You Sleep When You Die

If you don’t arrange your life so that you have time for what you want to do, no one else is going to. And if you look up and find that you don’t love what you do, then get the hell out of it! That’s the beautiful thing about devoting your life to something that you love: You know right away when you’ve gone off track.

“1984″ was the very first high-profile Super Bowl ad. It was an event in itself. Before this, the ads you saw during the Super Bowl were pretty much like all the other ads you saw during any other football game. Nobody tuned in to watch the ads; people tuned in to watch the game. But on Super Bowl Sunday, 1984, Steve Jobs, a master promoter, changed that. He got people to pay more attention to his ad than they did to the game! Along the way, he paid for a bigger production budget for a TV ad than anyone had ever seen … freaked out the Apple board of directors … and raised the bar for my entire industry.

Of course we all have tough periods in our lives. There were definitely plenty of dark days for me and this agency, days when we faced setbacks and lost clients. But we always found a way to learn from the experience and become stronger, and we always bounced back.

Our national investment in education is not paying off the way it should. We need to face the fact that we don’t really have a public school “system” in this country. What we have is a public school crisis.

Last weekend, Laura pulled into St. Maarten, the same port she had left from over a year ago and 27,000 nautical miles earlier. She is now sixteen and the youngest person ever to sail around the globe alone. I salute her. Should Laura have been allowed to make this trip in the first place? It seems like everybody’s got an opinion. Mine starts from the assumption that this is a special kid.