The best thing about a good idea is that it forces you to act. Insight is rarer, and infinitely more precious. A strong insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand reasons to make something happen. … More than anything else, an insight states a truth that alters how you see the world. -Phil Dusenberry
The quotes I combined above are from Then We Set His Hair on Fire
It would be easy to read this book just for the myriad of delightful stories he tells about the development of new advertising campaigns, but he continually circles back to the concept of how they were based on insights. He also makes it practical by showing how he was using insights to move various needles of perceptions to get sales, a goal of advertising.
Some the points that jumped out at me while reading are:
- quality of thinking is what gets attention
- in research or when being coached the point is to learn something you don’t already know
- broaden influence by causing insights to happen
- judge others’ insights on merit and not on how you’d do it
- feed your insights by having a life outside of your field
There are more buried within the book and to get the most from it you may have to read with pen in hand, pulling out the bullet points for yourself. The stories in each chapter are grouped around a unifying theme, but it’s more of a narrative than a presentation.
I received this book as a gift from InBubbleWrap, the really cool weekly (or thereabouts) book giveaway sponsored by publisher 800-CEO-READ. I had been going to give it away in my turn, but decided that, no, I really would like to read it again in a little while and see if I get another layer of learning from it.
