In 1994 John Lassiter of Pixar Animations was up against a daunting task: creating a character to rival Disney's Simba and Alladin.
And so he created...Lunar Larry?
This episode dives into a little-known story about one of the most beloved animated characters of all time and shows us why bad ideas are a vital part of the creative process.
Join Ivan as he discusses the journey many artists go through, from disastrous train wrecks to creative masterpieces, teaching you to embrace your bad ideas and understand that they can often pave the way to impactful content.
Ditch the stress of immediate perfection and dare to let your ideas run free. Embrace the power of collaboration and the beauty of fresh perspective. We even share a special exercise to help you get all your ideas - good, bad, and downright terrible - out of your head and onto paper.
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If this episode sparks off any new ideas, we would love to hear them! Please email us at info@writebusinessresults.com OR fire us a DM on social media. Links to all our favourite haunts are below:
LinkedIn:
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In 1994 John Lassiter of Pixar Animations was up against a daunting task: creating a character to rival Disney's Simba and Alladin.
And so he created...Lunar Larry?
This episode dives into a little-known story about one of the most beloved animated characters of all time and shows us why bad ideas are a vital part of the creative process.
Join Ivan as he discusses the journey many artists go through, from disastrous train wrecks to creative masterpieces, teaching you to embrace your bad ideas and understand that they can often pave the way to impactful content.
Ditch the stress of immediate perfection and dare to let your ideas run free. Embrace the power of collaboration and the beauty of fresh perspective. We even share a special exercise to help you get all your ideas - good, bad, and downright terrible - out of your head and onto paper.
---------------------------------------------
If this episode sparks off any new ideas, we would love to hear them! Please email us at info@writebusinessresults.com OR fire us a DM on social media. Links to all our favourite haunts are below:
LinkedIn:
Instagram:
Hey, what's up guys? This is Ivan Meakin and you are listening to Content Untap, sponsored by Riot Business Results. This is a show where I go on a mission to unpack all those tiny little details that make up fantastic content. I report my findings back to you and I try and give you some practical tips that you guys can take home into your next project. If you do like what you hear, please do all those classic podcasting things you know like share, subscribe, tell your friends about us all that kind of stuff. It helps us spread the word and reach more people just like you, which is awesome. Also, if you wanted to have a more in-depth conversation about what you're hearing today, just hit us up on LinkedIn. You can go to the Riot Business Results LinkedIn page or you can go to my own personal LinkedIn page and Fire SDM. We can spark a whole conversation there. Thanks guys. Let's just crack on with the episode.
Speaker 1:So the year is 1994. In Richmond, california, a group of animators, screenwriters, producers are all like a crowd of around a table, deep in a heated debate, because all across this table, amongst astrays and paper coffin cups, are a bunch of pencil sketches that all depict various versions of a cartoon astromot. Now, a lot of these sketches are in better shape than others, but these are already the lucky ones, the ones that hadn't yet been thrown away into the overflowing bin in the corner of that room. It's like the graveyard, or so many other astronauts who had failed to land with their creators. I like to think of it. If you take a look at these sketches, you'll see that some of them resemble something that your nine year old child will bring to school for show and tell, and others are a much more detailed sketch of, probably, if you look at the photos, what looks like Johnny Bravo in a space suit with a double LL insignia emblazoned on his chest, and on the chalkboard in that room in very big, bold letters was a name. The name was Lunar Larry.
Speaker 1:Now the director and the one in charge of this arrangement of tired looking people was none other than John Lassiter, and he was the chief creative officer of Pixar animation studios at the time, and John had a very big problem because Lunar Larry and all his various guys was a total disaster. So the character was an absolute train wreck. It looked awful and I just did not have that pizzazz that John was looking for. Now Lassiter couldn't put his finger on it at the time, but something was missing from this character Because at the time he was trying to rival the Disney power hats of, like the Lion King and Aladdin, who were coming out in similar years huge, huge competition. And if he was going to face up this competition, lunar Larry had to go because it was way too wacky and way too childish. John had a lot on his plate, to be fair.
