Many years ago, as a young and dumb copywriter living in Memphis, I was hired by an ad agency whose lead writer was moving to the distant metropolis of Kansas City. We sat together in her office, surrounded by her nicknacks and tchotchkes, reviewing all the clients she would soon leave behind.
"Have you found a new agency in KC?" I asked, making polite smalltalk.
She shook her head. "Nah."
"Easing into it?"
"Nope. I'm actually enrolling in veterinarian school."
She was no hack. She had done great work in Memphis. Her career in advertising seemed golden. I was stunned to learn she was abandoning it for a lifetime of treating lyme disease.
You get older, you understand. Your stomach becomes too soft to take any more blows. The acceptance you once so desperately craved – the jealousy of peers, the praise from clients, the acknowledgment from the agency's elite – transitions to something simpler: the primal need to please yourself.
Rejection is a creative's coy and cruel mistress. She leads you one with faint platitudes before leaving you alone at the table with a sheet of white paper stained with red ink and vague redirection. A relationship with Rejection is exhausting and punishing. Early on, you endure it because you like the challenge. And because you're stupid. You think you have the energy and charm to woo her. Win her over.
But Rejection never evolves. She refuses to adopt your perspective or even try to work it out. Rejection only wants you to conform to her. There is no give and take. No 50/50. She'll toss you a scrap before taking her pound of flesh.
The sizzling relationship eventually becomes an emotionless business arrangement. Rejection keeps your work honest and maybe even profitable, but the romance is gone. You've received too many eye rolls and snide remarks to consider Rejection anything more than a not-silent-enough partner.
And that's how you endure in advertising. Rejection knocks, and you coldly open the door and invite her inside. She'll talk and talk and talk. You'll nod and agree at the right places. The things she says hurts because much of it is true.
But you can still surprise her. Every now and then, you respond with something sharp and clever and reminiscent of those days when you thought everything you wrote was sharp and clever, and a genuinely sweet smile appears on Rejection's ruby lips
You still got it, handsome. Now give me two alternatives.
