It's certainly not a shock to find that the industry has no imagination. I think people don't know what it is I do. Because half the time you're talking to people who are in their 20s, and I've been doing this for over 25 years.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Now I don't know half of the young people in the industry. It's too spread out, too diffuse.
I feel like I ask people who have been in the industry for a while a lot of questions.
There might come a point where I don't want to be in this industry at all.
Most organizations do not value imagination, do not encourage it, do not reward it. In many cases, they don't even think about it. But if you're not thinking about imagination, I guarantee you're not going to have meaningful innovation.
I didn't really start building my own stuff until I was 24, 25 or so, and even then, I ran into a lot of resistance from, like, older folks, like my bosses at other companies or people in the industry that were like, 'Oh that's an interesting idea, but it will never work.' And, I don't know, I kind of believed everything that they told me.
I do worry about young people in the business who have experienced a lot of success and are punted around doing those manic publicity trails, when you don't really know who you are yet.
I had a very active imagination as a kid, and I was constantly performing, whether I was making money doing it or not, whether it was on a stage in front of 1,000 people or in the living room in front of my family.
The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.
Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.
This industry is very make-believe and you caught in a false sense of what reality is.