Russell Davies

Do Cornelissen

A piece in today's FT magazine reminded me that I wrote about L. Cornelissen in the long version of the Do Interesting book. It's still in there but it got trimmed a lot. It's below.

And there's this lovely little quote from the owner.

Here's the piece. This version's also better because it's got a longer interview with Navaz...

There’s a shop called L Cornelissen and Son. They’ve been selling art supplies in London since 1855.

The place sells colour like a Harry Potter shop might sell magic; like a mediaeval library for paint and papers. 

And they’re indirectly responsible for billions of pounds of commercial creativity, because generations of advertising art directors and copywriters get their particular large, green scrapbooks from L. Cornelissen.

Advertising creatives have particularly well honed habits when it comes to the production of interesting ideas. They do it on demand. For money. They know, more than almost anyone else, that you can’t rely on inspiration. 

So they collect and collect and collect. 

Images, photography, illustrative styles, bits of type, overheard speech, fragments of idea, other ads, anything that grabs their eye. 

None of it with any real purpose other than one day it’ll come in handy. (And this is one place where the industry's reputation for kleptomania comes from.)

Everyone in an advertising agency has seen it: late at night, ‘the creatives’ stuck on a project, desperately leafing through their scrapbooks looking for the image, or the juxtaposition of images, that’ll light up their brief. 

And then, even later, sneaking into another creative team’s office to see what’s in their scrapbooks.

This is where most of the best ads in the world have come from.

Follow their lead. Collect stuff that catches your eye. Stick it in a book. Flick through when you’re looking for ideas. You can do it electronically but paper really helps. You develop a sense memory for where a particular idea sits, you get the unexpected connections and happy accidents of adjacent pages, you get something to do with your hands when you’re thinking, and something to share with your work partner.

Maybe physical scrapbooks work by being tools for what the psychologist Ellen Langer calls ‘soft openness’

“What you want is a soft openness—to be attentive to the things you’re doing but not single-minded, because then you’re missing other opportunities.”

And it’s not just advertising creatives who love scrapbooks. Fashion people are the same.

Navaz Batliwalla is an editorial consultant, author, stylist and fashion blogger. I talked to her about her creative habits.

“Yeah, I have scrapbooks and I've been doing scrapbooks since I was a student. I'm like a scrapbook myself.  I'm very hybridy. Taking things from different places and then hatching them together in whatever context. 

I love collage and when I went to college I actually wanted to be an illustrator. The course was called fashion promotion, illustration, and photography. The course was like a collage itself. 

One of my good friends at college was into collage and he made these beautiful scrapbooks. And I got this really amazing one with different coloured papers, it was massive and quite expensive so I just keep stuffing and stuffing and stuffing.

So now I’ve got to the point where they're completely overstuffed and now I just use boxes and carrier bags. Bags full of scraps and it's really relaxing, putting the scraps together because that's when you start making connections. 

I tend to revisit them all the time. And I tend to play with the scraps rather than actually putting them in the scrapbook. Once you commit to the scrapbook, it’s like I’ve finished something. I've made this lovely piece of art. So you are torn. How do I use this? Do I commit it to this or do I commit to something else?

It's so relaxing and even the process of putting straps together, your mind wanders. Maybe I do it every six months and all the things that happened to you in your life in six months means that you're looking at this piece in a different way. It means something completely different. It then goes with something else.

And if I'm starting a big project, like a book, you can just get the scrap out or get the box of sheets out and just start going through them, pulling things out and making a new pile and a way of thinking.

It's a way of easing yourself into the subject and it's amazing because although I know my scrapbooks and my boxes quite well now, there's always things that you've forgotten about. Something that you kept not knowing what it'll be for.

Also, when you look back through your scrapbook you find, oh, there's some themes in here which maybe you didn't know you were interested in to start with.”

Stepping stones into the dark

(I feel like I've posted this before but I can't find it...so. It's a bit that didn't make it into the Do Interesting book. Though, clearly, it should have)

The Australian author Helen Garner wrote a magnificent essay for The Guardian about happiness. She said she’d finally realised that it wasn’t a thing you got after a lifetime of striving but something that you ‘glimpse in the corner of your eye’ Something elusive, that slips away before you name it. 

And then she writes:

“So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.”

And then she tells you about the things she’s noticed. It’s magical and mundane.

