I have a thing about the number three. It started when I was young, and it was probably more significant back then. I played amateur soccer where there were no names on the jerseys, only numbers. I always tried to snatch the jersey with 3 on the back on match day, but didn’t always succeed. Today, I play soccer wearing number three, still an amateur, but at least my name is on it, making the fight for this odd prime number way easier these days.

This numerical crush isn’t just about the number, it’s also about doing things thrice. If I do something two times, I feel an uncontrollable urge to do it just once more. I would, of course, never draw attention to this mildly obsessive compulsive behaviour, because it has always just been about my own satisfaction.

Trilogy isn’t a new concept. It has been done over and over and over again—yup, three times. However, there’s probably a reason why three is such a classic number of repetitions. Without having looked deeper into the magic of this powerful number, I do know, that over the years I’ve given it a lot of time, energy and trust:

01. Walking a pedestrian crossing and stepping on two white stripes in a row, I would automatically step on the third one as well. No questions asked.

02. When shooting hoops and hitting two out of two, there’s no way I would walk away and not give it a third try.

03. If I saw something happening twice, I was hoping for it to happen just one more time—unless it was unpleasant, of course.

Back in March 2020, I wrote a piece about the not-for-profit initiative, which I started in 2018. Now, with the second collection done and a donation made to save the Australian koalas and their habitat, I’m here again, back at the keyboard, planting the seeds for the third collection.

April x three

When publishing the second collection on my portfolio, I noticed that the last shirt for the Amity collection was sold in April. The same month as the Empathy collection sold out, but a year earlier. I then realised that I’d better get going and make sure I sell the last shirt for the next collection in April 2022, or else…

During the second collection, I decided to focus more on brand exposure, but looking back, I could, of course, have done much more. One of the things I escalated was posting more on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. As most people know, it’s a great way to build a small or massive following and to keep people updated on what’s happening with and around the brand.

Secondly, I created a project on Behance—an online platform for creatives—to showcase the two collections and get a bit of traffic through that channel. Also, I was kind of proud to show off the two collections and tell people about the donations we had made. The fact that the apparel brand had raised over A$1,000 for charities was worth mentioning, in my opinion. Everything is of course relative and A$1,000 may not sound like a lot of money, but it’s A$1,000 more than what I had previously donated to mental health or the koalas.

Thirdly, I tried to get a hold of various journalists in Denmark to talk about this not-for-profit initiative by a Danish citizen, living and working in Sydney. I was left on “seen” more than a couple of times, but with time I started receiving responses from journalists.

The first response I received said: “Thank you, but we’ll pass.” Short, but to the point. I have nothing but respect for that. Now, what happened next, changed my view on getting this story in the paper. A few days went by and suddenly I received another response from a different Danish journalist reading: “Thanks, but we’ll pass.”

No way. I just received two rejections in a row containing almost the exact same words. I obviously had to get that third rejection. If not, what was the point of getting rejected twice?

The hunt continued.

Minus 100,000

In January, I was fortunate enough to have an article written in a local Danish newspaper. The article was about N I — C O and, of course, the fact that I was born and raised in the city from where the newspaper reports.

I often find that journalists aren’t too willing to offer any advertising or exposure for your brand. In some people’s view, news and advertising are two things which should be kept separate. I tend to agree. Nonetheless, the journalist and I spoke and, in a compromising way, I answered her questions about the Danish boy growing up in Vejle, while also slipping in some words about N I — C O and how the initiative came about. The creative side-project was, for me, the most interesting part of the interview, while the story about my journey from Vejle to Sydney probably interested her more.

Furthermore, a key part of the story was about the juxtaposition I’d put myself in with owing 100,000 DKK to my Danish bank, while also trying to build a brand that donates all profits to charity. That never bothered me back then and, financially, things look different today.

The article is in Danish—sorry, not sorry.

Tiffanie Mazellier

The concept for the collections is to collaborate with another designer and for each to create the front or back of a long-sleeve shirt. The two create their individual designs around a predetermined theme and colour palette. One of the two designers is always me.

I needed to find a designer for the second collection and after being rejected by Jessica Walsh—you know, no answer is also an answer—I put together a list of interesting designers and wrote emails, messages and shared pitch decks around the globe, from the U.S. to Spain and luckily also to New Caledonia. She wasn’t my first choice to collaborate with—my apologies Tiffanie, but I hope you understand—but she was exactly what I was looking for.