Speaker 1:Now, the true origin story of what happened next and how John figured things out is a mystery, but I'm going to tell you how I think happened. Driving home late one night, john looked into the night sky, saw a full moon glistening down on him and then a bunch of ideas raised through his brain the moon, apollo 11, astronauts and then he landed on it. He was going to name the character Buzz in honor of the legendary Buzz Aldrin himself, and obviously we had to add a little bit of cosmic flavor to the mix. So it's Buzz Lightyear, the space ranger. Now, what happened two years later in 1996 left the world in awe as Toy Story hit big screen at the El Capitan theater in Los Angeles, and it actually went on to become the highest-grossing film in its opening weekend, breaking in 373 million dollars worldwide and collecting three Academy Award nominations to boot.
Speaker 1:So you're probably wondering why I'm telling you guys this story and what this has to do with content creation. But here's the fact. Nobody wants to have a bad idea, right? In fact, most people on this earth, most people you know and I know, will probably do absolutely anything to stop their bad ideas from ever seeing the light of day. You're just going to lock them away in the brain and they stay imprisoned, mostly out of the fear that they're going to make us seem like an idiot, like a fool, or it's going to open us up to ridicule in some way. And in fact, since few of these terrible ideas ever actually make it out of people's heads and onto paper because, as I just said before, no one's going to want to be that person who came up with something shitty, right, something that's open to ridicule, ruin their reputation. Instead, what we all want, which is understandable, is to be the person with the genius spark to have that Archimedes Eureka moment that's going to send us running from our bathtubs and onto the streets for the world to marvel at. So if it's not an idea like that, you know, we kind of just don't want to know about it. We don't want the wacky or nonsense ideas out there tarnishing our reputation as upstanding content creators, thought leaders, business owners however you want to label it yourself. But bad ideas like the really really shitty and terrible ones, they're actually a content creator's best friend.
Speaker 1:In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about the power of a terrible idea and why you need to let it out of your head and get it out onto paper, and how letting go of this idea of perfection can actually lead you to create impactful content that your audience are going to flop to. So look, if we go back to the story about John Lasseter and Buzz Lightyear a toy story it shook John and his team months to finally find Buzz Lightyear and in that process, in the midst of all those failed attempts and terrible ideas, something really amazing was born out of that and a lot of the times. As content creators, we want to get it right the first time around. Of course we do. It's understandable, right. But if we're going to spend all the time creating, we have this idea that it either needs to be a hit straight off the bat or it's not worth building it all.
Speaker 1:Stephen Pressfield actually, in his book the War of Art, words this really really well and he relates this down to resistance. But whatever you want to call it, whether that's resistance or the ego, something holds people back from creating a fear that we're going to put something terrible out there. That's going to be judged. But if we take a step back and look at the Buzz Lightyear story, what we understand is that real artists, the ones who create content people are going to remember for generations, are a lot braver than that. What they understand is that they need to wade through countless mediocre creations before they can hit on something truly meaningful, something that's going to add a lot of value to people's lives.
Speaker 1:So what John Lass turn the team at Pixar understood is that they needed a lunar leery in order to bring Buzz Lightyear to life. And it's kind of true, because in a lot of the same ways with content creation, when we create a new content project, this idea of looking for perfection off the bat is a super flawed way of thinking about it and actually holds us back and gets in our way a lot more often than we think. Here's the thing finding our Buzz Lightyear is only really going to come through the creative adventure of trial and error. We're obviously going to have to birth all of these shitty ideas out there and bring them to life, no matter how terrible they sound, without any judgment from other people around us and, most importantly, judgment from ourselves. So one thing that I really liked that I saw on social media not long ago was Matt Damon, who once reflected on some of the best advice that he ever received as a screenwriter from Ben Affleck, and they were on the set together whilst they were filming the awesome, oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, which is an amazing movie. Matt Damon said judge me for how good my good ideas are, not how bad my bad ideas are. And he says to me that is the most important thing when you embark on a collaborative process with somebody.
