Puctuation is a Life Choice

(Re-published from my previous blog)

At a work-sponsored conference in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin several months ago, I took part in an ‘interactive’ closing session along with hundreds of my co-workers. The purpose of the session was to unveil our new recruiting strategy for getting ‘top talent’ individuals to come work for us after graduating from business school. After showing the new recruiting video – which was essentially a montage of people participating in extreme sports with some sort of message about how we ‘go to the limit’ – the session leaders asked for our help in developing a creative message to be printed on ‘Save the Date’ postcards which would go along with our other printed recruiting materials. They gave us a theme to work with – three key words – and a couple of examples of visual triplicates that fulfilled the three-word message (which was a stupid theme, by the way, but that’s beside the point). The challenge was to see which group could come up with the most exciting postcard idea, and the winning idea would be printed and distributed.

I got into it. This was the artistic opportunity I had never been afforded at work. This was a chance to get all these ‘cutting-edge’ consultants to show what they were made of. Come up with a funky ad campaign visual that would attract young, hip professionals – I was all over it.

After disappointing suggestions from my team, I started drawing up some examples. They were willing to go with a couple of them, although most of the team seemed unexcited by the entire project and started having their own side conversations. I blazed on, drawing and writing descriptions; by the end of the allotted 15 minutes, I had 3 concepts for the ad design.

The presentations began with one group’s lame idea – tailoring each post-card design to the recruited school by incorporating photos of competing college sports teams, pennants, crowds of fans, etc. The designs were judged by the volume of applause from the audience, and this one received only some courtesy claps and one shout from the team’s own table.

The designs that followed were equally received, until about the fifth or sixth one in (my team had not yet presented). It was a simple concept, three pictures – a question mark, an exclamation mark, and a period. The period was the same color and style as the period in our company logo; how cute. I paid attention to first five seconds of the group’s design explanation, and went back to perfecting my drawings. Their design was boring and obvious – seriously, punctuation has been done so many times! Beside the fact that they blatantly copied our trademark logo material, the concept was entirely uncreative. When, moments after I had re-buried myself in my own team’s presentation material, the room erupted in applause for the ‘punctuation design’, I was shocked and confused. My team members were pounding on the table – what was going on? As the punctuation people pranced off the stage, wagging their poster back and forth to the claps and whoops of the audience, I put my markers down and decided our team would not be competing. They didn’t mind.

I realize this sounds judgmental and pretentious. I want to explain that I do not really think my designs were worthy of a glance from a true advertising ‘creative’. The point of this illustrative story is that I was faced, in a very stark way, with the unfortunate lack of creativity in my professional sphere and the immense scale of it all. My company, huge as it is, is supposedly trusted to provide ‘expertise’ to management of the largest, most powerful companies in the world. Either we’re not doing our job, or I had the wrong idea of what I was signing up for – and I think it’s the latter, unfortunately.

I have participated in activities like this before; we all have. I can remember some creative presentations in high school where I never had a chance. My liberal inner-city public high school had this great arts program that really encouraged imagination and artistic expression. At the time, I took advantage of the classes that were offered but I didn’t believe it was necessarily my strongest discipline; I saw the purpose of art as a way for people to express themselves and I knew I didn’t have the talent to use it well. Since the Lake Geneva experience, however, I think there is another, extremely important purpose for an arts education – to cultivate creativity and imagination. And I actually feel bad that my co-workers never had the opportunities and the sincere encouragement that I had in my youthful creative pursuits.

One of my closest friends at work was recently asking herself why, after doing everything right – earning high grades, getting a degree in finance, taking a good job after college – she still felt like she had no idea where she wanted to go in life. I wanted to tell her that shouldn’t be something we’re scared of. We should be encouraged, all along the way, to think of these moments of uncertainty as a creative opportunity – to take an art class, talk to crazy people who think about things in unconventional ways, work with kids who haven’t been molded into the ‘system’ yet, take a road trip with no destination in mind. She needs a chance to trust her own imagination; she, like so many of my co-workers, really has a lot of creative potential.

A certain degree of confidence in one’s own creative abilities – ideally cultivated beginning at a young age – could make all the difference in changing the wide-spread notion that uncertainty should be avoided. So many good things could come from a society that is always trying to think about issues and problems in new ways, even if it means taking a risk. Life is only ‘punctuated’ if you’re taught to play it safe.