Tiffanie contributed voluntarily, with payment never part of the conversation, just as in the first collection. Now, I’m not an advocate for creatives working for free. I strongly believe people should be paid for their work, but the creatives in this case are always in a position to say no when I contact them concerning a collaboration. To put things in perspective; I created the brand, coded the website, found the screen printers, tested the quality of the shirts, packaged up and shipped orders for free, just so we could donate as much money as possible to these charities. Hence why I don’t offer designers any payment to collaborate on a N I — C O collection. At the end of the day, it’s all about the amount of money being donated.

Nonetheless, I received Tiffanie’s design on the day of the deadline, took it to the screen printers around the corner and placed the order for twenty screen-printed shirts.

She did end up receiving the last size small of the Amity collection as a humble thanks for her time during a busy period in her work life.

More money, more solutions.

In August 2021, the hunt to find a designer to collaborate with on the upcoming collection has begun. Currently, a lot of thoughts are being put into what the next theme, colour palette or charity could be.

N I — C O donated A$446.47 to mental health the first time around and A$590.46 to the Australian koalas the second. For the third collection, the aim is to put those numbers to shame.

The majority of previous sales came from friends and family. With the additional brand exposure and potentially a new type of collaboration, the hope is to see an even broader interest and sales this time. A rise in sales will result in more money being donated. We’ll remain not-for-profit no matter the number of shirts or orders, but perhaps we could do better than a collection of just twenty shirts? It would without a doubt make us, and hopefully the charity, happier.

So here we are, with the third collection slowly taking shape. If it ends up being the last one from N I — C O, then I hope it becomes a memorable one, in one way or another.

Three.
Two.
One.

The word suddenly hit me as I was standing there looking at a piece of art coming to life by two graffiti artists: collaboration.

One of the two legends had invited me to an event to watch them decorate a garage door in an urban neighbourhood in Sydney. They were each working on their individually part of what would later become an ibis with a skull-shaped chest. As I was standing with my phone in one hand and a beer in the other, the word collaboration crossed my mind again and again. Spray cans on the ground, bright colours on metal and alcohol in the blood.

Walking home that afternoon, a little bit intoxicated and truly inspired, I thought about collaboration and the idea of creating something with someone. When thinking back on that Sunday afternoon in September 2017, I see it as a rather important one. The thoughts I had that day would eventually change my view on compassion and the idea of giving something back. Ever since that sunny Sunday in September, I’ve been working in the background on how to create a project founded around collaboration. Not to mention how to make a profit on it. Firstly, I knew I needed a name. And a website. And a product. And the colour palette. And so the list grew longer and longer.

The website went live on 28th August 2019. The project took a solid two years to get off the ground. There are a lot of reasons for this. First of all, if you have ever had to manage projects on the side of your full-time occupation, then you know how limited time is. If you then add a few weekly events to the schedule, you’ll soon see how your project ends up last on your list of priorities.

I’m just a creative, not a full-time developer.

Secondly, due to laws for starting businesses and having a working visa in a foreign country, there were emails and conversations, which needed to happen before launching anything at all. Finally, an essential part of the project was to keep expenses as low as possible. Therefore, the visual identity was created by me. The labels were created, printed, cut and applied by me. To avoid paying monthly fees for a website template it was developed from a blank canvas. Even though it’s a simple-looking responsive website, I’m just a creative, not a full-time developer.

Overall, keeping expenses to a minimum was an important strategy since the goal of this project is to donate as much profit to charities as possible.

N I — C O started as a thought of wanting to do good. The initiative was always to do a collaborative project among individuals who wanted to make a change using their creative skill set. It’s a not-for-profit collaboration with a purpose to do good — it’s about giving something back.

With regards to the product, I knew it had to be something we could sell. Something people could use. After going through a list of items from caps and bags to cups and phone cases, I decided that the product should be white long sleeve t-shirts. I’ve always been fond of this particular piece of clothing and I find it quite useful to wear in Sydney. I have worn it to the beach, to dinners and on a first date (we weren’t a perfect match but that had absolutely nothing to do with the shirt).

The name was one of those elements that straight off the bat just made sense. Once N I — C O became a thought and the internal rationale was in place, I never explored other options. When growing up and up until this day, across countries and different languages, my nickname has always been Nico. I wanted this project to reflect a personal element about me. That’s why the name never became a point of discussion. The other designer and the choice of charity will change from collection to collection. The choice of charity is closely related to the collection theme and is agreed upon between the two designers involved.

