Philip Edsel

Colton Holmes (00:00):

Matthew McConaughey in his green suit.

Philip Edsel (00:02):

Yeah, exactly. It was McConaughey in his green suit. Well, McConaughey does what McConaughey wants.

Colton Holmes (00:06):

Y'all have seen 500% growth in 2023.

Philip Edsel (00:09):

One of the things I think you need as a creative director is confidence.

Colton Holmes (00:13):

You are using that as the front door to getting to tell more story.

Philip Edsel (00:18):

We have gotten deadly at speaking the language of our users.

Colton Holmes (00:22):

What would you say was probably your riskiest bet that you made?

Philip Edsel (00:26):

There's really no right or wrong answer. The challenge is did it work?

Colton Holmes (00:34):

I'm Colton Holmes, and today I'm your host on the rough draft. In this episode, I sit down with Philip Edsel, a creative director with a background spanning across e-commerce, advertising, professional sports and tech industries. Edsel has led global ad campaigns from conception to creation, working with brands like Nike, Reebok, Red Bull, MTV, and Filson, just to name a few. In this episode, we talk about his journey to becoming a creative director and the importance of taking risks in the creative industry. We also chat specifically about his work with Austin FC and Ladder and how he uses Seth Godin's concept of the Purple Cow to stand out and drive success. All right, here's my conversation with Philip Edsel.

(01:21):

So your journey to becoming a creative director has been an extensive one is maybe the term I would use between a writing major in college, to a digital marketer, to then a photographer, commercial photographer, and then to a director and now creative director. Is that right? Did I miss anything there?

Philip Edsel (01:38):

I was in a band for about seven years.

Colton Holmes (01:39):

Band, I did miss the band.

Philip Edsel (01:40):

I was only in Rolling Stone. No big deal.

Colton Holmes (01:42):

Sorry, I totally missed that one.

Philip Edsel (01:45):

No, I'm messing with you. Yeah, I would call it a complicated and somewhat circuitous route to becoming a creative director, but we're here.

Colton Holmes (01:51):

Yeah. Yeah. So I just want to take a minute and let you explain what exactly a creative director is. I think people might have different definitions of what that is and maybe the definition has gotten skewed as maybe as online media has become more and more of a thing. But I'd love for you to take a second and just define that for us.

Philip Edsel (02:08):

Sure. Yeah, I think it's just whatever you want to put in your Instagram bio. No, it's funny, everyone kind of claims that title. I think there's obviously a traditional career path and a traditional role of creative director, which is found generally in advertising. But there's a creative director at Tiffany's, actually, Tiffany and Co. I think it's Ruba Lee. And she had a really great summation of what a creative director is. And she described it as a conductor or conductor of an orchestra. The idea is that you're basically the person that's overseeing the combination of a lot of different modalities and industries and craft, and seeing a lot of different styles of creative come together in hopefully a cohesive campaign.

(02:58):

So having a background in music and design and copywriting and photography and video, all that sort of stuff comes into play, and why the traditional role of creative director generally takes years and years to work your way into. But I found my way in through the back door, but it feels like a lot of the marketing roles these days have broken traditional norms and are getting there by starting as a creative and then working your way up.

Colton Holmes (03:30):

Yeah, and I think that speaks into what I really want to chat about today, which is this idea of being a contrarian in the creative industry. And whenever you and I got to chat a couple of days ago, that's where we just kept going back to is being this contrarian, and the safe bet is the risky bet, or the safe bet is really the unsafe bet and the risky bet is really, in reality, the safe bet in this industry and really probably in most cases. And so I'd love for you to just chat about where that idea comes from, where you got that inspiration.

Philip Edsel (03:59):

Yeah. We were talking about Purple Cow, I think I brought up, which is an incredible book by Seth Godin. And that was a book that I read early on in my marketing career and really was influential for me. The premise of the book is essentially that we've all seen a million cows. Cows aren't really that special, but if you were driving down the road and you saw a purple cow, you might stop, you might pull over, you might want a photo with that cow, you might want to buy the cow. And that's like the opening illustration of the book. And the idea is that as a marketer, creating products that are different will always be more beneficial to you. And thinking about things in a way that's different will always be more beneficial to you. And ultimately, he comes to the idea that the playing it safe, the safe route is actually a riskier decision in the long run because there's just less success there. You end up looking like everyone else, you end up doing the same thing as everyone else and you don't stand out. Versus taking a risk is actually the safer bet in a creative field or in really any field creating a product, whatever that looks like because you have the opportunity to stand out and to do something different and to be original.

