99 Times Bigger
Jul 13th, 2009 by richard
Don’t you just love mavericks? Aren’t you just inspired to succeed by the folk that eschew the conventional small thinking and make a hole in the world with their limitless, pioneering and paradigm shifting ideas?
I am working with a legendary TV producer at the moment and man she is an inspiration!
She is a charismatic and gorgeous lady called Caryn Manderback. She produced some of the most successful series in the history of television broadcasting, The Cosby Show and Rosanne to name but two. What I love about Caryn and what has inspired (and expanded) me is just how big she thinks. Most people in TV around the world are thinking only about getting a show commissioned and broadcast, and they do their very best to comply with what has become a box ticking exercise in pleasing timorous commissioners, who are looking for safe and steady genre specific programmes, often rehashed and warmed up versions of what has worked before.
Invariably when you think small you tend to get small.
If you are aiming for sixty minutes of seen-it-before TV or film you’ll probably get just that; another cop shop, just another medical drama or worse still just another combination; the police-medic show set in the past or the future or in an altered reality.
If you aim for one programme that is similar to something else ‘but with a twist’ you’ll end with another unsatisfying warmed up stew or other people’s ideas. And if you stretch your thinking and aim at producing a six part series you’ll probably find your self struggling for strong story ideas by episode four or five. With Caryn however (and other giants of the same ilk) the thinking is much bigger, 99 times bigger in fact. She is not scratting about in the dirt looking for a one off episode or a two parter that might later lead onto something grandiose and bespoke, she is aiming for an idea that will produce 100 episodes (which in the golden number in US television).
And because she is thinking in increments of 100, she probably does not start struggling for story ideas until she hits perhaps the seventieth of eightieth episode. And that is because when you think fearfully small you place a timorous caveat on your creativity. Your ‘idea net’ is only cast into local and shallow waters. It makes sense when you think about it, if you are looking to create one unoriginal story why would your creative juices start searching the cosmos for six unique episodes. And if you place your order (with God, with the Universe, with the Quantum catalogue) for six stories, why the hell would it deliver 100. I had one solitary conversation with Caryn and her business partner Jamie in a London restaurant where she talked about the concept of expansive and maverick thinking and just the idea of it triggered massive creativity in me, in fact (later that night, 2am) I came up with over twenty episode ideas for a series we were looking at, without me even having to go outside of my own experiences. And that was because the concept massively inspired me to cast my net far and wide. If you think about finding 100 story lines for a television series you automatically go out into deeper waters and you instinctively cast a very wide net. And this method of thinking big works in any industry.
When we were raising money recently to make a feature film for instance we aimed at a budget of £2 million and to make this happen we took on a city financer whose job it was to make big money shapes. When he realised how little (from his perspective) we were trying to raise he became reluctant. He said that (as anti-intuitive as it may seem) it would be easier for him to raise £100 million (which he had already done for another project) than it would be to raise £2 million because many of his clients – who were more used to investing seven figure sums in high end eight figure projects – would not be interested in making such a small investment in a tiny enterprise.
And so he was left to cast a smaller net in the shallows, and whilst he did raise our money and we did find and work with some wonderful investors it was a ball-breaking exercise to generate the interest in (his words not mine) ‘such small amounts of money.’
The very act of thinking small is by its very nature limiting because supply rarely exceeds demand.
The great philanthropist and inventive genius Buckminster Fuller discovered the same principle. After forty years of ‘just getting by’ and experiencing more failure in his life and business than success he did an inventory on his four decades of living in the human condition and he realised that the very few major successes he had won thus far came when he thought about serving lots of people (thinking expansively), and his catalogue of failures were the result of thinking just about serving himself, which is common thinking but it is small thinking. He realised that, when he thought about serving just his own needs his ideas remained very local, but when he expanded his goals and thought about creating something that might attract and serve tens of millions of people he suddenly found his creative net unfolding across the global waters and as a consequence he became one of the most ingenious and prolific inventors of his generation.
So if you are struggling at the moment to create or invent or even just to survive why not take inspiration from Caryn and Buckminster and try thinking bigger, 99 times bigger in fact. You will undoubtedly have to fight for your large ideas, you may have to thump a few tables to break people out of their own limiting paradigms, but it will be well worth the effort in the end because you will achieve pioneering and prolific success, you will become a maverick, and let me tell you that is something worth getting up for in the morning.
Be well
Geoff Thompson