DAN FREEDMAN INTERVIEW
Dan is best known for his hugely successful Jamie Johnson books and TV series. The books have been adapted for TV by the BBC and the drama series is broadcast worldwide. Before becoming an author, Dan was managing editor for The FA for seven years. When not writing, Dan gives talks at schools and sports clubs. He has made 2000 school visits during the last decade and it was those experiences that inspired him to write his newest novels, Unstoppable and I am Lenny Brown.
DG
We've probably become friendlier over the last six months or nine months or so, since everything has happened and I’ve really enjoyed all of our conversations and some of our brainstorming sessions on a variety of different topics.
Part of the reason why Build the Invisible has taken shape is because lots of people will say to me, how did you become a football lawyer, maybe in the same way that people say to you, how did you become a football writer or an author, in the same way that I know people will say to people in the music industry or fashion industry or jewellery business or TV and film, that's my passion, how do I combine that passion and curiosity with my day job.
So, from being in the presence of a best-selling sports and football author, how firstly, did you start on that journey, was it writing first or was it your passion and football idea first?
DF
It went way back to being a kid really. My passion was football and obviously I wanted to be a footballer but wasn't good enough, and so then, literally the first question when I was about 13 or 14 was, how on earth am I going to get involved with football, because I was really stubborn and didn't like doing anything that I didn't want to do, and the only thing I wanted to do and think about was my passion, which was football.
At the time I didn't really consider myself much of a reader, because the books we were being told to read at school didn't really engage me and therefore, I wasn't much of a writer, but the first inkling of writing and getting involved with football was the idea that football journalists got to go to watch football and meet the players as part of their job so they got paid to do it; that was a revelation.
The first action behind that idea was that I wrote to every single football club, radio station, TV station, and newspaper in my area. I was lucky that I lived in London but there are obviously those organizations in every area, and I said, can I please come in and make the teas and coffees and do the photocopying during my school holidays? You've got to utilize obviously if you know someone who works at an organization and I knew someone who knew someone who worked at a football club and did some work there.
The other thing I found was that people will open their doors, generally speaking, to allow you to come in and do some work experience quite often, and then it's up to you to make yourself as invaluable or as useful as possible, because it can work the other way. I’ve also seen it be the case, and felt it be the case, that sometimes work experience people are a bit of a hassle to have around because you've got to think of something for them to do, so there's a balance.
I was at the Mail on Sunday doing work experience and I kept going into the editor's office and leaving him notes for articles that I thought should be written, and even writing an article and giving it to him, and at some point he called me and he said, look, you see all those people out there, they're the journalists that I pay to do this work. This article's fine, but you're not one of my journalists. As I had shown willing, he came out again another week later and said, do you want to get your name in this newspaper or what? I said, yeah, so he said, okay, well, there's this simple little article that needs to be written; it's your job to go and do it. It was basically about what clubs were doing for fans, which turned on its head the idea that clubs were always trying to take money from fans; a very simple idea but it stemmed from trying to make myself useful, and trying to get that little bit of opportunity and recognition.
There's stages; there's getting your foot in the door, and then there's people knowing who you are and what you can do and trying to make yourself a positive asset in that workplace.
The other thing I would suggest, and I always asked for, every time I left an organization, if I had, as I hoped, been helpful, I would always go to someone and say, could I please get a little reference, just a paragraph or two on headed paper. By the end of my time at school and uni, I had these references from the BBC, Sky, ITV, the Mail on Sunday, Daily Express, Arsenal Football Club. I hadn't done anything mind-blowing there, but it really made me look a much more authentically credible person to get an opportunity in that industry that I loved because I had these references from these organizations.
What I always thought was, loads of people would want the job that I was aspiring to have, to be paid to be working in football and watching football, but that's no good to just say, I want to do it, you've got to back it up with action, so I backed it up with action. I tried to make myself useful and I had evidence in the words of people in the industry saying that I had been useful. I was 20 or 21 and I hadn't worked officially in the industry, but I had this CV so that when I did apply for a job, it didn't look like I was just coming out of nowhere, it looked like this is something I’ve been building towards for many years, which had been the case.
