The Friday Thing #806

Thanks for the notes back last week – and pointers to other great Generative AI inspired ads/work.

The Friday Thing #806 is inspired by one of my favourite new writers.

Billy Oppenheimer is a writing and research assistant to Ryan Holiday and every Sunday he sends a newsletter with six things he found, and thought were interesting during the week. It’s like a 6x version of The Friday Thing but given his content it’s more like a 600x.

I enjoyed the recent story he told about Nike’s 24-hour shoe design contest in 1985. It’s hard to believe but this is when Nike was really struggling with a 50% drop in their stock and Adidas, Converse, and Rebook were all outselling the Beaverton company. Nike panicked and held a shoe design contest that was won by a corporate architect named Tinker Hatfield. It’s fair to say that today, Tinker is the most famous sneaker designer ever. His story was told during season 1 of Abstract on Netflix.?

What I enjoyed most about the story is how Tinker came up with the idea of the visible air bag that became so iconic with the Nike Air Max 1. He was inspired by The Centre Pompidou in Paris – because he’s an architect of course and like the Air Max, Pompidou is an iconic, groundbreaking creation. I’ve always marveled at how many creatives who trained as architects have applied their skills to other creative fields beyond architecture. Tom Ford, Gwen Stefani, Pharrell, Ice Cube, Chris Lowe, Miuccia Prada. The list goes on…..and includes a great architect in my own household who is an amazing creative on so many levels.

It’s a great reminder of the transferability of skills, and as Billy points out, proves out the discovery made by psychologist Charles Spearman in 1904 that, contrary to previously held beliefs, specializing in one thing does not make you worse at other things. It’s a bit like generative AI in that sense with so called emergent phenomena. More on that in the future….

Back to Tinker Hatfield though who said:

Creativity is a function of the “library in your head”. “When you sit down to create something...what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.”

I thought about this quote a lot during this week as I spent time packing up my office for the move to a new space. It meant packing lots of books, magazines, art, artifacts, gifts, letters, clippings, stickers and so much more. I thought for a few moments about throwing away a lot of this “stuff”. It’s all just junk, right? I actually sat down on a sofa and pondered this for a bit and was then reminded of Tinker’s quote. I realized I would be throwing away many of my creative references and connections to ‘the library in my head’. So, I kept it all and will cherish reinstalling this ‘stuff’ and in the process, rebooting my brain a bit with the creative references as I unpack. I can hardly wait….

That’s if for this week. This Friday is the end of a chapter and the start of a new one.

Happy Friday. On rotation at Casa Clayton this evening is Domino Dancing????

-Steve?