A bit about pens - not in the book

Taylor Swift has three different pens which she uses to write different types of songs. She writes her most gothic overwrought lyrics with a quill pen, all scratchy and twisted. She writes poetic literary stuff with a fountain pen and she writes the bouncy bubblegum stuff with a glitter pen, like you’d find in a teenagers pencil case. She confessed all this when accepting a Songwriter of the Decade award.

Slightly disappointingly she says these pens are imaginary.  “I don’t have a quill. Any more. I broke it when I was mad.”

People who write for a living are intensely interested in this kind of thing. Get together with a gang of writers and they’re not arguing about influences or iambic pentameters. They’re gossiping about tools. Has anyone found a source of Alwych’s? What’s your workflow in Scrivener? How much does everyone hate Word?

Of course, there are always a few isolated individuals who airily contend that the tools don’t matter. They can write on anything, anywhere, they don’t need a special chair and a special pen. They look down on the rest of us. ‘Just write’ they say. And if you’re one of them. Great. But why are you reading this? This book is for those of us who occasionally need a nudge. We’re looking for ways to make things easier and one of the ways to do that is to make them exciting and pleasurable. So if you get pleasure from writing with a particular special pen, fantastic. Just make sure you carry it around. If you’ve got a favourite fountain pen that makes you feel slightly like you’re Joan Didion skewering a contemporary more then embrace it. Maybe get the hat and sunglasses too. Whatever it takes to get you writing.

Try this: treat yourself to a slightly more expensive pen or pencil than you’re otherwise normally use. Make a little moment out of using it for the first time. Let the ceremony of that first mark carry over into your writing and get the flow going.

(The book in question)

You've gone and got national acclaim

I've finally screwed up the courage to look inside my copy. This is the first page I turned to. Made me smile. I'm taking that to be a good sign. (Moody chops)

Count something / write something

A kind correspondent read my post about Do Interesting and thought I might be interested in Atul Gawande's 2005 Commencement Address to the Harvard Medical School. She's right. It's fantastic.

Here's his Rule 3:

"Count something. No matter what you ultimately do in medicine— whether you go into purely clinical practice or work in research or business and never touch a patient again—a doctor should be a scientist in his or her world.

In the simplest terms, this means that we should count something. The laboratory researcher may count the number of tumor cell lines with a particular gene defect. Likewise, the clinician might count the number of patients who develop a particular complication—or even just how many are seen on time and how many were made to wait. It doesn’t really matter what you count. You don’t need a research grant. The only requirement is that what you count should be interesting to you.

When I was a resident I began counting how often one of our patients had something forgotten inside them after surgery—either a sponge or an instrument. It wasn’t very frequently: about one in 15,000 operations. But they could be badly injured. One patient had a 13 inch retractor left in him and it tore into his bowel and bladder. Another had a small sponge left in his brain, which caused an abscess and a permanent seizure disorder.

Then I counted how often such cases happened because the nurses hadn’t counted all the sponges like they were supposed to, or because the doctors ignored nurses’ warnings that something was missing. It turned out to be hardly ever. I got a little more sophisticated and compared patients who had stuff left inside them with ones who didn’t. It turned out that the mishaps predominantly occurred in patients with emergency operations or operations in which something unexpected was encountered—like a cancer when one expected appendicitis. Things began to make sense. If nurses have to track fifty sponges and a couple hundred instruments during an operation, already a tricky thing to do, it is understandably much harder under emergency circumstances, or when unexpected changes require bringing in lots more equipment. Punishing people more therefore wasn’t going to eliminate the problem. Only a technological solution would—perhaps a way of scanning for sponges and instruments in everyone.

If you count something interesting to you, I tell you: you will find something interesting."

And here's Rule 4:

"Write something. It makes no difference whether you write a paper for a medical journal, five paragraphs for a website, or a collection of poetry. Try to put your name in print at least once a year. What you write does not need to achieve perfection. It only needs to add some small observation about our world. One should not underestimate the effect of one’s contributions.

The physician and poet Lewis Thomas once pointed out, “The invention of a mechanism for the systematic publication of fragments of scientific work may well have been the key event in the history of modern science.” For by soliciting modest contributions from the many, it has produced a store of collective know-how with far greater power than any one individual could have achieved.

I think this is as true outside science as inside.

One should also not underestimate the power of the act of writing itself. I did not write until I became a doctor. But once I became a doctor, I found I needed to write. Medicine is retail. We provide our services to one person at a time, one after another. It is a grind. For all its complexity, it is more physically than intellectually taxing. But writing let me step back, engage as something more than a retailer, and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness. 

