Direct from Cannes: The wisdom of Michael Patrick King

For me, one of the highlights of the past few days was listening to Michael Patrick King. Michael is best known for writing most of  ‘Sex and the City’. He is also the executive producer and the writer of ‘2 Broke Girls’. Michael believes that the key to his success is his passion for storytelling.

Michael believes in creating characters that are ‘emotionally volatile’. And to create these characters, these ideas and these stories, he believes in listening and understanding.

I really enjoyed Michael’s world-view that to create brilliance you need to ‘follow the energy of the world’. It is a combination of what you want to do and what is open for you. When you see a green light and a red light. Go green. Simple.

Michael stressed the need to trust your won guts and instinct. Yes, there is a need to listen and understand people. In fact the only way to create greatness is to ride the next trend. And that requires real understanding. The challenge today however is the fact that there are so many opinions and they are so loud. So which view represents how people truly feel? The answer lies in surrounding yourself with people who have a feel for this world. Ultimately, it is about telling stories a week before people start saying it in their bedrooms.

When asked what kind of people do you like working with? Michael’s answer was even more intriguing– ‘People who have risk enthusiasm’. Think about it. There are so many failures around us. And yet to create magic you need to do something, which has not been done before. So you need people who can take risk, enthusiastically.

So should stories represent life? The answer is ‘No’. Stories should not be about life. They should be about heightened life. Do people in real life speak like his characters.  And Michael’s answer is, ‘they would if they had a writer to express how they feel’. Brilliant.

The last part of what really inspired me was Michael’s definition of success.  When do you know your work is a hit? Answer – ‘You never know. It is about looking at the next episode. Than the next season.’ The answers made me reflect on how quickly we in our business start thinking of ourselves as successful, and start behaving successful. But maybe the greatest way to succeed is to never truly feel entirely successful. It keeps your soul hungry. It keeps you humble and forces you to be open to embrace ‘energy of the world’.