Hello, My Name is Chaos

Well, it seems this old gem of a blog needed a life line, so here I am writing to you from Cote d'Azur in the south of France. I’m here on the Grady College Cannes Lions Study Abroad Program and for the next few entries, I will be writing about my experiences throughout the  Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. 

But first, a little background. The festival started in 1954 and was originally held in Venice. The goal was to highlight advertisements only found in cinema and gather people from the industry together. Of course, the advertising and marketing industry has drastically changed since then, and the festival has embraced that change and taken a more broad approach to creativity, advertising, marketing and overall communications. 

For me, this experience is about so much more than networking or viewing some of the best marketing work from around the world, — it’s actually about chaos, disruption, and disorder, three things I choose to fiercely avoid in my day to day life. It’s about how all those things can be a part of your personal and professional life, but it can actually be your biggest inspiration.  
I recently came across a TED talk by Tim Harford, economist and author of the newly released book “Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives”. He spoke on how a little mess can shake up our creative process and allow us to solve the seemingly unsolvable, we just have to be willing to welcome the chaotic. Something like a new team member, a big change in your personal life, a crowded or noisy room, a terrible font, a technical glitch or even a full scale hiccup can drastically change your creative process and lead to a breakthrough. Sometimes in order to solve a complicated problem, you have to create a complicated environment. 

This idea has been tested in social settings as well as in companies, adding randomness, making crazy decisions and trying stupid things in order to get out of a creative rut. Harford mentions that “these disruptions help us solve problems, they help us become more creative. But we don't feel that they're helping us. We feel that they're getting in the way ... and so we resist.”  

In life, we choose to look at chaos as being very negative. We seek calm, stability, constants. I know, because those are the very things I seek everyday. But in this experience, I think I’ll take Harford’s advice. There’s a certain beauty in a mess and it can spark something that propels you forward in future endeavors.  So I go to this festival keeping that in mind, and I hope you do the same. Do something stupid, mess up, change your routine, get uncomfortable, and make something ugly. It just might change your life.