#343 The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness: David Ogilvy

**David Senra** (0:00)
This book is about philosophy, it's about ethos, beliefs, and all those things which gentlemen love to yap about.
If it's any consolation though, this book is also about sex, as it's written primarily to address a rather awkward question. Can a $2 billion gorilla like Ogilvy ever be svelte, sultry, and sexy again? The Ogilvy Agency of the 1950s and 1960s was far hotter than WK, CB, these are all these other competitors that they're listing at the time, and the rest of them combined.
The question is, can we still be gorgeous now that we're several hundred pounds heavier?
The answer to our dilemma can be summed up in two pithy words, divine discontent.
Decades before advertising profits were preaching good enough and good enough, Ogilvy was already practicing it.
But what did David actually mean by divine discontent?
Here's an interpretation.
Don't bow your head. Don't know your place. Defy the gods. Don't sit back. Don't give in. Don't give up. Don't win silver medals.
Don't be so easily happy with yourself. Don't be spineless. Don't be gutless. Don't be toadies. Don't go gentle into that good night. And don't ever, ever allow a single scrap of rubbish out of this agency.
This handbook will tell us how to make David's divine discontent a habit by the daily practice of the following creative habits.
That was an excerpt from the book I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is The Internal Pursuit of Unhappiness. The subtitle is Being Very Good Is No Good. You have to be very, very, very, very good and is written by the team at Ogilvy & Mather and David Ogilvy.
Before jumping back into the book, I'm gonna tell you how this unexpected episode came about. I've been spending the last like week and a half deep in study on one of my favorite filmmakers. I'm making an episode on him right now.
It's Quentin Tarantino. I get to the end of the book on Tarantino. The epilogue of that book blew my mind. I'm sitting at my desk. I put the book down and on my desk to the left of my computer monitor has been this book. I've read this book, The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness. And you can't even really call it a book. It's 65 pages. You can read it, I don't know, in an hour. And for some reason, I decided to pick it back up. And then I just in one sitting, read through the book again. And even though I read it before and I'm obsessed with David Ogilvy, I consider him one of my personal heroes. And I didn't even know who he was until I read Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. And he kept referring to Ogilvy as a genius. And so I was like, oh, I gotta find out who this guy is. And so I bought every book that I could find on him. And then somebody actually told me, they're like, I'm sure you have every book, but are you gonna do an episode on the Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness? I was like, what is that? So months ago, I wound up buying this book. So anyways, long story short, I had this idea in my mind, I was like, oh, I like this book, but you know, I can't ever do an episode on it. You know, it's too small. And for some reason, after I read it this time, I thought of an idea I learned a long time ago. And this is probably because a main story, the next episode will be obviously on Quentin Tarantino.
And what's remarkable about reading this book is, you know, there's all these ideas that Tarantino is finding in like the 1970s that he doesn't use until like the early 2000s.
And I finished this book and I think of this idea I learned about seven or probably seven years ago when I read Danny Meyer, Danny Meyer's famous New York restaurateur and the founder of Shake Shack.
And in Danny's autobiography, he's constantly coming up with like new ideas that no other restaurants have used before.
And he has this idea where he would prompt himself with five words, because people would say, oh, you can't do that, like no restaurants done that before. And so he would say, whoever wrote the rule, and then he would just say like whoever wrote the rule, for example, that you can't make a high quality hot dog cart that it was actually the very first version of what would come into Shake Shack. Shake Shack is now, you know, a four and a half billion dollar company today and started off as a hot dog cart in a park in New York City. And so I realized by refusing to even attempt to do a podcast on this book, that I was making up just fake rules. Like whoever wrote the rule that the book has to be, you know, 300 pages for me or a hundred pages or whatever it is for me to do an episode on. So I'm gonna jump into this book.