DG
You were doing the proactive thing, which is a fantastic thing to do, to go and say to them, can I have work experience. I believe that the best thing you can try and create in the reaction from the other person when you're looking for them to do you a favour is simply the word yes; how best to get to yes. I think you said it exactly right when you said, just let me come in and make the teas and coffees and any of the stuff that needs to be done, because I think a lot of people think when they want a job or they want that work experience, it has to be, please let me come in and be the centre of the universe, not centre of the universe in that sense, but in terms of, I need to do substantive stuff, I need to do all of these great things to put on my CV to justify my existence, whereas actually, and it goes to the point of my question in a roundabout way, I’m sure you learned really interesting sets of skills and soft skills from just being in that work environment, and seeing and feeling and doing all the things that people do in their normal jobs.
DF
Massively. I think in a way, people are nervous about going to a new school, so obviously you're going to be nervous when you finally get into a workplace, but if you've had the opportunity to be in there before and just cast your eye around, you know what you're going into, and sometimes all you're looking for in a work experience opportunity is literally someone to just say, thanks for that cup of tea, what's your name, so that they acknowledge your existence, because that's where you've got to begin.
With the newspapers, that's where I started, from the editor saying, we're not interested in this, and then he said, do you want to get your name in the newspaper, and then when I left, he said, what are you expected to get in your A Levels? Do you want to come and work here after you've finished your A Levels?
It really is slowly getting your foot through the door by giving them the best chance to say yes, and that then continues in the rest of your career.
When I started working at the FA, again this was a paid job, but I was answering the phones, answering letters and emails and I wanted to progress. I was working in the communications department and I got a great bit of advice from someone who'd been in the department longer than me. She said, what you need to do for our boss is write down the job spec that you want to do, what is it called, what are your responsibilities, how will it improve the working of the office and the organization, why you're the right person to do it. She said that, realistically, he's not going to be thinking about your development necessarily, but if you can go in and show him what your development is like, all he has to do is say yes; that's how you do it.
That's why it's good that you're doing this book, because you wouldn't necessarily know that unless you've been in the circumstances. You've got to give people the answer, or the opportunity to give you the answer that you want.
DG
I totally agree. It's almost like, you don't know until you know, and I almost think that some of the things that I know now, if my younger self had known, I would have probably saved me quite a lot of hassle and disappointment. Sometimes, that in itself is very much the learning curve, but that journey becomes very important.
If we can take that journey from FA, which obviously takes a number of years, into your role as being a full-time writer; how did that happen? That couldn't have been an easy path, deciding to leave such a great organisation like the FA, to do stuff on your own, and that takes quite a lot of strength of character to go from a paid job to doing something very different and putting yourself out there at a time when, I guess, the stereotypical thing is always to get the paid job, get a salary, all of the structured stuff that you come to expect from jobs these days, rather than the risk of everything else.
DF
I was so happy in my first few years at the FA and so proud to work at that organisation, at the centre of the sport that I loved, and then unfortunately things changed, and chief executives changed, and the culture became, I found, very much more defensive, and stayed, and less proactive, less positive, and I knew that I didn't fit there anymore, because I wanted to move forward and do fresh innovative things, and I just felt that that wasn't what was on people's agendas at that time. The easiest thing would have been to throw my toys out the pram and leave and go and do anything other than that, because I wasn't happy anymore working there, but I had a really good piece of advice from someone who I worked alongside. I opened up a bit and explained my situation and he said to me, you only get to leave once, make sure you do it right, and that presented a kind of image in my head that I was standing on a platform.
I was very proud of myself to have got a job in that organisation, however I felt about it at that time, I was standing on that platform, and I guess there were four options; I could either stay and it would be very flat; I could leave and go down and go to somewhere that I wasn't particularly enamoured with; I could leave and go somewhere equivalent; or I could leave and go up, but there weren't that many opportunities I didn't think to leave and go up, because it was still a dream job, even if I wasn't particularly happy, I was still at the centre of football.
