Advice on Advice: Take It or Leave It
There’s a tonne of advice out there for juniors wanting to break into the industry — books, blogs, and people wanting to give you their two cents. But advice comes from experience, and experiences are personal. Which means there’s a lot of conflicting advice out there. In a regular column Lauren Ami MacDonald tries to make sense of it all.
VS. Competition and fear are driving forces
When we feel fear, it’s our natural response to “fight”. We want to survive. We’ll work faster and harder. Which is great. But it’s absurd to think that an emergency response is a sustainable condition. When we’re nurtured, we learn how to think better, craft better, and be better. Then along comes complacency. Both equally disappointing. For the lack of anything else, I’ll leave you with this: did you know that the baby sharks inside of a mother’s womb will eat each other until only one survives? Let this be a lesson to you: life’s brutal on the inside of a shark’s uterus.
2 Comments
Some of your ‘advice’ is a little worrying…are you telling impressionable juniors (you being one yourself) that behaving in a predatorial manner in an office environment is the way to be? If that is so, be careful. I think you’re misleading people just because you want to sound cool and contentious here.
New entrants to advertising should be focused on only one thing for at least the first 5 years: learning as much as they can…by keeping their eyes and ears open, asking the occasional question. And keep the number of enemies you make to zero if you can.
You know what’s good advice? Work hard, get a book with good ideas, never give up trying, don’t fear rejection, and be humble.
That’s what peers and CDs told me while trying to get my foot in.
Seriously, that’s it. No rocket science involved. No uteruses too.