The James Hilton Column: The Future is Irritated

James Hilton, co-founder and CCO of AKQA, is one of the industry's most respected figures and we are delighted to welcome him on board as one of shots.net's new, regular columnists.

Hilton will be regaling us with his thoughts and opinions on advertising, creativity and whatever he deems interesting and relevant each month. In this, his inaugural missive, Hilton bemoans entrepreneurs.

“Hello, I’m an entrepreneur!”

I’m pretty sure I groaned. Inwardly, I think. This happens every time I do a talk. I used to be polite and listen and nod and make encouraging sounds to whatever bollocks followed; now I just reply: “How lovely!” and get the hell out of Dodge. Of course what I really wanted to say was “Oh why don’t you just f….” You see, these days you’d be forgiven for thinking that being ‘an entrepreneur’ is akin to attaining some kind of business-like Nirvana. Even Big Dave got in on it recently by singling-out ‘Britain's entrepreneurs’ as 'national heroes' like they were Gattaca-esque superior beings.

Those who can, do

Be that as it may, the thing that really irritates me (irritation being the theme of the day) is the seemingly accepted truth that you can teach this stuff. I met someone the other week who told me that they taught a course in entrepreneurialism. I asked how many businesses they'd had before they decided to teach. "Oh no, I’ve never had my own business. Maybe one day!” I didn't really know what to say. 'Those who teach…' So the saying goes.

My view is, you can no more teach someone how to be an entrepreneur than you can teach them how to be creative. You can, on the other hand, teach people how to be uncreative, risk-averse, and thereby not at all entrepreneurial. (Kids are best for this because they’re impressionable and despite their coming across as disrespectful little fuckers, they do actually - and quite bizarrely - look up to adults.) As far as I can tell, the British educational establishment excels at this reverse alchemy: the ability to take gold and turn it into shit. And it all boils down to process.

Part of the process

People love a process. If you can create a process, most people will stop thinking and follow it. Not because they’re idiots but because it’s one less thing to worry about, and let’s face it, we’re all busy. The problem is that most processes, by their very nature, remove all the good stuff. They sand down all the edges, blunt the spikes, make it ‘easier’. They demand that everyone think the same in order to follow the process and make it successful. And while this is probably very useful when it comes to the law, say, it’s the last thing you want in any form of creativity. How do we know this process exists and starts as soon as we can talk? Easy. At school, you can ‘fail’ art. What. The. Fuck. Is. Up. With. That?

Creativity is driven by passion. But what happens when passion is replaced by process? Terrifyingly, but not surprisingly: nothing at all. Or a toilet paper ad is born perhaps. Same difference. Passion is an unstoppable desire where risks seem far less frightening, where undiscovered paths are found and explored. By its very nature it defies categorisation, and those who follow it are often labelled as ‘difficult to teach’.

The consequences of passion

Entrepreneurialism and creativity are the same exact thing. Interchangeable. They are both the consequence of passion. And irritation. But mainly irritation. Not the sort of irritation one feels when the printer jams. Again. But the sort of oh-my-god-I’m-going-to-stab-someone-in-the-eye-with-this-pencil type of irritation that you might feel when, oh I don’t know, possibly when you’ve spent four fucking hours trying to get tech support to realise that asking someone what their password is in order to send a password reset email when your password has stopped working is the sort of torture that would make the CIA feel bad.

In essence, the irritation you feel when you know, you fundamentally know, that it really doesn’t need to be this hard, this difficult, this dumb, and you could probably figure out a much better way of doing it if only you could be arsed.

The spirit of entrepreneurialism

This is the difference between those with ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ and those without it. Those with it can be arsed. Not only can they be arsed, but they are so infuriated, enraged or utterly confused by the status quo that they can’t help but begin to try to solve the problem. They NEED to make things better. They know in their hearts that to ‘fail’ is to do nothing at all. Why aren’t these people the norm? Why aren’t they the rule instead of the exception?

Maybe it’s the apathy bred into us. Maybe it's the process that stripped us of our dreams of becoming astronauts. Maybe it’s how we educate our future generations and instill their understanding of failure. Maybe it’s our understanding, or lack thereof, of the consequences and rewards of failure and risk. Maybe not everyone can, or wants, to think freely.

Everyone's an entrepreneur

What’s my point? I suppose it’s this: everyone is an entrepreneur if they want to be. In just the same way that everyone is creative. It’s just that most have forgotten how to be and so now it’s held as something ‘special’.

Both are pure arts, I believe requiring honourable purposes in order to succeed – the pursuit of material wealth is not a goal, it’s a consequence of creating something of worth that makes life better for people. Sorry, but you can’t teach that on a course. But you can build an educational system with freedom of thought and positive failure built into its DNA, so that being ‘entrepreneurial’ is no longer the latest buzzword, but the normal way of being.

Until that glorious day, please don’t ever introduce yourself as ‘an entrepreneur’. That’s like telling people you’re cool. It gets awkward.