I decided that no matter how difficult it was, I was going to stick it out and I wasn't going to leave unless it was for something that, in my mind, was definitively better, absolutely better, than where I was.
Then what happened was (and this was just at the time that Harry Potter was getting massive), someone told me that they'd gone to the bookshop to buy a novel for a football mad kid, 10 or 11 year old football mad kid, but they couldn't find any football novels in there; they're autobiographies and biographies and short stories, but not proper novels with football in there.
Effectively what happened for the next three years or so was, I thought about the film Shawshank Redemption, in that I would go to work and I would do my job, but I would also save a little bit of myself while I was at work. I would save a little bit of my energy, my enthusiasm, my ideas, my positivity, my drive, because I knew that they weren't really being appreciated or put into action there, so I held them in reserve. Then I would come home each night, and the first thing I would do, would be to go to sleep. I read about Winston Churchill and how he used to have a 10 minute power nap, or 20 minute power nap, after lunch during the war, which would allow him to keep going until two or three in the morning and then be up again early the next morning, so I would come home from work, I would go to sleep for a bit, have a little nap, and then I would work into the early hours, trying to write a novel, which I’ve never done before.
My aspiration or my dream was to be the next JK Rowling, for my character Jamie Johnson to be the Harry Potter of soccer, and that was my vision and my aim, and each day, each night, I considered it to be a little bit more carving away of the future I wanted for myself, and that went on and off for about three years; three years of rejections, three years of trying to make the book better, three years of staying in my job because of the pact I’d made with myself of not leaving until I got to a point where the book was good enough, I had an agent and I had a three book offer from a really big children's publisher called Scholastic.
At that point, I still thought that maybe I’d stay at the FA and maybe do it alongside them, but it just didn't work out, and I thought, if I want to make a success of this career of being an author, I need to give everything to it and I’ve waited long enough. This book deal at least gave me a little bit of a financial buffer to take that risk that you're talking about, so I waited until I had another platform to go to, and in my mind, especially because of all the rejections and the difficulty of the path of getting that three book deal, I felt that that was the platform that was higher than the one I was on, and that was when I took the leap.
DG
When you were going through that transition away from the FA to what you were going to do full-time, and have been incredibly successful at doing, what was your mindset like at different times, when you were thinking, I’ve invested a lot of time into this? I put all these habits in place to try to bring Jamie Johnson to life and I keep on getting all of these rejections and people are telling me, it's not good enough, or in effect, I’m not good enough.
How did you cope with that, and how did you deal with it to gain enough resilience to keep going, even though some people kept on rejecting you, whilst others didn't necessarily know about you at that time?
DF
The first rejection was brilliant. I sent my book to Bloomsbury who were the publishers of Harry Potter, because that was the journey I was going to follow, and I got a rejection. It felt fantastic, because I’d never written a book before, and probably deep down, I didn't believe I could, although I had these huge ambitions deep down, you always have doubts, but there I was with a letter about my book from Bloomsbury publishers on headed notepaper talking about my Jamie Johnson book.
It said, sorry, we're not interested, but that didn't matter, I was just on an absolute high, because suddenly it was real, suddenly I was in the game. These publishers were talking about my book, so it existed, and then I was on a bit of a high but then the stubbornness came back out in me and I was, like, right, now I’m in business and now I’ve got a target and that's to prove these people wrong, and it really gave me fire and fuel and determination.
I had a very specific target. These people needed to know that they've made a mistake. I was going to work everything to the bone in order to make it good enough and I’d show them, and I really found that very motivational and so that early rejection really gave me a lot of power. Then the next stage was after about 18 months to two years of being rejected where I’d gone through some really good development, and what I found was that I tried to make every rejection a positive, in that whenever I got rejected, I always wrote back and said, can you tell me why you're rejecting the book, because I knew that I’d never had a novel published before and I couldn't expect to just sit down and turn one out like that, and so some of the rejections were really constructive.
