Hugh McLeod's Gaping Void blog

The cartoon above came to me after a Twitter exchange I had with my good friend, the fellow cartoonist-writer-creativity-guru-ninja-whatever, Austin Kleon:

Hugh: If all your songs are songs about writing songs, don’t expect anyone to listen to them.

Austin: The problem with writing about creativity is that it’s often more lucrative than actually being creative.

Hugh: I know. If I had to write about creativity day-in-day-out, I’d kill myself

Austin: God, I can’t wait to start making some actual stupid art again.

Ha!

Both Austin and I have both written books on creativity. Mine did really well so far; I expect Austin’s, when it comes out next month, to become a massive bestseller, if I’m still going to carry on believing that there’s any justice in the world.

i.e. I know my stuff, at least on a good day, and Austin DEFINITELY does.

Yet somehow both he and I still feel as clueless as anyone else, even if we do get paid to write books about on the subject. Why? Because, actually:

Creativity comes after the fact.

Kids come up to me and ask me all the time…

Kid: How do I get a “creative” career-thing going like yours?

Hugh: Make something. Grab a piece of paper and a pen or whatever and get cracking…

Kid: What if it isn’t any good?

Hugh: Then you’re screwed.

Kid: Ok, what if it’s pretty good, but it’s still going to take me another twenty or thirty years before the world understands it?

Hugh: Then you’re slightly less screwed.

At that point, they’re already sick of asking me any more questions and so they move on, unhappy. Oh well…

The thing is, people think there’s some set of ideal conditions out there, floating independently in space, that somehow have be met, some magic fairy boxes that need to be ticked off, before you can go and “be creative”, whatever that means.

“I’ve got to quit my job, leave my wife, move to India and become an opium addict yada yada yada…” “I’ve got to drop out of college, move to New York and carry on a forbidden and tumultuous lesbian affair with a Japanese novelist twice my age  yada yada yada…”

Actually, no. The way to be creative is to make stuff. You wake up in the morning, have some breakfast, hit the work bench and get on it with it.

Or not. Maybe you’d rather just hang out, light a joint and watch Star Trek reruns. Your call.

You can’t plan for creativity. You can only plan to do the work.

Whether it ends up being “creative” or not, is decided later. Long after you’ve finished the thing and moved on to something else.

That’s what I mean by it coming “after the fact.”

And so there we are.

My friend Danielle makes really awesome jewelry. And now she has her own website, Inheritance Jewelry.

OK, granted, the website could use some work design-wise, but it’s still early days, she’s new to this world…

This is what Web 2.0 REALLY means to me, why it’s REALLY important.

It allows a young woman like Danielle to follow her dreams, without having to take out a loan, without having to sign a lease with some rich landlord in some expensive neighborhood.

This is why the web needs to stay open…

Go, Danielle, Go! Rock on.

Thanks to Kathleen Warner for ordering the gapingvoid business card above.

I’m passionate about the idea that a business card should be more than just a way of handing out contact details, but a social object that states what you believe in, what you stand for.

Exactly.

This cartoon was inspired by Matt Mullenweg’s very moving post over on GigaOm, “Open Web FTW”. He’s right, the web needs to stay open, WE need to stay open:

For a year now, I’ve said scripting is the new literacy. That’s something I strongly believe. In Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, he talks about “program or be programmed.” That is, if you’re not in control of your inputs, you’re not really in control of your outputs either. You’re just a reactionary force.

[NB. gapingvoid is created on WordPress software, Mullenwag’s company. I’ve hung out with him a couple of times. A lovely fellow.]

If a lawyer gives you her  gapingvoid business card, what does that tell you?

Like Jeff says, that you’re not dealing with a normal lawyer…

Exactly.

[You can get the bizcard design above here, and if you like the design well enough to hang it on your wall, the print is for sale here. Rock on.]

I got the idea for gapingvoid business cards when I was living in New York, when I discovered that I preferred giving out my own, hand-drawn business cards to people, rather than the ho-hum business cards that my employer at the the time issued me with.

Of course, after a while it became a lot of work, drawing them every time I met someone. Eventually I started getting them printed. Then I thought, why not print them for other people? The rest is history…

I always thought there was a market for business cards that stood out. Cards that reflected the personality of the person handing them out, cards that said, “I’m not just one more random shmuck in a bar, doing the usual handing out his card to an equally random chick in a bar yada, yada, yada.”

Living in New York, in a sea of other equally opportunitist young people on the make, it was easy to be “another random guy”. I don’t want to be that random guy. I wanted to be something else.

And it worked. What started out as an act of rebellion among the suits and hipsters of Manhattan, turned into a successful business and art career.

I’m having fun. You?

Thanks to Ben Nesvig for ordering a set of our gapingvoid business cards  [You can get your own here…].

The gapingvoid business cards– my cartoons printed on the back, your personal details printed on the front– are designed to act like “Idiot Filters”. In other words, people who are cool seem to like them right away, people who are idiots always tend to ask “WTF?” So it’s a good way of gauging people, quickly.

That’s the idea, anyway. At the very least, they’ve created A LOT of fun for people over the years. And now we have more designs than ever. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions. Rock on.

[Cartoon first published circa 2005 etc.]

So uber-famous-corporate-blogger-ninja-rockstar Jerimiah Owyang blogged about The Golden Age of Tech Blogging being over. His colleague, my friend, Brian Solis doesn’t agree. Lots of other people are yakkin’ about it as well, it seems. I guess that’s a good thing. Here are my thoughts:

1. Time to quote Shirky YET AGAIN: “So for­get about blogs and blog­gers and blog­ging and focus on this — the cost and dif­fi­culty of publishing abso­lu­tely anything, by anyone, into a glo­bal medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that inc­rea­sed pool of poten­tial pro­du­cers is going to be vast.” -CLAY SHIRKY in 2004.

