Denters wanted.

I don’t read a lot of “business books.” Generally, I’ve found they're written by people who aren’t in business or people who are longer on flamboyance than they are on substance. 

What’s more, I’ve always been more of a “Plutarch’s Lives” kind of guy. Believing than most human and business and social-dynamic verities could be studied through reading the seminal works of seminal thinkers.

That said, a little over 21 years ago when I started my first stint at an agency no one’s heard of any longer, Ogilvy & Mather, I had a dot-com client, Mark Barden, who was also a famous planner. He was then, and he is now, associated with Adam Morgan, author of “Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders." You can say "hi" to Mark here. I'm at least 93% sure he won't bite you.

I read Morgan’s book and liked it. Having come from a series of small, feisty agencies like Ally & Gargano, the idea from a marketing point of view of kicking a bigger, bloated competitor in the kishkas appealed to my street-fighter sensibility. You might say that some of the best of DDB, indeed, the best of advertising comes from that sensibility: Volkswagen, Avis, Chiat\Day's Apple and more. You cut a bully down to size. 

Working with Mark Barden didn’t last long. The client itself didn’t really have a business model and when the dot-com bubble burst like a dam in a spring flood, the client all but disappeared.

But I admired Mark and thought he was both honest and smart. And challenging. So when he recommended—about 15 years ago—Adam Morgan’s new book, “The Pirate Inside,” I rushed out, ordered a copy and devoured it, I believe in one sitting.

I was in charge of a big, dumb, moribund agency at the time and with all my naively-derived myopia, I ordered twenty copies for senior people in the beige bureaucracy of what was hyperbolically called an agency. I’d bet fifty-cents, none of the twenty people I gave the book to ever broke the book’s spine, much less read any of its 350 pages.

It’s been a decade-and-a-half since I read The Pirate Inside. So I don’t really know if my memory of what I read is really what I read so long ago. Accuracy is not really important here. Nor is the provenance of an idea. What’s important is that some piece of Morgan nettled some part of my cortex and helped move my belief system.

What I got from Morgan is a characterization of behavior that is absolutely vital to creativity while it is simultaneously an anathema to modern agencies and the modern Vulture-Capital plutocratic Holding Company state. In fact, if you look at the current television news images of small citizens against rows of militarized, Praetorian and heavily-weaponized ‘defenders of the state,’ you’ll get the idea.

You dare not, today in any circumstances, be contrary. Remember your Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Give it an industry-specific shove and you quickly get to, “In a time of universal conformity, being yourself is a revolutionary act.”

In the Pirate Inside, I learned that smart social organizations (i.e. agencies, corporations, fraternities, sororities, nuclear families) need a “denter.”

A denter is someone who, 'wants to put a dent in the world'.

Here are some key characteristics of denters.

1. They regard themselves as employed by the brand (or idea), rather than the company. Denters see the company essentially as little more than a financial resource - their real loyalty is to their brand. They set out to do only what is right for the brand.

2. Denters are not driven by careerism - they are not doing their job for the role that it will get them afterwards. They are totally committed to doing whatever it takes to make their brand succeed - even if in doing so they get on the wrong side of people who might seem important for their long-term role in the company. As such, many made it clear that they were not particularly concerned about whether they would still be with the same employer in 10 years' time. While they would not necessarily choose to leave, they were very confident that they could find a job elsewhere.

3. Denters are also embrace tension, rather than accept dilution of the brand vision or idea. They may not necessarily seek tension, but they neither mind it nor retreat from it when it is encountered.

4. Denters are defined as much by what they refuse to accept as what they have passion for.

In the HR-led culture of agencies and clients today, being a denter earns you that worst of all career-ending epithets. It’s the 2020’s equivalent of the whispering that you were a Communist in the 1950s. It’s been used against me.

“George is hard to work with.” “George asks too many questions.” “We ask George to do X and he does Y.” “George argues.” “George is like a dog with a bone.” “George is stubborn and battles for his point of view.”

If you can get your hands on the various vomitous assessment criteria found on most “Employee Evaluation Forms,” you’ll see phrases like these: “_____is a good collaborator.” “_____ seeks consensus.” “_______is a bridge-builder.”

Such personnel attributes might be beneficial in a pre-school environment, but in an environment that is meant to encourage energy, irreverence, insouciance and general creative mayhem, it is counter-productive bordering on stupid.

The modern holding company-agency-client-CMO-fired-every-42-months nexus demands complacency and cooperation.