I’ll never forget, for example, that someone took the time to walk me through and we discovered that I was making Jamie Johnson too nice of a character because I thought as I’m writing for kids, he should be some kind of role model, and I thought role model was flawlessness, and it's not; the best role models are the people that have got flaws, we all have them, and then we can discuss it and talk about how we overcome them. This was a fantastic piece of advice from this editor; she was kind enough to talk to me and she said, you've got to find that balance, he's got to dip his toe in the water, he’s got to be naughty, but he can't get wet, and I was like, okay, I think that makes sense, so some of the rejections were absolutely pivotal for me, but still after about two years, I had had enough of rejections and actually getting nowhere.
I visit schools a lot and we always talk about growth mindset and resilience and perseverance, but the truth is, I was ready to give up. I had called up a friend who had been really helpful to me, she'd once had a book published and so she took it upon herself to be in my corner, and I called her up about 10 o'clock at night and I said, I’m giving up, thanks for all your help, but I’ve given it two years and it hasn't worked, so be it, I need to move on and think about something else. She told me to shut up, told me I was an idiot, and told me to go and carry on with my writing and to call her back any time, day or night, when I’d finished, and she told me I was wrong and that the book was going to be published, and I’ve got to get back on that horse.
I thank her in the acknowledgments of every book that I write. I always thank her because that conversation saved the career that I hadn't yet had, and that I’m so proud to have, and so I do believe that not everyone has it, but if you've got someone in your corner that you can share the journey with, sometimes we do need people to believe in us when we don't believe in ourselves.
I think growth mindset, perseverance, resilience, is very important and it's easy things to discuss but I don't think people should be ashamed or afraid to sometimes admit that they feel like giving up, because I certainly did and I think that's human nature too, you just hope you're lucky enough to have someone like I did, who didn't allow me to give up.
DG
I totally agree. You almost need the mirror, if that's the right way of putting it, which is, you innately believe you're good enough when you look at yourself in the mirror, but sometimes you need someone else to believe in your characteristics as well to give you that strength on occasion.
DF
Yeah, and I just think we need that arm around the shoulder metaphorically, just someone to say keep going.
DG
Agreed.
You put a really great piece of content out on social media, I think around a month or so ago, it was a video which I loved, which almost demystified your writing to a degree, and the reason why I loved it so much, was that here you are, this fantastic multi-million selling book author, and here you are, putting out a paragraph of writing, I’m not sure if it was about Jamie Johnson or another book, with lots and lots of scribble on it; I think part was your scribbling, part was an editor's scribble, demonstrating effectively that your first iteration of something is certainly not the last iteration of something.
The reason why I love it so much is because everybody has this glossy image of all of these writers doing everything perfectly first time, whereas actually it's the exact opposite of that by the sounds of it. I can speak from my experience, it's just iteration on iteration, compounding on compounding on compounding, in order to get you to the end results, and I’d just love to hear about why you put that out there, and the life lesson behind it perhaps.
DF
The first thing that was a revelation to me, that I learned when I was at school when I was doing A levels, I can remember I always found myself feeling so alone when we were given a piece of writing to do, and I remember one day, it wasn't even my teacher, but I was talking to this other teacher, and he said to me, tell me what you're thinking of writing and we can discuss it before you start writing it. It was amazing to think that there was a B between A and C and that you were allowed to go and talk to someone about what you were going to do before you did it, rather than you get given a task and then you hand in the task and then you get told whether it was right or wrong.
It felt so good that it felt like cheating to me and that was an amazing thing to do. I do that whenever I can now. If I’ve got a task and I’m doing it for someone, especially if I’m doing a book, I’ll talk to my editor and say, these are my ideas, what do you think of them? Not only does it help you get on the right track, but it's quite clever in the sense that if you're delivering it for someone and you've had a chat with them beforehand and you've discussed it, they get ownership of it, so when you hand it in, they want it to be good, because they've given you some of the ideas. That for me was one of the biggest parts of learning how to write; talk to someone about what you're going to do before you do it and then, to come back to this example of writing, this is what being a writer is.
That's what I always say in schools, being a writer, any of us can write a book or write a story, but this is what being an actual author looks like, because the most significant part of the work is not sitting down and writing a story or writing an article or writing a piece of work, the most significant effort is once you've got something there, having a look at how to make it the best it can be.
