by Brian Wong
Most of the pages on our site only have about a hundred words on them. We’re not trying to outsmart anybody. We don’t have to. What we have to offer speaks for itself.
When people look at our site, or listen to us talk, or read our emails, they don’t think we’re trying to impress them—and that’s impressive.
Time is money. Don’t waste mine. If you’ve got something to say, say it. If you don’t, go back to the drawing board, work up something that’s good, and come back. I’ll always listen to a good idea—I just don’t want to waste my life listening to all the bullshit that comes before it.
Good ideas come in short sentences.
Good ideas are easy to explain because they’re ideas people already know, even if they haven’t heard them.
Concise is good.
Long-winded is bad.
How’s that for getting to the point?
Steve Jobs’s last words were: “Oh wow! Oh wow! Oh wow!”
His sister, who was at his bedside, described the words as a reflection of Jobs’s “capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, and the still more beautiful later.”
It’s impossible to know what Jobs really meant or was experiencing. But it’s hard not to feel as if, right there on his deathbed, he was seeing something new.
The point about Steve Jobs’s last words is what they reveal about his capacity for wonderment. It was almost as if he simply was at one more of the hundreds of meetings at Apple when someone had described the possibility of creating something that not only didn’t exist yet but also had never even been dreamed of until that point.
The most incredible of all dreams are those flights of imagination in which someone sees what others should have seen long ago. The nature of Jobs’s genius was that he could see what was hiding in plain sight.
How did he do it? He kept his mind wide open. Jobs was a master of the brilliant question that is sometimes considered the dumb question. Does something exist, or not? Can something exist, or not? Break it down.
The entirety of the Western philosophy of learning kicked off about twenty-five hundred years ago with Socrates, whose Socratic method revolved around simply asking questions.
In the East, the same essential style of learning was based on the Zen Buddhist concept called shoshin, which means “beginner’s mind.” That kind of mind has no preconceptions, and as a result, it can see all kinds of possibilities, while the experts only see the few that already exist.
Jobs, fascinated by Zen, was famous for going into meetings like he was the dumbest guy in the room and asking people to explain stuff in words that cats and dogs could understand. A lot of the time the questions he asked weren’t even precise, but just vague, general things—more like Rorschach inkblots of questions.
But they generally seemed to elicit smart answers, and the more intently Jobs listened, the smarter the answers became. Then he’d ask something like, “Can you rephrase that?” Then he’d finish with, “Why?” By the end of it, Jobs had often dug up a nugget that helped take the company in some new and previously unimagined direction.
Where will his successor take it from here?
That’s a good question. I’ll have to think about it. I try to kiip an open mind. If your mind is open, you can find great ideas in all kinds of unexpected places.
As I write this I’m settling into my seat and getting some work done as we lift over Rome en route back to San Francisco, trying not to make too much eye contact with the guy next to me, because it’s a long flight and I don’t want to get roped into a lengthy conversation. It’s true, you can meet a lot of interesting and influential people on planes, and sometimes it leads to good opportunities or new knowledge. But I find it’s best to make contact late in the flight, because you can still connect without wasting time on hours of chitchat that you’re really not interested in.
I hate wasting anything, and time is high on the list.
I hate wasting time so much that on the flight over, I got pissed at myself for even heading for Rome because I’ve already been there, and what I love most about traveling is seeing new places. Every place in the world is its own university, offering you a new view of life with its kinesthetic kaleidoscope of sights, smells, feelings, and tastes, and I try to cram in as much of that experience as possible.
So I was annoyed not only because I was going somewhere I’d already been but also because I was coming for just one event, without my usual packed agenda, so it felt as though my time was being doubly wasted.
The event was a big one, though: the Festival of Media Global, where the senior execs from the world’s biggest brands get together with the greatest ad and marketing people in the world. And while I didn’t have any formal meetings planned, my gig there was keynote speaker, so it was definitely a worthwhile investment of time.
But I was still annoyed by going to only one place to do one job. That’s just my personality.
I know that might sound weird, but I love to just go, go, go, and keep going. It makes me feel super-alive and ultra-productive. When you’re on the go, you never know what will happen—and sometimes the only reason something happens is because you’re on the go.
So in an effort to make the most out of every second of my trip, on my flight out of New York, I hit Google Maps and saw that the closest big city to Rome was Florence, or Firenze—birthplace of the Renaissance! Since my goal in life is to be a Renaissance man, I knew I couldn’t go wrong in Firenze.
The trip alone was sick. We blasted out of Rome on Rail Europe at 220 miles an hour, and for an hour and eighteen minutes I devoured the luscious if speed-blurred visuals of Tuscany flashing past the window like a surreal Van Gogh painting. Then—boom!—we were there! My kind of train ride.