Colton Holmes (05:13):

What are some tactical ways that you see yourself implementing that into your work? Whether that's processes or tools?

Philip Edsel (05:20):

I'll answer that in two ways, maybe the overarching thing that I think about, and then my actual process. I remember years ago, I was driving down the highway. And I remember having this epiphany that when you graduate from college when you've been... I was in a band for seven years. I was a freelance photographer for seven years. I'm hustling to build a career, and it was starting to work. But what I realized was doing all these different things and writing and music and design and photography, that I just had ideas. I can't do math to save my life, but I can look at a blank piece of paper and have an idea. And that is a really, really valuable skill. And I had this epiphany that I'm going to be okay. I'll be able to make a career because no matter what I do, I'm going to be an idea person. That's my natural setting.

(06:14):

And that was really encouraging for me as an artist. And I feel like other artists don't necessarily think about that a lot of if you can be an original thinker, that's an incredibly valuable skill to have because not a lot of people are like that. Even people in marketing, they think about spreadsheets and whatever. But Paul Graham has a really great article called How to Do Great Work. And in that, he talks about original thinkers. And his analogy I think is original thinkers are like angle grinders throwing off sparks. They are people that are doing work. And then as they're doing work, ideas are just popping into their head and coming. And I love that analogy. And that's how I think about original thinkers and thinking like this purple cow mentality.

(07:02):

In terms of my process, I'm sure everyone has ideas differently. I'm sure there are plenty of people that just daydream, and all of a sudden the muse takes over and delivers them some sort of idea. That's not necessarily my process. I'm a little bit more type A, but my process is the combination of collecting. I remember throughout my career as a songwriter, I would just write down little phrases I thought were cool, words, interesting words, interesting phrases that I was reading, literally anything and everything that I would see. I would just write down in a notebook, and I had it everywhere. So when it came time to write, the thoughts that I was having, I could reference and bring in cool ideas and cull creativity into something that was original and unique in its own right, but had a lot of pulled pieces.

(08:04):

And that's how I think about ideas now, is I'm constantly looking for inspiration and saving inspiration and seeing different things across different industries that I think are really cool, whether it's like, "Oh, that's a really dope camera angle," or, "That's a really cool shot," or, "This is a really cool effect," or whatever it is. And then when it comes time to do my thing, I'm pulling in these different ideas that weren't relevant to my idea, but sort of get a new life or get a breath of fresh air. And so my process is I, first and foremost, if I really want to have good ideas, I think creators need time and space and they don't give themselves that a lot. We go to look for inspiration first. We're on Instagram, we're on Pinterest, we're doing things instead of just allowing ourselves to think. And so for me, probably number one place is shower, white noise, nothing else.

Philip Edsel (09:03):

... probably number one place is shower. White noise, nothing. I don't have a phone near me, nothing else is distracting me, and I can just actually think about stuff. I also, I do my best work and even when I go work out, I have my best workouts when I listen to one song on repeat because I kind of forget. You find the vibe and then I kind of forget that the song is happening because it just becomes sort of pattern or a white noise in the background.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:09:04]

Colton Holmes (09:26):

Like a drone in the background?

Philip Edsel (09:26):

Exactly. A drone. And so that really helps me just zone out. So, any sort of white noise or anything that just allows my brain to shut out everything else helps me think a lot. And then from there, I'm like, once I can have ideas, I'm starting to pull things that I've referenced and it all starts to come together. And ideas evolve over time. When you start something, you don't really have any boundaries. And then as you try to fit it into a box, you get more guidelines and then it evolves and whatever. But that's kind of how I start.

