One of the great life lessons I ever received I got twenty years ago from a woman I've met just once.
At the time I was the co-lead of the flagship office of a big, moribund Boston agency. Every Tuesday morning I would bring all the creatives together--about 150 in all. I'd usually talk about something that was happening in the agency, what we were pitching, new hires or whatever. Then I turn it over to people who had sold new work that they wanted to share.
This was all about raising the level of ambition of the creatives who worked at this place. To get them out of any complacency they might have fallen into. About twice a month, I'd try to bring in someone from the outside who I thought people could learn from.
Once, when Apple was opening a new store on Newbury Street, I brought in the architect who was designing the place. I thought who better to speak about user interface than the person who's been designing one that actually works in real life?
Another time I brought in Sally Hogshead.
At the time, Sally was transitioning from advertising creative director to a speaker specializing in helping people become as fascinating (and confident in that fascination) as they can be. Sally was off-the-charts great. I'm not even sure she charged us to charge us up.
Before her talk, Sally and I sat together in my ballpark-sized office and talked as if we were old friends. I must have told her about what I was hoping she would bring to the agency. Or what I was hoping I would get out of her talk.
I didn't write down anything she said, but I remember it like I had carved it into marble.
"George," she said, "three things are important in a career.
One: Your portfolio. The actually work you do. The way you think. The proof of your professional ability.
Two: Your reputation. What people say about you. How your name precedes you. What your name means to the world.
Three: Your network. Who you know. Who you meet. Who you touch, amuse, help, teach and learn from.
No matter who you are, your life will be full of ups-and-downs. But if you keep these three things in fighting-trim, you'll be ok."
End quote.
As I enter my fifth year running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've been feeling a little folded, spindled and mutilated. To date, I've had my best year but, about six weeks ago, wrapping up an assignment, I realized I had nothing in the pipeline and nothing, even, over the proximate horizon.
Scary.
Sure, I know enough to know I have essentially a retainer with more blue chip accounts than maybe Needham Harper & Steers or Levine Huntley have. And if past is prologue, the phone will before long jingle with a call from one or a couple of those accounts.
Phone calls equal revenue.
I like revenue.
But a certain barometer of my business, calls from people I don't know thanks to the ads I run on Linked In, was showing storm-signals. I get about half my business from those calls, maybe three inquiries a month, and I hadn't had one come into fruition for too long for me to be able to sleep at night.
Long walks along the Long Island Sound did nothing to calm my jittery nerves. Knowing I had $100,000 or more scheduled for payment from clients didn't help much either. It wasn't anyway, a question of money. It was a question of kicking ass.
I like kicking ass. Kicking the ass of other creatives who want the same business I want. And mostly, kicking the ass of an industry that betrayed hundreds and hundreds of people like myself. I mean the people who made the non-advertising moguls at the top of the advertising business obscenely rich--who were then fired because, well, they could be.
It was cheaper that way.
Then, I got an email from a planning friend who met someone at a barbecue--someone who's the CMO of a nice-sized start-up. Then someone at a very prestigious magazine saw an ad of mine on LinkedIn and in under-a-month, we signed a contract. I got two days of day-rate from someone else--an unnamed agency. And four days ago I heard from someone I hadn't spoken to since 2015. She hooked me up with a company who just hired me for one of my 3-6-3s.
No matter what you do for a living, whether or not you were abused as a kid, or kicked in the head by a horse, or undone by this malefactor of great wealth or that, you can wake up one morning and find yourself trying to walk balanced on a long white chalkline of despair. And errant bit of equilibrium can send you ass over teakettle into a deep slough of despond if not an abyss.
You must remember this, abyss is just abyss.
Sally's words and her one-two-three above won't keep you from that slough. Maybe nothing really can. As Neil Young once screeched, "rust never sleeps." Or, "everything that rises must recede."
But fighting back, trying again, and that au-courant notion of resilience are founded on thinking like that which Sally imparted to me twenty years ago.
Wherever you are,
whatever you're doing,
whenever you want to,
Sally,
I owe you one.
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