If I go to the store and pick up a normal gallon of milk, it will be milk that came from a cow injected with growth hormones. I have to pay extra if I don’t want my morning bowl of cereal to have something in common with Manny Ramirez and Big Papi.

Two and a half years ago we moved into the house in which we currently reside. We purchased a moderately-priced and well-reviewed washer and dryer. Today I often have to set the dryer to run a second cycle in order to dry my clothes completely.

I was talking with Meg the other day about the quality of food. She sighed and said, “Why do we have to pay a fortune for stuff to not be crap?”

****************

The standards of quality have dropped. This is a big theme in today’s market. Quality, hand-crafted goods are hot, and they sell at a premium. The focus now is on value. As we decide to pass on cheaply made goods in search of something better, the impulse may be to pay top dollar indiscriminately: buy everything organic, pay for designer labels on our clothes, settle only for a Mercedes Benz. How do I discern between quality and luxury?

Solid, High Quality and Luxury

What’s the difference between solid and high quality? Take two bags that I own as an example: Beckel Canvas’s Possibilities Bag, and Duluth Pack’s Ammo Bag. I did an in-depth post on Beckel Canvas and went into a fair amount of detail here.

Both bags are made of durable canvas, sewn by a human being in the United States, and have solid heavy-duty zippers. The difference is found in the details. The Ammo Bag features piping along the edges, leather tassels on the zippers, and brass snaps to snap shut the leather handle. Whereas the Possibilities bag stitching is on the inside (no piping) and the leather handle strap is what appears to be slightly lower quality leather with a velcro fastening.

Here are a couple photos to show the difference.

Beckel Possibilities Bag:

Duluth Pack Ammo bag:

There’s nothing wrong with the Beckel bag, it brings great value, especially at the lower price point. It is a solid bag. The Duluth Pack raises value through the finishings, but it shows in the price tag as well. You can move up the ladder to Filson, Ally Cappillino, Porter (via h(y)r collective, they’re hard to find sometimes) and on up the line. Depending on your financial means and intended use, any of these options could fall into that sweet spot of high value for your dollar.

Somewhere on the upper end of this scale you’re going to enter into luxury. Luxury, in my opinion, can be defined as an excess amount of craft, as seen here with KMW’s hand-dyed 1980’s. While an argument can be made for the regular KMW 1980’s as high quality jeans, the hand-dyed context exclusive run falls squarely under the title of luxury.

Another form of luxury is to spend indiscriminately because of a perceived value. You see this with hybrid cars (Escalade hybrid? Give me a break.) and organic food. There are some foods that are grown with a lot of pesticides (and are consequently worse for you). These include fruits such as peaches, apples, strawberries, cherries, and imported grapes and it’s worth your money to buy these organic. Other fruits–bananas, oranges, mangoes, and pineapple–are grown with less pesticides. Paying for organic bananas is a luxury because the amount you’re paying brings in very little increased value, making them an excessive expense.

Buying the most expensive item rarely brings the highest value. Maximizing your dollar is all about finding the highest value available. Sometimes this means skimping on (or skipping entirely) less important areas.

These same principles can be applied to film and video production. Stay tuned for Craft Part II: Video Production.

Simmons laid out the reasons for his candidacy in an interview with Minneapolis Star Tribune writer Michael Rand. The campaign included a Facebook page with 2,000+ fans, a reported 12,000 emails from fans to Timberwolves President Chris Wright pleading with him to hire Simmons, and a barrage of innovative ideas he sent out via Twitter. In fact, that’s where he launched his campaign.

There was a real groundswell that embraced his candidacy. It was all over the blogs, forums, and social media sites. There was something intriguing about the idea. Not just for a gimmick, but something about him that almost made you believe he could do the job. Listen to the first few minutes of the B.S. Report where Bill makes his pitch for the job.
Bill-Simmons-GM-pitch

What is it that sets him apart? He has ideas. They’re not half-baked ideas, and they’re not generic ideas. He’s amassed a huge amount of knowledge about the NBA, its history, and what it takes to put together a winning team (his epic 700 page book is due out this fall.) He has a fertile mind that churns out ideas at a non-stop pace.

This isn’t a man who would make the same old decisions as the last guy.

The strongest element of his argument is that he isn’t bound by fear of failure or losing his job. He already has a successful career as a writer. This would allow him to focus himself completely on solving the puzzle of how to build a championship franchise.

Would Simmons’ knack for using ingenuity have translated to a real ability to run a franchise? Or would this just be a ploy to promote his next book? I don’t know. But it sure did make for an engaging story.

Read Part I and Part II of the Ingenuity series.

Ingenuity isn’t obvious, otherwise it would simply be the standard. On top of that, just because I used ingenuity yesterday doesn’t guarantee I will today. The path to ingenuity is a tough thing to map out; it eludes a formula.

Instead of trying to spell out hard and fast rules, I’m going to look at it in terms of things that will either produce or destroy ingenuity. In other words: friends and foes.

