Don Draper, the legendary ad man, is facing meltdown.
His agency’s clients are deserting. The partners are squabbling. Redundancies will have to be made. Adland has got wind that Sterling Cooper Draper Price is in trouble.
Don has just returned from a clandestine meeting with Heinz that he hoped would give them a lifeline – but the prospect rebuffed him, saying he wanted to wait and see “if you’re still in business in six months”.
Peggy, his trusted copywriter, asks Don what they are going to do.
We’re creative. We’re gonna sit at our desks typing while the walls fall down around us. Because we’re the least important, most important thing there is.
As usual with Don, the pithy statement is rich with meaning.
On a superficial level, the Heinz executive has just treated him as the “least important” part of the agency by advising him to leave business negotiations to his partners. He’s not the first creative to be patronisingly dismissed by a businessman and he won’t be the last.
And yet, living in the golden age of advertising, Don knows that not just Heinz but all mighty corporations depend on ideas men like him to sell their products.
Yes, the ‘account boys’ in his own agency may be better at landing deals than him, but their livelihood is hanging by a thread too – and Don’s imagination is the only thing that can save them all.
The phrase “typing while the walls fall down around us” is a glancing allusion at the saying “fiddling while Rome burns” – used to dismiss artistic types as hopelessly impractical. But Don’s twist on the cliche is defiant, asserting that creativity is more enduring than the walls of Rome or Madison Avenue.
Faced with disaster, Don’s response is an unshakeable confidence in his creative ability.
The Mad Men episode in which this scene takes place is set in 1965, when ad agencies – businesses that depended on creativity – were anomalies. Now, creativity is critical to the survival of more and more types of business. And faced with the storms of recent years, many executives would give a lot to be as confident as Don that they can save their business with a brilliant idea.
But creativity is more than mere survival to Don.
Reading his words again, I sense relief as well as defiance. Sitting and thinking and typing isn’t just a means to a business end, it’s a refuge in the storm, a way of holding onto meaning and certainty in a chaotic world. Like the writer in Auden’s poem ‘Journey to Iceland’, when “Tears fall in all the rivers”, he “runs howling to his art”.
Ultimately, thinking and writing are Don’s very identity: “We’re creative” he says, as if its obvious they have no choice but to create.
Over to You
How important is creativity to you?
Have you ever used your creativity to deal with a crisis?
What are your favourite words of wisdom from Don Draper?
About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a Coach for Artists, Creatives and Entrepreneurs. For a free 26-week guide to success as a creative professional, sign up for Mark’s course The Creative Pathfinder.
“Ultimately, thinking and writing are Don’s very identity: “We’re creative” he says, as if its obvious they have no choice but to create.”
Yep it is our very breath. We have no choice because creativity is like breathing to us.
When we don’t create we die a slow and seeping death. We are hollow, half-lifes.
We identify with creativity and it shapes our identity in an organic, real and whole way that goes to the core of who we are, yet flows through us and insists on expression.
All attempts to withold or contain the flow of our creative selves lead to annihilation of the spirit, the soul or the being.
Its for these reasons that is is critical in our world right now. The old ways are not working we need innovation and creative options – it is time for all creatives to step up and into their expression fearlessly.
May all answer their calling.
Indeed.
Creativity is like breathing – pointers may help, but we do the process ourselves. Creative clusters, where we gather as peers to develop our strength, are best regarded as tribal gatherings, where creative beings raise, celebrate, and actualize the creative power which runs through us all.
The most common misconception about creativity is that we would have to leave our current lives in order to pursue our dreams. It is easier for us to use our jobs, families, financial situations, time obligations, etc., as a way (or ways) to keep us “safe” from the anxiety caused by stepping out of our comfort zones into the creative process. When we allow ourselves to be thus thwarted, we deny ourselves tremendous joy. The most effective way to center confront blocks is to form creative cluster groups in the lives we’re already leading.
I’m with Isaac Asimov on this. Interviewer: “Isaac, what would you do if you had only six months to live?” IA: “Type faster!”
🙂
I had a conversation with a painter about creativity and business. We both agreed about how difficult it is when the administrative work eats up too much time.
“I start feeling… off,” he said.
“Like your skin doesn’t fit?”
“Exactly!”
I don’t know how else to describe it. For some of us, the act of creating just *is.* Not doing it isn’t an option.
That reminds me of a conversation between Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster, from the Daily Routines blog:
Hm. I think/write/draw therefore I am.
The very act of procreation is the ultimate creative act of course.
Yet when Nietzche said
“The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything— and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the “productive” man a yet higher species.”
He made an interesting point that for me simply questions motive behind the creative act.
Creation for the sake of artistic self expression, or creation for business and profit.
I believe the business of creativity is a slippery unless we are truly following the path of the heart!
I think it’s usually a bit of both, even for the ‘pure’ artists.
Hey Mark,
Creativity is the fuel, and the fire.
When I haven’t been writing for a few days, I feel a little off-balance; words dashing by my ears, willing me to write them down.
When I finally give in, they stop stalking me so ferociously, and breathe easy again. So do I.
Creativity lights the labyrinths of my mind, no matter how dark. Colour me obsessed, but I am merely a shade of myself without it.
Conor
Well, sometimes obsessions can be very creative. 😉
To the entrepreneur, creativity is the source of innovation, without which the business will cease to be relevant in the marketplace.
Creativity is not just important, it is the main thing on which everything else is hinged. Therefore, creativity how we remain relevant in our various field of endeavour. Without creativity we become obsolete.
Preserving and developing our creativity is the only way we can truly LIVE!
What the man said.
I’m reminded of great writers and great books, written in poverty..
Yes AND poverty is not inevitable for writers. 🙂
Our greatest creative act is our lives as they unfold everyday.
What, you think someone else is making this stuff up?
You mean there’s no-one I can blame? 😉
Sadly no! Shaking your fist at the sky and yelling feels good though.
I found this post from doing a search for ‘most important least important thing there is’ as this is the motto of my agency.
I see it a little differently to what has been discussed here, it’s not the ‘creativity’ as such that is important (in the quote), but the fact that advertising is one of the most stressful jobs. In a survey some years ago, it was reported that working in advertising was the 3rd most stressful job, behind working for the police force or ambulance service.
The reason for the stress is that there are quite often time critical deadlines to be met, where the client, for example, may have booked hundreds of thousand pounds worth of advertising space and if the work doesn’t meet the deadline there’s a whole world of stress. This is only one example of a stressful situation within advertising but the point is, at the time that all this stuff is happening, it may seem like the most stressful thing there is, but in the general scheme of things and in the real world, it’s not stressful at all, ie – no one is going to die if the ad doesn’t make it to the publication on time (unless the account exec dies of a heart attack, or the client kills the production manager lol).
Anyway, just felt I wanted to share my interpretation of this great quote.
Thanks, I like that interpretation. Having worked with quite a few clients in the ad industry, I can see what you mean!
I guess Don Draper is like Shakespeare – we can always read different meanings in the great quotations. 😉