Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, America, Attitude & Aptitude, Childhood, Creativity, Culture, Daddyhood, Emotion, Empathy, England, Family, Goodbye America, Happiness, Home, Imagination, Innocence, Jill, Love, My Fatherhood, Otis, Parents
Yes I know today is the day where all the ghosts and ghouls are supposed to come out and play, but I thought I’d inject a bit of love and positivity into the World.
I know … who the hell am I?
Unsurprisingly, this new side of me is connected to my past life in LA.
While we are absolutely loving being in England and London, there are things about LA we miss.
One of them is Otis’ amazing preschool.
As I have written before, it’s an amazing, creative, inclusive place of learning and we were so happy he was there.
But leaving was always going to be hard – especially given we were leaving the country – so we asked the school if we could buy a piece of furniture for them on behalf of Otis.
Not just because it’s a school where the lessons are conducted outdoors but because we wanted Otis to know that while he was in America for a short time, his presence mattered to the community and the community mattered to Otis.
I’m so grateful they said yes which is why, while we’re thousands of miles away in the cold of England, there is a bench in sunny Manhattan Beach that allows Otis to always be in a place he loved while also letting his friends – and future students – always enjoy being in the environment they find themselves in.
The point of this post also relates to the people I’ve been lucky enough to call colleagues around the World, but that’s a post for another day [and does not relate to leaving stickers and badges around the place] so with that, I just want to say a huge thank you to Manhattan Beach Nursery School, the kids and parents who go there and LA as a whole.
Take that Halloween.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Childhood, Comment, Culture, Daddyhood, Education, Emotion, Empathy, Family, Innocence, Insight, Jill, Otis, Parents
I cry.
I cry a lot.
I cry at films.
I cry at memories.
I cry at just how much I love Otis.
Now I appreciate that’s not the sort of thing you should admit, but that’s what I want to change.
I get why it happens.
From the moment we are kids, we are told not to cry.
To be fair, it’s less to do with any sense of parental embarrassment and more to do with parents hating seeing their precious child being upset, but in my opinion, it’s still wrong.
But it gets worse.
Especially for little boys.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard a Dad tell their little man who has fallen over …
“Big boys don’t cry”.
I totally appreciate they’re not saying it to be mean, but I can’t help but worry for what we are teaching the men of tomorrow.
Especially in America.
I was lucky, I was brought up in a household that didn’t try to hide emotions.
I was taught it was healthy and was encouraged to express how I felt.
Now I know that was pretty rare, but fortunately for everyone else, there was the local pub.
The pub was more than a place for drinking, it was a place for men to express their feelings.
Sure, they did it through banter and jokes, but it was where you could reveal your feelings and fears to other men in an environment that was, ironically, none threatening and none judgemental.
I have no idea if that’s still the case but I know in America it’s not.
Here, you don’t go to a bar to talk, you go to a bar to sit with other men and watch sports.
There appears little outlet for men to express their feelings which means either the pressure of situations add up to unbelievable levels or the response to situations is disproportionate or overly aggressive and confrontational.
OK, so not everyone is like that, but until we teach our children – and especially our little boys – that crying is actually the act of someone strong rather than weak, then we are going to continue stopping people knowing how to navigate the challenges and frustrations that fill our lives. Or said another way, we’ll be stopping our kids from being able to be as good as they can be … which is a crime no parent wants to ever be accused of doing.
Which is another thing we could all learn from the values taught at Otis’ school.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Comment, Culture, Daddyhood, Emotion, Empathy, Family, Innocence, Insight, Jill, Love
So recently I saw that the movie, Fame was 38 years old.
While I didn’t see the film, the memory of the TV show is burned into my mind.
I remember seeing trailers for it on TV earlier that week and wanting to watch it … however when it aired, I was out with my friends playing football – it was summer – so when I finally walked into the house [via the back garden, as I’d gone to talk to my Mum and Dad who were enjoying the late evening sun] the show was half way through the episode.
But I was hooked from the beginning.
The idea of a school that taught creativity in a way that wasn’t stuffy was infectious to me.
Previous to that, I didn’t even know those things could exist but the fact there was a TV show about it, meant it must do. Somewhere.
