Baby Talk

I haven't been a very good girl.  I haven't been practicing what I've preached back in the day when I still had my 'anaks'.

Oh, 'anaks' is my term of endearment for my old creative team at the old ad agency.  I don't call them 'my people', 'my subordinates', 'my underlings'.  They're 'my children' whom I trained to be better Creatives, whom I shaped to be better survivors.  That was all in them, of course.  What I did was simply give the push.

That push, I haven't been giving myself lately.

One of my golden rules then was 'Fight for your creative right'.  You know your craft better than anyone else in the room.  So don't let anyone tell you otherwise.  I did that for a good long time.  My 'anaks' did so, too.  We were a team.  And we always came out every war unscathed.

Here I am now, doing the exact opposite.  Selling myself short, selling out most of the time, and then spending the rest of the day kicking myself in the shin and whining about it.  Ok, I'm hard on myself.  I don't sell out on the first try.  I do fight.  But I do throw in the towel faster than before.

What I have now is a new rule: 'Never take things personally'.  When the shit hits the fan, when you've fallen and have gotten up, when you're done screaming for a good 3 seconds --move on.  No point in sulking over that beautiful ad your client has mangled into a sad piece of advertising junk.  Defeat happens.  There's a lot of other battles to get into and win.

It's a saner rule when you think about it.  Fighting is good, but letting go after a good fight works, too.  When you're working alone and fighting for no one else but yourself, it's time to be more practical, less emotional.  It's a little less fun, but one has to grow up sometime.

Thanks for the lollipop, ma'am.  Now, please turn around so I can beat you mercilessly with it.
Word, anaks!





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