How Composing An Epitaph For After You've Died Can Help You Live A Life You'd Want To Be Remembered For
Every so often I take a time-out and do a purposeful gut check to determine if a course correction of some sort is needed. The first of these came, as it relates to my professional career at least, shortly after I enrolled in the since-renamed School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Carolina.
I targeted the “J school” as a teenager living in Hillsborough just to the north of the Chapel Hill campus. I conceived a path to get me into Howell Hall and so crafted my high school class load around those subjects which would best qualify me to be accepted as well as prepare me for attaining the advertising degree I intended to enable me to have a career as a high-profile agency Account Executive. (For those unaware, an AE primarily work with the agency’s clients to understand their business goals and then use their training and creativity to develop a plan to use the appropriate marketing techniques to bring about the desired results.)
This was all well and good on paper, everyone who has seen Mad Men or thirtysomething knows it can be a pretty cool way to earn a buck, but it quickly became apparent to me that the job I grew up wanting was not in the cards because, as Stephen King noted in his Dark Tower series, the world had moved on. So, I did what I thought sensible, and after the first semester of my junior year I switched concentrations to Visual Communications, focusing on graphic design and photography instead.
A Cautionary Tale About Being Careful What You Wish For
Flash forward a few years and I was working at a small regional agency in downtown Raleigh. I was very grateful to have been given the job, I remember vividly how receiving the official offer was the first time I truly understood what the phrase “a weight had been lifted” meant, but it didn’t take long before I came to realize that I was the third best designer in a room with, sadly, two other designers. Well, that's was no good, so it was time for another gut check.
This time when I used my Best Case Scenario projection technique, which sees me measuring the likelihood that I would have a career I would look back on with something other than regret, I realized that if everything went swimmingly and exactly according to plan, I would be "rewarded" with a position doing all the things I liked least about the job (full time and under gobs of pressure), while at the same time all those things I loved about the work I would do rarely, if at all. Clearly, it was time for a new plan.
The Value Of Being Your Own Mentor
Once I realized that I hadn't ever done for myself what I was attempting to do for my clients on a daily basis, that is identify and speak to their Unique Selling Point (USP) which is meant to encapsulate the essence of why any would-be customers should care to know about them, I made a dispassionate assessment of my interests, skills, aptitude, and nature. Equipped with this list of traits and/or qualifications, I was prepared to figure out what it was I really wanted to be when I grew up.
Marketing master Seth Godin speaks to the notion of cultivating a reputation for being the best at one thing, better than all others who do likewise, so that when the time comes for someone to buy that particular good/service they won’t only have you in their “consideration set” but the idea of working with you is a foregone conclusion. By being a "purple cow" one metaphorically stands out in a crowded field. I believe this to be a completely sound concept, so I determined to determine how I could apply the principle to my career.
What I realized was that by the time I got to do my part of any given project, all the decisions responsible for its chances for succeeding had already been made, and further this meant that those things that I was better at than others were no longer even relevant. (This because a graphic designer is the very last creative to touch the deliverables when they send their production files to the printer/magazine/web developer.) Basically the folks in the Creative Department are just the ones who open the cage to return the rehabbed animal to the wild after the caregivers have nursed it back to health. Or if you are prefer a more literary explanation than an animal-centric one, they are merely the period on the sentence. I, however, want to write the whole story, not merely punctuate it, so it was time to swim upstream.
The Only Constant In Life Is Change
That was 15 years ago, and, for better or for worse, I am now in a position where the execution of a campaign is based on my professional insights. The Why of my clients’ messaging is based upon my capacity to understand/explain what sort of information will inspire a purchase, based on knowing where that which the company supplies and that which the customer needs intersects.
Beyond that, the parameters of the all-important defining of the best audience to speak to are based mostly upon the market research I do with/for my clients. I have arrived, by a certain way of thinking, but another gut check tells me that the person I am now, the one who knows what this work is actually like as opposed to the guy I was a decade and a half ago who speculated what it was about, understands that writing up a treatment plan for the injured critter for others to act on is really no better than being the one who frees the thing in a few months time.
What I now know is right for me, is to be a generalist who shepherds the entire process from its beginning to its end. Whether due to a perfectionist nature driven by OCD, or a control-freak propensity born of a full belief that "if you want something done right you should do it yourself," I am actively transitioning into the next stage of my professional career, this time as a Creator and Founder.
We Should All Aspire To Love What We Do, Even If It Feels Like Work
Be it my television series, one of my feature films, a website community, an app, or an innovative product, I’m to the point now where I believe that if it sprung from my mind, then it is up to me to bring it to life. Things worth accomplishing are achieved by the Doers of the world, and the people who can fairly claim to be in that fraternity don’t come by that right accidentally.
It is only through consistent, lasting, and purposeful action that one will see their efforts through to completion. I'm willing to put in the work, no question, but it absolutely remains to be seen if I am able. But the mere fact that I am trying to reach a goal means I might, as opposed to the certainty of not even trying to accomplish something to begin with.
As we’re told when going into a commercial break, we'll have to stay tuned if we are to find out.
EPILOGUE:
It's said that the past is prologue. It’s also said that given a long enough time line, the survival rate is zero.
I keep both these truisms in mind when I do my mental exercises regarding the trajectory of my life, and the single best tactic I have yet identified to this end is to remind myself of the epitaph I want on my headstone.
My intention is that by stepping away from my investment in Ego and my natural leanings towards defensiveness, even if just for a moment, I can evaluate if those at my internment will read those few words (mine are of course different than yours, and it isn’t important what they are anyway) and think, "Nailed it." Or will those I’ve left behind instead be wondering how the cemetery people could have made such a massive blunder as having installed someone else's granite marker at the head of my burial plot?
The cool thing about doing it this way is that, like Tom Sawyer or the Arthurian guy in the wheelbarrow, I'm not dead yet, so I can still adjust course before the final summarization of my character arc is (literally) written in stone.
And the same holds true for you.