With the name in place and a predefined colour palette, we used our creativity to produce two designs independently of each other. At the moment, eighteen out of twenty shirts have been sold, packaged and shipped globally. Shirts from the Empathy collection are now seen in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Mexico and Brazil.

Out of control

I believe life gets more convenient when you realise there are things which are out of your control. On a day-to-day basis, I’m working on accepting these things and learning how to deal with them when they appear. As mentioned earlier, the two designs for the Empathy collection were designed by two designers. One of them is my former creative partner in crime, Michael Gad. He’s a Danish art director who’s also a dear friend of mine. I told him about the project and texted him if he wanted to participate. He responded: “Reeeaaaaady.”

I noticed something was off as soon as I opened the box from the supplier.

When he, the following month, transferred his final design to me, I was satisfied to see that he had chosen a typographical direction instead of an illustrative one. Merely for the reason that I had chosen to do the exact opposite for the design on the back. To clarify, we didn’t interact during the time we developed our individual designs. Therefore, you’ll notice the two designs have completely different styles. This is deliberate. It would have been easy to create two designs in the same style but where’s the pleasure in doing that? Nonetheless, once the two designs were completed, it was time to provide the company with the finalized files. I placed the order of twenty shirts and picked up the product relatively short time after.

I noticed something was off, as soon as I opened the box from the supplier. I was considerably familiar with the two designs and I knew them rather well. The shirts were nicely folded. As I unfolded the top of the box, the front was facing me. There it was — the missing part of the design. The purpose of N I — C O has always been to do good. Therefore, it wouldn’t have been responsible of us to create twenty new shirts because of the missing letters ’OU’ in the word ‘YOU’. The situation wasn’t optimal.

I was wondering how Michael might take the news about the mistake. In my mind, I was trying to come up with a rationale for why the letter ‘Y’ could work and practised my inner monologue. I told myself that there’s something nice about the letter ‘Y’ in this context. In today’s world, it’s used instead of the word ‘why’. When remembering that the theme is empathy and that this is about making a difference and helping others, perhaps it was about asking the correct questions with ‘Y’:

Y shouldn’t you help? Y not make a difference? Y me?

Simultaneously, I was reading the book A More Beautiful Question. It included a sentence that made me think of a situation like this: “If ‘What If’ is about imagining and ‘How’ is about doing, the initial ‘Why’ stage has to do with seeing and understanding”.

A couple of days went by until I decided to tell Michael about the mistake. I told him what had happened and that I would talk to the company. They responded with the following two emails:

“That’s no good at all. Let me take a look and see what we can do.”

“Sorry about this. If you’re in the area can you drop the shirts back into us and we will print the extra letters. Otherwise, I can have a courier collect from you?”

With screen printing, adding two letters in this size is not an easy thing to
do. The screens will have to be fitted and perfectly aligned on top of the shirts to add the additional letters. I was wondering whether or not it would be worth jeopardising the entire collection to add those two letters but I trusted the guys to do a good job — and they did. Now that you’ve been given this information, you will probably be able to tell that the print was done more than once. If you hadn’t, I highly doubt you would have been able to point it out.

When I returned the collection to where I picked it up two days earlier, I only returned nineteen shirts. I wanted to donate one of the special edition shirts to my brother in Denmark. I wonder if he ever noticed that two letters are missing on his shirt?

About the designs

Michael tells a story through his design about how ‘You’ in the top left corner and ‘Me’ in the bottom right corner becomes ‘We’ in the centre. The two words are placed with a great distance between them. It’s about bringing those two together to create something better. ‘We’ is created from the two words and the horizontal lines making use of the negative space.

The lack of empathy felt on online platforms had a massive saying in the design created for the back. The key visual is showing a heart made up of a pair of shoes. The heart was crucial to the design since I believe that’s where empathy begins. The pair of shoes have a reference to the saying: walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. The seven lines at the top, from where the shoes are hanging, were made by using an online binary code converter. The word empathy was converted into lines of binary code spelling out the word when reading from top to bottom — one letter per line.

25th of August 2019

N I — C O was never meant to be big—it was meant to be beautiful. Launching the website and making the first purchase resulted in an incredible feeling. It was the 25th of August, 2019. Moments after placing the order, fulfilling it and “shipping” the shirt to myself, I listened to Lost In The World by Kanye West and exhaled deeply—I then went to the pub for a G&T.

Thank you

Thanks to Michael Gad for his work and dedication on the collection. You have laid the foundation for future collections and donations.

