Your Perception Is Not My Reality
For people who are intently focused on career success, the journey can be long and arduous, filled with both sorrows and delights. The path is not linear for most, it’s a series of adaptations to the challenges that stand before the seeker and doer of deeds. This journey echoes through the ages.
Arthur C. Brooks, behavioral social scientist, author, and senior fellow at Harvard Business School, writing in The Atlantic, describes work and eventual retirement as “The Hero’s Journey,” tapping the mythic models and language of Joseph Campbell.
This is how he describes the challenges embedded in retirement…
The hero’s journey is great when you’re in the middle of it. The trouble comes when your strengths start to wane, because now you’re off script. People rarely change the story they’ve constructed for their lives; they rage, instead, trying to pound their lives back into the story line, often with sad results.
I watched my dad’s disappointment at the end of his career. He, like so many men, defined himself by his work. When you take the work away, you also remove one’s identity, at least to some degree. In reality, we are all much more than our work, whatever we may think or project.
“The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world,” Campbell writes. “The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life.” In other words, the end of the true hero’s journey is coming home and finding a battle to be waged not with an external enemy, but with one’s own demons. Win that final battle — the hardest one of all — and true victory is yours.
Life is full of transitions. Take the anachronistic concept of retirement off the table altogether and the changes from one state of being to another still require self-reflection, plus reserves of confidence, resources, and life and work experience.
I am 55 years old today. I started working as a copywriter in 1997, when I was 31 years old. Over the past decade, I’ve transitioned from an employee to self-employment, and the transition is far from complete.
I’ve also witnessed the moves made by my friends and peers in my age group. One friend and former colleague is a full-time fine arts painter now. His struggle to “make it” as an artist is not complete, because it never is. In reality, you find success or success finds you, and then there are long dry stretches where too few hire you or buy from you.
Endurance and perseverance are requirements for artists and writers, and for anyone moving from one stage of life to the next.
In Related News, Refuse To Be Shamed Into Silence
Lynn Steger Strong, a fiction writer, an Ivy League adjunct professor, and a mother to two kids, writing in The Guardian, says it’s hard for her to make a living today, as it is for so many talented, educated, experienced professionals. She also says it’s hard for her and others to share the pain of economic failure or distress.
One of the reasons many of us don’t share the ways we do not have enough money is, I would argue, because we’re ashamed to say we’re struggling. We’ve internalized that our suffering is our fault — that it is because we must not be working hard enough.
…I hope we might begin to say out loud all the ways the system has failed us. To admit as a group that we are being slaughtered and exploited, that our bodies are overworked and undervalued, it takes the onus off of any one of us. It can and should make us feel less shame and less fear.
Because I’ve been reticent to share how I am struggling to advance my advertising career, I’ve led people to the wrong conclusions about me.
Several people have told me that they didn’t realize that I was available for hire. I heard it so many times, I had to do something about it, and reframe the way I capture and present my industry expertise.
A new friend here in Austin and a former agency founder told me when people hear that he used to own an agency, they reflexively assume that his rates are high. Why do we carry these assumptions like five-pound weights around our belt? Saggy pants are not a good look.
I am for hire.
I do need work.
Talent Belongs on the Field
What kind of work am I best suited to do, and for whom?
Colin Lewis, Chief Marketing Officer at OpenJaw Technologies, writing for Marketing Week, indirectly suggests I look away from any sort of agency job:
Age discrimination is an even bigger issue than gender. Once you are over 40 and looking for work, it’s a world of equal opportunity discrimination — male or female. Over 50, you have a better chance of being hit by a sniper’s bullet in your back garden than being considered for a role.
I want to rage so badly against the stupidity of the ad machine. But it won’t get me work, so I’ll skip it, for now.
I left my last job at BFG Communications in Hilton Head just two months prior to the stock market collapse of 2008. For those who do not recall, the market folded in half that October. Therefore, there were no jobs to be had in 2019. Not for me, a 44 year old director-level creative.
During this downturn, Bonehook LLC, my marketing services firm was borne of necessity. I also wanted to do it better, a.k.a. my way.
Bonehook’s inception was relationship-based. One of my closest friends in the world hired me to create a children’s hospital brand. We did and went from there to land new clients in banking, identity theft protection, healthcare, human services, technology, wine, sports, outdoor recreation, and more.
I won these accounts on the strength of my referral network. Your network is gold, but it runs out eventually. When it happened to me in 2018, my initial reaction was to replace it with a systems approach to lead generation, to alter or totally remake the service offerings, and so on.
But guess what? None of these things come close to the value of other people who can see what you have to offer, helping you find new or more work. The answer to a “well run dry” moment isn’t to fill a funnel. No, it means you need to put more work into meeting new people and growing your professional network. Again. And again. It does not end. Nor does the need to prove yourself, to remain humble, to be kind to people. To be consistently great, you must first be consistent. When you’re both lucky and patient, great will come.
