a letter to myself

Posted on October 16th, 2010 at 6:46 pm by @uberblond

25


We work in an industry that requires us to compromise. No one of us can look back over the arc of our career and say that we didn’t work on something that, if we dug into it deeply enough, made us squirm.

I have sold chemical drinks, “foods” with unspeakable ingredients, products that have negative environmental effects and medical solutions that had debilitating side effects if you were in the tragic 5% of people who did not respond well to the treatment.  I have worked on these in the past, and I’ll work on similarly dubious products in the future as long as I stay in this industry.

Working in our industry is a choice we all make, with the above knowledge in mind, for one reason or another. I’m not here to berate that choice. Life is complicated. Nothing is black and white.

But I do believe we are headed into the next era of our industry. We’ll have to make things that are more honest and more useful and the *shiny glossy* that we’ve hidden behind for decades just won’t cut it anymore. This obviously won’t happen overnight on every assignment, but more and more there will be profound things to be done through and with this industry. I agree with John Hegarty, we’re heading into an era where awe-inspiring brilliance can and will happen from our walls. And I hope I can contribute to it.

So while we do currently work in a world that has more compromises than not, we must be extra vigilant to not let our individual, human pursuit be compromised in the process. Your pursuit should be pure. Ultimately we want to, can and will have to make things that are new and brave and wonderful. But we won’t be a part of new and brave and wonderful if we round off the edges of ourselves and learn how to bow unnecessarily along the way. We as an industry must adjust to survive.

Someday your hair will a beautiful grey, your wrinkles stately and your bones bent. And in that time none of the current compromises will matter – whether you kissed that client’s ass enough, whether you had that title, whether you got it out the door before it was due (even though “it” was a bit lame now wasn’t it?)… it just won’t matter.

What will remain is your integrity. Were you kind? Did you bring what needed to to be brought for your team? Did you point out the bullshit and resolve not to propagate it in your own sphere of influence? Did you treat others with dignity?

What will remain is your soul. Did you speak up when something inside you trembled and you felt something? When you had a thought that made those little electric sparks go off did you go out and do it? Did you advocate for the brave? Push for the brilliantly uncommon?

Whatever is wild in you, whatever scares you, whatever makes your blood rush and your being buzz; whatever makes you “crazy”… protect it. Nurture it. That is the part that is truly yours.  Do not let a process, a need to climb, your “status”, kill that. And be kind along the way.

Now more than ever we’ll need the ingenious and the brave. We’ll need a conscience and humanity. And if being true to that means you have to be a bit mad, then so be it.

Carry on wolves, carry on.