To the readers, I truly appreciate you for taking the time to read about the journey of N I — C O. A huge thank you goes out to everyone who’s purchased a long-sleeve shirt from the Empathy collection. You’re all legends.

Visit ni-co.studio and buy your shirt today. Follow the ongoing journey on Instagram and Twitter.

From words to moving images.
Three has always been my lucky number. Therefore, here is the third and last article of this series. Before I move on to tell you the motive for publishing these three articles and why the last one is called Priorities, I would like to address what prioritising is all about seen from my point of view.

As things are right now, I consider prioritising to be crucial. As mentioned in previous articles, I needed an overview of how to optimise on the work I wanted to do and this was where prioritising came in handy. The scenario about time was described in the first article. With the help of Evernote my thoughts and sketches where placed within a system, which then immediately also became a list of priorities. With the help of the application, I was able to work out what to do with which tasks and, most importantly, where to begin. I also made sure to dedicate enough time during evenings and weekends to work on these projects. I wanted to make sure that I made progress from one Monday to the following. One step at the time. However, my understanding of prioritising was shifted earlier this year when I came across this tweet:

“I don’t manage my time priorities. Priorities manage me.”
 — Yoko Ono on Twitter in March 2018.

To me, this was a somewhat new way of looking at prioritising. Simultaneously as I was reading the tweet, I went through some of the replies, and not everyone seemed to agree with the statement and I understand why. Nonetheless, I found some truth in the tweet by eighty-five-year-old singer, songwriter, and peace activist. What Yoko Ono wrote made a small impact on me, and I felt it made sense with regards to how I was working on and how I saw these things progressing. This new perspective didn’t change the creative work, but it changed the way I looked at prioritising. Up until then, I thought I was the one pulling the strings of the projects I was involved in. It turned out to be the other way around. God damn.

When prioritising was all empty carbs
I also did some prioritising with regards to my three daily meals. This new terrible meal plan had nothing to do with an experiment. It had to do with prioritising and was an intentional choice I made to prioritise something larger than a healthy lifestyle for a little while. In the previous article Time, I wrote about sleeping less in able to create more. In this section of the article, it’s about eating cheap to pay off student debt. The way I see it; both sleep and nutrition were compromised due to a higher purpose.

As you’ll see in the imagery below, I’m certain that I wasn’t getting the recommended 400g of vegetables per serving per day. However, I’m pretty sure I was getting my share of carbs. The following three images are an example of prioritising. A choice about not prioritising a healthy diet but prioritising paying off my student debt quicker than first assumed. Of course, there were days with a variety of meals, but the imagery below pretty much sums up what the compromise was all about. I know it wasn’t an optimal move to make, but the alternate meal plan was also only temporary — it lasted around eight months.

Time saved shouldn’t be time wasted
Prioritising becomes interesting when looking into time-saving technologies. We’ve been provided with a variety of technology to help us save time and make our lives easier. How great is that! Now, what we choose to do with the time we save through the help of technology is interesting. Naturally, I can’t write on other people’s behalf and let me be honest, I’ve done a minimum of research into the subject. However, I assume that in most cases it is spent on things which are considered not to be significant to each individual. Of course, once again, it all comes down to individual prioritising but just think about it for a second.

Furthermore, as I wrote in the last article Creativity my smartphone is on airplane mode sixteen hours a day from Monday to Friday. The reason for this is that I need to be focused or sleeping during those hours, and here is where I truly appreciate time-saving technologies, because they make my life easier outside of those hours. The time I save by using these technologies is mostly spend on things I prioritise. Otherwise, if it wasn’t, what’s the point of making peoples lives easier? If we only save time to waste it on scrolling a bit further down the news feed, then I don’t see the point. In the first two articles, I was figuring out how to optimise on time to be able to create more. With prioritising I’ll be able to reduce procrastination on projects I’m working on and actually get things done.

Time x creativity = priorities
In the first article Time, I wrote about wanting to explore new creative territories and moving images was definitely one of them. Priorities is the title of a film I’ve created. It’s a documentary about what more or less went down between November 2016 and April 2018. Of course, the creation of the film took longer than first expected. From purchasing the first GoPro camera — and losing it at sea — to purchasing a second camera, obtaining the footage, selecting which recordings were useful, creating the poster, building the website and finalising the project in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Priorities is without a doubt the most comprehensive project I’ve worked on so far. Throughout my time, I’ve never recorded, not to mention edited, anything this long. Usually, my time behind the camera is somewhere between ten to fifteen seconds when Snaps or Insta-stories are recorded and published. This project was something else in so many ways. My initial idea was that Priorities would be a twenty-something minutes film about studying at the Queensland University of Technology, living in Brisbane and having beers in the pool with mates. It quickly turned in to much more than that, and I’m genuinely pleased that it did.

