The Muse Is Out of Focus

Last night, in a lot by the sea, I went to the circus. A huge red-and-white tent was set up on the lot, the ocean air filling it with a sweet combination of brine and possibility. I had a great seat, close enough to see the expressions on the performers’ faces, yet far enough away to get the whole picture. I love the circus. Where else can you see clowns, acrobats, contortionists, and jugglers in one spot and not worry about catching an STD? We don’t have vaudeville any longer, but the circus is working hard to keep that tradition alive.

I was a clown. Not a class clown, an actual performing clown. I worked under a tent. I did bits. I made people laugh and rarely made a kid cry. Because I had good teachers, I understood the purpose and meaning of being a clown. I loved it and, you know, I was good at it. So when I go to the circus, and I go whenever I see an ad for one, I’m watching with a love of the craft and a memory of what it was like.

Sitting there last night, watching the tent breathe and the audience lean forward, I felt that old recognition. Not nostalgia exactly. More like remembering a language I used to speak with my whole body. There are some forms of imagination that don’t ask permission before entering the room. They arrive painted, sweating, grinning, already in motion.

After the show, as I walked home, I bumped into a friend of mine who is an artist. A real, working, pieces in a gallery, artist. He said I seemed excited, and I congratulated him on his keen observation skills. “I am excited,” I told him, “I’ve just been to the circus.” With that, I let loose all the thrills of the acts, the fun, the excitement, the danger, and how it all brought back memories of my clown days. “And now,” he said, “What are you doing now?” I was thrown by the question. I knew he didn’t mean at that moment. I was heading home; he knew that, but his question was more all-encompassing. Not what are you doing this moment, but what are you doing with these feelings, memories, and emotions. What will you create? is what he was asking. I don’t know, was all I could say to him. He smiled, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Your muse is out of focus.” And then he walked off toward his usual bar, leaving me on the street, alone, wondering what the hell he meant and if I could get a muse on DoorDash.

The thing is, I’ve never had a muse. I’ve met women who inspired me, but usually they inspired me to act like an idiot and put notes and flowers on their cars. But I never considered any woman as a muse. Mostly because the idea of a muse seems old-fashioned, out of date, and it’s hard to have a muse when said muse has a restraining order out on you. But the women in the diaphonous dress, lying about on couches, teasing me, looking at me with smoky eyes and inspiring me into writing more, better, deeper, that has never been a part of my process. I know only a few folks who’ve had muses, and they mostly turned out to be dysfunctional relationships, and no writing was done.

So, my friend's comment about my muse being out of focus was interesting, and it started me thinking about muses, what is a muse, why is a muse, and, as is always the case, how it connects to my work with ThoughtLab. And this brought up the question: if you’re a brand, do you have a muse?

What a brand muse actually is

I don’t think a brand muse is mystical. I don’t think she floats into a quarterly planning meeting wearing a sheer robe, taps the CMO on the forehead, and whispers the next campaign platform into existence. Though, honestly, I would attend that meeting.

A brand muse is less dramatic than that, and probably more useful. It’s the instinct underneath the work. The thing a brand keeps returning to when it has to make a choice. It’s the pressure that says, " This sounds like us, this doesn’t, this is alive, this is just approved.”

That matters because brands make decisions all day long. Brands make choices all day long, from campaigns to product names to the weird little customer emails nobody thinks matter until they sound like they were written by a haunted compliance department. written by someone who has clearly been trapped in a compliance basement since 2009. Every one of those choices either sharpens the brand or blurs it a little more.

When the muse is in focus, the brand knows what kind of world it belongs to. Not in a precious way. Not in a “we are a movement” way, unless the brand has earned that, and very few have. I mean, it has a kind of weather, a sense of humor, and enough nerve to know what belongs to it and what doesn’t. The difference between a sentence that would be said and a sentence that only exists because sixteen people survived a meeting and nobody had the strength to fight anymore.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. A muse is not the work itself. She’s what helps the work know where to go.

For a clown, maybe that’s timing. For a writer, maybe it’s the little internal shiver that tells you a line is either honest or trying too hard. For a brand, it’s the creative instinct that gives everything a center. Without it, the work can still be clean. It can still be strategic. It can still be very pleased with itself in a deck.

But it won’t have a pulse.

When the muse is in focus

You can feel it when a brand knows what it is doing.

Not everything is loud. Not everything has to juggle fire while riding a horse. Sometimes the work is quiet and exact. Sometimes it’s strange enough to make someone in the room nervous. The point is not volume. The point is focus.

Old Spice knew. At some point, somebody looked at a men’s body wash brand and decided the answer was not more steam, more abs, or another man staring into a mirror as if soap had finally solved his childhood trauma. The answer was absurdity with a straight face. A man on a horse. A voice that moved faster than logic. A whole little universe where confidence had become unhinged, but somehow still smelled good.

That is a muse in focus. You may not like the work. You may be tired of the work. But you know, immediately, that it belongs to Old Spice.

Liberty Mutual has it too, even though I still can’t fully explain why. LiMu Emu and Doug should probably not work. An emu and a man in a little insurance sitcom sounds like the result of a whiteboard session that went unattended for too long. But there they are, year after year, living inside this odd little world the brand keeps choosing on purpose. That “on purpose” matters.

A lot of brands stumble into something interesting once, then spend the next three years sanding it down so nobody gets blamed for liking it. The braver thing is to keep going. To protect the strange little door once it opens. To say, yes, this is ours, even if someone in a conference room has questions.

That’s what focus looks like. The work has a center. It can bend without becoming someone else. It can change campaigns, change formats, change the joke, and still carry the same charge.

The muse is not there to make the brand pretty. She is there to make the brand recognizable in its bones.