Colton Holmes (10:02):

Yeah, that's really good. For me, I picked up fly-fishing in the last few years and just going out-

Philip Edsel (10:07):

I'm sure it's amazing.

Colton Holmes (10:07):

... and being in a part of Austin that not a lot of people go and just sit in the water and do the same thing-

Philip Edsel (10:13):

Monotonous thing. I'm sure it's amazing.

Colton Holmes (10:15):

... over and over. And a just becomes mindless and your brain gets to start just thinking of other things.

Philip Edsel (10:20):

In that same essay from Paul Graham, How To Do Great Work, he talks about this idea of indirect thinking. And two things I think are interesting. One is like you can solve problems by indirect thinking in ways that you can't solve it by frontal attack. You can try to force yourself to solve a problem, but that never really goes very well. But if you can find an activity or a space where you can be creative, sometimes not thinking about something, but kind of thinking about it is more effective.

(10:52):

He also mentions though that in order to be able to do that, you have to be doing work. Your work and the thoughts about your work have to be able to feed that sort of subconscious. Because if you just are like, "Oh, I'm going to go daydream," but you have nothing feeding it, then they're no ideas.

Colton Holmes (11:11):

It just shuts down.

Philip Edsel (11:11):

Yeah. It just shuts down.

Colton Holmes (11:12):

Yeah, that's interesting. This is a Paul Graham essay?

Philip Edsel (11:15):

Paul Graham. Yeah. I'll link it somewhere.

Colton Holmes (11:18):

Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes. So, you're at Ladder, and so you were mentioning that y'all have seen 500% growth in 2023, and you attributed that to your short form video strategy that you implemented. I'd love to just hear a little bit about where that came from and how that is even the risky bet among safe bets.

Philip Edsel (11:37):

Yeah, absolutely. It was a risky bet for a number of reasons. One is every big brand in the world runs ads or does performance marketing in traditional marketplaces or platforms or just even on Instagram itself, like Meta Facebook. And we as a startup can't really compete with their budgets. And so we thought, okay, we need a growth lever. What's the one that we feel like we can figure out relatively quickly, easily, and affordably? And TikTok just overwhelmingly was like, this is the fastest growing app in the world. And there aren't a ton of huge brands on there that are really pursuing it. It feels like there's a huge opportunity.

(12:23):

As somebody with a background in video, shooting on an iPhone, editing on an iPhone is the easiest thing in the world for me. And I could go from concept to execution immediately. I think that's one of the really cool things about this creator economy and where social media is now is, yeah, it doesn't have the production value of this podcast or a lot of things that you see on TV, but it just is so immediate. And it's also just very transparent. Like on TikTok, the more you try to use fancy marketing language or good copywriting, the worse your content performs and the more you just speak a human, the better your content performs.

(13:08):

We spent, our CEO in particular literally read through thousands and thousands and thousands of app store reviews. And this is before you could just plug this into ChatGPT, and it would've just told you all this stuff, which that would've been really helpful. But he pulled out keywords and then he organized all the reviews by themes, and then we would look at what words were they using most frequently and whatever. And so we have gotten deadly at speaking the language of our users and basically speaking the same language back to them. So, they don't need to do any translating in their head of like, "Oh, this is the marketing speak that you guys are using. Maybe this would be good for X, Y, Z."

(13:50):

It's literally we're just saying things like people would say on TikTok. And so that was just really, really effective at communicating with our audience. But again, that's not base setting for how people think about marketing. They think about, "Let's do some big brand shoot. Let's run ads on Facebook or TV or whatever, and let's have a copywriter write a really cool script." Instead of like, "Hey, let's shoot this on the iPhone. Let's use a creator, somebody that's at the gym, and let's just use the words that they would use."

Colton Holmes (14:25):

What are maybe some experimenting that y'all did as y'all were generating this new team and this idea as it was formulating? Maybe some things that y'all took some bets on that didn't work, but that maybe led you to a bit that did work. What was some iteration and experiments that y'all did that?

