Categories: Articles

All You Need Is Love (And Then Comes The Business)

Art first. Business second.

If you get the chance, be sure to watch the documentary, All Together Now. The feature-length documentary chronicles the making of The Beatles‘ Love show by Cirque du Soleil. It’s a staggering work of creativity, and we’re not talking about the majesty that is the everyday performance, but rather how this very unique partnership of the two living members of The Beatles (Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr) with the wives and family members of the two members who are no longer with us (John Lennon and George Harrison) with producer Sir George Martin and his son Giles Martin worked alongside of Guy Laliberte and his intensely intense creative and management team at Cirque Du Soleil to create this stunning live entertainment spectacle.

Toiling in the minutia.

What becomes immediately clear throughout the documentary is that success is predicated on what you bring to the table every day. Success comes from labouring (and yes, even fighting) over the details. Success comes from delivering a creative product that is driven to success by the sheer perseverance to do things that have never been done before. It is about the Outliers (as Malcolm Gladwell says).

Marketing falls short.

Why can’t this be our raison d’être for every mandate and campaign? Why not bring the same kind of intensity to our Digital Marketing and Social Media lives? This movie is an eye opening experience for anyone who struggles with trying to understand where passion comes from. Passion is a joke to these people. It’s not about the passion… it’s about something deeper. Like the name of the show itself, it’s about love. Even though each person behind-the-scenes comes from a different discipline of the arts, they have a love for what they do (even if what they do won’t seem obvious to you to while watching the movie). These people take a bucket of question marks and turns it into a masterpiece.

Bring that love to what you’re doing now.

No one will understand what you’re doing at first. New business models look weird. New ways of doing things look weird. Think about how strange and foreign Twitter first looked to the world. Think about the heads that turned sideways when Tony Hsieh explained what he wanted to do with Zappos. Do you really think everybody knew that four chaps from Liverpool would reinvent how we connect to music? Do you really think everybody knew that one guy from Montreal would re-invent the circus and change the live performance industry forever?

CTRL-ALT-DEL.

Don’t be afraid to reboot your business model, that campaign you’re working on or that Blog post you’ve been procrastinating over. The only way you’re going to push forward is to CTRL-ALT-DEL your current thinking/way of doing things. You’re going to have to push yourself to really find the love in everything you do, and if you can’t find the love, watch All Together Now (it is sure to inspire you). If that doesn’t work, believe these words: art first. business second (and yes, whatever you do for a living is art. Don’t believe me? Read Seth Godin‘s latest business book, Linchpin).

All together now… all you need is love.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.