Florence has fabulous museums (and you probably guessed that I love museums, because they’re like a high-speed rail hop through history), so I tore through them for six straight hours, taking a jillion photos, topped by an up-close experience with Michelangelo’s David. When it’s right in your face, it’s like you’re doing more than just looking at it. It’s truly a ridiculous work of art. In five hundred years nobody’s done better sculpture, and being that close to it stamps an indelible lesson about excellence on your brain.
The next day I jumped on the first train out to Pisa, where the Leaning Tower was finally open after twelve years of restoration. It turns out what they say is true: Your whole body can feel the lean when you climb up it. And before I knew it, time was up. On to Roma.
Now, I go to huge international business events all the time—Cannes Lions, South by Southwest, you name it—but for a guy like me, the Festival of Media is like media nirvana. Every global heavy hitter in business and the media-buying business is there, because it’s one of those things that isn’t cheap to get to or attend, and that weeds out everybody but the decision makers.
So you tend to find yourself sitting down to lunch with people like the heads of media for HSBC, Fiat, and Reckitt Benckiser (makers of Lysol and so on). It was a conference awash with pure energy if I ever saw one.
I traded business cards and interesting information with countless people from around the world, and especially Europe—a hot, huge market for Kiip right now. We’re now generating a lot more revenue from Europe than ever because of our recent campaigns for Coke and Coke Zero, so opportunities abound, and every conversation seems to lead to one.
Before I knew it, it was time for my speech—a feel-good message about the new era in which advertising isn’t intrusive—and I took the stage to Pharrell Williams’s song “Happy,” the obvious opening score for a speech I called “Because I’m Happy: Capturing the Perfect Moment.” I like to think it helped people feel happy about what they were doing and why they were there, and—as it always is when you connect with an audience—it felt like I was making a thousand friends at once.
Then it was on to the gala dinner, which stretched out to about 4:30 in the morning. Meaning it was over early enough to go
somewhere else and have another experience.
I’d never seen the Roman Colosseum, and what more perfect time is there for avoiding crowds than 4:30 a.m.? A few minutes in a taxi, and there I was.
It was amazing. It was so quiet you could almost hear the history of the place, with gladiators clanging swords and crowds roaring, even though there were no people in sight!
Well, there was one person. He was about a hundred yards from me. Another tireless sightseer, I figured. Or not. Then he started walking toward me. Moving faster. Faster. Too fast. Holy shit!
I had two choices: stick around and see what’s up with this guy, who might turn out to be the most interesting person I’d met yet, or run like hell.
If I ran, I’d never know what the guy wanted. Maybe he was running toward me because he’d been at the Festival of Media, heard my speech, and wanted to do a deal. Or maybe he was a pickpocket, a recent escapee from a mental asylum, or a serial murderer.
I decided not to find out. I spun around and booked it down the street. He kept coming. Two blocks. Two and a half. I was panting. I still had a bottle of one of the finest wines in Italy in me, and he probably didn’t. This would not work to my advantage.
Then he slowed, and finally stopped.
Not me. I kept moving.
As I’ve said, to keep moving is a wise strategy—in business, in life, and, as I learned that night, maybe in saving your life too.
I remember my first old-man moment. It was the kind of harbinger of late life you never forget—it marks the moment where you begin to stare down the barrel of the vast sweep of time that carries you, in our fast-forward era, all too quickly toward the somber, reflective epoch in life.
It happened at a concert, where, at the ripe age of twenty-two, I was suddenly the old dude who wasn’t fixated on his phone.
In my defense as somebody who’s still got a little youth left in him, it was at an Imagine Dragons concert, where the demographics skew toward seventeen-year-old girls. But still.
What was I doing there? To set the record straight, I was brought there by a girl. Who was older than seventeen, I should add.
But the point is, as I was listening to the band (which was actually good), I found myself in this sea of teenage girls Snapchatting every precious moment to their friends. What struck me was the disconnect between how the girls seemed to be experiencing the concert and the experience they were surely trying to convey to their friends. As far as I could tell, they seemed as bored and detached as newspaper reporters in old movies. But surely the photos they were sending to their friends were meant to show how much fun was being had. My attitude was like: “Girls, the friends you’re sending this stuff to are probably enjoying the concert more than you! Wouldn’t you enjoy the concert more if you weren’t a total slave to Snapchatting photos to your friends?”
The moral of the story is: Get over the idea that you’ve got to share every darn thing you ever think or do with everyone you know, as well as the assumption that the more people you share something with the more popular you are. It exposes more of you than you really need to, and at the same time takes you out of the experience you are trying to live. Look at all the celebrities who shot themselves in the foot by oversharing every detail of their private lives.
Besides, it’s totally counterproductive, because the more you put out there the faster people get tired of keeping up with it. In the attempt to seem important, your stuff gets so weak and tired that people think you’ve got nothing important to share.
Another downside to making yourself into an on-the-scene reporter is that you stop bothering to remember things and lose what could be some of your most precious memories.
I like to keep my best memories off-camera and as private as possible. It makes them more vivid. You remember the way it really was, rather than the way a photo or video makes it look.