Speaker 1:So there's a couple of things here that I think is worth unpicking. First thing, content creation and the creative process should be a collaborative process. If you keep things locked in and only create an isolation, only creating for yourself, you only have yourself to judge the output of that, which is really setting yourself back. Because when you open up the creative process to other people and begin a collaboration, what you can get is a whole new perspective on what you've got. You can bounce bad ideas off of each other and iterate those ideas into something awesome. So when you're creating, it's really important to even if you have friends, family, anyone that you trust nearby to have someone that you can bounce these ideas off of, because creating an isolation doesn't always necessarily yield the best results. So that's the first thing, and the second thing is building on that, because terrible ideas, the ones that really make you cringe, are a vital part of the creative process and that's super important to remember because without them, those kind of fires of the creative engine that we all have lurking inside us are never going to be ignited right. What we need to find is we need to find that lunar lair, that kind of raw material that we can fashion into something beautiful later on.
Speaker 1:One of the most rewarding exercises that I'd like to kind of run with you guys today is to help you get every single idea out of your head and onto paper. It doesn't really matter how terrible or out of place it is. What happens is there's a wonderful magic that happens when you let go and you just create. The first benefit is it's actually going to help you visualize what ideas are worth taking forward. What I want to kind of set out here is that there are no rules, there's no judgment. There's just a kind of a playground to let your ideas run riot for a while before you need to herd them back into formation.
Speaker 1:Here's the exercise. Right, just have a think about your audience, your ideal listener. You know who they are. Right, you've probably built a customer avatar for your ideal clients. More often than not, if you're a business, your ideal audience, or your ideal listener or reader or whatever they are, are going to be very similar to your ideal client. If you're a content creator, just think about what kind of content you're creating and who is your ideal audience and who are you trying to add value to with your content. When you know who these people are, what you can do is you can start brainstorming every single question that they want answers to the topics that they talk about. You can think about the problems they need solving, everything that's relevant to you and the message that you want to convey in your book, blog, podcast, video, whatever piece of content that you're building Next up. Think about how you're going to deliver that message, right, is it going to be through storytelling in a podcast? Is it going to be through an interactive webinar? Maybe you want to record yourself delivering your service to a client and share that on your socials for content, or maybe you're just going to go for broke, for example, making outlandish videos about selling wedding dresses to men to illustrate the point of finding your ideal marketplace. That's actually a true story, by the way. If you're interested in hearing more about it, you can check out my interview with Matt Wilson.
Speaker 1:Basically, it doesn't really matter what comes out during this process. The important thing is that you just get it all out on paper and then you could just sleep on it for a couple of days, maybe a week. The main thing really is that you're coming back to it with a fresh, new perspective. When you can come at it with that perspective, what you can do is start eliminating anything that you can't or don't want to deliver on, with the aim of shortlisting about three to 10 ideal topics and one method of delivery that's going to appeal to your ideal audience. As you said, that method of delivery could be videos, it could be a podcast, it could be a blog, it could be a book. Just pick one method of delivery and three to 10 ideal topics for now.
Speaker 1:If you do this, that's just going to get that creative juices moving. If you can just do it and just create, you're going to have the raw material that you need. Then what you can do is you could iterate on and you can just keep on building on top of it and you rinse and repeat it until you find the idea that really gets you pumped. It's kind of like the traffic is blown away that reveals delicious golden wheat within it. That one idea will show itself to you. I promise You're going to know when it happens, and you're going to know it because you can feel it. It's going to hit you like a freaking thunderbolt at the sky and you're going to pull in our comedies, trust me. You're going to jump out of your bathtub and you're going to want to shout your Eureka all over the streets. Just, please don't do in our comedies. And I wish that you keep your clothes on first. That's my only only request before you do anything. That moment is when you know that you've hit on something truly special. It's when you know that you found that idea that's going to make a difference to you, to your business and to your audience. That's when you know that you found your Buzz Lightyear. I hope that was useful, guys. Until next time, keep creating, keep telling stories and I will see you soon.
Speaker 1:Hey guys, thanks again for listening to another episode of content untapped. Firstly, let me just say a massive shout out to Right Business Results for sponsoring this entire show. It would absolutely not be possible without you, guys, so thank you so much. If you are interested in finding out what we're up to at Right Business Results create content to grow an oil audience please do get in touch at info at rightbusinessresultscom and we will get back to you post-paste. Secondly, if you wanted to continue the conversation about creating great content or anything that you're listening to on this show, give us a DM to the Right Business Results LinkedIn page, or you can DM my personal page and we can spark up a whole new conversation about any of this stuff. We love having conversations about content, so the more the merrier, guys. Thanks again for listening and I will see you next time.