Be More Bag.

As many of you already know, the creative industry recently lost a giant.

Andrew ‘Bag’ Sidwell will long be remembered as one of Australia’s most prolific thinkers & builders.

We first met in early 2011, after a friend put my name forward to join the batsh*t bananas world of commercial radio at Australia’s largest commercial broadcaster. Allegedly, more than 250 people applied to be the first digital creative at Austereo in Melbourne, but for some reason the big fella chose me.

Within just a few months, we’d won several multimillion dollar campaigns, with my new boss even backing my insane pitch to the TAC, based on an idea that very soon, we’d be leaving posthumous messages of love and regret on someone’s social media feed.

Oh, the irony.

The learning curve was steeper than Tony Hawk’s backyard skate ramp, but with someone like Bag in my corner, everything seemed possible.

Unfortunately, not everyone is lucky enough to have someone like this in their lives.

It took me 28 long years to find a brain that seemed to connect dots the same way mine did and I’ll be forever grateful for the time he took in training me how to use it.

Until I met a leader who saw the value in the weird neural connections I was able to make, I grew up believing exactly what my parents had been told by every teacher and doctor at the time: That I had very little to offer the world besides a few laughs, at my own expense.

In lieu of any other explanation, and thanks to the (no doubt well-intentioned but ultimately destructive) decision taken to add a letter ‘H’ to the diagnostic criteria of ADD by the fancy folks at the American Psychiatric Association , I spent 40.5 years utterly convinced I was irreparably broken and should therefore mask anything vaguely true about myself in order to appear cool, calm and disaffected, rather than seeking help for a brain that simply can’t produce as much dopamine as others.

To be clear: I have no idea if Bag had ADHD or not (friends don’t diagnose friends) and it makes no difference either way.

Like most of us, he longed to be recognised for more than just the inexperienced antics of his youth.

Yet unlike so many of us, instead of resorting to a victim mentality where the world owed him an explanation for why things didn't look the way we'd like them to, he was willing to publicly champion anyone willing to champion others for who they truly were.

He was a man willing to dig deep and walk the walk.

He didn't just say 'The government will never get this message across. Someone should make something that speaks directly to young men'.

He texted me and said 'Hey mate, I've just registered a domain called 'Dear Men of Tomorrow'. Can you help me build a website for it by next week?'

If you only take one thing from this article, please make it this;

At some point, everyone feels like ‘the other’ in some way. Which means every single day, we each have an opportunity to reinforce that belief for someone else… Or help reframe it.

That’s why I’ve decided to step away from client work for one day each week to create content aimed at helping more people befriend their brain.

Because I believe neurodivergence is cool? Ugh, nope.

(I'm so ashamed of saying any of this out loud that I've justified putting it off for MONTHS).

Because I asked ChatGPT to suggest a list of exciting new ‘niche audiences’ to exploit?

One million percent, no.

I’ve decided to do this because, after more than 25 years studying the digital horizon, I can honestly say I've run out of ways to delicately describe what's coming next to my kids.

Anyone who dismisses AI as a hype bubble or 'just another technological wave', clearly has not gotten their hands dirty by running their own experiments or playing with it themselves.

Likewise, anyone who tells you AI will 'emancipate humanity from hard labour, with zero downsides' is attempting to fool you - or worse - themselves.

So…

During these last few historic hours before the world receives the first, watered-down, public version of ‘Apple Intelligence’, connecting the personal data of more than 1 billion individuals to the entirety of human knowledge, via an alien technology capable of infinitely iterating and improving upon itself…

Whether you’ve been professionally diagnosed, find yourself waiting in a long line of neurocurious folks, or just have lots of ideas and could use a hand figuring out which ones to focus on… I’m putting my hand up to guide you as best I can, either personally, or via Heumans.com

Not because I pretend to have all the answers.

But because I believe humanity's next chapter will require us to find unexpected solutions to obvious problems, and seemingly obvious solutions to unexpected problems (my preferred definition of creativity, via Rei Inamoto ).

Because I believe whatever comes next will need every one of us to Be More Bag.