There was a time, a time not too long ago, when, if you were a fly on the wall of my office, you'd see me animating banner ads day in and out. And if I wasn't actually animating them, I'd be in a meeting about them, or having beer with my co-workers brainstorming about them, or coming up with concepts for them. I used to enjoy many parts of this life and I'm grateful for my early days in Advertising. Not only do I count many post-university friends in the industry I worked, but I also had my fair share of mentors and insights. I might have even helped a few people along the way. With the positive, however, came some pretty weighted moments where I would feel decidedly unfulfilled, decidedly unhappy, decidedly scared. I don't romanticize this. I was scared. I would expect most people would include these feelings into the category of Necessary Evils, that is, working for a living. I grant this possibility. But I find it curious that ever since I started to take those anxieties seriously, my working life improved, in the sense that I enjoyed it more. And this is long before I left employed life. This started when I started to talk to my managers in the kind of candid professional tone that I'd been trying out since high school. It didn't work as well on teachers, for the most part. This is in part because they had too many things going on at once to ultimately care about an average and well-behaved student who seemed to be heading in a pretty good direction (me). Managers, however, who know the difficulty of creating a good team, have always appreciated it. Even if I wasn't the strongest member of said team. What am I getting at? Two things. 1. You're probably more valuable to your employer than you realise. 2. I built a new banner ad today. It's for Siteway Select. It's promoting my newest print available, of Marlon Brando in the Wild One.

Labels: Advertising, CareerTalk, Freelancing, Siteway, SitewaySelect

¶ 11:19 AM
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