FOES OF INGENUITY

1. That sounds exhausting.
When I wake up in the morning my muscles are sore and tight. I know that if I stretch for just 10 minutes or so and pump out a few push-ups and crunches, my blood will get going and the rest of the day will go well. The problem is, when I first wake up, that sounds exhausting. I just want to go back to sleep or slink into the shower and skip the exercise.

On the days I don’t give myself the time to stretch and exercise, I pay the price with low energy, stiffness, and lack of mobility. How often do you see ‘creative’ work that fits that same description? Like visual examples? Here’s one:

2. Distra… wait, what were you saying?
There are 1,000 things to distract me from performing high quality work each day. For example, this, this, this (you know, for a creativity room!), and this.

3. Flexible standards of excellence (not as good as it sounds).
Time and energy may limit the use of ingenuity on every single project we work on. Those should be our only limits.

Unfortunately, when a client or boss will accept less than our best work we often lower our standards of excellence accordingly. How many of your clients have a refined sense for quality creative work? If they don’t, how does that affect your effort?

4. The game speeds up on you.
I borrowed this phrase from sports. You can see it most clearly with a baseball example: A young pitcher is cruising along doing fine, then he gives up a solo home run. It’s just one run, everything should be fine. But, all of a sudden, that pitcher can’t hit the strike zone. He walks a couple batters, tries to overcompensate and grooves a pitch or two to the wrong savvy hitter. Next thing you know he’s given up 5 runs and there’s only one out. Once he lost control, the game sped up on him and he couldn’t reign it back in.

This happens to me at work all the time. I’ve got a clear head in the morning; a to-do list that’s concise. By the afternoon I have 9 tabs open on my internet browser and I’m shuffling between 7 applications. I’m hopping from task to task with no big picture perspective. All of a sudden it’s five o’clock. The game sped up on me.

5. Making an effort is not cool.
I kind of blame Seinfeld for this. All of us who were raised on Seinfeld saw on the surface this guy who loafed around, cracked wise with his friends, didn’t stand for much, lived in New York, and had a very comfortable lifestyle. As previously discussed here, we were already spoiled and believed ourselves bound for greatness. This didn’t help.

FRIENDS OF INGENUITY

1.  Lending your all to solving the problem.
It’s like Don Draper told Peggy Olson, “Concentrate deeply on the problem, and then forget about it completely. An answer will just appear.” I’m not sure it’s the perfect answer, but it is insightful. Focus all your mind’s energy on a problem (no cell phone distractions, no email, no distractions!) and you are well on your way.

2. Do your homework.
Budget time to do your homework, is a little more accurate. Know as much about the history and details of the subject as possible. When you have a vast and deep understanding to draw from you will multiply your options creatively. Time spent actively dedicated to research on a project will show in the results.

3. Cross pollination.
Draw inspiration from a broad variety of sources. Don’t be afraid to apply solutions from diverse areas to your problem, or compare apples to oranges. Sometimes this creates interesting dichotomies and possible solutions. Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker, Most Likely to Succeed compares hiring school teachers to drafting NFL quarterbacks. It is a great example of an interesting comparison of apples to oranges.

4. Don’t stop at just a few ideas, keep going.
Exhaust yourself idea-wise. This is where Jerry Seinfeld the man redeems Jerry Seinfeld the TV character. You won’t stumble backwards on to true success.

5. Rigorous investigation of elements.
Ever wonder how Pixar only makes great movies? My dad does. He asks me all the time, “How do they do that? How do they only make really great movies?” Well, this is how: Andrew Stanton, co-writer and director of WALL-E, explains the rigorous process they go through in writing their stories:
Andrew-Stanton-Pixar

(Click here to stream the entire interview done by Creative Screenwriting Magazine’s Jeff Goldsmith.)

These are just a few friends and foes of ingenuity. What things have you found that produce or destroy ingenuity?

Stay tuned for Ingenuity Observed the ongoing search for ingenuity in the world around us.

Everyone wants to be exciting, on the cutting-edge, forward-thinking and all those other overused words. Mr. Godin suggests we “lean out on the edge and become interesting, noteworthy and yes, remarkable.”

If boring is our natural state, and there is no greater sin than boring our audience, how do we avoid this and create remarkable visual storytelling? How do we find and use ingenuity?

INGENUITY DEFINED

The cool thing about ingenuity is that it can pertain to anything–from a more efficient way to perform a heart transplant, a better way to cook an egg, or a faster pinewood derby car.

It always leads to things becoming better. Whether it increases efficiency, raises quality, or improves performance; you have elements combining to produce solutions to a problem.

Here’s an example:

Now you’re saying, “Wait a minute? What problem did that solve?” In this case, it was a problem most of us didn’t see. But DJ Steve Porter did. He observed that each of these interview clips has been out there floating around the internet, entertaining us for years. And he had the tools to improve upon them.

On the importance scale it may be more like a faster pinewood derby car than a more efficient heart transplant, but it employs ingenuity nonetheless.