A few things I find interesting about this project are how some elements of it ended up exactly how I imagined them to back in November 2016, while other parts of course completely changed throughout the creative process of more than seventeen months. Changes are great as long as they’re for the better so overall I’m truly satisfied with the final result. I’m also kind of delighted that the project has come to an end.

It’s a wrap
The three articles were written to introduce this long-term project Priorities. In conclusion, I would like to thank everyone who in one way or another was a part of the project — on and off screen. I’m pretty excited about having recorded all these great moments. I captured a lot of moments but looking back I certainly also missed quite a few great ones along the way. Just imagine how many times I didn’t bring my camera with me. Not to mention the three days of footage I lost in Noosa when the camera was buried at sea.

Enough about Time, Creativity and Priorities. Go to priorities.studio and watch the film you don’t have time for. Do your prioritising, I’ve already done mine.

Thank you for your time.

Cre—a—ti—vi—ty.
Two down. One to go. I hope you had a chance to read Time, which was the first article of this series. If you didn’t, then continue reading since the three pieces are not part of a small puzzle. Creativity is the second piece and another topic which—just like time—controls and priorities the majority of my life. Whatever you might think about what you’re about to read, you should know, that I’m not going to turn creativity on its head and trying to define what it is and what it isn’t. That wouldn’t be possible in 1,800 words. However, I would like to write about some of the things I embrace and see as defining creativity. Not to mention how it over the years has helped shaped the person I’ve become. I was once a creative student. Now, my current job title is Creative and please don’t misunderstand; I’m still here to learn, not to teach.

Look what advertising has done to itself
Long before my time, you know, back in The Golden Age of Advertising, the skill set of creatives was primarily used to sell products: soap, cars, hats, alcohol, endless packs of cigarets etc. Today, even though a lot of these products still have selling peaks due to advertising, another dimension has been added to advertising within the last couple of decades: goodvertising. This new face of advertising is proof that you don’t necessarily have to sell your soul to work in the advertising industry. Think about it, you don’t have to be the cynical money-driven soulless salesman your friends outside of the industry thinks you are. Naturally, you want to be a great salesman, but sometimes when the work is excellent and created for the greater good, it will automatically sell itself. In recent years I’ve seen my share of case videos where advertising is used to solve problems way more significant than the company’s decrease in sales for that one specific product. For example, here are three examples of clients and agencies who—I believe—genuinely wanted to do good:

— Meet Graham by Clemenger BBDO
— Nike Swoosh Vote by Wieden+Kennedy
— Ocean Dildos by Agency Africa

If you would like to experience other great examples of goodvertising, you should read and study the book ‘Goodvertising: Creative Advertising that Cares’ by Thomas Kolster. I used this book as a reference more than once during my Master Degree in Creative Advertising.

Creativity is everywhere
Every day, every month, throughout the year whenever I pass a poster, a magazine cover, a piece of packaging, street art, clothing design, a billboard, a bus or whatever I might meet on my way, I analyse it. I look at the typography, the use of colours, the choice of imagery and the overall message. To you, this might sound like a time-consuming process, but in general, it probably takes between two and three seconds to do. I tend to try and figure out what the idea is, what the brief was, how the designer made it, and why he or she made the choices they did. A similar thing happens when looking at logos on wine bottles, pens, shop windows and on smartphone apps. It’s has become such a natural thing that I hardly notice that I’m doing it. It just happens. All of the information gathered from this is processed and either kept or thrown away straight away. I believe this is partial where inspiration comes from. You see things and connect them with other things to try and create something original. Also, I’m still convinced that most ideas and creative sparks happen outside of the four walls of the agency, even though I happen to spend an extensive amount of time at the agency from throughout the week.

Hello Monday made me feel like a little boy
Ever since 2011 I’ve been fascinated by Hello Monday. I see the digital design agency as one hell of a great example of how to run a creative design agency. Through the years I‘ve had my share of beers with a relatively high percentage of the employees/former employees at Hello Monday. Therefore, I see myself as having a pretty solid view and understanding of why the digital agency has been rewarded Agency of The Year six times.