Remembering what happened to you is a classic way to train your mind, and it doesn’t dilute remembrances of things past with the static of digital interference. Seriously, I know people who go around thinking: “Did I see this on social media, or experience it myself? I dunno—it doesn’t matter.”
Yes, it does.
Real life matters, and so do the people you share it with.
So instead of constantly broadcasting your life, why don’t you try living it?
Here’s a bedtime story that college kids tell themselves while they toss and turn at the thought of surviving another term: “Once upon a time, in a land of Fierce Competition, a little college boy named Bill Gates [you can substitute Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg] worked very hard, so that one day he could have a good job. But evil old professors who knew that he was destined to be the Prince of Money burdened him with dull ideas that hurt his big brain very, very much. One day he broke free, ran far from the School of Dullards, and joined a merry group of brave escapees from college who had magical ideas: Michael Dell, David Karp, Kevin Rose, Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey, and Paul Allen, to name a few. They had great fun, and soon ruled the entire kingdom—which they renamed DropOut Land, in honor of the proven fact of history that every billionaire dropped out of college—and lived happily ever after. With a hot girl. And a Gulfstream G500. The End. No, two hot girls, and a yacht with a helipad, like Larry Ellison’s. The End.”
Given that I work in tech, people all around me have bought into this fairy tale, and it’s just hilarious when you see them try to bring it to the real world. They’re like, “Whoa, dude, I just dropped out of college and now I’ve got this massive freedom, so I’m gonna be an entrepreneur, because that’s cool—and if I don’t like it, I’m gonna jump ship and head straight for the hot new thing!”
It’s the curse of my generation. We didn’t invent bailing, but we sure as hell made an art form of it.
I often have to warn people about the dangers of not seeing things through. I think that one of the biggest cheats in life is proving that you have the integrity to finish what you started. That’s the one thing that makes you the type of person other people will rely on, and come to, when they really need something. The dropout ethic has been legitimized to such a degree that there are now two essential approaches to entrepreneurship. In one, the entrepreneur builds his idea into a company for the primary purpose of selling it. That’s considered a viable business model, and I’m not saying people haven’t made money from it—but think about this: Is making money the be-all and end-all of life?
Plus, do you really want to be known as the guy who took the money and ran from your first start-up?
What about the people who helped you build the company and who are going to get axed by the new management? It’s unlikely that they’ll ever want to do business with you again. And what about your own reputation as somebody who doesn’t know how to take something to the next level, somebody who’s always chasing the hot new thing, no matter whom he has to run over to catch it?
And plus, what if there is no hot new thing? What if you’re burned out and washed up by thirty?
What if the $10 million you made on the sale of your start-up taxes down to $5 million, then drops to $4 million after you piss away about a million of it on living the life of the young rich? What do you do when it drops to $2 million after you dump your own money into something that flops, because nobody else believes you’ll see it through (and they’re right)? What if you realize you’re all out of killer ideas, and settle down with a pretty nice house, an okay car, and enough left over to—based on returning the standard 5 percent in the market, after taxes—give you an income of $40,000 a year?
Is that the dream you dreamed when you lulled yourself to sleep in college with fairy tales of being a power dropout?
Then there’s the other approach to entrepreneurship, the one I followed. First you finish school, where you learn how to think critically, engage socially, and plan for your future—rationally. Then, once you get the idea of your life, you have the tools to turn it into a dream so real you can hold it in your hands, and m
ake other people see it too. You love the idea almost as much as you might someday love a wife or child, and the work you do on it feels more like play, as other people are drawn to it, and drawn to you. Some are investors. Others are customers. Doesn’t matter, because they all feel like family to you.
You and your band of brothers and sisters create something that makes life better right away, and it spreads so effortlessly that it seems harder to keep it small than make it big.
As your company grows, your equity grows. Money always stays real, and greed is never something that keeps you up at night. You stay the course, not out of a sense of guilt, responsibility, or inertia, but because you love what you do so much that cutting and running never once even enters your thought process.
People see you as a person who is true to his ideas, true to his word, and true to the people around him. Your embrace of loyalty as an ethic becomes as natural as your love of your idea, and is seen as a central part of your identity.
Your life makes sense.
You wake up one day in a land of Fierce Competition, which you rule kindly but firmly, with the bluebirds singing, and weaving ribbons together as they fly (a lot like in Cinderella, but better, because they’re designing your new logo), as your princess calls out, “Prince of Money! Breakfast is ready!”
You pinch yourself. It leaves an ugly bruise. Must be real life.
About five hundred times a year, somebody says to me, “I’d love to have coffee with you for about fifteen minutes, and pick your brain.”
As a rule, these people are starting to nurse an idea into a business, or they’re entrepreneurs whose project has stalled.
I usually tell them, “Sorry, but that would be just another fifteen minutes taken away from you actually doing something.”