Switching from doing to teaching advertising
I never believed the expression, those who can do, and those who can't teach. To be a good teacher, you have to know how to do whatever it is that you are going to teach. After you have been working in advertising for several years and you have a solid understanding of how the business works and exactly what one must know to create effective advertisements, you may want to consider sharing your knowledge and skills in a classroom.
This can be done while you are still working in advertising if you teach adult education courses. Many local colleges and high schools offer continuing education programs with classes in the evenings and on weekends. Or the day may come when you will decide that you have had enough of agency work and would like to do something that is not filled with deadlines and pressures. Teaching advertising full-time at a college can be a wonderful alternative.
Usually a master's degree is required for college level teaching. But when the subject matter deals with an area that can only be taught by someone whose expertise comes from years of actually working in the field, then practical hands-on experience will be accepted in lieu of the degree. Colleges that offer programs in advertising, marketing, communications, and design are always looking for competent professionals who can teach the many facets of these areas. So whether your niche in advertising happens to be design, production, copy, research, media, or account work, there will be teaching opportunities waiting for you if the time arrives when you would like to explore a totally different kind of environment in which to share your love of advertising.
Knowing yourself
The most important thing you can do for yourself is to stay in touch with that inner voice that comes from your heart, not your head. That voice will always tell you precisely what you want in your life. Knowing what you want and going after it is the key to inner peace and joy.
Most people have no clue about what they want in life. They spend the majority of their time pursuing goals that ultimately mean nothing to them. They may think these goals are important while they are chasing after them, but the feeling of importance comes not from the goal but the excitement of the chase. Once the goal is attained, there is a deep feeling of emptiness, an overwhelming sense of, "Now what do I do?" And the only answer to that question is to set another goal and to start the chase all over again.
If you have ever found yourself in that place where you were always setting goals, only to be left unfulfilled when you attained them, you were not in touch with what you truly wanted. Instead you were going after something you thought you wanted-a message delivered by your head, not your heart.
Your heads talks to you all the time. In fact, it chatters. It tells you what you should do, what you could do, and what you would do if only things were. . . . Your head logically reasons everything out trying to determine just the right move. It is also where you store your measuring stick-that instrument you use to measure your accomplishments, your successes, and your shortcomings against everyone else around you. The problem with that is that you are the one who will always come up short. There will always be someone out there who is smarter than you, better than you, more accomplished, and more successful. As a result, you will endlessly chase after a thing called "success," using other people as your model. And just when you think you have got it, a newer, better, and more current model will come along. And then the chase begins all over again.
After years of running in pursuit of a goal that you could never reach, if you are lucky, you will be one of the few who suddenly realizes that the goal-the model of success you were trying to become-had nothing to do with you. It had to do with everyone else around you and what they said they wanted. And your head, being the dutiful little recorder of the information floating around you, picked up their messages and fed them right back to you. You mistakenly took that information and believed it to be your own inner voice. It was an inner voice alright, but it was simply a recording of everything your head had ever heard that made logical sense. And that recording played over and over until you thought it was your own.
Once you recognize that you have been pursuing goals and desires set by other people-your parents, your teachers, your friends, and all the nameless faces you have seen on television shows and in advertisements, you will begin to see that you have been running on a treadmill that was leading nowhere. But you can make the choice to get off. Once you do, a strange unfamiliar silence will surround you. You will no longer be hearing the mindless roar of that ever-spinning treadmill. And in that silence, perhaps for the first time, you will hear a tiny, whispering voice that will deliver a message so powerful that you will wonder why you never heard it before. That message will give you the inner vision that will enable you to see through the fallacy of the beliefs you have been accepting as truth from your head for so many years.
That whispering voice is your heart. It comes from the feeling center of your body, not the thinking center. And knowing what you want in life can only be understood when you are in touch with your feelings.
