Quote of The Week, Fowler – 3/16/08

You will look very smart if you take a deadly project and make it great. You will look very foolish if you take a peach of a project and blow it. The advantage of riding the dark horse is that nobody expects much. If you over-deliver on it, you’ll be a star.

-David Fowler, Ogilvy

Most of the summer internship minibooks are due tomorrow. A week (or more pertinently, 7 months) of work has been spent leading up to this moment. If I were to mention the words “hard work,” it wouldn’t seem like an understatement. It would just seem un-encompassing.

Hard work doesn’t take into account nerves, relying on someone else, screwed-up printers, lack of confidence in yourself and your pieces, and an overall lack of knowledge about where to even begin binding your own book.

I’m a wannabe writer. Not a wannabe Johannes freaking Gutenberg.

The above quote has also contributed to my ill feelings at the moment. While I'm real happy with how it turned out, there's still a feeling I can't shake.

Piecing through my book, I've found that not only do I have nothing beyond traditional print ads, but nothing I feel went above and beyond what I think could have been done. Each of my products—Toastmasters Public Speaking Groups, Dell Easy Crosswords, RockTheVote.org, Sylvia’s Soul Food and Jack Daniel’s mini bottles—were “peaches of projects,” and while I didn’t bomb any of them, I didn’t do what could have been done.

And until I figure out a way to over-deliver, that notion will haunt me.

dubs. out.