Aging & Wisdom Quote by David Ogilvy

Ogilvy’s advice lands like a martini-dry joke, but it’s also a piece of brand strategy aimed squarely at the self. “Develop your eccentricities” reads as permission to cultivate quirks deliberately, not apologize for them. The punchline - “people won’t think you’re going gaga” - is classic Ogilvy: humor that smuggles in a hard-eyed view of how audiences work. Because the real subject here isn’t aging; it’s perception management.

As an advertising man, Ogilvy understood that people don’t experience you raw. They experience a narrative. If your oddities appear suddenly in old age, they get filed under decline. If they’ve been consistent, they become “character.” The line exposes a cruel social logic: we grant eccentricity to those who’ve already trained us to expect it. Consistency, even in strangeness, reads as authenticity. Inconsistency reads as trouble.

The subtext is also a quiet rejection of corporate blandness. Ogilvy built an empire on the disciplined craft of persuasion, yet he knew the marketplace rewards distinctiveness. Eccentricity is differentiation; it’s the personal equivalent of a memorable campaign. Start early, and you’re not merely tolerated - you’re legible.

There’s a darker flicker beneath the wit: aging is a credibility test, and society is eager to interpret older people through the lens of deterioration. Ogilvy’s solution is pragmatic and slightly cynical: get ahead of the story. Be strange on purpose now, so later you can be yourself without needing a doctor’s note.