Burn Baby, Burn

For 35 years, I made things that disappeared. 

That’s one of the strange truths about advertising. 

You can spend weeks developing an idea, fighting for it, refining it,  producing it, obsessing over every word and every frame - and then it  runs. 

A newspaper ad appears one morning and by the next day may be  wrapping somebody’s fish. 

A commercial runs for a few weeks and disappears. 

A billboard comes down. 

So I thought I understood impermanence. 

Then I went to Burning Man.  

And I realized I had only understood one version of it. 

Advertising is temporary because the world moves on. Burning Man often  creates things that are temporary by design. 

That’s a very different idea. 

Some of the installations are enormous. They can take months, sometimes  close to a year, to conceive, engineer and build. They require imagination,  collaboration, craftsmanship, money, labor and commitment. 

And then they’re gone. 

Sometimes they are literally burned. 

There’s something almost shocking about that if you come from a  profession where creative people spend so much of their lives trying to  make their work last. 

We save the tear sheets. 

We make the reels. 

We enter the awards shows. 

We build the portfolios. 

We hope somebody remembers the campaign twenty years later. The work may be disposable, but the ego still wants permanence. Burning Man operates from a different premise. 

Create something beautiful. 

Create something astonishing. 

Create something nobody has seen before. 

Be completely present for it while it exists. 

Then let it go.  

That struck me more deeply than I expected. 

Because maybe the distinction is not between permanent and temporary  work.

Maybe it is between creating something in order to possess the result and  creating something because the act of creating it matters. 

The creative business, understandably, is built around outcomes. What is the objective? 

Who is the audience? 

What are we trying to communicate? 

What are we selling? 

Those are necessary questions. I spent most of my professional life  answering them. 

But creative people may occasionally need permission to ask a completely  different question: 

What happens if we make this simply because we have never seen it before? 

No strategy deck. 

No focus group. 

No guarantee that it works. 

No promise that it lasts. 

Just curiosity, imagination and the willingness to follow an idea  somewhere unfamiliar. 

Burning Man reminded me that there is another kind of creativity: creativity  before the brief. 

Creativity before usefulness. 

And paradoxically, that kind of seemingly purposeless creation may make  us better at the purposeful kind. 

Because when everything you create must immediately justify itself, you  become very good at producing answers.

But creativity also depends on remaining capable of discovering questions  you did not know existed. 

There is something larger in this idea, too. 

We spend so much of our lives trying to hold onto things. Work. 

Relationships. 

Reputations. 

Places. 

Versions of ourselves. 

We confuse preservation with value. 

But something does not need to last forever in order to have mattered  enormously. 

Maybe the point is to recognize how beautiful something is while it’s here. To be present enough to experience it. 

To allow it to change you. 

And then, when its moment has passed, to let it go. 

That may be the most interesting creative lesson I brought home from the  desert. 

Make the thing. 

Give yourself completely to making it. 

Be there while it lives. 

Learn whatever it has to teach you. 

And when it has given you everything it has to give, don’t confuse holding  on with honoring it. 

Sometimes the final creative act is allowing it burn to ashes.