It's a brutal truth about advertising. The major cost to an agency is human brains. There are very few overheads to cut, and next to no assets to sell. When the business wobbles, people go.
Which means you can do excellent work, win things, be well-liked, and still end up carrying a cardboard box to the lift on a Wednesday afternoon, wondering what on Jolly Green Giant's earth just happened.
The mistake that's easy to make when you're younger, is to judge your career at microscope range.
Someone gets promoted ahead of you. Someone wins a giant award for work you secretly think is a polished bronze at best. Someone lands a job at the agency you didn't think they deserved to get into.Social media pours petrol on all of it.
You can start emotionally day-trading your self-worth.
I felt like an utter champion in my first two years, and a total loser in my third. That peak and trough has repeated itself a few times since. But I've been doing this long enough now to see the shape of it:
the compounding of inevitability.
Curiosity, integrity, standards, generosity, resilience, craft...
These quietly compound over long periods.
Eventually, the people doing all that become very difficult to stop, even if from the outside it looks chaotic for a while, and even if they hit a few potholes on their journey.
Bitterness compounds, too. Mistaking jadedness for intelligence compounds. So do cynicism, gossip, and cutting corners.
We get roughly 350,000 waking minutes a year. It's not healthy to spend them all on work, of course. But even half that adds up to something, whether you mean it to or not.
Whether your mind is buried in work you think will have impact, or you're busy arguing with someone in the comments section… it compounds.
In the short term, careers often look random. In the long term, they look eerily inevitable.
Zoom in and it's chaos. Zoom out and there's usually a shape, a pattern of you, that's formed across years.
The industry trains you to obsess over episodes. This pitch, this award season, this redundancy round, this promotion cycle.
But what matters is your trajectory.
Repeated behaviour hardens into reputation. Reputation hardens into trust. Trust hardens into opportunity.
A surprisingly large number of successful careers are simply the result of surviving long enough for the pattern to reveal itself.
Comparison is the thief of joy. The people 'crushing it' right this second, might matter a lot less than the people who simply keep going long enough for the pattern to reveal itself.
Repetition creates pattern. When in doubt, zoom out.
