Book Review – Hugh MacLeod’s “Ignore Everybody”

My copy of Hugh MacLeod’s ‘Ignore Everybody And 39 Other Keys to Creativity’ arrived on Saturday morning. It had felt like a bloody long wait for Amazon to get hold of stock to fulfil my order. Was it worth it?

At just over £13 after Amazon’s usual discount, this was not a cheap book. (Just checked and the price is now down to £8.66. That will teach me for pre-ordering!) It also ‘weighs’ in at under 175 pages, with lots of white space. Finally, much of the content has appeared before on both MacLeod’s gapingvoid blog and in a document for download (an e-essay) called “How to Be Creative”. As MacLeod himself writes in the preface, this essay has been downloaded over a million times.

So, who’s buying the book? And why?

The same people who read the blog and have downloaded the essay. MacLeod has built an audience based very much on the methods he outlines in the book itself. If ever there was a recursive proof in the pudding, here’s one baked right in.

That’s not to say that MacLeod has simply cashed in on the success of his methodology and reproduced a warmed over version of old leavings. But let’s face it, however wrapped up in the digital world we might be, we still love books. And this is a nice book. It looks good and it feels great in the hands. And it’s not a book you’re going to read once and put to the back of the shelves. This is a book you’re going to keep close and dip into repeatedly. By the time you’ve read it three times, it’s price will probably start to feel pretty much of a steal.

It’s an easy read. I mean that as a compliment. The chapters are blog post short, of course, and they’re continually enlivened – and often reinforced – by a whole raft of great cartoons. The cartoons often hit hardest just when you’re sitting back and thinking that perhaps MacLeod hasn’t really nailed what he wanted to say in the chapter you’re reading. Just as you allow yourself a smidgeon of superiority to creep edgewise into your brain, there’s one of his cartoons sneaking up and hammering your ego with the claw end of the tool.

On top of that, many of the chapter titles and sentences read like well-honed epigrams. MacLeod has a talent for pungent brevity that Nietzsche might have envied. What about these?

“Good ideas have lonely childhoods.” (p14)

“A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind.” (p44)

“Avoid the dullards; avoid the people who play is safe. They can’t help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct; they are extinction.” (p71)

“Diluting your product to make it more ‘commercial’ will just make people like it less.” (p90)

“Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle – that is, being human.” (p117)

There’s a certain ‘fuck off and die’ attitude that exudes from a lot of MacLeod’s writing that either grates or wins you over. In my case, I’ve travelled from the grate to the win. Macleod, being MacLeod, won’t give a toss but the reason for my journey is grounded in that very indifference: he talks the talk and then backs it up.

This is a dangerous book in all the right ways. For a start, it’s a blueprint for living the life you know you want. Best of all, it doesn’t come wrapped up in new age style waffle about laws of attraction and spiritual fulfilment. The overriding message is one of hard work. For MacLeod the choice seems simple and binary: work hard to get where you want to be (which may actually be a different place to where you first intended) or choose what at first seems to be the easy option (but which is ultimately the route to joyless middle age) and keep believing that personality or luck alone will be enough to see you emerge from the mass striving to compete in your chosen work or artistic milieu. In other words, if you’re an employer shackled to the idea of keeping your employees competing in mediocrity to maintain the status quo, buy up all the copies you can to prevent them slipping into the hands of your workers.

Everyone else, just buy the book and get started on your new life. Don’t ignore me on this!