Dirt. And Hurt.

About 35 years ago, I worked at Ally & Gargano for a creative director called Ed Butler. Ed was widely-considered one of the best writers in the ad business. Because he had had a severe problem with alcohol, he had suffered a series of career set-backs but now he was sober and he had hired me.

Just two from Ed.

Even the story of why Ed hired me illuminates his character. I had mistakenly put a marker-comp in my book. An ad I did for the New York Police Department who were running an internal campaign on suicide prevention. I had forgotten I had left the ad in a sleeve in my book--an ad the NYPD never bought.

But Ed found it. And hired me because of it. The headline read, "Last year, ten New York City cops were shot to death. Seven did it themselves." 

The account I worked on with Ed was a retail account, and I pretty much had to write an ad a week. That meant that once a week, I'd have to write a 100 or so words of body copy, often on a complex financial product, and get it approved by Ed. 

In those days, getting approval didn't involve pinging someone via slack, sending them three emails, or sending them an IM. You usually knew when someone arrived at work or came back from lunch and you mustered up your courage and cornered them then. I was young at the time and Ed was legendary and 30 years older than I. The whole approval process was intimidating.

One day, I showed Ed a piece of body copy.

"You wrote quicker, I'd say faster. But it's your decision." 

He read some more, "Oh," he said, "You're a 'what's more' guy. I like that. Half the battle is writing a list and making it feel like it's not a list."

Then Ed looked at me with his blues. 

"You know how to write. You don't have to show me your copy anymore. You can if you want to, if you need my help. But you don't need to."

Actually, working with Chris Wall and Steve Hayden was much the same way. They might have a nip and tuck here or there, but for the most part, they were hands off. Maybe they'd read things just to get the little jokes I'd regularly slip into my copy just to see if anyone noticed. Once on something I was writing for Chris, I wrote a sentence, "This makes the Crab Nebula look like small potatoes." After he saw that, my hand was essentially stamped.

One thing I've noticed through the years: the more confident and competent the boss, the fewer rounds of revisions you're put through.

Since I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, many of my agency friends ask me how I have the time to handle all the business I handle in addition to staying on top of my social feeds--which get me more business. 

I almost always say, "If you were going to draw a pie chart of your days at Ogilvy, I'd bet 45% is meetings, 25% is wondering why you weren't invited to a meeting, 20% is dealing with 17-rounds of changes on a tweet, 5% is dealing with the time-sheet po-po. That leaves only 5% of your agency life for actual work. (If you believe as I do that meetings hardly count as work.)

When you work on your own, 78% of your time is actual work. 12% of your time is pantomiming to your spouse "I'm on a call," and 10% of your time is chasing clients who think Net120 is ethical. In other words, working on your own it's liberatingly productive.

Even though it's 271-degrees out, I went out for a three-mile walk just after lunch today. I started thinking about this agency vs. self dichotomy. Here's what I got to.

If my job was digging holes--say ten a day, and each hole was made up of 20 shovels-full of dirt, at an agency I'd have to get approval after each shovel was filled. 

I might be told I had too much dirt on a shovel, or not enough. I might be told I threw the dirt into the wrong pile. I might be told I wasn't scoped to dig that hole. Or I should move to another hole because my hole-supervisor noticed a rock in my hole and we had rock-removal people who specialized in this and who billed at a higher hourly rate and we had to bring them in--even if I could do it just fine.

The critiques of my digging wouldn't end there. Someone might say my down-stroke wasn't vertical enough. Or deep enough. Or it was too deep. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Today, all I do is dig holes. I've dug a lot in my life and been making a living at it for parts of five decades, approaching six. I'd wager not that many people are more skilled than I at digging.

So, I dig. With muscle, authority and confidence. Those characteristics are usually synonymous with quality, efficiency and productivity.

That's me.

Dishing the dirt.