I have just read “Brutal Simplicity Of Thought” by Charles
Saatchi. It is essentially the training manual for new staff at his advertising
agency. Read it. Here are the first few pages (almost) in full because they are
so brilliant:
If you want your work
to achieve the impossible, you will be need Brutal Simplicity Of Thought.
You will need a deep
distaste for waffle, vagueness, platitudes and flim flam-a strong preference to
get to the point.
Your mind will become
a threshing machine, sorting the intellectual wheat from the chaff.
Winston Churchill was
a great believer in simplicity. He liked to quote Blaise Pascal’s letter to a
friend that started:
“I didn’t have time to
write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
He knew that to
achieve simplicity is very hard. He understood that it required what Bertrand
Russell called:
“The painful necessity
of thought”
Simplicity is more
than a discipline: it is a test. It forces exactitude or it annihilates. It
accelerates a failure when a cause is weak, and it clarifies and strengthens a
cause that is strong.
When President
Roosevelt wanted to persuade a profoundly isolationist America to help Britain
in her hour of need, he invented a simple phrase to help him to do it. He
called his policy:
And he used simple
language to express it:
“Suppose my
neighbour’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose...if he can
take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help put out the
fire...I don’t say to him before that operation, “Neighbour, my garden hose
cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it”...I don’t want $15-I want my garden
hose back after the fire is over”.
That’s how it was
done. A simple story of a fire and a hose. The rest is history.
The most powerful
rallying cries are simple and to the point:
“Your country needs
you!”
“No taxation without
representation!”
“One man! One vote!”
There was nothing
complicated about:
“Liberte, Egalite,
Fraternite”
Nobody had to explain
what it meant when they heard John F Kennedy say:
“The torch has been
passed to a new generation of Americans”
Nobody needed further
elucidation when they heard:
“Do unto others as you
would be done by”
Or when Martin Luther
King said:
“I have a dream”
In all aspects of
life, simplicity rules. It means the only possible words in the only possible
order.
Simplicity in poetry.
John Keats was sitting in a coffee shop with his friend, Stephens.
He was writing. He
said:
“A thing of beauty is
a constant joy. What think you of that, Stephens?”
No response from
Stephens. Keats carried on. Half an hour later, Keats said:
“A thing of beauty is
a joy forever”.
That, his friend said,
will last forever. And it did.
Simplicity in art. Delacroix
explained:
“If you are not
skilled enough to sketch a man falling out of the window during the time it
takes to get him from the fifth story to the ground, then you will never be
able to produce monumental work.”
Simplicity in prose. Is
it any wonder that Kafka lives forever, when you consider the opening words of
the trial:
“Someone must have
laid a false accusation against Joseph K because one morning he was arrested
without having done anything wrong.”
Simplicity in drama. Hamlet
has become the most performed play in history because Shakespeare captured the
human dilemma in ten words:
“To be or not to be,
that is the question”.
Simplicity in politics.
During Britain’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill was presented with the
proposal for a Local Defence Volunteers Force, to be Britain’s last stand in
the event of a German invasion. The LDVF. He liked the plan. And approved it.
But he didn’t like the name. He changed it to:
“The Home Guard”
And so it became.
The post war 1918
general election was won by Lloyd George, with five words:
“A land fit for
heroes”
In the post war 1945
general election, Clement Atlee defeated the war hero Winston Churchill with
nine words:
“We won the war. And
now-win the peace.”
The Conservatives were
helped to win the 1979 general election by three words:
“Labour isn’t working”
You hear it said that
this search for simplicity is insulting the intelligence of the general public,
or treating them like morons. On the contrary, it is a mark of respect for the
listener. The world is always short of time, so précis is a form of good
manners.
Furthermore: words
spell money...
Simplicity in business. Every
day, a blind man sat on the pavement in Central Park. He had his hat in front
of him, begging for money. A sign read:
“I am blind”
Passers-by ignored
him. One day, an advertising man saw his plight. He altered the wording on his
sign and cash started pouring into the hat. What had he done? He had changed
the sign to read:
“It is spring and I am
blind”
When William Proctor
and James Gamble started Proctor and Gamble, they only had one insignificant
product-Ivory Bar Soap. Until they added the slogan:
“99 44/100% Pure”
That was the beginning
of the Proctor and Gamble legend.