To be honest, at that point in my life – 1982 – I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but it’s now obvious to me that part of the appeal of the show was because I wanted to go down that path, I just didn’t know it before then.
It might sound a bit of a leap, but the show might be one of the reasons I picked up the guitar about a year later and went on to spend a big chunk of my life between the ages of 17-24 making, earning and traveling because of music.
I always wonder if I’d have tried to get into a school of the arts if there had been one available in the UK at that time.
There were acting schools, but nothing like the one in Fame.
Of course, the school on Fame was fictitious, but the schools it was based on represented a very different feel and place of learning that the UK equivalent.
I personally think these schools are incredibly important.
At a time where education seems universally focused on academic subjects, the value of ‘the arts’ seems to have slipped down in importance.
I get why, but I can tell you, if Otis wanted to go to one when he is older – I’d be thrilled.
Sure, you could argue a degree in dance or music or acting is going to be harder to turn into a good income down the line, but apart from the fact you could say that about most degrees in general these days … the role of education is not just to better the individual, but for that individual to help better the country they live in.
It’s for this reason I’m so vehemently opposed to education-for-profit.
Not just because it has resulted in universities lowering their qualification standards to increase admission, but because a highly educated population adds huge commercial value to a country.
Smart people do smart things.
Whether that is creating things or attracting things, a highly educated workforce creates more opportunities for others … be that people, communities, companies or countries … and it’s for this reason I passionately believe governments should keep standards insanely high but the cost of insanely low.
But sadly few look at it that way – preferring to take the money rather than make the investment – resulting in too many people going to university in the hope of getting a great future but finding out they got sold a great lie.
Education is an amazing thing – regardless what you study – but with degrees fast becoming worth less than the paper they’re written on, I hope if Otis does choose to advance his education, he follows the path that leads him to emotional fulfillment.
I don’t care what that is … art, music, accountancy or tech … but for me the key is he does it for his happiness, not purely for his career because in a World where everyone seems to do stuff to get ahead, there’s something amazing in following a path for the sheer joy that you enjoy it and that’s something I would love for him to do.
As my parents taught me, at the end of the day, feeling fulfilled is more important than simply being content.
Wow, this is quite a leap from a 1982 TV show about kids dancing in the streets of NY isn’t it.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, America, Attitude & Aptitude, Chaos, Confidence, Creativity, Culture, Daddyhood, Education, Emotion, Empathy, Equality, Innocence, Jill, Love, Management, Mum & Dad, Otis, Parents
So Otis goes to this amazing hippy kindergarten school near where we live.
It’s a co-parenting school which means that the parents have to help with the schooling of the kids, not just with the funding.
It follows a very specific philosophy defined by the founder and it’s a place where kids learn through expressing their creativity.
They even have a ‘mud room’ for the kids to cause mayhem when it rains.
Put simply, we love it.
A few weeks ago, we went there on the weekend to help decorate it during spring break when I came across these 2 signs in the school …
I love them.
It sums up everything we adore about the school.
It captures exactly why Otis feels it’s a safe and happy place for him to explore.
It also addresses something I have been looking into for a while, which is the lack of outlet American men have to express their feelings.
Everything is built on acting tough.
Crying is for wimps.
Hell, even the bars are full of sports TV’s basting out scores, which means people don’t have the quiet to talk to one another – something I had growing up in England that actually encouraged the sharing of feelings and emotions. Albeit often wrapped up in banter.
The macho pride that seems to underpin so much of American male society feels like it’s still the 1950’s … which is why I love that this school doesn’t tell kids to ‘stop crying’, but asks what is wrong and then sympathises with their predicament which remarkably, helps them stop crying far more quickly and in a more positive way than any shouting would ever do.
Now imagine if companies operated by the same ideals.
Listening.
Valuing.
Caring.
Developing.
Oh I know those words appear in a million mission statements, but we all know they’re often used more as an illusion than an action.