Every time a creative do time sheets, a creative idea dies.
— Partner at Hello Monday

Back in 2015, I was out having drinks with the other half of the junior art director team I used to be part of. We were at a bar in Denmark and were joined by other creatives from Hello Monday, who we both knew pretty well. You know how it goes: beer turned into drinks, drinks turned into shots, and within a couple of hours, we were — for the hundredth time — talking and discussing creativity, awards, future projects, agencies and advertising versus design. Once again, I’ve always admired Hello Monday’s view on creativity, design, clients and not least the way they treat their employees. However, that night at the bar the discussion was mostly about awards, advertising and digital design. The phrase about selling your soul to the devil to work in advertising was thrown around alongside some comments about winning awards. Same old, same old, right? Nonetheless, shortly after I went to the restroom to take a leak. Strangely enough, I chose to enter one of the booths in the restroom where I locked the door and just stood there for a moment feeling completely and utterly fucking devastated…

Spontaneously, I just started crying. God damn. I remember feeling overwhelmed about work, lack of award nominations, industry competitions, acknowledgement, career goals and the eternal hunt to succeed within the industry. It seemed like some people had a less complicated time achieving success, while I felt like I was struggling just to stay afloat in the industry. I guess agency life and always trying to convince yourself that you had a place in this industry mixed with alcohol just got too much that night. Those ten minutes felt like forever standing in the booth trying to figure out what the hell was going on, and what needed to change.

Creativity > advertising + design
There is without a doubt a major difference between advertising and design, but I’ve always thought that the idea and the ability to solve problems were the fundamental elements tying the two creative disciplines together. One of my former lecturers once said: “Design is meant to create a sense of order. Advertising is intended to course disruption!” I find this to be true, but I also believe that when talking about advertising and design, not everything is that black or white. Design can course disruption and advertising can be elegantly designed. Nor is creativity a simple thing to define but below you’ll find a small selection of ways I see creativity as being more than just advertising and design:

Pink Ribbon Germany
A brilliant example of how the idea, the media and the message come together in perfect harmony.

Stranger Things / Season 2
The story took place in 1984. Michael Jackson’s multi-million selling album Thriller was released in 1982. It was a great idea — in 2018 — to combine the famous track with the theme of the series. I find it incredibly satisfying when two great things are connected into something which elevates one thing and gives the other new life.

Swiss Life / Life turns in a sentence
Leo Burnett created these beautiful pieces of communication back in 2011. They are as simple, as they are true.

Ed Sheeran / Supermarket Flowers
Creativity doesn’t have to be commercial. I don’t believe the purpose of writing this song was to make money. It probably did anyway, but I reckon it wasn’t the purpose. The track is a perfect example of how simple —yet original — a track can be considering how much new music is released on a daily basis.

Nordic notes
The Norwegian Government decided to redesign the 50-, 100-, 200-, 500- and 1000-krone note which they did exceptionally well.

Pentagram / Leafs by Snoop
Snoop Dogg’s line of medical and recreational marijuana-related products was giving a visual identity. “The challenge was creating a brand that captured Snoop’s unique personality and style. At the same time, it was important that it appeals to a broad spectrum of users.”

BBDO / In Real Life
I’ve watched this film several times. It’s ridiculous how a simple idea can convey such a powerful piece of creativity. Great idea. Beautiful execution.

“If this behaviour is unacceptable in real life, why is it so normal online?”

Esquires / The Passion of Muhammed Ali
The famous magazine cover by Georg Louis is one of the classics. The cover shows the boxer martyred as St. Sebastian, a patron saint of athletes and one who was shot with arrows for his steadfast religious beliefs.

Hello Monday
Not only do they have a beautifully crafted website. The work presented on the site is also next level. From We The Fans to YouTube Kids. Years ago I came across a slide deck from Hello Monday containing the statement: “If it feels like advertising, we’re doing it wrong.” That sentence has always stuck with me.

Channel 4 / Meet The Superhumans
I once watched Andy Flemming — group Creative Director of M&C Saatchi Sydney — give a presentation on some of the best TV commercials in his opinion. After showing Meet The Superhumans, he mentioned that he found it difficult to watch without tearing up. He’s probably not the only one.

Banksy
It’s illegal, and maybe that’s why it’s so excellent. I especially enjoy the stencils found all over the world containing strong comments on today’s society for us to speculate about.

The Steve Jobs Theatre
On September 12, 2017, when Apple opened the new theatre to the public, the presentation began with a dedication to co-founder Steve Jobs by the man himself:

“There are lots of ways to be as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out. And you never — you never meet the people, you never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours, but somehow in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something is transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what’s really important to us. That’s what’s going to keep Apple, Apple, as if we keep us, us.”