This may not be your style of entertainment, but there are a couple of elements that I feel pushed this beyond your standard internet compilation. 1) He modifies their voices so that they are singing their rants 2) He creates a narrative flow with the clips; one leads into the next and creates new meaning as it does.

Those two things set this apart in terms of quality. It is clear that someone who knows what they are doing is at work here.

This is just one example. Got others? Add them in the comments. How would you define ingenuity? How does ingenuity relate to your work/craft/world experience? Click here to read Ingenuity in Storytelling Part II: Friends and Foes.

It’s the, “This is going to be tough, but you’d better get going or you’re going to miss this opportunity” speech. They’re giving it to all of us. Are we listening?

There are clearly opportunities out there, no matter how dire the landscape looks. They’re asking our generation if we’re tough enough for it. I’d like us to prove that we’re not as spoiled as I think we are. That we’re not as quick to fold as we may feel we are. That television and video games didn’t rot our brains. I’d like us to prove that we’re up to the challenge. So, let’s prove it.

And by the way, if you read their words, there might be a google map out of this quagmire in there.

There are thousands of books that tackle the problem of the art of storytelling, from the classics of Joseph Campbell to the more recent incarnations that find niches in marketing, screenwriting, or non-fiction. You’ve seen them, you’ve read them. How to tell a story seems like it should be intuitive. But how many times have you seen a friend fumble the ball in front of a group at a party. How many times have you been that friend? Maybe some people have the storytelling skills in their blood. But my suspicion is that they’ve practiced the art over and over until it was perfect. And that they’re heeding the words of Michael Caine.

Telling stories through moving images is what I do. If you were on the home page of this very website right now you would read: “we add ingenuity, craft, technology and compelling characters to produce engaging stories”. Over the next several weeks I’ll be posting a more in depth series that deals with the relationship between ingenuity, craft, technology, compelling characters and the art of engaging storytelling.  After all, anyone can turn a great phrase on the home page of a website. But if you’re going to tell a story the right way, you’ve got to do better than that.

One of my favorite parts of the film is when Steve and Ned first meet Bill Ubell, the bond company stooge. They step into the elevator and Steve immediately says, “I hope you’re not going to bust my balls, pal.”

Which leads to this exchange:
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re a bond company stooge.”
After a moment of disbelief BIll replies, “Well, I’m also a human being.”

Then Steve apologizes and they demonstrate their teamsmanship through a group cheer like the one you would do at the end of a Little League game. This kicks off their next big adventure.

The spirit of Life Aquatic lies in its team. They may be mismatches and castoffs from society, but they work together to make documentary-movie adventures. They collaborate.

Collaboration has been on my mind lately. A great team can make all the difference. But, as mentioned here and elsewhere, sometimes we talk more about collaborating then we actually collaborate. In that spirit, I’m going to talk more about collaboration. Or, more precisely, I’ve made a list of a few reasons why I believe collaboration to be as rare and difficult to accomplish as it is exciting to talk about.

1. No, you don’t understand: I’m the star of this show

As Louis CK pounded home on Conan O’Brien’s show last year, my generation (whatever you call past GenX) is the most spoiled generation ever. Not only are we spoiled rotten, but we also believe it is our destiny to become rich, famous, and important. The drive to do something great, or be someone who contributes is easily surpassed by our egotism and expectations of rewards handed out for whatever we feel like doing. The star mentality doesn’t lend itself to working with others.

2. The undeveloped role player

A second difficulty we find is lack of training. When were we ever taught to play a role on a team?  Remember how well those “group projects” went in high school? Three people sitting around procrastinating, while the one hard worker planned and worked and took the project home to finish working on it late into the night. You think she wants to work with you on the next big thing now?

If you played a team sport and lucked into a great coach, you may have learned a bit of it then. If he (or she) could pound anything through your thick skull. Even then, it takes years to learn this stuff. And our schools (higher ed included) aren’t doing a good enough job at instructing us how to collaborate.

3. With no reason not to, we surround ourselves with ourselves

These days, it’s easy to completely sequester ourselves from anyone with an alternative opinion. I’m an artist? I don’t have much need for an accountant or a businessman as a friend. I’m a cop, why would I hang out with a writer? We’ve come to a point where it feels so comfortable and easy to surround ourselves with people who think, believe, talk like, and are interested in all the same things as us. And that’s what we do. The trick is that doing this takes away an essential element of collaboration: In order to collaborate, each party must bring something unique to the table. So if I surround myself with director-types, we’ll have a grand old time quoting Wes Anderson movies (and trust me, it is grand), but chances are we won’t be developing synergistic genius.

I don’t have the answers, but I suspect mixing in a dissenting opinion, putting the process and end result ahead of personal glory, and doing only what we can (as it is said genius does) can’t be bad ideas.

Beyond this, why do collaborations fail? And why don’t they come to fruition in the first place? While you’re thinking, maybe we should get together and make something great.