Nothing is cool and everything is cool

We started a newsletter on Linkedin ages ago - because Chuck and I are genuinely interested in a million things and wanted to explore them and find connections between them and what we work on. I’m zooming out a little to examine some of the ideas behind this “Inspired by anywhere” funda that we operate on. 

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I have recently worked on a bookstore, a wealth management firm, a theatre festival, a women’s supplements brand, an SME business consultancy, and a fashion festival. I am equally kicked about ALL of them for different reasons. But only three of those projects are considered “cool” and I know you know what I mean. 

Younger folks in the advertising and adjacent industries aspire to work on brands like Apple and Nike or those in fields that signal something about their taste and personality (fashion, music, food) or brands that are established (pick any known brand out there) and that have deemed to be a success before they got involved in it. 

I’m not dissing this at all — it’s a part of the process. Especially when you are younger and don't know yourself very well, the world doesn't know you at all, so you try to build yourself up by associating yourself with what society has already stamped as aspirational and successful. Borrowing cred, hoping it rubs off on you to show that you are a person of taste and talent.

When I was younger, one of my aspirational brands was NH7 Weekender. I had attended for years, I had become entrenched in the culture it was creating, I thought it was mad cool (it 100% is and continues to be), and I thought working on that was GOALS. And then hey, I got to lead comms and marketing for it for 2 years! A DREAM! SO COOL!

Let me tell you, that veneer of cool wears off real quick. Working on it was amazing, but it was all logistics and pressure and timelines and approvals and thinking on your feet and getting things done and early mornings and late nights and headaches and thanking your stars that the people on your team are as invested as you are. And as much as you think music is cool, if you have to think about it day in and day out, it becomes extremely mundane — part of the furniture in your brain. When broken down into day-to-day BAU, nothing is cool and everything is work. I have also worked on brands in travel, food, and fashion and figured that there is only so much you can starry-eyed-ly think about these topics before it becomes same old, same old - “okay there is work to be done, get to it.”

Over the years I’ve realised that not only is cool overrated, but nothing is cool. I promise this is not a negative take because when nothing is cool — EVERYTHING is cool.

Personal finance and auto component manufacturing and SaaS and swimsuits and electric fans. All of them need you to talk to people and work with people and think from different lenses and do different things and learn things you didn’t know before and exercise some new muscle in your brain.

B2B teaches me a lot about how to think of “business” in itself (an erstwhile abstract concept that is getting clearer the more I work within it). Manufacturing and finance and those more "dry" fields make me go OMG at the nuts and bolts of how the world works and what people value and prioritise in those specific contexts. Consumer-facing products and spaces are fun in their own way (partly because it’s easier to relate to being the audience you are working to satisfy) but what interests me more is how their founders approach them, with such different visions and ambitions and ways of working and what they value and wish to stand for, and how gaps in audience requirements can be teased out and filled. 

I enjoy working on all of these and then some, and this really helps with connecting dots in your brain. It feels completely natural for me to connect something I did for a music festival back in the day to some communication challenge of a non-profit I’m working on, for instance. 

As someone who was an overthinky not-super-secure person when she was younger, I’m grateful to have figured out that there is zero value in what the world thinks is cool or even what I think is cool - and the only thing that matters is that the work itself seems worth doing, that you can give your all to it, and you can get a lot out of it for yourself.