In the bid to build office ‘culture’, so many organizations forget it’s not just about what you say – or even what you do – it’s the practiced beliefs that defines what everyone values, which is why companies could learn even more from this school than my dear Otis.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, America, Anniversary, Attitude & Aptitude, Authenticity, Comment, Creativity, Culture, Cynic, Dad, Daddyhood, Deutsch, Differentiation, Emotion, Empathy, End of Year, England, Family, Fatherhood, Friendship, Goodbye America, Goodbye China, Grand announcements, Happiness, Hello America, Holiday, Home, Innocence, Insight, Jill, LaLaLand, London, Love, Martin Weigel, Mum, Mum & Dad, My Fatherhood, Otis, Parents, Paul, Planners, Planning, R/GA, Relationships, Rosie, Sentimentality, WeigelCampbell, Wieden+Kennedy
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Tardis_BBC_Television_Center.jpg
So this is the final post of the year.
It’s been a big year for me and the family.
Then again, it was a big year for the family last year too.
However, whereas 2017 saw us leave Shanghai and Wieden+Kennedy – something that was truly emotional for all of us – 2018 has seen us go from sunny LA, working at Deutsch, living in a house by the beach and driving a custom made Audi to being citizens of cold and rainy London, living in a much smaller house in Fulham, working at R/GA [with some sprinkles of Metallica madness in-between] and traveling by tube to and from everywhere.
And we haven’t been this happy in ages.
Don’t get me wrong, there are things we definitely miss from our life in the US – people, the weather, Otis’ school, free soda refills and bacon mainly – but this move was right for us for a whole host of reasons, personal and professional, and we enter 2019 with the full expectation we’ll still be here when 2020 comes around.
I hope.
It’s funny, when I read the final post I wrote for last year, it is apparent that change was in our minds. We didn’t think that openly, but it seems it was there.
Of course, moving to a country and then leaving in just over a year is not the best thing.
It’s financial stupidity for one.
But these things happen and we are very happy for the amazing experience, though I must admit I’m even happier my wife, son and cat are still talking to me.
Fools.
But while our environment has changed, some things have stayed exactly the same.
Your ability to trash everything I write on here, for one.
And to you all, I say a huge thank you.
Sure, being told I’m a bad dressing, musically ignorant, gadget tosser every-single-day can get a bit tiring, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Because amongst the insults, there’s often pearls of gold in there.
Stuff that makes me think about things a different way.
Stuff that influences how I think about things I never thought about.
Stuff that just keeps me on my toes and interested about stuff.
And I love it.
I love that people come here and share a bit of their time and opinion with me.
Yes, I appreciate moving to the UK and still posting at 6am is screwing up the flow of the comments given the East Coast of America is asleep and can’t insult/join-in until much later … but the fact so many people still write makes me feel very fortunate.
While I have loved the ability to move countries and cultures so many times – and hope to continue doing it, just not for a bit – the reality is that is makes your friendship network difficult.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very fortunate we have technology to keep me in touch with the wonderful people I’ve met in every country we’ve lived [whether they like it or not] and this year I got to catch up with people I’ve not seen in years – from Freddie to Paula – but there is something about having a level of constancy that makes you feel settled.
Bizarrely, this blog has provided me with a bit of that.
Even with people I have still yet to meet.
[Though I met Marcus and Neil Perkin this year and that made me so happy]
While I would never suggest I am your friend, you have been to me – in many ways and at many times, both at moments of darkness and happiness – and I want to take this opportunity to say thank you.
To all of you.
Even you Andy.
When I started this blog way back in May 2006, I never expected anyone to read it, let alone comment so the fact some of you still are – regardless that many Police officers would call it abuse – I’m grateful.
I’m excited about next year.
It will be big.
Not because we’ll be moving … or I’ll changing job … but new things will be entering my life.
From my beloved Otis starting proper school – which literally is screwing with my head – to the much-talked-about-but-not-much-actually-done Weigel/Campbell officially doing its thing in addition to the exciting adventures and exploits my wonderfully beautiful family, my bloody amazing friends and fantastic new planning team will get up to that will make me feel even luckier than I do already.
Being back in England has had a much bigger effect on me than I ever imagined it would.
I am grateful for it.
I am grateful for all I have.
I hope this holiday season and 2019 is one that is wonderful for you all too.
See you in a few weeks. [Yeah, don’t think you get so lucky to not have me come back]