Furthermore, by putting your writing out to an audience, even a small one, you connect yourself to something larger than yourself.

The first thing I ever published was a diary in an online magazine of five days as a surgical resident. I remember that feeling of having it come out in print. One is proud but also nervous. Will people notice it? What will they think? Did I say something dumb? An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community, and also of concern to contribute something meaningful to it.

So choose your audience. Then write something."

Why be more interesting?

This is a section I'm working on for the book. It's not a simple answer...

Tooth and claw - the productivity answer

There were once two hikers setting up camp in the woods after a long day’s walking. They’d just finished their evening meal and were settling down in their tent, getting into their sleeping bags, when they heard the unmistakable sounds of a bear snuffling around the campsite. They froze with fear. Then they heard it getting closer, then they saw the bulge in the nylon as the bear rubbed against the outside of the tent. One of the hikers slowly reached over to their rucksack, dug out a pair of running shoes and silently started putting them on. 

“What are you doing?” whispered the other hiker “You can’t outrun a bear”

“I don’t have to outrun a bear” the first hiker replied “I just have to outrun you”

This is a reason to be interesting. It’s a competitive world out there. In a world of work, a world of raising money to start a business, or to persuade someone to buy your new idea, or to support your cause, or whatever it is, it helps if you’ve got a little edge. And being more interesting can be that edge. It won’t make you the fastest runner in the world but it’ll help.

Just because - the life is for living answer

Someone once did a study which claimed that a greater proportion of scientists who won Nobel Prizes had hobbies than those that didn't. I posted this on the Do Interesting instagram and my friend James poked at it, questioning what I was suggesting: ‘be interesting so you can be successful, so you can win?’ And, yes, that's a bit of it, we talked about that above. 

But there's more to it than that. I think it's a useful counter to all the productivity pom in the world to remember that not only is being maniacally focused on work unhealthy, but that it also doesn’t work. I like the Nobel/hobbies study because it demonstrates that hobbies don't get in the way of professional success. Many of us want to succeed professionally and feel like our hobbies should sit on pause while we do it. This is study is one indication that that's pointless.

What else is there? - the happiness answer

The Australian author Helen Garner just wrote a magnificent essay for The Guardian about happiness. She said she’d finally realised that it wasn’t a thing you got after a lifetime of striving but something that you ‘glimpse in the corner of your eye’ Something elusive, that slips away before you name it. 

And then she writes:

“So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.”

And then she tells you about the things she’s noticed. It’s magical and mundane. Go read it.

Being interesting means being interested. What else is there?

Executive summary*

I've just written this as a first page in the Do Interesting book. (Don't worry, we've also written other pages. This isn't all there is.)

If you’re in a bookshop trying to decide whether to buy this book this is the page you want.

Interesting isn’t something you are, it’s something you do. You get more interesting by being more interested, by paying a little more attention to the world. And there are a bunch of relatively easy, ways to do that. Which we’ve divided into three sections

Noticing - you should spend a little bit of time, dailyish, paying extra attention to the world and noticing something new about it.

We’ve got 23 ways you could do that.

Collecting - you should make an extra effort, weeklyish, to collect and compile what you’ve noticed so you can find it and use it again.

We’ve got 15 ways you could do that.

Making - you should do something with what you’ve collected, monthishly. You should make something that you put back into the world. Something interesting.

We’ve got 21 ways you could do that.

We’ve also interviewed a bunch of interesting people who aren’t Steve Jobs or Picasso but just regular people like you and me who tell us how they do all this.

*if not you’re not an executive please don’t read this page

The opposite of interesting is not boring it's ChatGPT

A kind correspondent has pointed out that the list of 10 ways to be Interesting generated by ChatGPT and featured in yesterday's post only contained 9 items. Of course! I had not noticed.

AI is going to be the very devil to edit because it's so smooth that it's hard to read properly. We just bounce off it. I presume, because it's basing almost everything on 'what's the next most probable word?', we feel like we can tell where it's going and make unconscious assumptions about where it'll end up. 

That strange way with language used to be strange and interesting. It threw up unexpected words and beguiling ideas. Now it's just strangely, dangerously bland.

I am not a robot

When I first thought about doing Do Interesting I assumed it'd be easy. I've spent a long time thinking about this stuff. There's the blog post from way back when, there are the conferences, there've been occasional workshops. I own the twitter account. For a while when you typed 'how to be interesting' into google you got me. And Oliver Burkeman once said I was interesting..""Start a blog," the designer and blogger Russell Davies recommends, but as experience shows, only interesting people – Davies included – start interesting blogs."

