‘Save the Planet. It’s the only one with beer.’

Throughout our daily lives, we are bombarded with banal ‘noise’. At every turn, and in every medium, we are faced with advertising, branding, and comment. Increasingly, everyone has an opinion on everything, regardless of their knowledge or understanding of the actual issue. When was the last time you heard a member of the public admit that they had no opinion on a subject when a microphone was thrust into their face by some over-eager newshound from a local/regional/national news agency, even as it became obvious that that was the case?

So, with this saturation of banality, when one does come across a moment of real insight, or at least something that is thought-provoking, it is more than refreshing. I was in Dubai a week or so ago and came across this phrase credited to His Excellency Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Vice-President of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Dubai:

‘The path towards excellence does not stop – on the contrary, success acts as an incentive to greater success’.

As a philosophy, this seems to me to be right on the money. It’s to the point, it’s ambitious and it’s limitless. As a rallying cry for a nation reinventing itself in the modern world (and, arguably, helping to define that world), it is inspirational to the generations building that nation now (even if, for many, Dubai is an adopted home), and for those to come.

I’ve said before on this blog that one of the great joys of my job is that I have never once heard any one of my colleagues at EGD say anything like “that’s good enough” – there is a constant drive to improve what we do and the way we do it. To that end, Sheikh Mohammed’s quotation resonated strongly with me.

The other thing I read last week that also resonated was this:

‘Save the Planet. It’s the only one with beer.’