In this scenario, I’d written seven lines in a Jamie Johnson book, handed it to my editor and then we both had a look at it to see if there's anything that could be improved, and that's the question you ask yourself, how can this be better, and her writing is the larger writing, she's saying, maybe there should be more background about family history, for example, and then my writing is this scrawl that you can't really read, further ideas that I’ve had, and then essentially what you've got is the fact that we've decided that every single word is going to have to be changed and that's thirty-five words of a novel, which might be 35,000 words, so that might be a thousandth of the work that goes into the book after it's written, but you might want to do ten drafts, so that might be one ten thousandth of the work that goes into the book after it's written. That is how being an author is different to someone who would like to write a book, and when you get this back and you look at it, a big part of you is stamping your feet on the ground saying, but I wanted it to be perfect, why isn't it perfect, why can't you just tell me that what I’ve done is brilliant, and we move on, and then a little part of you, the adult part of you, the professional part of you, is saying, this person's brain is now allied to my brain and we're both chasing the same objective which is to make this piece of work as good as it can be, so you should be grateful that this brain is helping you to make that objective a possibility by giving you the opportunities and the insight to improve what you're doing that's going to have your name on it, and that's going to go all over the world.
It's about trying to listen to that wise bit of you, as opposed to the child in you that is stamping the feet on the ground, saying I wanted it to be perfect first time round.
DG
On that point, when we went for our customary walks over the last few months, you mentioned one thing to me about a piece of work that you were writing, I can't remember the exact phrase, you'll probably have the better phrase, that you were writing it to get it out there as a means to then improve it as a result.
That's the thing that I mention in the book quite a lot, it's almost the starting of the creative process, whatever it might be, that is the buzz that I still get and I can totally see it as the buzz that you completely get, the act of creation in our own small ways, that act of putting something out there, knowing it doesn't need to be perfect, which then can be iterated, and that to me is a really powerful message.
DF
There are so many different ways to think about it, but it's to just get something that you can talk about, and then you work on it to improve it, and there are millions of metaphors; one that I was just thinking about is which is probably rubbish, but you don't try and have a huge fire, you've just got to get some heat and get that first flame going and then you can fan it and get it really going, but don't wait for perfection to come along in order to put it out there, because that's the C, the B bit after A is to get something out there which is generally rubbish, and you know it, but at least it's something you can talk about and that's the way that you get to C from A, by having that B; does that make sense?
DG
It does. There's the book that I was telling you about called Atomic Habits by James Clear and he talks a lot, quite early on in the book, about the act of compounding. It's almost those small iterations, consistent small iterations, that don't feel like they're making a difference in the short term, but over a longer consistent period of time, make that massive fire that you're talking about, make the novel, but what you need to start with is the small flame and the first iteration.
DF
You’ve just got to get something to talk to people about, because then those little iterations, it's actually really fun and it doesn't make you feel too apprehensive.
You think, I’m just going to change that paragraph, I’m just going to add that bit, and you do that over time, and they're nice little bits to add and to change and to improve and that's fun, but it can feel so overawing if you're sitting down and you're saying, now I’ve got to create brilliance, I’ve got to create perfection, because it doesn't happen, so just get a little something that you can hold in your hands and mould and then enjoy that moulding process, rather than attempting to extract from yourself the final product at the beginning.
DG
I’m starting to change my view on the word ‘passion’ because when everyone says to me, I’m really passionate about music or all these different passion industries that we talk about, after I read a piece by a VC tech starter entrepreneur called Paul Graham, and he talked about the idea, not necessarily of passion, but of curiosity, being your driver.
DF
Also, you said to me once about finding something that you don't mind doing and these are all different expressions of things that we are able to do and able to give our time to, and if we're curious about something, then it doesn't feel difficult or it doesn't feel too much of a hardship to invest our time in. If we're just doing tiny little improvements, that is bite-sized bits of fun.
DG
The way that I realize that I’m curious about something is when I sit down to read or do or consume or whatever, and I just give myself a five minute timer to do that and it turns into half an hour, and you don't realize it's turned into half an hour because even though the initial act might have been energy sapping, such as I’m going to have to do this now or I want to do this now, once you actually get into it, and when people say time flies, I’m fascinated by the idea of time flying, because I think that is the output of curiosity.
