautiful and the interesting.
p.s. This is in response to the questions I get from people that are curious about "how I do what I do." I am by no means wise or tall, but this is what I do, so I thought I would share.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Complete list of posts.
Here is the complete list of posts on everything is replaceable.
Eddie Vedder, The Nappy Roots and Ideas.
A beer commercial teaches us about church.
Respect or ignore those that came before you? Yes.
Lessons from Louie - The Past.
Eddie Vedder, The Nappy Roots and Ideas.
A beer commercial teaches us about church.
Respect or ignore those that came before you? Yes.
Lessons from Louie - The Past.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