Simplicity rules. Consider
the three iconic documents of Western civilisation. There really are only three
of them. And they really did change the world. Their aim was revolution. Their
effect was revelation. You need only look at them to be inspired. You will be
deeply affected by all three. To read them afresh is to understand the power of
simplicity. You don’t need a Harvard PHD to follow any of them:
Their opening and
closing words say it all. They are of course:
The Sermon On The
Mount, by Jesus Christ.
The Declaration of
Independence, by the Founding Fathers of America.
The Communist
Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels.
The first founded perhaps
the greatest religion ever seen:
Open: And seeing the
multitudes...he opened his mouth and taught them, saying...
Close: And it came to
pass...people were astonished at his doctrine.
The second made one
country into a superpower:
Open: We, the people,
hold these truths to be self-evident.
Close: ...we mutually
pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour.
And the third launched
what Isaiah Berlin called the greatest organised social movement of all time:
Open: The history of
all previously existing society is the history of class struggle
Close: Workers of the
world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Nobody can resist that
kind of simplicity. Its reach is global. It strikes a chord in humans
everywhere. Nobody is immune.
Their Brutal
Simplicity Of Thought allowed them to change the world.
With Brutal Simplicity
of Thought nothing is impossible.
Happy ending. There is an
unexpected by-product of this process; it makes people happy. It enables the
human mind to function at its best, and to be supremely effective.
It allows you to have
a romantic belief in your ability to change the world by an act of
breathtakingly brutal simplicity. It is a licence to reject the status quo. It leads to a determined conviction that
you, acting alone or almost single-handedly, can make what seems highly
improbable, in fact happen.
So that even the
meekest can meet life with the possibility of mastering its difficulties.
The people who do not
have such beliefs are miserable. They are mere men of commerce: non-believers,
empty suits.
By contrast, such men
and women as you, find happiness in transforming one form of life into another.
You know you can permanently and radically alter the outlook and values of a
significant body of human beings.
You will have power
through what John F Kennedy called:
“The mastery of the
inside of men’s minds”
Particularly your
own...
Maurice Saatchi,
September 2011.
Good huh?
I’m at the Edinburgh festival doing a stand-up show. It’s
good. But not on the same planet as Daniel Kitson’s stand-up show, which is the
best show of any kind I’ve ever seen. Just phenomenal. Kitson understands the
power of simplicity. He can provide whole worlds of insight in dense
one-liners. He reminds me of Samuel Beckett in this respect (e.g. on habit “we
are like dogs chained to our own vomit”). The phrases I remember from his show
this year include:
“The result is an imposter in football” (quoting the Spanish
player Xavi on how outcome doesn’t necessarily reflect objective quality or
effort); “Life is the incremental death of hope”; “Life is a series of
impossible things that slowly become inevitable”.
There are many more simple but evocative similes, metaphors
and one-liners too. But these are the phrases I remember most clearly. I only
remember them because I listened to them. And I listened to them because they
were contained within compelling and hilarious stories. We must sugar the pill.
But the pill must be easy to swallow on its own terms i.e. SIMPLE.
Creativity, originality, insightfulness: these are all
difficult. Complexity is not. Do not mistake one for the other.
Kitson is the master of observation, or the minutiae of
human life, or the “quiet dignity of unwitnessed lives”, of the divinity of the
everyday. Observational material gets a bad name, people see it as simple,
easy. But visionaries are necessarily masters of reality. We all wander through
life almost in a coma, blinded by an anaesthetic of familiarity (this is a
Richard Dawkins line). What we see most is the hardest to see.
So look for what everybody else is blind to, and open their
eyes to it with poetic simplicity. They will think you a magician.
I think I’ll finish this post with another example from
Saatchi’s book. It is a quote from Picasso: “It took me a whole life-time to
learn how to draw like a child”.
Complete essentialism is beautiful. Kitson does it, Picasso
did it, let us all aim for it. It will be rewarded by impact.
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