The Value Of Stumbling Around In The Dark
After decades in the business, the recipe for success remains the same
There are not many instances in my life or career where I followed a traditional path to achieving my goals. This wasn’t because I was such a maverick, intent on doing it my way and breaking with tradition. I just didn’t know any better. I took the route that seemed open to me, which was never the well-worn path of others.
When I was first starting out, rather than trying to get an entry-level job with an advertising agency, I joined forces with another novice and simply started our own. I came from the music industry, and he came from media sales. I was an intuitive empath, and he was a hardcore sales grunt. Somehow, we made it work.
One of the main reasons for our success was that I held such high expectations for what I imagined the internal workings of an advertising agency to be. If we were pitching against other agencies, I assumed they were bringing their best stuff, using their most talented staff, and working as hard as they could. My naivety contributed directly to the effort I brought to each project. I simply worked harder than the next guy because I believed that’s what it took. Even after I realized that not everyone approached business development this way, I believed that it wasn’t enough to just win a piece of business. I wanted to crush it.
After a quarter century of working for the same firm, I’ve left the nest once again, and am off on my own, trying to find my legs and develop new wings. It’s a bit like re-entering the dating scene after being out of it for decades. The landscape has all changed and there’s a lot you’ve forgotten how to do, such as networking and giving a shit. There are new technologies that claim to do all manner of things, but the moment you dig a little deeper, you realize it all comes back to the basics.
Understanding human behavior, finding a message consumers will find compelling, figuring out where to best reach them, and telling stories that connect with them emotionally. The delivery systems have changed but not the human need for meaning and discovery.
In the early days of my career, I would spend countless hours pouring over design annuals such as Communication Arts, Print, How, and Archive. I studied the copywriting and deconstructed the design, emulating a bit of this and a bit of that. This was the best marketing and branding available and I used it as a sort of North Star to guide my work. I assumed everything I produced should be comfortable sitting beside the best work in the world. In fact, I thought my work needed to be better because I was no one.
I kept this attitude for most of my career, adopting a strategy of working harder, going deeper, and delivering more than my competitors. My goal was never to simply win a piece of business, but to have the key decision maker turn to their subordinates and say, “Do we really have to sit through the other presentations?” I heard about this happening more often than you might think.
There was an advantage to stumbling around in the dark. The internet was in its infancy then, and everything was not yet at our fingertips with the touch of a button. Other than what you could find by reading magazines, newspapers, and watching television, there was no way to find out what anyone else was doing. I had no other choice than to assume that they were all doing great work.
There is another key advantage to blissful ignorance when it comes to creative development, and that’s not knowing what you don’t know. The reason so much innovation comes from youth vigor is that they lack the experience needed to convince them that their hair-brained idea won’t work. They break through traditional boundaries and try new things because they’re unaware that it can’t be done. In truth, it has nothing to do with age and everything to do with the fear of failure. Young people are built for failure.
It does appear, at times, that people have become more risk-averse than they used to be. Most corporations are pretty conservative, as a general rule, and avoid risk whenever possible. But not the leaders — not the vanguard. There’s no way to lead from the middle. You have to be willing to be out in front, which means you will occasionally make wrong turns and have to try again.
Brands that are willing to take risks, calculated though they may be, are the ones who break through and become leaders. They make their mistakes and they move on, using what they’ve learned to try new things and achieve new heights. The safety of the middle is fleeting. The businesses who play it safe get their lunches eaten by hungrier startups.
Whether it’s a maturing business or an aging creative, the issues are largely the same. You get to a point where you’re more afraid of losing what you have than you are motivated by the prospect of winning big. You go from being a creative visionary to someone who manages risk. All your relevant experience works against you because all you see are the pitfalls.
We’re not all going to suddenly become reckless, throwing caution to the wind and ignoring all our instincts for self-preservation, but we could learn to keep an open mind to our own biases and prejudices. Not all biases are bad or wrong. Not all prejudices are evil. But we need to constantly reflect on why we feel this way and whether or not our feelings are rooted in substantive evidence that honestly confirms our opinion. I find that often they do not.
Ironically, perhaps, it’s not the fear of trying new things that prohibits us from pushing the envelope, but rather a fear of trusting our gut. The minute we stop advocating for what we believe is the right thing to do, hedging our bets with safer strategies and tried and true tactics, we relinquish our key advantage, which is to think freely and courageously.
We tell ourselves it’s the clients who are being cautious, but often we do it to ourselves. We fall into the trap of self-censorship, convincing ourselves that the client won’t go for it. We begin dumbing things down and neglect to speak up and say what we really think.
For me, the greatest risk we face is that we stop trusting ourselves. We stop trusting that voice that whispered in our ears all those years, telling us to go for it. We stop being willing to fail and no longer take chances. We operate out of fear, rather than freedom.
That’s what real failure looks like.
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