2.  The business model of blogging has been proven many times over, so pretending that it hasn’t is pointless. Indirectly, Fred Wilson’s blog is EASILY worth more to him, than what AOL paid Mike Arrington for Techcrunch, maybe by a factor of ten (and they paid over $20 million for the latter, I am told). I’m not kidding! Whether or not said proven business model suits your individual needs is another question…

3. Blogging is no longer about “The Conversation”. That moved over to Twitter, Facebook etc years ago. If you’re just looking to natter and rant with the other trolls, I guess the comment section of a large blog like Gawker or HuffPo is as good a place as any. One more waste of space wasting their time, whatever. I’m liking Google Plus a lot these days. It has the same spontaneity as Twitter, but a bit more engaging and thoughtful, somehow. I never go on Facebook much any more. Too many “civilians”.

4. We forget JUST how utterly time-consuming blogging used to be, back when it was the only game in town. I remember the early blogging days, don’t you?  Remember how keeping up with the blogosphere properly took ten hours a day? Nowadays, the only people who are left blogging are the people who REALLY want to, who ACTUALLY have something to say. Everyone else is uploading cat photos on Facebook. I think this is a good thing.

5. Traffic is now harder to get than ever, but I’m OK with that. The kind of effort it takes me to get a noticeable and sustainable increase in blog traffic, ballpark, is about the same amount of time and effort it takes me to get a book deal and write the first draft.  Guess which option I chose? Exactly…

 6. I’m waiting for the Golden Age of Facebook and Twitter to be over, too. That way we can all get away from our computers and back to actually getting some real work done. Ha!

7. It’s the product, Stupid. My social media strategy these days has only three words: “Draw more cartoons”. In other words, create more real work, ACTUAL PRODUCT (in my case, cartoons) and the social media will fall into place, but only AFTER I’ve done the thing that actually pays the bills. Getting all obsessed with social media BEFORE you’ve created something of real, lasting value is putting the cart before the horse. But that’s an easy mistake to make online, I’m as guilty of that as anyone. Never again.

8. None of this is new. My thoughts on blogging aren’t that different than the last time I wrote a post like this one, nearly two years ago. Nor are my thoughts that different to anybody else’s I’ve seen lately, frankly. Do the math…

After this cartoon went out in the newsletter earlier this year, we received a number of emails from people asking for female version. Here it is!

I think the Buddhist in me came out in this one. So much human suffering is tied to hanging on to things; material, emotional, or otherwise.

I believe that happiness comes from inside us - We often forget that, and spend a lot of time blaming other people for our unhappiness.

The commentary on the original image read:

“If you’re unhappy, nine times out of ten it’s because you’re clinging onto something.

Nine times out of ten, happiness and letting go are synonymous.”

Exactly.

[You can buy the print here etc.]

Hardly a morning goes by these days without me hearing some story on NPR Morning Edition about American economic woe. Especially around this Christmas time. People who’ve been working hard all their lives, suddenly can’t afford presents for their kids. Those kind of stories. They’re sad as hell, and they seem to be getting more and more frequent.

At the same time I keep seeing news stories like this one from the WSJ: About how competition in Silicon Valley for engineering talent is so fierce, they’re fighting over interns now:

Silicon Valley’s talent wars are going younger.

Bay Area tech companies, already in a fierce fight for full-time hires, are now also battling to woo summer interns. Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response—sometimes even luring candidates away from college.

And then there was another story from the BBC, about how Brazil has now overtaken the UK as the world’s sixth largest economy.

A  lot of the world is in flux, so it seems. And to this cartoonist, it has a simple enough explanation:

The Great Convergence is upon us, and our friend, the Internet is accelerating the process. This would be happening with our without “The 1%”  misbehaving themselves– whatever the mainstream media and the Occupy crowd might say.

The good news is, if you have a talent, the world wants it, and it has never been so easy to show your talent to the world.

The bad news is, especially for us fat & lazy Americans, is that the great, century-long era of Prosperity-on-Autopilot  is over.

The world still wants serious talent. And it still wants people doing the grunt work: pushing mops, digging ditches, waiting tables, answering phones, flipping burgers etc..

It’s the people in the middle that nobody knows what to do with anymore. And the politicians who claim that they do, are lying.

It’s probably too late for my generation, that ship has already sailed. But for the kids out there reading this, who are just starting out?

Learn how to work hard, work long hours. Find something you love, and then excel at it. Above all else, learn how to create, learn how to invent. That’s your only hope, really.

Like I said, no more Autopilot.

[Link:] Per­so­nent Hodie.

1. Per­so­nent hodie

voces pue­ru­lae,

lau­dan­tes iucunde

qui nobis est natus,

summo Deo datus,

et de vir­gi­neo ven­tre proc­rea­tus.

2. in mundo nas­ci­tur,

pan­nis invol­vi­tur

prae­sepi poni­tur

sta­bulo bru­to­rum,

rec­tor super­no­rum.

per­di­dit spo­lia prin­ceps infer­no­rum.

3. magi tres vene­runt,

par­vu­lum inqui­runt,

par­vu­lum inqui­runt,

ste­llu­lam sequendo,

ipsum ado­rando,

aurum, thus, et myrrham ei offe­rendo.

4. omnes cle­ri­culi,

pari­ter pueri,

can­tent ut angeli:

adve­nisti mundo,

lau­des tibi fundo.

ideo glo­ria in excel­sis Deo.

Merry Christ-Mass, Everybody.