Philip Edsel (14:41):

Yeah, I mean, we started everything with like, okay, we want to be experts at this. We want to learn. At the time, there were maybe two people that had courses on TikTok and we were like, "All right, we feel like they're experts. We'll try to learn as much as we can." We also, were doing it ourselves, just trying to figure it out as we went. And on the creative side, we had a coach that wasn't on TikTok, but she was explosive on Instagram and she was a CrossFit athlete. She was just the perfect demo to be on TikTok.

(15:13):

And she was like, "Yeah, you can take all my content and just do whatever you want with there. I don't have time to build a TikTok audience, but I would love for you to do it." And I was like, "Perfect. I would love to just test this." So, started testing it, and I think within a month or maybe three months, she had a few hundred thousand followers.

Colton Holmes (15:34):

So, you took her stuff from Instagram and created an account for her on TikTok?

Philip Edsel (15:38):

Created an account for her, as her, like she's posting it, but I was handling all the content. Basically just creating off ideas I saw were working on the platform and it was the perfect opportunity to test the theory, and it was just immediately explosive. I remember the first time we had a post that was just going crazy viral, Greg, the CEO and I were just texting each other, "Are you seeing this? This is insane."

(16:05):

It just picked up. I just refreshed and it was like 10,000 more views. And that's the crazy thing about those platforms and what feels like some of the last arbitrage, or at least right now where we are in culture and society and tech and social media, the arbitrage right now is virality because you can get such outsized attention and views on things that you don't have to pay for if you can get it to go viral.

Colton Holmes (16:32):

Yeah. Huge ROI.

Philip Edsel (16:34):

Yeah. Huge ROI, because you probably spent whatever, 10 minutes on this iPhone video that's now blowing up. So, that was really exciting to us and proving the concept was really huge. We quickly realized that as a brand to work on TikTok, brands don't work on TikTok because none of the audience is on TikTok to follow brands. Generally, brands have gotten a lot better at it, but at least two years ago, no one wants to follow brand.

(17:03):

They want to follow people and personalities. And so we quickly realized we need a face for this account. It's definitely not me, but we need to hire a creator that can be the face of Ladder on TikTok. And that was enormously successful for us. And then we were like, "Okay, how do we scale that? How do we get more creators? How do we engage more audiences?" And that sort of thing. So, we just grew from there.

Colton Holmes (17:24):

And I mean, you and I were chatting about this a little bit before we started, about how you are kind of using that as the front door to getting to tell more stories. As a storyteller, what does that look like?

Philip Edsel (17:35):

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think the way, just to quickly... Not to harp on TikTok the whole time, but the reason it's the fastest growing app in the world, or at least was and may still be, is because of its discovery algorithm. It was unlike anything that had ever existed before. Instagram Reels have now obviously ripped it off and are trying to do the same thing, but there was no other platform that took your content and immediately put in front of new people. And then if it got some sort of engagement or met-

Philip Edsel (18:03):

... they put in front of new people, and then if it got some sort of engagement or met some sort of metric, who knows what that is, it would put it in front of more new people. So, the opportunity then wasn't to speak to your followers. On Instagram, you would post something and it would go to some increasingly small percentage of your followers. TikTok is like, "I'm going to show this to brand new people, and then if that works, we will show it to a wider audience of brand new people," so it's a billboard, it's constantly just getting in front of new people. So the equation there is like, how can I make the best billboard? It's not like, how can I tell the best story about my brand or really try to communicate all these insane product features that we've built into the app that no other app has. That's cool, but that's not a good billboard. And so we were like, "Okay, what gets the most attention? What's the best billboard that we can then pull them into the app?"

(18:58):

And then, thankfully, we have a product that's unbelievable, that has incredible retention that people are obsessed with. So it's not like we're selling them on some bill of goods. It's like, we're actually getting them into a product that is unbelievable. And then from there, we can tell a different story. So, we did a campaign last month or maybe a month and a half ago called The Process is The Point, and we flew all over the country, in four days, we went from coast to coast documenting five different members all over the country that are avid Ladder users on different teams with different coaches, different training styles and different personas: one was a single mom, one is a police officer who is one of the only active police officers that has had a kidney transplant, one is a survivor of Hodgkin's lymphoma, and then we had an amputee that is on a bodybuilding team in Dallas.

