001: If you want to learn something, teach it.

Or succumb to peer pressure and launch a newsletter

The beef hash breakfast at The Block is quite delicious, and the guy who brings the coffee has a tremendous sense of humor. So my defenses were inadequate yesterday.

Let’s back up. In 2007 I accepted Nancy Rice’s challenge to construct and teach a curriculum at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design around “the future of advertising.” Our goal: Illuminate everything nascent and untraditional; spread out a smorgasbord of insights, guest speakers and ideas, and root it all in brand strategy. Very few can predict the future. But trying to teach it can give you a glimpse around some corners.

I’ve taught the course four times since 2007. We’ve covered the birth of blogging and social, the death of more than MySpace, the rise of performance digital and the cacophony of platforms, strategies, techniques, personalities, trends and opportunities. The course incubated a companion speaker series that ran for almost a decade. Most important, teaching served as a laboratory to strengthen lots of curiosity muscles, especially mine. The last time I taught the course we learned how to pivot into remote learning due to a global pandemic.

In short, if you want to learn something—especially the future—teach it.

Which is why I’m thrilled to return to MCAD on January 23, 2023 to reinvigorate a fifth iteration of The Future of Advertising. Here’s the latest draft of the syllabus.

Apparently, however, that is not enough.

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Welcome to my commitment to you, your creativity, and the future.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have the best kind of friends.

Without them, I would merely teach the Future of Advertising course. And you might only hear about it in a blog post of mine.

But now you get to ride along for all the details. Thanks to my beef hash-induced condition yesterday, and the welcome, joyful, and persuasive encouragement of my friends, I’ve spun up Curiosity+Courage.

This newsletter will enable you to attend the Future of Advertising course for free, without the inconvenience of actually attending. Subscribe and you’ll get a Before, During and After post for each of the 15 course sessions. That’s three posts of scintillating content free each week (minus spring break), until early May.

The class meets Monday nights, so I’m estimating each “Before” post hits Sundays… “During” arrives late Monday or early Tuesday, and “After” will ship on Wednesdays.

Welcome to Curiosity+Courage.

Initially, this newsletter is going to focus on the future of advertising—as a pragmatic lens through which to think about and leverage creativity to affect change. But once May 2023 rolls around, subject matter will evolve. Hopefully you’ll react and respond, I’ll learn, and the journey will continue and we’ll all benefit.

I’m convinced successful Idea People—whether in advertising, design, film, music, education, coding, policy, economics, business—are defined by at least two characteristics: 1) they are deliberately a lot more curious than most people, and 2) they have developed a courage to leverage creativity to affect change.

(And there’s craft, of course, which we’ll definitely cover.)

It’s a deep well, with lots to reflect on. I’m excited to write about it.

I hope you’re eager to subscribe, read, and maybe even react.

Onward!

Tim