Another thing that I just want to mention, I’m sorry we're going on for a while but it's because you've got a lot of pearls of wisdom right now and I don't want to stop your flow, which is habit forming stuff, so again with James Clear, or with others, we talked about those small incremental changes and iterations and compounding, you talk, for example, about how when you're at the FA still, you'd come back, you'd have a sleep, I presume that's almost like a refresh or a separation, like, now I can properly focus, and that's the time to go into the early hours.
Do you find that you still have quite a lot of those types of productive habits or things that you do generally that is of value to you professionally, or just in your life more generally?
DF
I’m maybe not the best example of this, because what happens if I am on a writing project, if I feel like I’m in the zone, basically everything else goes out the window and sometimes, I will specifically take myself away to a different place, where my family and friends and phone and laptop, everything apart from what I’m using to write on, aren't there, aren't present, because I do find it difficult to find absolute clarity of thought in and around all of the normal things that we need to do, whether it's the washing up or answering emails or going on Twitter or whatever it may be; I find that saps my focus and creativity.
For me to be creative, I want nothing apart from a book that I’m reading to grow my mind, so that is one thing actually. When I’m writing, I always read a book because it's the equivalent of, if you want to speak French, you surround yourself with good French speakers, so I find that if I’m reading a good book, it's not that I’m copying it, it's just that I’m speaking the language of excellent literature in my mind and so it’s just something that will give me a little booster and it will connect with what I’m looking to produce in my story, and then I’ll get up and I’ll go and write.
For me, when I’m writing, if I’m really in the zone, it's like my antenna are up and everything that I’m thinking or reading is dedicated to that one goal of deepening and improving the story and examining it more, so it's not necessarily very well matched with real life and obligations and responsibilities.
DG
I can understand that completely. When I was talking about starting to write this in the first place, I said, I think I just need a few undistracted days, so I booked into a hotel, not ridiculously far away from where I am, only about an hour or so away, just to get into that habit routine of exactly what you said, just nothing else distracting, apart from my laptop and I was working for 10-12 hours a day, which I really enjoyed and was very empowering.
What I found there was, that even within that period, I had certain times when I was more engaged or proactive, so for example, for me, I’m better from 7am until around lunchtime. I know I’m not brilliant from about 3-5pm and I know I’m very good late at night from 8-11pm, say for example.
Even within what you're saying, in terms of either thinking time, doing time, reading time, or otherwise, do you have particular periods, because there's a whole set of literature on this, in terms of when you feel that you're at your peak, in terms of if you're a footballer, or otherwise, or an artist generally.
DF
I think I’m quite sensitive around sleep, so it depends if I’ve had a good night's sleep. If I’ve had exercise, I find that very helpful.
Sometimes my best work is when I’ve allowed myself to switch off and I’m not working, so maybe I’ve done a good day's work of writing and editing and then I’ll be watching a film and it'll be midnight and my brain is relaxed and I’ll say, that is brilliant, the idea of that character in the film suddenly changing their mind because they've seen the bus stop and they've seen the expression on the faces of the people at the bus stop, and it's made something click in their mind, that relates directly to the dilemma of my character, and I’ll make a note, so I always have to write it down at the time, and that one clarity of thought, piece of clear thought, when I thought I’d knocked off for the day at midnight, will probably set me up for the whole day's writing the next day, which could come at any time with me, to be honest. As I say, it just depends.
I’m constantly playing games with myself to try and get myself feeling confident enough to put pen to paper, but I definitely find that it's often when I switch off that I’m most productive or creative. Sometimes you'll wake up, and I know Keith Richards has talked about this, you'll wake up with a brilliant idea, you write it down, at least you think it's a brilliant idea, and then you wake up the next morning and it literally doesn't even make sense.
