Ignore Everybody - MacLeod, Hugh [13]
Like I said, whatever.
It was endless . . . yak yak yak . . . Oy vey! Ted, I love ya, you’re a great guy, but shut the hell up. . . .
In retrospect it was Ted’s example that taught me a very poignant lesson—back then I was still too young and naive to have learned it by that point—that your office could be awash with every ad award in existence, Clios and One Show awards (those are the big ones in the industry), yet your career could still be down the sinkhole.
Don’t get me wrong—my career there was a complete disaster. This is not a case of one of the Alphas mocking the Betas. This is a Gamma mocking the Betas.
I’m having lunch with my associate John, who’s about the same age as I am. We started working at the agency about the same time. We’re eating cheap and cheerful Thai food, just down the road from the agency.
“I gotta get out of this company,” I say.
“I thought you liked your job,” says John.
“I do,” I say. “But the only reason they like having me around is because I’m still young and cheap. The minute I am no longer either, I’m dead meat.”
“Like Ted,” says John.
“Yeah, him and the rest of the Watercooler Gang.”
“The Watercoolies.” John laughs.
So we had a good chuckle about our poor, hapless elders. We weren’t that sympathetic, frankly. Their lives might have been hell then, but they had already had their glory moments. They had won their awards, flown off to the Bahamas to shoot toilet paper ads with famous movie stars and all that. Unlike us young’uns. John and I had only been out of college a couple of years and had yet to make our mark on the industry we had entered with about as much passion and hope as anybody alive.
We had sold a few newspaper ads now and then, some magazine spreads, but the TV stuff was still well beyond reach. So far the agency we had worked for had yet to allow us to shine. Was this our fault or theirs? Maybe a little bit of both, but back then it was all “Their fault, dammit!” Of course, everything is “Their fault, dammit” when you’re twenty-four.
I quit my job about a year later. John stayed on with the agency for whatever reason, then a few years later got married, with his first kid following soon after. Suddenly with a family to support, he couldn’t afford to get fired. The creative director knew this and started to squeeze.
“You don’t mind working this weekend, John, do you? Good. I knew you wouldn’t. We all know how much the team relies on you to deliver at crunch time—that’s why we value you so highly, John, wouldn’t you say?”
Last time I saw John he was working at this horrible little agency for a fraction of his former salary. Turns out the big agency had tossed him out about a week after his kid’s second birthday.
We’re sitting there at the Thai restaurant again, having lunch for old time’s sake. We’re having a good time, talking about the usual artsy-fartsy stuff we always do. It’s a great conversation, marred only by the fact that when I look at John, the word “Watercooler” keeps popping into my head, uninvited.
20. Sing in your own voice.
Picasso was a terrible colorist. Turner couldn’t paint human beings worth a damn. Saul Steinberg’s formal drafting skills were appalling. T. S. Eliot had a full-time day job.
Henry Miller was a wildly uneven writer. Bob Dylan can’t sing or play guitar.
BUT THAT DIDN’T STOP THEM, RIGHT?
So I guess the next question is, “Why not?”
I have no idea. Why should it? No one person can be good at everything. The really good artists, the really successful entrepreneurs, figure out how to circumvent their limitations, figure out how to turn their strengths into weaknesses. The fact that Turner couldn’t draw human beings very well left him no choice but to improve his