It destroys denters.

If you ever again wonder why so much work and so many workplaces suck and why so many so-called creative people feel like they’ve had the marrow sucked from their pliant bones, notice how smoothly everything is running.

There’s not a dent or a denter in sight.

Stan' up and Fight.

One of the great—perhaps the only—positive about being old in our business, or any business, I suppose, is that your pulse begins to modulate.

Let me explain what I mean.

By the time you’re forty years into working, or forty years into a marriage, or three decades into being a parent, you’ve seen a lot. You’ve gone through losses of giant accounts, asshole bosses, unreasonable demands, false accusations, and mean-spirited rebukes.

You’ve endured innuendo, politics, meanness, lies, back-stabbing, front-stabbing and side-stabbing. You’ve been hit upside the head, had your ass handed to you and been knocked down more times than Mike Tyson’s sparring partner.

You’ve suffered broken bones, scraped knees, black eyes and a black soul. Your soul, to badly mangle one of America’s greatest poets, Langston Hughes, has grown deep like the river. You bleed the torrents of the ages. You bear scars, visible and invisible.

And you have survived.

As the old saying goes, you’ve been down so long, it looks like up to you. You’ve reached the point where you don’t mind being kicked in the kishkas simply because it feels so good when they stop.

And you have survived.

That’s it, really. When I look at someone in their early 40s who has a big title and a good reel and an arrogance to go with it, I don’t say anything. I listen to him talk (it’s usually a him) and talk and talk. I listen to them like young Portuguese might have listened to Columbus five centuries ago as he stood before a crinkly map of terra incognito as if he knew the route of every wave and the position and populace of every land and island.

I listen to him talk and talk and talk, full of the full flush of arrogance, like an unbeaten boxer before he’s ever kissed the canvas. He thinks he has all the answers. He thinks he’ll dodge all the haymakers, uppercuts, jabs and hooks. As well as the short piston of a Marciano-right launched to full-velocity in the space of just six inches or eight and could bazooka through a wall of reinforced concrete like my mother’s scowl.

I listen and I laugh to myself and I shake my head, without ever moving it.

Wait, my friend. Wait.

There are few people in any field in any profession in any family situation who don’t suffer their comeuppance. Willie Mays started his major league career going 0 for 21. He asked wise old Leo to send him back to the Minneapolis Millers where he had batted .477.

There are few people anywhere who don’t get knocked down, debilitated, bruised. Who, while lying on the pavement and looking bleary at the stars don’t say to themselves, one time or another, ‘What for am I doing this? Why don’t I just stay down.’

And frankly, by the time you’re my age—and my level of pain-in-the-assness—you’ve had to pick yourself up five times or ten or even twenty. You’ve amassed a track record of getting up again, and even then, you’re never quite sure about knock down twenty-one.

But especially that first time. The first time you crash into a wall or face the portcullis of indifference or the crafty grin of cruelty. That first time it happens, and then that second time, and then that third, how you act then, how you behave and perform, how you get to your feet then, well, guess what?

You don’t know, you don’t ever know how you’ll deal with the inevitable until it happens to you.

And it will.

Four months away.

Rockwell Kent’s “Wreck of the D.T. Sheridan’’ (circa 1949).

It's been almost four months since my wife grabbed me by my right ear, twisted it hard and dragged me kicking and screaming from our Manhattan co-op. This is the longest I've been away from the City since my sojourn south of the border when I toiled so long ago for the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League.

I'm beginning to feel like my brain is turning to cottage cheese.

I miss the noise of the city. I miss my friends and people I work with. I miss kibbitzing with cab drivers, the fruit stand woman, the guy I buy bagels from in the morning. 

I miss having the Times delivered to my door. And the Wall Street Journal on Saturdays. I miss talking about sports with my doormen and hearing the neighbors' kids playing in the hallway.

I miss Zabar's. And Sable's. And Katz's. And, in general, people of my faith--a faith built on the belief that god exists in a well-seasoned and well-sliced pastrami sandwich made with two really good, chewy, carroway-heavy slices of just-out-of-the-oven rye bread.

I even miss cursing at cabbies running lights. I miss rich ladies walking dogs that by rights are really cats. I miss walking two miles into a gentrifying Spanish Harlem and eating at Patsy's, an old Italian stronghold on 118th and First, for one of their bubbling pizzas right out of their ancient coal-fired brick oven which is a distant relative of Vesuvius.

