True story:
A sixty-year-old woman named Madeline was sitting in a doctor’s surgery.
She was blind and she had cerebral palsy.
And she was educated and eloquent.
She was complaining to the doctor about her hands:
“I can’t read Braille, not a single word. I can’t do anything with my hands — they are completely useless.”
Madeline had never in her life been able to use her hands — she needed help for everything.
She held them up. “Useless godforsaken lumps of dough — they don’t even feel part of me.”
The doctor, Oliver Sacks, was startled — because the hands are not usually affected by cerebral palsy.
But Madeline could detect light touch, pain, and temperature with her hands.
Sacks placed different objects in to her hands, including one of his own hands. “She could not identify — and she did not explore; there were no active ‘interrogatory’ movements of her hands — they were, indeed, as inactive, as inert, as useless, as ‘lumps of dough’.”
Maybe this was because the woman had been nannied, and babied, all her life — she’d never had to use her hands. And so she’d grown to think that she couldn’t use them.
That was Sacks’ hypothesis. He asked the nurses to start leaving her food slightly out of reach. And one day, instead of waiting patiently for someone to help, Madeline reached out, grabbed a bagel, and ate.
It was the first use Madeline had made of her hands in sixty years.
Madeline discovered other foods, food containers, forks; she explored, and delighted in discovering shapes and textures, objects, faces, people. She asked for clay, and she made her first sculpture: a shoehorn.
Then she modelled heads and figures, and within a year she became known as the Blind Sculptress of St Benedict’s.
…
Jonas Lembke believes that creatives need to re-learn how to say ‘No’.
That there are too many yes-men in advertising.
That when the client wants to kill what the creative believes is great work, there’s no fight.
It’s tricky, I think. A client might pick away at the work, afraid that it’s too risqué. And the result might be a wet fish of a cousin to the original.
Or it might just get killed in one clean swipe.
There might be two answers to this:
1. Say ‘No’ more: As Jonas says, if you believe in the work, then that is the most generous, selfless, and professional thing you can do for your client.
I suggest you need to be great at saying ‘No’. Use the brief, use the client’s concerns to get to the core of what makes the work great.
Or, 2. Be brilliant: just come back with More. Better. Better. More.
Maybe some of each.
Either way, the more yes-men there are, the more wet fish is the norm in the industry, the less useful are the creative minds.
It would be a shame if advertising agencies and freelancers were to become useless lumps of dough.
If a blind sixty year old who had never before used her hands can learn to sculpt.
An advertising industry can sculpt more.