One of my goals
With regards to the statement made by Steve Jobs, I find it not only to be true but also surprisingly inspirational. Just consider how many things in your life you take for granted every day. For once the things are not referring to friends, family and loved ones. No, this is about all the other things you also care about. From your smartphone and the app which gets you laid a couple of times a week, to the design of your wallet and the safety features of your car. Someone created all those things, and I’m hoping someday to create something which will make someone slightly happier.

I don’t ever have to meet them or shake their hand.

Priority reading.
‘Time’ is the first of three articles. The following two pieces of writing will be published in the time to come focusing on three of the most critical topics in my life for almost a decade. I’ll do my best to make the first article great, make the second not suck and make the third piece coherent with the two others.

Imagine, it took me half a lifetime to realise that time is running out.
— Liam O’ Connor

In the past decade, I’ve realised that time — the universal element which never stops — is crucial to me. As being a part of the creative industry, I feel that on more occasions than not, there’s not enough time to do the creative things I want to achieve. When saying this, I’m mostly referring to my spare time, which is time spent outside of the advertising agency where I work. If I want to be able to create more in this specific time, I have to look at how I did things before to be able to improve on them moving forward. When I look back, I’ve done things to be more efficient with my time in my strive to create and do more. I firmly believe that right now I’m at an all-time high in regards to creating more within the time I have. Throughout the three articles, I’ll get more into the details of what I’m precisely trying to achieve and what I have already succeeded in doing up until this point. One of the first things I did was to get all the thoughts out of my head and into Evernote. By using the application, I suddenly had a clear aerial view of what I wanted to do and how many assets each project needed. It soon became an extended to-do list with clear priorities of what needed to happen. To no one’s surprise, I began with the most accessible asset in the most straightforward project on the list and moved on from there.

Never not working
I’m not the first to declare that, and I won’t be the last. I see this grammatically wrong written headline as a great thing if you like what you do on a day to day basis. In my ability to create more time I’ve deliberately not signed up for neither Netflix, Foxtel or Stan. Through endless conversations about these three platforms, I’m well aware of the high-quality content these platforms offer, but I don’t feel like I have the time to sign up and get involved. Don’t get me wrong; I watch plenty of various videos on YouTube including talk shows about American politics, documentaries, music videos or cartoon series (Family Guy, Big Mouth, The Simpsons, Fugget About It, Archer and so forth). However, this entertainment is enjoyed when eating or right before I go to sleep. I find YouTube easier to control than the auto-playing function I see on Netflix, where you sit and stare at the countdown until the next episode begins. Overall, it means I spend more time creating stuff and less time procrastinating.

Furthermore, I’ve heard and read the following statement multiple times before, so I’m assuming it is not new to you either: “we all have the same amount of minutes per day three-hundred-sixty-five days a year.” There is not a lot to argue in regards to the statement itself, but it lacks a bit of context. It’s important to remember that some people have personal assistants, some people have extensive financial assets, while others are struggling to find a job and pay for next week’s rent. The statement applies to all of us, but we’re not all in the same position to achieve things in the same pace. Nevertheless, it’s up to all these people — including myself — to decide what to do with those one-thousand-four-hundred-forty minutes we all have per day. Overall, I reckon the critical perspective is what you consider to be significant on a day to day basis. I’ve found a mantra which works for me;

I would rather do it today than tomorrow.

I’m convinced that procrastination is a universal thing, and it will never stop to exist. I also believe there are levels of procrastination and at the moment it’s probably at the same level as my bank account, low. Even though I often spend time sitting on a surfboard in the ocean for a couple of hours, I don’t consider that as being a sign of procrastination or a waste of time. If anyone argued that it is, I would say it’s a different kind of time waste. The thoughts behind a couple of paragraphs in this article were thought of while sitting there in my wetsuit waiting for the right wave and the right time.