(19:57):

And we just went all over the country to document these people. And I had this script written that was, again, not a great billboard for TikTok, but was a very inspiring, motivating script about why do we do this every day? Why do we show up every day and why would you just check the box on today when you know the clock just starts over on tomorrow, you got to do it all over again. And the whole thing obviously comes down to the idea that the process is the point. That's why we do it.

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:18:04]

Speaker 1 (20:25):

Unless you don't have to do it tomorrow, you get to do it tomorrow. Unless you were never doing it just to check the box, you were doing it for your kids, for your confidence, for the moment you get to say, "I showed up today." And the exhaustion, the sweat, the hassle, those are all badges of honor, baby. Those are all part of plan. And the process is the point.

Speaker 2 (21:04):

Great [inaudible 00:21:12].

Philip Edsel (21:11):

And we released this campaign and for the first time ever, we saw, if you read the comments on those posts, the members are in the comments being like, "I feel so seen. This is exactly why I do Ladder. This is exactly why I show up. This is exactly why I fit my workout in after I put my kids to bed," and all this other stuff, and it was speaking to the exact user of Ladder, and it was so spot on to their motivation. And so, it's not something that we would necessarily use for performance or acquisition on the brand side, but it's one of those brand affinity plays that creates so much just loyalty and buy-in. So that's the opportunity to tell a story. And the cool thing is all of our teams have team chats where they're all talking. We have a Ladder announcements channel, which is all it goes to all a 100,000 members on Ladder. And so we can send that. We sent that video out in that campaign to all those members. We sent it in all the team chats and the conversations that were happening around that were just incredible. So those are the type of stories and opportunities we can tell, but we can't tell those stories until they've gotten into the app and experienced it.

Colton Holmes (22:26):

Yeah, as a creative director and thinking about all of your experience of writer, musician, photographer, director, all of those and all of those things, how do you think that's contributed to your success and how you've been able to take this risk, and maybe even how your CEO trusted you to take this risk, and how it's become fruitful for you guys?

Philip Edsel (22:46):

One of the things I think you need as a creative director is confidence. And as a creative, you don't always have it or you maybe feel like a little bit of imposter syndrome or whatever it is. I feel like my personality type, I've had a decent amount of confidence, but in creative director roles, especially when I was at Austin FC and we were doing things like stadium signage and billboards and all these random mediums that I'd never done before, you have to be able to make decisions that there's really no correct answer to. You have to be able to explain why you made those decisions, especially to higher up or executives or whatever. But there's really no right or wrong answer. The challenge is, did it work?

(23:40):

And so, as a creative and a creative director, especially thinking about campaigns that take decent budgets and a long amount of time to plan, you have to feel pretty confident in the decisions that you're making. And it's just experience. Having experience as a musician and as a writer and a photographer, and working on just so many different vast array of projects over 10 plus years, 15 years, just gives you more confidence when you have to make a decision in a field or a project that you have never done before or been in before that it's the right decision. So, I at least have something to go off of or a reasoning behind why I make those decisions creatively, even if they're in gray space.

Colton Holmes (24:30):

Yeah. And as a creative director, you kind of have to have a holistic view of all of those mediums, right?

Philip Edsel (24:37):

Sure.

Colton Holmes (24:37):

And even thinking about Austin FC, whenever you got to develop that brand and help push the creative there, which I get to see all the time going to the games, it seems like that might be this picture of this culminating career journey that you've had. And I feel like you probably got to pull a little bit from each one of those experiences, of photography, of music, of writing, all culminating into this one [inaudible 00:25:03].

Philip Edsel (25:03):

Definitely. Yeah, that was definitely the biggest challenge so far because it was across every medium, and it was honestly the most analog creative role I've ever had because-

Colton Holmes (25:14):

And also, building a brand that is trying to tap into the creativity of the Austin culture too, right?

Philip Edsel (25:20):

Yeah, 100%.

Colton Holmes (25:20):

It's twofold, right?

Philip Edsel (25:23):

And getting seen by 20,000 people and physically every single week in a stadium. It's got to live up to more than just an Instagram post.

Colton Holmes (25:31):

Right.

