Many people think of marketing, advertising and selling as part of some icky thing they have to do to survive. It’s this belief that leads to an attitude that holds them back, and the right attitude is the first step to selling (anything).
When Kit (Brie Larson) is kicked out of art school and moves in with her parents, she decides, is coerced into, taking a job with a temp agency that palaces her in a PR firm. Kit puts away her childish things and becomes a business women with a suit she borrows from her mom. She meets the VP of the company, and naive about his intentions, she accepts his invitation to work on a Mystic Vacuum account.
She rejects her initial drawings, a Pokémon meets vacuum
amalgamation, and tries to go with more traditional representations of women vacuuming,
which she draws on graph paper for added grown-upness. These mundane vacuums
and their housewives earn her creepy boss’ approval, but they don’t work for Kit.
She finally gets an idea and recruits her work friend and
the delivery guy to help her with the presentation. They come in at the end of
the sexy woman, baby, selfie vacuum presentation, and pitch Kit’s idea with
glitter, magic, creativity, love and enthusiasm. She has an original idea that
would sell vacuums through the sheer differentiation factor.
The woman executive who is in charge of the Mystic Vacuum company
thinks it’s too much. She likes the sexy woman with the selfie, baby and vacuum
– an idea that says women can have it all, and one that is outdated and done to
death. All of the other male ad execs express the same sentiment. So, it comes
down to the boss, and Kit has hope.
The boss said earlier that the lack of creativity in the
work place was killing him. He still chooses the woman, vacuum, baby, selfie by
asking to be told more about the lingerie. Kit loses her job.
While the movie itself is whimsical and freeing, this
particular commentary on creativity in the workplace is all too real. On average,
creative people get fewer promotions and fewer raises than their less creative
co-workers. They face ridicule for their ideas and blame when the idea fails
while not receiving commensurate rewards when an idea succeeds. No matter what
people say about creativity, most times bosses, teachers and coworkers want the
comfort of the known and the safe.
For Kit, it’s all for the best. She seeks her own personal
unicorn and finds her creative self and the support she needs to continue being
creative. For creative people, it’s important to learn that many ideas will be
rejected not because they’re bad or they won’t work but because people fear the
unknown and failure, and every new idea carries a risk with it. Life isn’t all
rainbows and unicorns, but it can be better if you find people who love and
support your work, even if they are relative strangers.
Ignaz Semmelweis could be seen as a cautionary tale for creatives. In 1846, he advocated for washing hands before delivering babies, and Vienna General saw an increase in mother and new born survival rates in the clinic where he worked. However, because he didn’t know why handwashing worked, he was derided by the medical and scientific community. He lost his job and his life because the establishment didn’t accept what he saw as common sense. “My way saves lives; of course, everyone should adopt it, even if we don’t know why.”
He was dealing with saving people’s lives and the scientific
community. Rather than someone jumping in to test Semmelweis’ theories and find
out why it worked or if it was a fluke, Semmelweis’ doctors and colleagues continuously
found fault with his idea, even when they didn’t do any experimentation of
their own. Not only did Semmelweis end up losing his life, but thousands of
women and children died because he couldn’t defend his hypothesis and no one
else wanted to check it out to see what the hospital was doing differently. Semmelweis
isn’t the only cautionary tale that creatives should think about.
According to Kevin Ashton in “How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery,” Gaston Hervieu tested his parachute in 1909 by throwing a 160-pound dummy off the Eiffel Tower. The dummy floated down to safety. Franz Reichelt was not impressed. Reichelt was working on his own parachute and called Hervieu’s test a sham because he used a dummy. In 1912, Reichelt showed up at the Eiffel Tower, press in tow; he was ready to show off his own parachute, which he was going to test on himself.
Hervieu showed up at the Eiffel Tower to stop Reichelt.
Hervieu said the parachute wouldn’t work for technical reasons. Reichelt went
up the Eiffel Tower anyway. Experts at the Aero-Club de France had previously
told Reichelt his parachute wouldn’t work. Previous experiments that Reichelt
did with his parachute had ended in failure; he had broken his leg in one
failed attempt to deploy the parachute. Reichelt didn’t listen to his rejectors,
which are common when any new idea is presented, and he didn’t learn from his
failures. He stuck with the same design and jumped from the Eiffel Tower to
plummet to his death.
While Semmelweis would have been well-served if he could’ve
ignored the slings and arrows of the ignorant medical community experts of his
time and continued with his crusade to persuade them as to the efficacy of
handwashing, Reichelt would’ve been better off listening to the critics of his
invention and heeding his own failed experiments. Failure and rejection aren’t necessarily
bad if we can learn the right lessons from them.
In these cases, one lesson would be to persist in the face
of rejection, but learn from it. If Semmelweis had been able to get past his
belief that common sense would prevail and started conducting experiments, he
may have discovered the germ theory of illness before Pasteur. Another lesson
would be to pay attention to your failures. If Reichelt had accepted the
reality of failures, he may have been able to make a parachute that would’ve
been better than Hervieu’s. Instead, both creators’ deaths can be linked to
their innovations.
Being creative isn’t easy. You will be ridiculed. You will
be rejected. You just need to keep going and change with every lesson that is
dealt to you.