In Keith Richards’ case, one day he woke up and he didn't even remember it, but on his little dictaphone, he had the riff for Satisfaction, I think it was, and he didn't even remember recording it, and of course we're talking about all this perseverance, but there are the outliers as well. I think famously, if I’m not wrong, Elton John, famously, his diary entry was something like, did this in the morning, went to meet someone else in the evening, in the afternoon wrote Candle in the Wind. Sometimes what seems like a moment of inspiration is actually the crystallization of years of thought, an analysis that then just presents itself.
DG
I could be completely wrong but I think that is the compounding effect; Candle in the Wind is the compounding effect of the 20 years’ worth of writing that has gone before to get him into that place, maybe other things as well.
DF
The book that I’m working on at the moment, which you and Hollie are reading and kindly helping with, I’ve been trying to write it probably for six or seven years but I hadn't found the hook, and then I was walking near where you and I live, I was walking on the heath and I was barely even thinking about it, and then I was just like, what if the character can't do this, then that's something definitive that they can't do and that means that's an obstacle for them to overcome, and we’ll see whether anything happens with this book, but if it does, it will be because of that one moment, just having a walk, not even really thinking about things, and an idea coming to you, but it's because the brain had been working on it for six or seven years.
DG
Also, when I’ve spoken to other people, the benefit of having that clarity of thought, I think a lot of the time, that clarity of thought is because you're doing something else at the same time, out of the thing that you're doing, the ability to connect disparate ideas is what sets a lot of people apart.
Is the clarity of thought to think, I read, I spoke, I thought, I did, something completely different, whilst that cog, for the big thing that you're doing, is very slowly just ticking over, and then suddenly, that one thing goes like that, and it goes click. Is that how you find it sometimes?
DF
That's exactly it. It's looking for connections and when I’m on, I can see connections in everything to what I’m doing, literally just looking at a pamphlet and I’ll say, that colour is my character's favourite colour or I’ll look at a sculpture and I’ll say, the expression on that face is how that character feels. When I’m really on song, everything is flowing into the idea and I can use everything.
DG
Last one which I think you've probably already touched on, and this isn't to put you on the spot, but the last question I ask everybody that I’m chatting to is, if you had a massive billboard where you could say anything to inspire others, what would it say?
DF
Mistakes are brilliant; just don't make the same mistakes twice.
DG
That was quick.
DF
I think you have to keep telling that to yourself and it's easy to say because we don't want to make mistakes, we don't want to do something wrong or be embarrassed. Certainly that's what I would say to my younger self; make as many mistakes as you can because that's how we grow and how we learn, but if you make the same mistakes, then that's stupid.
DG
There’s a Japanese saying that I love that you've probably heard as well; I’m going to try and pronounce it right, I’ve got my notes next to me, but I could make a complete pigs ear of it, so apologies, it says nana korobi ya oki, I think, which means, fall seven, rise eight, which I really like. I’m always interested in seven and eight because it's not one or two, or it's not zero or one, it's, you're going to keep falling in a positive way, but you’ve got to keep upwards.
DF
What I don't understand about that is, why isn't it, fall seven, rise seven, because how can you rise eight times if you've only fallen seven, or have I got that wrong?
DG
I think if you fall seven times and you're rising seven; are you saying, you fall first and then you rise? That's interesting.
DF
After the seventh rise, if you don't fall again, you're standing.
DG
Maybe you're rising higher.
DF
So you've got two rises on the end.
DG
It would seem a bit odd, wouldn't it, to fall seven, rise seven.
DF
Exactly, but it's got to be accurate.
DG
You really messed my head up with that. I’m going to have to really think about that now.
DF
You're right, how do you rise up for the eighth time, if you've only fallen seven?
DG
Maybe you're rising first.
DF
But then when you say rise first, if rising is first, wouldn't it come first in the slogan?
DG
Well, I think the emphasis is obviously on the positive, so it would sound worse, rise eight but fall seven.
DF
It depends if you consider yourself to be upstanding, because we're not born… I don't know.
DG
Love it. Dan, thanks very much for that and I’m sorry, we were going to talk for half an hour and we’ve talked for an hour.
DF
We can do more any time. Let's consider that the first iteration and then when we want to do more, we can do more.