Philip Edsel (25:31):

So, that was definitely a challenge, and it was really cool. It definitely was the culmination in a lot of ways, but also it was a lot of new stuff. I had never done stadium signage or I had done some in-store display stuff with a menswear brand that I was a creative director for and founder of before that. But it takes it all to a whole new level when you're... We're going to design a van, and we're going to wrap it, and it's going to be live activation that drives around Austin, it's called the Verde Van, and what is it going to look like? What kind of van is it? What does the experience feel like? That's a whole nother medium if you have a graphic design background or a photographer background. So a lot of it was new, but a lot of it was really eyeopening, so definitely a great experience.

Colton Holmes (26:26):

Going back to this whole theme of the Purple Cow and taking risky bets, how did you approach that with that mindset, and how did that lead to success there?

Philip Edsel (26:35):

Yeah, I think Austin FC was a really interesting project and challenge because first and foremost, it's first ever professional sports team, it was the newest MLS team in the league that year, and there really wasn't a city that was that similar to Austin that had launched an MLS team. And Austin as a city is so unique. Obviously, the slogan for the city is Keep Austin-

Philip Edsel (27:03):

... is so unique. Obviously the slogan for the city is Keep Boston Weird. And so we were trying to create a team and a brand that represented the culture. That's what every good sports team is trying to do.

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:27:04]

Colton Holmes (27:14):

Right. Yeah.

Philip Edsel (27:14):

It's like, how do we reflect the ethos and personality of the people that we represent?

Colton Holmes (27:21):

Yeah.

Philip Edsel (27:22):

If you watch Wrexham, this is something they're awesome at, but that's what every team is trying to do. And Austin, being such a unique city with such a cultural history of live music and analog arts, we had to build that into everything that we did. And that was, at the macro level, of how we thought about our activations and our slogans and the songs that the supporters are singing, and the rituals that happen in the game. Like the heartbeat of Austin, hitting the drum, and all that stuff we thought about. And then the-

Colton Holmes (28:01):

Matthew McConaughey in his green suit.

Philip Edsel (28:02):

Yeah, exactly. There's McConaughey in his green suit. Well, McConaughey does what McConaughey wants but also is a great representative and ambassador for the city. But even on the micro level, too, down to the very detailed minutiae of, okay, from a design perspective, everything we design is going to have some sort of analog texture. So we're never going to put something on a black background. It's going to have a little bit of a grungy, gritty paper texture.

(28:31):

Our type isn't going to be clean type. It's going to be stamped or have a little bit of a graffiti effect. Our photos aren't going to be super clean fast photography from the world that I had come from. It's going to have a little bit of a filmy effect.

Colton Holmes (28:47):

Yeah.

Philip Edsel (28:47):

It's going to feel a little more analog. So that ethos really permeated everything we did as a club, and they've evolved that. And it's still built into the culture of everything that they do. The one interesting challenge that I'll talk about with Austin FC was, when you build a brand, generally you work with a design agency and they give you your brand guidelines. The Butler Bros in Austin did Austin FC's original design guidelines.

(29:18):

They did an unbelievable job. I wasn't a part of that process, but I came in right before the team. The stadium was just, basically, a pit of sand, and it was in the middle of COVID. But basically all I had to go off of was a PDF which, again, they did an awesome job with, but the problem with a PDF is it covers three use cases of thousands of use cases. As a design agency, you're never thinking about, okay, if you guys ever do... and you can't plan for when you guys do a wrap in the stadium on a wall, what's that going to look like?

Colton Holmes (29:57):

Right, yeah.

Philip Edsel (29:58):

So the challenge as creative director for a brand new team trying to do something really ambitious in the league and in professional sports, it was like, "Okay, how do I take this PDF and now translate it into literally everything that we do?" All of our social assets in game, all of the little LED screens you see that line the field. How does that get translated? Even the live score bugs on live broadcast where it just shows one-to-zero. Awesome, whatever. We even have little collage effects happening in those score bugs, too. So we probably took it maybe too far and spent way too much time thinking about all this stuff, but that's the type of stuff and the type of detail that really gives a brand an ethos and cohesiveness, too.