I never would have believed I'd be living in a land where Lilly Pulitzer is considered OG, with people wearing Nantucket red shorts without irony. In fact, I haven't seen a tattoo in three weeks and against all odds I'm beginning to miss self-mutilation.

That's right. I'm beginning to miss my cottage cheese mind,

However, there's a sandy beach not 500 feet from our home that allows dogs. And Whiskey swims there three times a day. I toss her duck and we race over algaed rocks in pursuit. 

However, I sleep at night with the French doors open to a long wooden balcony and I hear the small waves of the Sound twenty feet below me. About 1000 feet into the sound is a red nun buoy with a clanging bell that peals each night with each wave. I told my wife this morning that if it were a church bell, it would be four-million o'clock.

However, I enjoy the ever-present crush of business--which seems to find its way inexorably to my keyboard--and I especially enjoy making money for myself, not for some far-away executives who I was making rich, who I would never meet and who had the temerity to kick me to the curb because they failed to recognize the fundamental difference between price and value.

Yeah, four months up here on the Gingham Coast. Four months away from the world that nursed me into manhood. Four months away from coffee with my friends and Shun Lee West and, dare I say it, the chazerei of a life bursting at the seams with fullness and, yes, good fortune.

Four months is a long time and four months is a short time. All is fine up here. My wife and I haven't killed each other. Whiskey is in treatment and doing well. And my kids are, in the best way, special.

I hope, soon, the horrors of Amerika in its Age of Ignoble Ignorance will start to pixelate then disappear like the taste of an existential rice cake in your mouth. I hope, soon, we can have a chat or take a walk or share a cuppa or just exchange a glance.

I've never been a giant fan of normal.

And I'm ok with my present state of abnormality.

But it would be nice to see you all again.

And please, keep the faith.

And above even that, keep laughing.

Please read this. Please do something. Now.

I met my oldest and wisest friend when we were just 13 and ninth-graders together in an elite private school in one of New York's tonier suburbs. I've written about Fred a lot in this space. As you'd expect I would, having known him for 49 years.

In fact, I can say with only the slightest bit of hyperbole that Fred saved my life. Growing up with two brutally demanding parents, Fred was the first person who ever told me I was smart. For that, I thank him nearly every day.

Fred is now the Executive Director of a noble organization--The Police Athletic League. The PAL calls itself "The Best Friend a Kid Can Have." That slogan might be hard to reckon with in the wake of George Floyd and countless others.

But Fred believes it. And so do I.

America has an original sin that we are all damaged by. That original sin affects each of us every day. We all have work to do to overcome the toxins of that sin. Racism, hate and violence are our national SuperFund site.

Let's all pitch in and start cleaning.

With Fred's permission.
And from The New York Daily News, June 3, 2020.

Our cops, our children and our country: George Floyd and how to get through this wrenching moment

By FREDERICK J. WATTS

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |

JUN 03, 2020 | 5:00 AM

I am no stranger to policing. My late father was a New York City police officer; I was a prosecutor for 30 years with the Manhattan district attorney’s office; and I now run the Police Athletic League (PAL), which serves thousands of inner-city youth in educational and recreational programs.

Still, nothing in my background prepared me for what I viewed on the video of Derek Chauvin putting his knee on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes.

My wife and I are the parents of two young men. Like all parents, we have worried about our children from the time they were young. Will they make friends; do well in school; make the varsity team; drive safely? Will they become happy and successful adults, pursuing friendships, education and careers?

But we are an African-American family, and our household, like those of African-American families nationwide, has an additional guttural fear: that our children will be victims of senseless violence solely because of their race. Perhaps they will go for a run and end up like Ahmaud Arbery — killed for the crime of jogging while black. I still worry that my now adult sons may have a routine encounter with a police officer and suffer the fate of Floyd. Like so many African American parents, I have a raw fear deep in my chest that I can never fully escape.

This fear found expression when my oldest son was asked to walk a family friend’s dog late one evening. The friend was a white adult, and lived in a private house in a largely white neighborhood. The friend had casually told my son to “hop through the porch window” if he could not find the key to the front door.

The friend meant no harm. But my wife and I were horrified. We knew what the friend did not appreciate. This act — a black teenager climbing through a window — could invite danger, perhaps death. Our son might never be given the chance to explain himself, an opportunity our friend blithely assumed would be available to him. What followed were explosive pleas by my wife and me, imploring our son that he must be more careful; that he bore an extra burden to ensure his own safety. Our appeals were loud and visceral, and those feelings of fear and anger came flooding back in the wake of the killings of Arbery and Floyd.