But then I got worried. This space - as a tech consultant might say - has commodified. The internet is full of advice about how to do all this. Be more productive/creative/imaginative in that kind of influencey, guru-y, sort-of-useful, sort-of-soul-destroying way.

I love Morning Pages. It's a lovely and useful idea. When Morning Pages becomes a lifestyle app subscription model notecards thing something goes wrong. I didn't want to write that kind of book. And even if I'd wanted to, it's too late.

So I thought I should get help. If I was rewriting that original blogpost now I'd instantly add 'find people you love to work with'. The BIGGEST lie about sort-of-creative work is that you do any of it on your own. You don't. It's always a collaboration. Even if just with your eventual audience or with Past and Future Yous.

I won't tell you about the people I've found yet because I've not asked their permission. But one of them (Ben) immediately proved my point by doing a genius thing. He typed this prompt into ChatGPT:

“Write me a short blog post, 500 words, on 10 ways to be interesting.”

ChatGPT wrote this:

Being interesting is an important quality to possess. It can make conversations more engaging, help you stand out in a crowd, and even make you more attractive to others. Here are 10 ways to be more interesting:

1. Be curious. Ask questions, seek out new experiences, and learn about a wide variety of topics. Being curious shows that you are engaged with the world around you and that you have a thirst for knowledge.
2. Have a passion. Whether it's a hobby, a sport, or a cause that you care about, having a passion can make you more interesting. It gives you something to talk about and share with others, and it shows that you have depth and complexity as a person.
3. Be adventurous. Try new things, go to new places, and push yourself outside of your comfort zone. Being adventurous shows that you are brave and willing to take risks, which can be very interesting to others.
4. Be creative. Think outside the box, come up with new ideas, and express yourself in unique ways. Being creative shows that you have a fertile imagination and that you are not afraid to be different.
5. Be a good listener. Listen carefully to what others have to say, ask follow-up questions, and show that you are genuinely interested in their thoughts and experiences. Being a good listener shows that you are considerate and empathetic, which are attractive qualities.
6. Be confident. Believe in yourself and your abilities, and don't be afraid to speak up and share your opinions. Being confident shows that you are self-assured and comfortable in your own skin, which can be very interesting to others.
7. Be open-minded. Be willing to consider different perspectives, learn from others, and change your mind when new information becomes available. Being open-minded shows that you are intellectually curious and flexible, which can be very interesting.
8. Be well-informed. Stay up-to-date on current events, know a little bit about a lot of different subjects, and be able to hold your own in a conversation. Being well-informed shows that you are knowledgeable and engaged with the world, which can make you more interesting.
9. Be a good storyteller. Share interesting stories about your life, your travels, or your experiences, and tell them in a way that is engaging and entertaining. Being a good storyteller shows that you have a vivid imagination and the ability to captivate an audience, which can make you very interesting.

It's OK, right? It's not very interesting or useful but it's a pretty good summary of the internet consensus about this stuff.

(I think for the book we'll have to do a shorter version. It's hard to read when it's this long. Like a Medium post.)

What was more alarming is the tone. It's quite like I write. It's Internet Modern. Short sentences. Plain. Be this. Do that. That was chastening. That made me even more determined to get other people involved and to make the book more various, more odd and more (of course) interesting.

I think we're getting there but it's an interesting needle to thread.

I will post extracts and Work In Progress for your perusal.

  

New Do who this?

I first talked at the Do Lectures in 2007 when it wasn't called Do. It was called Little Big Voice. Then I talked again in 2008 (with Matt Jones) and then I went back in 2009. But I don't remember talking. 

And in 2011 I went and did a How To Be Interesting workshop under the Do umbrella.

And then, last summer, I was fortunate enough to be asked to go and talk again. I think I got the vibe a bit wrong, to be honest, the 'Do community' was feeling a lot of post-pandemic fervour, I was banging on about the challenges of AI, but it was still the most fascinating few days. And, while I was there I bumped into Miranda who runs Do Books and she asked me if was interested in doing a Do book. And so I said, of course.

There was already a Do Present and I'd just written a book about PowerPoint so I had to fall back on the only other thing I'm qualified to write about. And so I'm writing Do Interesting.

We're aiming for it to be on sale in September 2023. I think. That seems very soon now.  But, if you stay tuned, over the next few weeks and months, you'll be able to follow along with a series of posts about how it's all going. It seems like a good thing to blog about writing. While I'm writing about blogging.