Colton Holmes (30:47):

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you did an incredible job, and it's fun to see it every week.

Philip Edsel (30:53):

Thanks.

Colton Holmes (30:53):

What would you say was probably your riskiest bet that you made in that context that had a really big payoff, that you were maybe surprised by or most proud of from-

Philip Edsel (31:05):

Yeah. I think, for me, the riskiest bet was actually entering the world of creative director. I had worked for myself for over a decade.

Colton Holmes (31:14):

Yeah.

Philip Edsel (31:14):

I was in a band. I was a photographer and director, running my own business. And when I got into photography I thought, down the road, creative director could be a pretty cool role. I have a pretty wide background of skills and mediums that I've worked in. But the idea of going to an office every day, to working in a corporate structure and working for a brand felt like a pretty risky step just because I wasn't in charge of all the shots.

Colton Holmes (31:46):

Yeah.

Philip Edsel (31:48):

And especially in pro sports, too, where I had never been in pro sports, didn't really know what all that entailed and how intense that was and how quick things have to turn around, and everything that comes along with it. But I was like, "When else am I going to get an opportunity to be a creative director for a pro sports team in a city that I'm born and raised in, that I know inside and out?"

Colton Holmes (32:13):

Right, yeah.

Philip Edsel (32:13):

And so that was just like... I knew it was a risk, but it was definitely an unbelievable experience.

Colton Holmes (32:20):

Yeah. That's an interesting perspective on this idea that we've been talking about of, for your work to stand out it needs to be different, but also, for you to grow and to stand out, you need to also be pushed to being different, too.

Philip Edsel (32:29):

Yeah.

Colton Holmes (32:29):

And so for me also, that's when I've grown the most as a creative and more, even, just... and my character grows.

Philip Edsel (32:37):

Sure.

Colton Holmes (32:38):

There's so much growth and maturity that comes along with doing something new that pushes you outside of safety, outside of the safe bet that just pays dividends on-

Philip Edsel (32:48):

100%. Yeah, the idea of the purple cow is obviously very applicable in art, in product, creating things, but also in your career, in your life. Pushing towards what excites you, what interests you, and trying to find new frontiers or gaps. That's, again, another thing that Paul Graham talks about. I keep coming back to this because it's so dense and so good, but trying to find those gaps and being willing to move into those gaps knowing that you don't know what you don't know, and you don't know much, but you're willing to take a chance has always been so valuable and fruitful for me.

Colton Holmes (33:30):

Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Well, Edsel, thank you for coming on a show today. It's been a pleasure to get to chat with you. For those who've been listening, how can they connect with you online or find your work?

Philip Edsel (33:41):

Yeah. You can find me on Instagram, @edsel. E-D-S-E-L. I don't really have anything I'm pushing at the moment. I used to do, for five years I did a daily little... this is actually inspired by Seth Godin as well, who does the same thing. He does a daily newsletter. It was like a short form commentary on being a creative, or social media, or just working for yourself as a freelancer. I've taken a break from that. I'm hoping one day I'll write a book on that, but for now you can just find me on Instagram. And definitely check out Ladder. It's the best product I've ever worked on and the best brand I've ever worked for, and so really excited about it.

Colton Holmes (34:24):

Awesome.

Philip Edsel (34:24):

Yeah.

Colton Holmes (34:24):

We'll put all that in the show notes, too.

Philip Edsel (34:26):

Cool.

Colton Holmes (34:26):

Edsel, thanks again, man. Thanks for joining me.

Philip Edsel (34:28):

Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. And thank you for the purple light to match the theme of the episode.

Colton Holmes (34:32):

Yeah, that's right. I didn't even think about that.

Philip Edsel (34:34):

Yeah. Cheers.

Colton Holmes (34:37):

Well, that's it for season one of The Rough Draft. We hope you've enjoyed getting a peek into the creative minds of our guests as much as we have. We'll be back soon for season two, but in the meantime head over to rev.com/podcasts to catch up on any episodes you've missed or to find resources mentioned in any of our episodes. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you again on the next season of The Rough Draft.

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