A good friend of mine told me about the days she spent doing absolutely nothing and that they were some truly memorable days. As far as I could understand doing ‘nothing’ included sleeping, laying in bed, watching series, eating takeaway, scrolling and falling asleep. An important reason why these days were memorable was that they were spent with a person close to her. For example, do you remember what you did over a year ago on a Tuesday in May? Neither do I, but I do remember a random Monday in May last year doing absolutely nothing. Once again, ‘nothing’ includes the same things described above by my friend. However, about that random Monday in May, a girl came to my house Sunday evening for Netflix and Chill — yeah, I didn’t have Netflix back then either — and after spending the night, I assumed that she would leave the following morning. On that Monday she asked me if I had any plans for the day and I responded that I didn’t. My original plan had probably something to do with running, doing assessments, eating, laundry, and all the other glorious things you have to do on Mondays. However, we spent the entire day sleeping, laying in bed, watching movies, eating takeaway, scrolling and falling asleep. Tuesday morning she left, and honestly, I look back at those thirty-six hours as well spend. This scenario completely contradicts what I’m aiming to archive in regards to time, but I guess there can and should be room for both.

It’s about time
I’m convinced that in the majority of cases the more time you spend on a creative project, the better it gets—at least up to a particular point in time where the graph then breaks. At the time when it breaks you’re either beginning to destroy the work you’ve created, complicating things or starting to steer away from the original idea. The specific breakpoint is often far, far into the future of where the initial thoughts for the project began. Not only does this description apply to the work done at the agency, but it also refers to the projects created in my spare time. Nevertheless, the issue at the moment is not spending too much time perfecting elements; it’s that I don’t feel like I have the time to accomplish all the things I would like to do.

Time is relative. I guess.

The bucket list on Evernote is getting smaller, but it’s usually two steps forward and one step back. The reason for is that I — presumably just like you — prefer to cross things off on the bucket list, but at the same time it’s also effortless to add more elements to it. In addition to that, I’m a single guy with no responsibility for smaller versions of myself, so I should have all the time in the world to complete my list and break the world record for getting stuff done. To be fair, it is precisely what I’m trying to do, but there is a clear priority which of course is work-related projects first and personal projects secondly. It often results in long days at the agency because I don’t have a critical deadline every day at 5.30 PM. I understand people in a relationship and who might have a couple of kids looks at things differently than I do, but in the end, I feel that it all comes down to prioritising the things in your life.

People are not wasting my time. I am.
I want to sleep less, as in way less. I read in the creative masterpiece Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent!) by George Lois that he managed to become an inspirational creative with just three hours of sleep per day. That’s truly impressive, but on the other hand as Tyler, the Creator said about smoking weed: “Not everything is for everyone.” I genuinely try to reduce the hours I sleep because I see it as being one of the elements which I can to some extent control. Humans need to rest, but there is a chance to optimise on the one-third of our lives which we in common dream away.

Airplane mode is on sixteen hours a day from Monday to Friday.

My smartphone is on airplane mode sixteen hours during weekdays. In the majority of the time between Monday and Friday, my phone is as useless as my tablet without a Wi-Fi connection. After I started working at the advertising agency in Surry Hills, I thought of ways to become more efficient with my time during agency hours and in my spare time. I felt I needed to find methods for achieving more by focusing intensively on things that matter and thereby deliver better results. To put things in perspective, first of all, I’m a Danish guy living in Australia. I barely receive any calls on my phone, and the messages I receive are usually not urgent. Neither is the content feed on my social media accounts. Therefore, I have decided to switch my phone to airplane mode every morning as I step into the agency. Occasional, I turn my phone back online during lunch or when we need to test the creative work on mobile devices. I’ve found airplane mode useful through work hours and without having done any extensive research I will conclude that my work performance and efficiency are better and higher than being online twenty-four seven. Secondly, airplane mode is also taking in to use every night before I go to sleep. The offline mode ensures that my sleep isn’t interrupted by messages from people back home due to the eight hour time difference between Denmark and Australia. In any case, the offline phone is still great for photos.

Just to clarify; I enjoy talking to people in Denmark, hanging out at Bondi, going to exhibitions, pubs, clubs, soccer games, beaches, because I genuinely want to and value it. The cost of that is time and sometimes money, but in the majority of times, it’s worth it. The older I get, the more I find myself embracing these experiences, surroundings and the new people I meet. I’ve learned to use these moments effectively as a break between work and personal projects. It’s not all about the bucket list, but you and I probably have some of the same things on that list, and it takes time to cross them off one by one. If you’ve found any shortcuts to get stuff done in half the time the rest of us spends on it, please let me know.

In conclusion, I want my creative projects to be more than the work I’m exposing online at the moment. I want to test creativity in new forms. I want to achieve something more meaningful with the help of my limited skill set and explore new creative areas. Now, all I need to accomplish these things is the one universal thing you can’t buy more of in this world…

Tick tock.
Tick tock.
Tick tock.