Don't Panic and read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

?If anything, I've learned a lot from books I read. Some more than others. Some books I didn't like. I tried reading Eckhart Tolle once and hated it profoundly. I've done self-help-growth-books before, so it's not a general allergy, to be clear. I just didn't like any of it, but I know many of you love it and that's cool. But today (well, a week ago, but on a cosmic scale does that really matter?) is the day one of the most fantastic books of all time was released in London on 12 October 1979. This book has changed perspectives and has provided many with the ultimate answer to the ultimate question. That is, if you know the ultimate question, a thing that makes sense. If you don't, it is equally valuable in the larger scale of things. The title of that particularly impactful book is 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.

Disclaimer, I guess (always disclaim things)

I'll be wildly quoting from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, which I will therefore abbreviate to THGTTG for reading convenience. Those quotes serve no purpose but to underline the vast importance of this work in life the universe in general. I've found myself reflecting on those words many times in my life and I have not gone a day without having a clear idea of where I have located my towel. In fact, I never really go anywhere without my towel, it seems. Okay, not on a daily basis when I commute to work, but on every trip I'll carry a towel, even if I know towels are provided.?More about this later. Also, I will try to talk about marketing/communications, but I have a strong feeling I'll sort of fail at that at some point.

THGTTG was written by Douglas Adams, a man with a clear sense of purpose since it took him 13 years to complete the five books that make up the series. The books have spawned a bunch of adaptations and a long list of followers. Every year, we observe Towel Day in tribute to the work, and I feel that it serves every part of life and should be part of your life. So let's get to quotes and reflections, all right?

Creation was a bad idea

“In the beginning the Universe was created.?This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

Ok, let's start with an upbeat one. One of the most important lessons of life is the utter insignificance (this will be a theme) it has and the weird fluke in the general proceedings of things it demonstrates. And that is perfectly ok, but if THGTTG underlines anything, it is not the idea of destiny or faith, but of coincidence. Things happen for absolutely random reasons, and so do we. Is that a comforting thought? It is if you think about bad things that befall you. Sure, people do bad things, but if you think to yourself that the reason you have a flat tire or whatever (there are much worse things obviously) is not related to your inner 'WHY ME?' exclamation, life gets easier. Viktor Frankl realised during one of the most harrowing experiences a person can have that we always have a choice in how we deal with what happens to us. We may not always be able to affect 'what happens to us', but we do affect how we handle it. A bit of what Covey later said with a sphere of influence and sphere of interest. Coming to terms with that is excellent and the most significant life lesson anyone can learn. Also, it is a great idea to be excellent towards each other, but that is from Bill & Ted, who are excellent and could have been created by Douglas Adams, but are not. Thanks, Doug (for THGTTG)! And if we then apply this to the field of marketing communications, it is absolutely the case that sometimes we fuck up. Massively. Unrelentingly. It is good to know that your focus at that point never needs to be; who is to blame? how could we have prevented it? You have to focus on where to go from here.

Two wrongs don't make a right (or do they?)

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

?Ok, so one of the biggest challenges for anyone, whether you are trying to market or communicate stuff, or just try to get by in daily life, is to empathize with others. Others, in the largest sense of the world, may have vastly different ideas about the way things work and should be done than you do. Value systems are very different, which we, as a species, sometimes struggle to understand. And yes, as a committed vegetarian with brave attempts to be a vegan at times, I also believe empathy should include other species on our planet, but that is a whole different matter and not part of the course for this article. Why are dolphins, who left our planet in the book due to a pending catastrophe they don’t bother telling the humans about and only left us the message of ‘so long and thanks for all the shoes’, useful for us? They embody a vastly different outlook on ife in this case. Consumers, citizens, anti-vaxxers, Trumpers, XR-people, vegans…these are all people who, like you, have an outlook on life, which may be vastly different, but is as entrenched and rock solid in their mind as your value set is in yours. As someone who works in communication on any level, which we all do basically, it is so good to think about the dolphins now and then. And yes, maybe they were right. Or a bit right. I hope I’m a bit right, too, and if we are all a bit right, we can communicate a lot easier, I think. Also sometimes I want to be right, but hope I'm wrong. Life is complicated.

Details are E-VE-RY-THING!

“In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”?

