ISSUE 116/

A BULLETIN FOR
BIG IDEAS AND
BETTER BUSINESS.

OPINION / Creativity

The Boredom Tax

💬 Sir John Hegarty

Have you noticed that lately, everything is starting to look and sound exactly the same? Look at your competitors’ websites, their ads, even the way they talk to their customers, and for the most part it’s like one giant, grey blur. We’ve drifted into a kind of collective sleepwalk, seduced by the certainty of data and the supposed safety of algorithms. We call it optimisation, but in truth it’s just doing the same thing as everyone else, only slightly faster. It feels productive and intelligent, but it’s also incredibly dull.

I call this the Boredom Tax. It’s the extra fortune you have to spend on media just to buy the attention your creative work failed to earn on its own. Efficiency feels safe, but in a world where AI can now do “efficient” better and cheaper than any of us, “safe” has become the most dangerous place you can be. Somewhere along the way, we traded imagination for stalking. We track people with digital ads instead of seducing them with an idea. But I don’t buy from people I don’t like, and I certainly don’t invite stalkers into my home.

That’s what led me to build Creativity for Growth. To wake people up. 

Over eight weeks, we go back to something most businesses have forgotten: truth. Your Product Truth, your point of view, the thing that actually makes you distinctive. From there, we look at how ideas are shaped, how they’re sold, and how you create an environment where they can survive. I’ve brought in people like Michael Acton Smith (Calm), Sir Paul Smith and Greg Hoffman (Ex CMO Nike) to show you what it really takes to build something that people care about.

We finish by confronting the question that sits behind all of this: where does AI end and human imagination begin? Because if you can’t answer that, you become replaceable. And creativity, at its best, is the one thing that ensures you’re not. 

The next cohort starts on 18 May. 

You can go back to the spreadsheets and keep paying the Boredom Tax, or you can decide that your imagination is the most valuable thing you own. If you want to see how the course works, I’ve walked through it in an Open Day you can watch online here. 

Move from being asleep in the data to awake to the truth. Start being irreplaceable. 

I’ll see you there.

Last week in Creativity:

• A Picasso becomes winnable - A €1M painting raffled for €100 briefly turned something we usually admire at a distance into something attainable - and, if anything, that made more people pay attention to it.

• Coachella becomes a battleground for brands - It now feels less like a competition between artists and more like one between brands, with activations seamlessly woven into the experience - like GAP’s hoodie house, solving the desert cold while turning it into a customisable fashion moment.

• The Masters rejects the feed - No phones, no content, no distractions - just presence; a reminder that in a world where everything is visible, value may lie in what you can’t see or share.

Head to Instagram for more detail - and what this means for creativity…

Unlock your creativity.

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