Yet there are reasons for hope. At our PAL centers, volunteer police officers coach sports teams made up of at-risk youth; read to children in afterschool programs; and compose and perform music with teens in PAL’s Cops & Kids Chorus. Those officers engage with youth in ways that allow them to internalize that these young ballplayers, students and singers “matter.” The officers live the reality that their young charges are not “less than,” but rather are the precious children of our community.

The very creation of these relationships makes it far less likely these officers would visit violence upon someone like Floyd, or stand idly by while it occurs.

PAL and many other outstanding non-profits confront the challenges of economic and social inequality head-on. Whether it is employing underserved teens in summer youth employment programs, or sending 100% of PAL’s College Access Program participants to college, countless officers and citizens are committed to leveling the playing field. Even in times of despair, these organizations show that it is possible to make a difference.

If you are like me, you have become emotional, perhaps moved to tears, over the killing of innocent people that we have witnessed. In response, I, along with many others, choose to fight. And, in this dark hour, I remain hopeful we will wage the fight by continuing to promote opportunities for youth, and help create the conditions and culture in law enforcement that promote social justice.

Watts, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, is executive director of the Police Athletic League.

Please donate to the Police Athletic League.

Write? Right!

Thank goodness that I don't feel this way very often, but I feel it tonight. 

I'm so saddened by the state of the world, so outraged, so angry that I feel nearly immobilized. My brain seems stuffed with cotton. Like most everyone else, I'm finding focus hard to come by.

But all is not lost.

And if you know me at all, you know that somehow I seem to be able to get up one more time than I get knocked down. I think amid all my failures as a human and a father, I've passed that on to my two daughters. 

Today, we linguistically anesthetize so many qualities I seldom know what things mean anymore. I suppose common parlance would call me resilient. But I'm rigid sometimes, and I associate the word with toys like Gumby. Just like I can't hear the word transparent without thinking of Saran Wrap. I don't think resilient is very good. I'd rather just be known as tough.

On Tuesday night, I started teaching an advertising class at Ad House. Over Zoom, of course.

I had prepared fairly copious notes beforehand. Not so that I could lecture. But so I could find details on things that my peripatetic mind leapt to.

So I had at my fingertips jpegs of about a hundred ads, fifty commercials and a bunch of 'how-to' things I had compiled through the years. The oldest I had been carrying around since 1984; I believe it was older than anyone in the class.

As I was jabbering on and talking about next week's assignment, I gave my students what I guess you could call resiliency techniques. Though I'd rather call them 'how to get through a tough patch.' Or what to do when you're up to your neck in shit and someone starts throwing baseballs at your head.

I don't have any real wisdom on the topic. Though over 40 years of working and 62 years of living I've had so many ups and downs, I suppose I could have earned the nickname Otis.

But I did say something to my class on Tuesday night that I'm thinking about now. It's something I learned from one of the Twentieth Century's greatest diarists, Viktor Klemperer. 

Klemperer, a Jew and a dissident, lived in Dresden, Germany. He survived the Nazis, Hap Arnold's firebombing of the city and ten years under communist rule when Dresden was part of East Germany.

Klemperer survived by writing.

Not writing to earn a living. Writing to earn his sanity.

That was my advice to my class--even the non-writers enrolled. Write. Write everything. Write observations. Describe your room. Write about the thing you're working on. Write as if you're blind-folded and don't edit yourself. Just write. You might write your way out of a problem.

That's what I told my class.

That's what I did tonight.

Blinding.

About two weeks ago I read a book called, “Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring.” You can buy the book here.  And you can read a few book reviews here  and here  and here.

The action of the book takes place in 1946, a few months after Sgt. Isaac Woodard is honorably discharged from the Army, having served three years fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. Sgt. Woodard received a battle star, a Good Conduct medal, a Service medal and, like all American participants in the war effort, a World War II Victory medal.  

On the bus home to rural South Carolina from Ft. Benning, Georgia, Woodard, still in uniform asked the bus driver, Alton Blackwell if he could stop the bus so Woodard could use a restroom. Greyhound drivers were instructed, in that era, to accommodate any such request from a passenger. But Blackwell said to Sgt. Woodard, “Hell, no. Goddammit. Go back and sit down. I ain’t got time to wait.”

Woodard replied, “God damn it, talk to me like I am talking to you. I am a man just like you.”

