Jason Bagley

Former CCO of Wieden+Kennedy Portland, founder of The Audacious School of Astonishing Pursuits

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

I love the way Greg Hahn described our job as creatives as solving business problems with "The illogical logic of the surprisingly obvious."

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

Creatives, stop making documentaries of what happened. Start making films of how it felt. Picasso said "Art is the lie that tells the truth."

Be true to the feeling, not the fact.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

Only present work you love. If you try to please everyone your work will be as lifeless as the glass eyes of a taxidermied mule.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

Present great work on every brief. Even the hopeless ones. Before you can build a great portfolio, you have to build a great reputation.

Creative opportunities follow creative reputation.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

All due respect, but Darth Vader needs to get some cardio. Dude refuses to run.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

"Learning is repeated recall not repeated exposure."

-Peter C. Brown

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

You think not being an expert is holding you back? It's your secret weapon.

It took a guy who wasn’t an auto engineer to revolutionize the auto industry.

It took a guy with no aerospace background to make reusable rockets.

Howard Schultz wasn’t in coffee — he just saw an espresso machine on a trip to Italy.

Oprah wasn’t a traditional journalist — she rewrote the rules of media.

Netflix founder Reed Hastings wasn’t in Hollywood — he just hated late fees so much he built Netflix out of pure spite.

Steve Jobs wasn’t a computer engineer.

Einstein was working in a patent office when he cracked open physics like a pinata.

The best way to not be held back by the rules, is to have no idea what they are.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

To make breakthrough creative, you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Because before big ideas are produced, they usually feel counterintuitive, extreme, and downright wrong. They feel like a huge mistake.

And when you hold the line on creative like that, people stop calling you “inspiring” and start calling you “difficult,” “uncollaborative,” and “too intense.”

The road to great work is bumpy, nauseating, and full of people begging you to turn the car around. Almost no one will be happy on that journey, but everyone will be happy when they get there.

You can make great work, or you can make everyone comfortable.

But you can’t have both.

"All progress depends on the unreasonable man (or woman).”
-George Bernard Shaw

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

Speaking of in between, is there an out-between?

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

Go to the edge of madness, or take a nap. Anything in between is a waste of your time.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

Lowering your standards to make it easier for your teams isn’t kindness. It’s sabotage disguised as niceness.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

Holding your teams to anything less than the unreasonably high standards required to make their best work is not kind.

Be kind, not nice.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

"Can we show a corpse slam into a bunch of gravestones before landing in his grave on TV?"
#adagencylife

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

Don't be all hat and no cowboy.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

I'm going to open an agency in The Mekong Delta in The Meridian of Time with a satellite office in The Baltic Sea.

Our main account will be @Arbys

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

"People who get diarrhea from @tacobell are weak and their bloodline is weak and history will forget them."

-Author Unknown

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

The important the brief, the less pressure you should put on creatives.

The more serious the topic, the more playful you should make the process.

The more intense the challenge, the more relaxed you should make the room.

Creativity thrives in paradox.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

A lot of creatives know what to do.

Some know how to do it.

Very few know the proper order in which to do it.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

Marriage is not about love. It's about having someone to help process and box Amazon returns.

[Jason Bagley @JasonCBagley]

"The trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say."

-David Ogilvy