It’s a myth that Columbus discovered that the Earth was round.
Aristotle had been a famous exponent of geocentric thinking since around 325 BC.
Geocentric thinking was the belief that the Earth is the centre of the universe and all the planets revolve around it.
So we knew the Earth was round, that’s why in 1492 Columbus sailed west to get to the far East, by going around the world.
He didn’t know America existed, which is why the Caribbean was called the West Indies and native Americans were called Indians, he thought he’d reached India.
But people did know that the earth was round, and they thought it was the centre of the universe and everything revolved around it: geocentric thinking.
Until Polish astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, proved this wasn’t true.
Around 1540, Copernicus proved that the planets didn’t revolve around Earth, we were just one of many planets revolving around the Sun.
This was the change from geocentric to heliocentric thinking.
It became known as the ‘Copernican shift’, a change in thinking so profound that it turned all previous concepts inside-out.
Of course, this was considered heresy by the Church, heliocentric thinking undermined the Church’s place at the centre of creation.
Which is why Copernicus wouldn’t publish it in his lifetime and Galileo, who published it after Copernicus’ death, was imprisoned by the Church for heresy.
The nearest we can get to understanding the difference is when you see something shot on a Go-Pro camera attached to a bicycle wheel.
It looks as if the camera is stationery and the world is revolving around it, but watching from outside we see that actually the world is stationery and the camera is revolving.
I was reminded of this by Dave Dye, who asked me to come on his podcast to talk about John Webster.
I don’t normally do podcasts, but I owe John Webster my career, he took a chance on me when no-one else would, so this was special.
Dave kept asking me what made John Webster different, how come he was more successful, more creative, more innovative, more influential than anyone else?
That’s when it hit me, everyone else was using geocentric thinking, John was using heliocentric thinking.
To put it another way, everyone else thought that advertising was really important, the centre of the world, believing everyone cared about it.
John was the opposite, he worked as if advertising was unimportant in the real world, just a bit of fun, something people only paid attention to if they liked it.
For most ad-people, the ads were meant to work in the advertising world, for John his ads had to work in the much bigger world of real people.
Unlike everyone else, John’s start-point was the public not the advertising industry.
He won more awards than everyone else, but he never cared about awards, never went to award shows, never had any awards on display in his office.
Awards to him, were the geocentric view, the belief that advertising was the centre of the universe and everything revolved around it.
Whereas for John, advertising was something that revolved around the real world of ordinary people.
It was only important if it became part of that real world.
So all John cared about was whether housewives laughed at his ads, whether schoolkids copied his characters, whether taxi drivers whistled his jingles, whether comedians used his ads in their acts, or newspapers used his straplines as headlines.
In short, whether his ads got into the language and became part of REAL life.
That’s the answer to the question Dave Dye kept asking me: “What made John Webster different to everyone else?”
The answer is the Copernican shift.
The change of perspective from geocentric thinking to heliocentric thinking.