For that, Blackwell called a cop on Woodard. The cop beat the hand-cuffed Sgt. Woodard in the face with a blackjack, hitting Woodard repeatedly in the face. He gouged Woodard's eyes. Then Woodard was locked in a cell for the night.

A local judge fined Woodard $50 and sent him to the state hospital who in turn sent him to a Veteran’s hospital which would admit black people. Woodard was permanently blinded from the assault.

This part of this all-too-relevant story, however, is not the point of today’s post, which is, to a degree about advertising.

Two white men, President Harry Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring are the point. They’re the point because they, like us in advertising, did something that’s unusual today or any other day.

They didn’t listen.

They didn’t listen to what public opinion told them to do.

They didn’t listen to advisors and confidants and pollsters or even common sense told them to do.

They did the hard thing.

They adhered to their convictions, their code, their beliefs.

Truman risked losing the 1948 Presidential election—in the wake of the Woodard beating, as a way of saying all are equal, Truman issued an Executive Order to integrate the United States Armed Forces and the Federal workforce. His own Joint Chiefs of Staff were against him, including George C. Marshall, his future Secretary of State, and arguably the most powerful and popular man in America at that time.

Judge Waties Waring, who eventually overturned the laws backing South Carolina’s segregated school system and helped indict the cop who beat and blinded Woodard, faced death threats, lost all his friends in his district and had his house fire-bombed.

In advertising—and on the client side—there’s something we should pay attention to that we don’t. There’s a reason conference rooms have 17 or 24 or 31 chairs. Because we’re asked to consider that many points of view, we’re asked to “satisfy” that many people. That’s not counting our qual and our quant. And the CEO and the CEO’s husband.

In fact, most ads—even a sign asking people to sign up for the javelin-catching team—are the product of hundreds of “stakeholders.” It’s why I once caustically remarked that most of what we produce are negotiations not communications. They make everyone happy by doing nothing for no one.

Let's stop listening to the wisdom of crowds. And begin listening to our wisdom. Let' stop doing what we think will please some target as defined some dopey focus group or online survey or biased research. Let's start living and breathing the essence of what we are and the people we work to inform--not just our bosses, boss' bosses and twenty-seven rungs up the ladder of banality.

If we as industry professionals are ever to reassert our personal integrity and the integrity of our industry, we can start by standing up for what we believe. Not what others say they do because it’s expedient.

The murders.

This is who we're fighting. This is who Trump is inciting.

People who bomb churches and kill little girls.

Who are never arrested and certainly never found guilty.

The murders.

The repeated murders.

The almost half-a-millennia of murders. And abuse. And denial of opportunity. Of evil. Of wrong.

What can we do in advertising?

Beyond marching. Beyond raising money. Beyond shaking our heads.

To steal a phrase from, believe it or not, Grover Norquist, I think we can starve the beast.

Of course, there are a lot of beasts.

But I'm talking about the main beast--the Seven-Headed Beast ridden by the Whore of Babylon. That Beast.

FOX.

No. Not just Fox News. Fox. Sports. Fox everything else. Anything that feeds Fox money--we must starve the beast.

Of course, clients can spend their money however they want. We can't stop them from advertising on, say, Fox Sports--which is different, presumably from Fox News.  That's their right.

But we can remind them, I think, that Fox Sports money feeds Fox News. If, 60 years ago you boycotted Woolworth lunch counters because they refused to serve people of color, how do you justify buying shampoo or clothespins or anything else at Woolworth?

I've written a lot in this space about advertising--a reflection of America--having become an "incrementalist" business. We make small changes and accept small results.

Smallness and incrementalism has been the course of American history when it comes to race. Even the Supreme Court's vaunted Brown decisions ruled that states must end segregation "with all deliberate speed." Vague and non-binding. And that vagueness gave white supremacists time to organize resistance.

If we as an industry have any backbone left, we must find a way to fight America's murdering-of-black-people-problem not with all deliberate speed, but by any means necessary.

In my opinion, this is not about running a spot about how much you care, or the latest tragedies. Anymore than fighting Covid was about creating some ridiculous hat forcing people to socially distance themselves or spacing out the letters of a logo. This also isn't about running a spot to show the goodness of your heart then spending tens of millions of ad dollars on various Fox shows. 

This is about hitting the haters where it hurts them most. They have no souls. That leaves only their wallets.

The least we can do is call for advertisers to boycott the network that keeps hate alive, that magnifies hate, that amplifies and normalizes it.