When the muse gets blurred

You can feel that too, though it doesn’t always announce itself as failure. The work still looks professional. That’s the dangerous part. Nothing is broken in an obvious way. The lighting is good, the voiceover is warm, and the message has been tested until everyone who needed to feel safe could feel safe before lunch. Then the thing arrives in the world with no pulse.

This is why so many car commercials feel like they were all raised in the same extremely clean suburb. There is always a road and a view, always someone driving as if changing lanes has revealed something tender and enormous about the human condition. And, they never use their directional.

Nobody sets out to make forgettable work. I don’t believe that. Somewhere early on, the idea probably had teeth. It might have let the car behave strangely, or given the driver something more interesting than a smoother commute. It might even have come close to telling the truth, which in advertising can be treated like finding a raccoon in the nursery. Then the idea entered the room, which is usually where the blur begins. Not because the people there are stupid. Most of them are smart, and many of them have good taste. But a clear instinct is hard to defend when everyone else is holding a spreadsheet. The unusual thing has to explain itself. The safe thing just has to sit there looking responsible.

So the edge comes off. The joke gets smaller. The line that made everyone nervous becomes a line that makes no one feel anything. By the time the work is finished, it has survived the process, but survival is not the same as life.

That’s the blurred muse. You can still see the outline of what might have been there, something with shape, something with nerve, something that once knew where it wanted to go. But now it’s just another car on another beautiful road, heading nowhere in particular.

The people who blur her

The easy version of this argument is that boring work comes from boring people. I don’t buy that.

Some of the people in those rooms are talented. The boring work is not proof that everyone involved is boring. A person can have taste, nerve, and a half-finished screenplay in a drawer, then still spend Tuesday afternoon asking whether the strange idea might make legal uncomfortable. That’s not a lack of imagination. That’s fear with a calendar invite. They didn’t enter the room, hoping to sand the life out of something. They entered the room responsible for money, reputation, timelines, jobs, and the terrible little weather system known as approval.

That kind of pressure changes people. A strange idea can be thrilling when it’s still in someone’s head, but once it has to survive a meeting, thrill starts looking like risk. Risk needs a defense. Defense needs numbers. Numbers have a way of making instinct seem childish, even when instinct is the only reason the work was alive in the first place.

So people get careful. They ask for the line to be softened. They wonder if the joke will land. They say the concept is interesting, which is often where interesting concepts go to hear the bad news. Nobody thinks they’re killing anything. They’re just making the work easier to approve.

That’s how the muse gets blurred. Not by one villain with a red pen, but by good people trying not to be wrong in public.

And I get it. Being wrong in public is awful. Being the person who approved the weird thing is even worse if the weird thing fails. But there’s a cost to making everything defensible before it’s allowed to breathe. After a while, the work no longer feels created. It feels managed.

That may be the real danger. Not failure. Not even bad taste. The real danger is a room full of smart people slowly teaching each other to distrust the first living thing that walks in.

How to know she’s gone

You can usually tell when the muse has left the building because the work starts sounding perfectly reasonable.

That’s the curse of it. Dead work rarely announces itself by being terrible. Terrible would almost be a mercy. Terrible has a smell. What usually shows up is something clean, balanced, approved, and impossible to remember five minutes later. The sentences behave. The visuals behave. The whole thing behaves itself right into the grave.

This is where brand work gets tricky, because everyone can point to the parts that are technically working. The message is clear. The audience is defined. The strategy has a nice little sentence at the top of the deck, wearing the shoes it bought for a conference. On paper, nothing looks wrong. But the work could belong to anyone.

That’s the giveaway. Swap the logo, and the body doesn’t reject the transplant. The voice has no fingerprints. The idea has no strange little scar that makes it unmistakable. It may be professional, but professional is not the same as alive.

A brand with no muse can still produce a lot of work. It can fill the calendar, feed the campaign, and keep the machine warm. What it can’t do is make people feel that someone with a point of view was in the room. There’s no sense of choice. No pressure. No odd little angle that tells you a human being fought for something.

And maybe that’s what my friend meant when he said my muse was out of focus. Maybe he wasn’t accusing me of having no imagination. Maybe he was telling me the signal had gotten soft. The thing I used to recognize under the tent, the thing that arrived painted and sweating and already in motion, was still there somewhere. I just wasn’t looking at it clearly enough.

The Takeaway

I keep thinking back to that tent by the sea.

The performers knew where the edge was. You could feel it. Not because everything was dangerous, though some of it was, but because the whole thing had a pulse. Clowning, when it’s done well, is not just falling down in large pants. It’s timing, taste, nerve, and a deep respect for the audience. You have to know what you’re serving. You have to know what kind of foolishness belongs to you.

Maybe that’s true for brands too.

A brand without a muse can still function. It can sell things, run meetings, make ads, send emails that begin with “We’re excited to announce.” The machine can keep moving for a long time without anyone asking whether the work still has a soul. But when the muse is out of focus, everything gets a little softer. The voice loses its shape. The strange parts get explained away. The work becomes easier to approve and harder to care about.

At ThoughtLab, that’s often where the real work begins. Not with making a brand louder or prettier, but helping it see what’s already trying to come through. The instinct. The nerve. The thing under the makeup.

I don’t know if I have a muse. I still think she sounds like trouble, and I have enough of that without inviting a woman in a diaphanous dress to start making notes in the margins. But I know what it feels like when something comes into focus. I felt it under the tent. I felt it walking home. I felt it when my friend put a hand on my shoulder and said the thing I didn’t want to hear.

Your muse is out of focus.

Maybe that’s not an insult. Maybe it’s an invitation to look harder.