There was no specific moment.
No ‘a-ha’ that popped me out, toast like, from comfortable corporate life. No event that persuaded me to turn away from a great job at a brilliant holding company, from colleagues and clients I loved working with, towards my current remit of self-selected passion projects, coffee-shop wi-fi, and lanyards. So many lanyards.
It was, as all these things are, a combination of factors largely beyond my control, with serendipity and sheer blind luck (the ones we all ignore the most) key among them. The freedom to make what might be seen as a risky choice is not one I take for granted. It is an enormous privilege, which I owe to so many. Employers, friends, clients and colleagues. My mentors. My family. Those who gave me the emotional, financial and network permission to roll the dice. The people who established for me both the platform from which to jump, and a landing zone towards which to aim. This wasn’t an act of lone bravery.
To coin a phrase, it takes a village to be an idiot.
So, how’s it going? Do you feel ever so worthy? The opening question I get the most from slightly wide-eyed friends and former colleagues in Ad-land. Wide-eyed with, it must be said, not a huge amount of visible jealousy.
No, obviously. I don’t. I feel, in no particular order, confused, nervous, naive, under-qualified, frustrated, excited, impatient, enthralled, impressed and a litany of other imposter emotions, all before my no-longer-expensed first coffee of the day. I’ve already learnt some lessons though. And because I’m a planner, I’ve organised them into a list. Three or five points, of course. No even numbers. Not my first list-writing rodeo. So, here we go.
Accidentally on Purpose
This is the big one. The first hurdle. The one at which so many fear they’ll fall. But here’s the thing… it’s not real. It doesn’t matter what your reason is. There’s no hierarchy of motivation. No league table of worthy causes or sufficiently urgent tasks. Run for parliament or run a marathon. Food Bank or World Bank. Spend more time with the kids. Spend less time with the kids. Give yourself a break from the challenge and the rush, or the rush of a new challenge. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. If it’ll be good for you, it’ll be good for the world. A secondment is not predicated on pure hair-shirted altruism alone. It is, first and foremost, selfish. It is, and must be, good for you. And that’s OK.
You don’t know what you know
Advertising is a glorious industry in which to work, to build a network, to establish a skill set. A brilliant foundation from which to step into any number of hugely different projects and be able to make an immediate and substantial difference. A career in advertising is some of the best training a person can have for something that is absolutely not advertising. The diversity of intellectual challenge, of creative output, of clients. The speed, the urgency. The frenzied jumping from one sort of question, one sort of client, one sort of emergency to another, and then discovering how unexpectedly relevant the time spent in one has been when brought to the other. The utterly preposterous reel of stories, anecdotes and memories we all carry with us after a couple of decades wandering the roads of ad-land.
Turns out, though, we pick up a bit more than we might realise over the course of those wanderings. The ability to cut to the core of an argument. To distill the complex into the memorable. To navigate or circumvent onerous processes. To assemble and function within diverse teams that (ideally) overcome hierarchy and turn together towards the best idea in the room. And, most unusual, the instinct to make it fun. To remember that we are the best episode of the Apprentice. The entertaining one. The one everyone looks forward to.
These skills are astonishingly valuable. Almost universally so. Trust those instincts. Trust that experience. Take what you do and point it at something new. Change the object, not the subject. Your value to any new endeavour is built upon to your faith in your existing skills, habits and instincts, not the abandonment of them.
You don’t know what you don’t know
Oh people are clever, aren’t they? The most refreshing aspect of taking time away from the clever people you know will be spending time with lots of clever people you don’t. Charity founders and volunteers. Politicians and pollsters. Campaigners, journalists and entrepreneurs. It’s like discovering a whole page to the intellectual menu that had been stuck shut. A back-room buffet of delicious ignorance. Listen up, write everything down, and top up your faith-in-humanity account.
Network access granted
If the first question is the wide-eyed ‘how’s it going?’, the second is even more predictable. Can I help? Literally without exception. What can I do?
Life in ad-land is by the nature of what we do a highly networked existence. We know who can create branded totes at one in the morning. We know an editor who can cut that. A director who’d shoot something perfect. A writer who could take a white paper and make it a colourful speech. A researcher who can moderate a group. In Milton Keynes. Tomorrow. A designer who’d be great on that. A VO studio round the corner. A planner who really, really gets Gen-Z fashion. We have, most of all, a friend who will care about this project just as much as everyone else in this room but has skills that none of them do, and will want to chip in. That network is the glorious, invaluable, under-appreciated pension of a career in Advertising. When people offer, say yes. Because they will.
One way & two way doors
Ah, Bezos. It’s a list. End with a third party endorsement, after all.
Jeff talks of a triage process for decision making, before making any decision itself. Is this a one-way door, from which there is no return, or a two-way door, from which it will be possible to turn around and head back. Too often, we mistake one for the other, thinking that a decision is a permanent change of course, as opposed simply to walking into a room from which we are free to escape at any time.
A career change is just that. A two-way door into a room of new treasure. And here’s the clincher. That treasure isn’t nailed down. There’s no rule governing what you can bring back with you. This isn’t the ‘Sports Almanac’ in Back to the Future. New experiences, new skills, new connections. The flood of fear, the joy of ignorance and the relief of realising your skills are applicable. New faith in your existing network. Exposure to the absurd talents, characters and working practices that exist all around us. Grab it all, like it’s the end of Crystal Maze. Stuff it in your jumper, down your pants, in your socks. And when you’re done, when the fan in that Crystal Dome turns off, turn around, find that door again. It’ll still be there. You can choose to go back, or you can choose to stay, and play again. Ad-land will still be there, brilliant and daft and underestimated. You’ll be better for your time away, if you return. And if you don’t, if you decide to stay, then where you’ve ended up will be better for your time spent first in Ad-land. It’s a non zero sum game.
Fuck’s sake. Lists of five. Patterns of three. Two way doors. Non zero sum games. See, you can take the planner out of the agency, but you still can’t take the agency out of the planner…