Say "Hello" to Gillian.

Gillian is a young copywriter I worked with when I was at Ogilvy. Like me, Gillian was usually in early--well before eight o'clock and she was working working working. I could tell right off the bat she was a bright light--and we started sharing smiles and books.

Not long ago, Gillian sent me an email. About agency stuff. I had an idea and asked her to write a blog post on what she's learned in her first two years in the business.

I think you'll find she has something to say. I also think I may be working for Gillian one day. If I'm lucky.

Thanks, Gillian.
---

What I learned during my first two years 

of advertising. Or How to Nag & Other Stories.

I never knew you could go to school for advertising.

If I did, I might not have studied 18^th century French Literature and Postmodern English*.

My journey towards advertising was mostly accidental, spurred by the knowledge which came to me remarkably late that a job existed where I would be paid to write without needing a PhD.

A revelation.

I’m now two years in and I haven’t resorted to begging for alms or selling poems on the street, at least not yet. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Be a nag.

I had a Jewish grandmother on one side and an Italian grandma on the other, so I had a head start on this. Nagging is my blood right.

To bring nagging into the office requires subtlety, but when wielded properly it can be a powerful tool. It requires knowing what is your due, understanding what you are owed and not backing down from that. However, equally important is knowing when something is well and truly off the table, as well as who can and cannot be nagged.

For example, if company policy dictates two reviews per year and yet you enter your 2-year workiversary woefully un-reviewed, time to start nagging.

But if your repeated requests for an all-office Gravity’s Rainbow book club are beginning to be met with a deep and mournful sigh, time to stop nagging.

Nagging should be approached with a pure heart, clear goals, and a delicate understanding of the feelings in the room.

Know your worth.

This one is tricky, but it’s at the heart of everything. I mean it in perhaps a more thoughtful and critical way than it is typically invoked. At least for myself, I had to understand my value in a detailed and tangible way. If I discovered my value to be slightly less remarkable than I hoped, time to accept the sting of knowledge and find new ways to make myself indispensable.

But once you know what you offer, don’t let anyone downplay it. Because I’ve found they’ll try to—not necessarily out of any mean-spirited, corporate backstabbing, but simply because undervaluing you is convenient. It takes less time, effort, and money for those high up to assume that those down below are mediocre. In the best-case scenario, the strength of your work alone can convince them you’re not. But sometimes, you need to advocate for yourself.

Once you’ve proven it to yourself, defend your worth resolutely to others.

Patience and Humility

Ah, a double-edged sword. Let’s start on the softer side.

Two years isn’t a long time to do anything. It’s certainly not a long time to work in advertising.

But in the very beginning, I found my ignorance could be an asset. I discovered it can be incredibly useful to walk into a room where everyone is accustomed to doing things the exact same way and say, “Why? Why is this the way it is?”

I asked it genuinely; I wasn’t being a smartass suggesting a better idea. I just didn’t know the answer. But then I discovered that other people didn’t know why they did things the way they did. And sometimes, things changed for the better.

I also knew when to work on the ignorance rather than embrace it. Therein lies the humility. I wrote down unfamiliar words and acronyms and looked them up. I researched the names and campaigns that kept cropping up in conversations. I asked genuine questions, sometimes at the risk of my bravado. I knew big things didn’t happen right away, and I didn’t expect them to or demand that they did. I never pretended to know more than I did and, despite all the chutzpah in my writing this far, I tried to know when it was truly right to put my head down and be quiet.

But now to the sharper side. Sometimes patience and humility is a code phrase for shrink yourself, don’t ask for anything, let whatever’s happening happen. Now’s as good a time as any to mention I’m a young woman. Would patience and humility be preached to me if I weren’t?

There’s a pattern to who I’ve seen get ahead, or at least a pattern to who I’ve seen pushed out. And more often than not, those who succeed are the same people who are told from a young age that their voices matter and always deserve to be heard. Colleagues of color and female colleagues tend too often to be cut by the sharper side of patience and humility.

When I graduated college, about three years and a lifetime ago, I never believed in my gut that I could be paid for my words. Ideas are a powerful currency, and the fact that my salary is based on them makes me feel good. My words are my worth, even when I’m selling baby food or motor oil. There’s a dignity and goodness in that. And to me that’s at the heart of advertising.

I get to create; I get to make something from nothing. In my first two years in the industry, I’ve learned to respect the power of that.

But don’t listen to me, I’m just a nag.

---

* But then again, I might still have.