Ignore Everybody is Hugh MacLeod’s collection of 40 lessons about creativity, drawn from his years of drawing cartoons on the backs of business cards while working in advertising and later building a career as an artist and marketing consultant. The lessons are short, most just a few pages, and written in a direct, conversational voice that matches the spirit of his cartoons.
The title captures the book’s opening argument: the best ideas are the ones that make other people uncomfortable, and if you wait for permission or approval, you’ll never make anything original. MacLeod is not saying that all feedback is worthless. He is saying that in the early stages, when an idea is new and fragile, exposing it to other people’s opinions is more likely to kill it than to improve it.
Other lessons cover topics like the “sex and cash theory” (every creative person needs a boring job to pay the bills while they develop their art), why your plan for making money from your creativity should be your own (not someone else’s template), why “good enough” is the enemy of great, and why the market for something to believe in is infinite. The lessons are short enough to read one at a time but connected enough to form a coherent philosophy when taken together.
For founders, the book is most relevant for those in the early stages when the idea is still strange to other people and the path forward isn’t clear. MacLeod’s insistence on doing the creative work before you have an audience or a business model mirrors the reality of most startups: you have to build something before you know whether it will work, and you have to keep building it even when people tell you it won’t.
The writing is informal and the book is heavily illustrated with MacLeod’s trademark business card cartoons. Some readers will finish it in an hour. The format is closer to a blog than a traditional book, which makes sense given that much of the material originated as blog posts. If you’re looking for a systematic framework, this isn’t it. If you want a short, honest book that gives you permission to trust your own creative instincts, it delivers.
