Welcome to the Action Digest, where you’ll find people making bolder moves than you’d see on the dance floor at a wedding reception after midnight.

A glimpse at the action we’re bringing you this week:

• 📰 We discover the creative process that generated one of the most powerful marketing campaigns in history. 

• 🔟 An astonishing statistic highlights what separates elite creative teams from the rest of the pack.

• 🏏 We learn the technique that a Hollywood hitmaker relies on to overcome the fear of getting started.

P.s., you can check out editions 1-33 here in case you missed them, including insights such as the mindset that helped an entrepreneur build seven different billion-dollar companies, how Steve Jobs cultivated great creative taste, and why success might be much closer than we thought possible.

Seriously, there are some gems you’ll appreciate in these earlier editions ;-)

1. The willingness to take an unholy number of shots on target

In 1978, Sir James Dyson was doing some work at a sawmill in England. 

Dyson was fascinated by the 30-foot high filtration system that the mill used to remove sawdust from the air. 

The system worked by spinning dusty air inside of a chamber with so much force that the dust particles got pushed up against the chamber’s walls. From there, the particles fell down into a container while the clean air rose to the top where it could escape. 

As Dyson contemplated the dust vortex, a remarkable idea struck him. 

Household vacuum cleaners at the time relied on bags and filters to collect dust. Their performance was lackluster and deteriorated over time as the filter gradually clogged.

But what if you could shrink down the sawmill’s filtration system from 30-feet in size to a miniature one foot version? The resulting filter could be attached to a vacuum cleaner and yield a superior product. 

“So I rushed home and made a cardboard version of this huge one,” Dyson recalls, “first of all, I offered the idea to the Ball Bearer Company. They weren't interested. What they actually said was, which is something that I was to hear many, many times over the next few years [was]: ‘look, if there was a better vacuum cleaner, one of those big vacuum cleaner companies would have done it.’”

Undeterred, Dyson sought advice from experts (including his old math teacher) to validate whether his idea had legs. 

It did, they confirmed, except for one problem. 

The sawmill’s cyclone system was designed for particles bigger than 20 microns in size. Household dust, however, could be as small as 0.5 microns. 

Dyson would have to figure out how to build a cyclone capable of handling participles that were 40x smaller. 

But why would he, a lone inventor who worked out of his garden shed, be able to pull this off if the “big companies” hadn’t? 

Well, because he had something that all great creators have in common: the willingness to take an unholy number of shots on target. 

“I've got to do this empirically,” Dyson thought to himself, “I've got to develop this myself. So I started the process of developing a cyclone that would work down to half a micron or less. And that took 5126 prototypes, failures, before I got the 5127th, which worked.” 

All in all, Dyson spent four years in his shed making one small tweak at a time until he cracked it. “It sounds tedious,” Dyson admits, “but it was the complete opposite. It was absolutely fascinating, day after day, building maybe one cyclone a day and testing it.”

While Dyson’s 5127 shots on goal may seem a little extreme, his process is quite normal when it comes to breakthrough creative results…

2. Behind every great result is a long line of mediocre attempts

David Oglivy is often referred to as “the father of modern advertising.” Some of his marketing campaigns were so successful that they single handedly tripled the sales of the products they featured and ran for multiple decades. 

His secret? Understanding the importance of an advertisement’s headline and taking many shots on goal with it. 

“A change of headline can make a difference of ten to one in sales,” Oglivy writes, therefore, “I never write fewer than sixteen headlines for a single advertisement.” 

Oglivy’s most famous headline was for Rolls-Royce:

“At 60 Miles an Hour the Loudest Noise in This New Rolls-Royce Comes from the Electric Clock.”

Despite only appearing in two newspapers and two magazines, the ad generated more praise than anything the agency had ever achieved. It was so successful at driving sales that they dared not run it again for fear that Rolls-Royce would not be able to meet the demand. 

How did Oglivy settle on that iconic headline? 

“Ogilvy spent three weeks talking with engineers and reading everything about the car,” and “he said he wrote over 100 headlines.” 

One hundred shots on goal. For a single sentence. That’s how! 

“The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST,” Oglivy emphasizes, “Test your premise. Test your media. Test your headlines and your illustrations. Test the size of your advertisements… Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

Behind every great result is a long line of stupid, mediocre, and laughable attempts. We must be willing to swing our way through plenty of strikeouts in order to hit a home run. 

But that’s easier said than done…

3. Keep your critic offstage until your explorer has had the chance to perform

From Forgetting Sarah Marshall, to Superbad, to Step Brothers—Judd Apatow has a knack for producing films that make a dent in pop culture. 

Apatow’s first step after settling on a movie premise is to brainstorm scene ideas. He writes anywhere from 100-200 scene ideas on note cards without thinking about how they connect at first. The average movie has about 50 scenes so this is Apatow taking a lot of shots on goal just like Dyson and Oglivy. 

But getting to even this early stage is difficult. 

“It’s really hard to start a script for me,” Apatow confesses, “because I think one of the things I always have to get over is—by writing, I’m finding out if I’m terrible. So it’s very easy to not write. Because if I don’t write, I won’t find out if I’m bad.”

Apatow’s experience reveals why taking lots of shots can be easier said than done: we worry that we’ll miss. Apatow’s mentor had an exercise for overcoming this fear, “he said, to get your creative juices going, for two weeks, write for 20 minutes a day. Print it. And then tear it up. Just to get used to your brain being creative.” 

This mindset is what helps Apatow get started, knowing that “I can toss it all. I can throw out all the work today. Just trust there might be something good. I wrote [my latest] script kind of fast. I just said I’m going to write straight through to the end, I’m not even going to re-read yesterday’s pages until I get to the end.” 

The creative brain has two main characters: the explorer and the critic. The critic plays an essential role but we must keep it offstage until the explorer has had a chance to do its thing. It’s a lot easier to start taking shots when we feel confident and free from judgment. 

Here’s a tool that can help keep the explorer and the critic apart…

4. Dozens of high-performers have these two things in common

We’ve now studied the creative process of dozens of people at the top of their field together. 

Actors, musicians, writers, architects, leaders, athletes, scientists—you name it. 

What do they all have in common? 

A lot! 

But two things stand out: 

1. They think deeply - they explore many more ideas and possibilities on average before taking action.
   

2. They act boldly - when they’re done thinking, they organize their ideas, become crystal clear on their next move, and act fast. 

The tricky part is that these two “modes” of creativity are naturally oppositional. 

It can be tough switching back and forth between them efficiently. 

That’s where the Action Book comes in handy. 

It’s designed to mirror the way high-performers think and streamline the both sides of the creative process. 

How?

By separating them. 

• On the left, a space for deep, unfiltered exploration. Sketch, doodle, mind map, or jot down every thought that comes to you. No rules. No constraints. Just a place to let your ideas breathe.

• On the right, a place to focus. To consolidate. Here’s where you bring clarity to your vision. Break down your next steps into clear, actionable tasks. Check them off one by one and watch your ideas come to life.

It gives you the freedom to think without limits—and the structure to turn those thoughts into bold action.

Elevate your creativity and order a fresh copy today.

We’ll leave you with this…

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