I am all-in favor for the ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ motto in most things in life, but if you are a marketeer/communications specialist, you know that the small stuff can kill your big stuff. I recently saw an ad for a inclusivity leadership program. It looked great, the image conveyed a. sense of diversity and the message was good. But in the corner of the advertisement, it said: LIMITED SPACE, followed by the deadly Dutch VOL=VOL (a line you’ll find on the signs of protesters who hate the idea of an immigrant finding safety in their home). Auch, that is a detail radically derailing your key message and obviously, with a colleague, I had a good laugh about it. There are plenty of examples where campaigns got everything right, but one key little detail. The HGTTG has ‘Don’t panic’ emblazoned on its cover, and it has become a cultural touchstone. Indeed, it is not a small detail in the corner, but the thought behind it, the idea it conveys on a key moment in the customer journey, is marketing gold in ways of thinking about your audience. This is why sometimes things succeed, because of that small nudge, this little convenience, that logo, or maybe simply the name is just right at the right time. I mean, do you know ‘Made to Stick’ by Chip and Dan Heath? That is precisely what I’m talking about. That’s all about that detail that does the trick. Recently I was doing a photoshoot, and we wanted to fake some shot in a video studio. One of the studio people said: ‘well, if your viewer knows anything about video, they’ll see this is a bullshit shot…’ There is enough bullshit in the world, let’s be brutally honest about that, so details, and sometimes that may mean some big, friendly letters with a message that is superrelevant to your product. It’s maybe bigger, but it's still a detail… (also, I know this is fictional, I DO know, but you can not deny the importance of being told 'don't panic' at times).

Space is the place

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

I find space fascinating. I think I found it more fascinating after reading THGTTG. But why is this phrase helpful? I’m not sure, but I’ve come to think that realizing our size in an expanding universe is epic-cally impactful on how we see ourselves. I’ve elaborately bragged about how I met some of the people responsible for the James Webb Telescope at a metal show in Austin during SXSW (should I just add people like that on LinkedIn? Damn you, social anxieties. Here is the blog in Dutch though.), but that was so impressive because of what the James Webb Telescope does. And of course, meeting the smart-asses who realize that is epic, but the JWT has shown us anew how amazingly vast the universe is and what mysteries we still have ahead of us. Immanuel Kant once wrote:

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”

While I now know that I reply to a quote with a quote that I actually have tattooed on my arm, that point is that this awe and wonder are at the core of who we are as human beings. We can be so caught up in our own little microcosms of (essentially) a lot of futile stuff that we forget to gaze up at the sky. Go look at some JWT pictures right now, see what that does to you. I mean, they make you feel the point I’m dancing around with this extensive text so go. Oh, and watch ‘Cosmic Time Machine’, it’s on Netflix.?

Be ready and know where your towel is

“A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”

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Ok, so I know where my towel is. I do not always carry a towel, but actually, most of the time I do. I never travel without a towel, even when I know that there will be a towel. I bring my towel, it’s a microfiber, compact towel, and if I know where it is ,I know I’m able to fend for myself. I also bring my toothbrush. It sounds silly, I know, and this is not a blog about Towel Day, but a blog to sort of praise THGTTG for its inspirational value. There are things that you need in life, things you ought to carry to feel safe and comfortable, wherever you are or wherever you go. Though this may be reading a bit too deeply into it, I think the towel represents self-care. I take a towel when I go on trips in my bag, I take a book in my bag almost daily, and I carry some painkillers at all times. I also need to have my earplugs because they allow me to retreat when things get too much. They’ve been too much for a long time, and I sort of fried myself a bit last year. I’ve not been as creative, energetic, or on point as before. I’ll get there again, but for now, I know where my towel is means to me that I know what I need to be healthy. I hope you do, too.

“So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

The fact that the dolphins, which I started this blog with, have left the earth as catastrophe is looming was a brilliant find to me. That they left this brief message is such a fantastic joke that keeps being entertaining. If anyone says this to me, I know they are in on the cosmic joke. Because our world is not doing well, and at some point, if we keep this up, it’ll leave us behind. And by that point, it is ‘so long and thanks for all the fish’ to us. If THGTTG teaches us anything, it is that we have agency over ourselves and an impact on others, but it also teaches us that there’s not an ‘everything’s going to be all right’ at the end. But don’t panic; know where your towel is, and be good. And feel free to share some other cool quotes.

Got any favourite quotes? Drop them in the comments. Even if they're from Eckhart Tolle. ?

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