Look at your plan daily
When you have a written plan, look at it every day. Pin it up on the wall in front of your desk or tape it to your bathroom mirror. Having it in front of you will be a conscious reminder that will keep your mind focused on your destination. In addition, just seeing it there, even if you do not get a chance to read it each day, will allow your subconscious mind to act on bringing new ideas into your conscious awareness that will help you improve upon your action plan. Looking at it frequently will also keep you aware of those plateau stages when you hit them and if you need to alter your destination or change it altogether.
Your personal life versus your career life
Many people make the big mistake of getting so caught up in their careers that they forget about their personal lives. I did that for a while. My life became my work. I had lost who I was as a person. That was mostly because I never learned to listen to my heart voice, so I never knew what I really wanted. I chased after other people's idea of success for a lot of years. I had become a combination of all those people I thought I wanted to be like. When I finally stopped running the race to nowhere, I realized just how much I had shut off my feelings and shut out my family and friends.
This is the danger that awaits anyone who is embarking on a new career, especially a career in advertising. Because advertising is so demanding, it is easy to get totally enmeshed in it. So when you know what you want and decide on your destination, think about how it will impact your personal life.
I once knew a woman who began her career working in a mid-sized local agency. She went from being a paste-up artist to an art director in three years. She loved her work and was very good at it. Then she decided that she was not being challenged enough. She wanted the thrill and excitement of working on big, national ad campaigns and million dollar commercials. She knew that she would have to go to Boston or New York for those accounts. So she opted for Boston. She got a job with a big agency and was delighted. At last her career would get off the ground.
Then I heard from her about eight months later. She was miserable. "Advertising wasn't fun anymore," she said. The pressure in an agency of this size was unbearable for her. "When you're working on multi-million dollar projects, one little mistake, one little oversight could cost the agency hundreds of thousands of dollars," she told me. She also said that she could not sleep at night, her fiancée broke off their engagement because he thought she was married to her job, and her doctor told her she had an ulcer. So be careful what you want and what you wish for. Sometimes the best of all possible worlds is right in your own backyard.
You are on your own
You have now come to the end of the book. I have shared with you everything I know about how to get a job in advertising and how to keep it. One last lithe bit of advice that I would like to pass along to you is something that I read when I was first starting out. It is called the Golden Rule of Success: Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It took a long time for me to understand exactly what that expression meant, but now I finally understand it. It means that how you may want to be treated by others is not necessarily how other people want to be treated by you.
We often make the mistake of thinking we are doing something wonderful for someone-an unrequested good deed-only to discover that all our efforts went unappreciated. In fact, sometimes our efforts were downright scorned at by the recipient. Why, we wonder? And then off we go in a huff thinking that people are so ungrateful. This happens not only with friends and family but also with co-workers and bosses. We want to help them out, be supportive, do nice things. But then it backfires. They think we are butting in or being presumptuous. Before you take the initiative to lend a helping hand to a co-worker or boss or business associate, save yourself some aggravation and ask if that person would like to have that done. Ask if that is something that would help, or if there is something else you could do instead.
Remembering this simple golden rule will keep you in harmony with those around you at the office and out in the business community where friends often try to help each other. In the end, I think you will find that true success is measured by not only the quality of your relationship with yourself, but your relationship with others.
