By Ben Golding

“I love what you hate.”

What a brilliant, inflammatory, no nonsense comment.

‘I love all the awkward, weird little things that make you uncomfortable.’

‘I love the stuff that puts you on the back foot, the scenarios that you’re not used to and make you anxious.’

Brilliant. I need to embody this more. This statement has so much more going for it than at first glance. It says not just, ‘I know things’ but, ‘I have more courage than you.’

Hating something so often comes from lack of understanding, from stupidity and ignorance. There are little nuggets of joy in almost all of human behaviour, you just have to be interested enough to search and find what you like about it. I’m not saying that you have to love everything, just that theres a reason ornithology books keep getting printed and theres a reason model train clubs need a big space.

I suppose ultimately I’m talking about empathy. I’m talking about the ability to put your mind into someone else and see through their eyes. We are currently working on a brief directed at the older generations, and at first it was hard to consider what we could play on to access them. So I built a persona, his name is Clive and he used to manage a rail station in Surrey. Theres so much more to him than that, but those are the headlines. White. Middle-class. 73. What makes Clive tick? Other than the very specific things to do with his health and family, he has similar worries to me. And I suppose thats the key here. People will always be people. I just need to understand, support and nurture who they are and I can find an ‘in’.

It’s so important in creative work to get uncomfortable, master it, and come back for more.

Bite off more than you can chew, and chew it. Thats how we sharpen our teeth.