Wednesday was Austin AdFed’s monthly luncheon, and the speaker was GSD&M’s Luke Sullivan. I hadn’t heard of him before, but the “How To Not Suck” title of the presentation had me too intrigued to not sign up. If I had gone to school for advertising, I would have read his much-praised book, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This!, but I have an English degree. If you missed it, that’s sad. It was truly excellent and pertinent.

Mr. Sullivan talked about excellence in the craft of what you do, and it was directed at creatives. Luckily for me, he was a copywriter for 17 years before moving into creative direction. All those examples about honing your work into excellence were about writing. Here’s what I got out of it:
A big part of producing work that’s really high quality is from having a good work ethic. Be in early, work hard, and really do your best on each small piece. Treat all jobs with the same level of attention and care, whether it’s a Superbowl ad or the graphic for a pay per click campaign’s landing page. No job is above you, and you certainly won’t get to the dream assignments doing a halfway job and kvetching about the work you have to do now.

It’s the sum of many small pieces of work that were all done better than they had to be that makes an exceptional product. This sense of quality isn’t really tangible–leather seats and a fast engine alone don’t set a BMW apart from other cars, but the thousand small parts, each designed with precision and care do. Precision takes time, and it’s your job to find ways to fit more time in for doing a good job. That means you probably need to stop playing online and talking to people.

If you find yourself procrastinating, it’s probably resistance to writing (or drawing, etc.). A good way to get over that is to use pencil and paper, just get all the ideas down without it being on your computer, where you’re in production mode. You come up with a hundred ideas and pick one. Distracting yourself until the One True Idea hits you upside the head gets nothing done. (This is a particularly egregious sin of mine.)