... But who's counting ...

From what I remember, somebody once said: “Don’t get a job, choose a career and whatever it is, do the best you can.”
I’m glad I followed that advice.
Because those words have motivated me throughout my career.
I looked up today and it dawned on me that I am in my fourth decade of professional Word Smithing!
From the IBM Model D, the Selectric models that followed and even the old word processor I used to pound out scripts at 212 Fifth Avenue, technology has come a long way but to me only one thing remains: The idea has to come before the execution.
Next time you look at a spot, see if you think somebody came up with that commercial with a solution to the client's problem first instead of an animation house they've been wanting to work with 'like forever'.
Or: (my favorite lately!) "I've got an idea! Let's use that song, you know the one, my Dad used to love it. The lyrics are ... you know ... let me Google it!"
And lo and behold; the client's Dad used to love that song, too. A $5,000,000 spot is born.
It doesn't matter that Ad Week and Advertising Age pan the crap out of the spot because it wins a Lion - for most money ever spent on a :30 spot not appearing in the Super Bowl - and the lazy creative guy who came up with the spot (such as it was because all he did download the mp3 and email it to the agency producer who emailed it to the animation house and they did all the heavy lifting) gets a big raise and a promotion.
The animation house is richer, the long-suffering, one-hit wonder of an artist gets a much needed big payday and because the media buy is so huge he/she gets to make the rounds of morning news shows so we can see how much they've aged and ask ourselves why we ever liked the song in the first place ... the song is revived and is covered by Enya or somebody like that and iTunes® reports record download sales and on and on so much so that Oprah doesn't give up her show, stages a huge comeback and buys the rights to the screen play about the life and loves of the creative guy who came up with the spot who by now, one year later, is also making the rounds of the morning shows and the various late night shows touting his best-selling autobiography and never forgets to tell us over and over that it was all because of his Dad who liked this song.
Because I am driven by what can only be called an old fashioned work ethic and the need for my work to stand apart from others, I should probably mention that yes, I have done what I call 'borrowed interest' work. But I have always been dragged kicking and screaming out of those meetings when such creative decisions were made and I had to write them. I generally worked harder than I should've on those spots.
That's because I always want to be proud of my work.
And because I mostly feel lucky that I got to choose my vocation. I chose to be a writer, but I know because of those important 16 words, it wouldn’t matter what had I chosen to do, because I would be working just as hard at that as I do at this.
Now I'm not hating.
I don't hate people who don't have careers.
I don't hate people who didn't have the opportunity to pick their current work.
I don't even hate people who hate what they do to earn their paychecks even though many make so much money I wonder how dare they not like it and how dare they complain about going every day to get that money and how double dare they not do a good job while they are there getting all that money.
I truly do believe that if we as Americans start to choose our careers instead of just taking jobs we will be a happier more productive people.
And for goodness sakes, why can't "a job" be a career?
A doorman, a butler, a wait person, a bus driver, a cabbie, a dish washer or whatever. People used to do those kinds of things and took their jobs seriously and made good money for their service.
If we were brave enough (and not so stupidly narcissistic!) to wash toilets or change bedding in a hotel or pick up after and baby sit other people’s children, or pump gas, mow grass or any other of what we now consider menial jobs, then we wouldn’t have other people coming in from the four corners of the earth to do those jobs.
And then:
We would not have people hating those other people for doing what they refuse to consider good, hard and honest work. From what I know of history, the Roman Empire was destroyed by it’s own refusal to see it’s inner workings not working. Over the past sixty years we’ve managed to whittle away that great can do attitude that helped us produce an infrastructure that at one time completely marveled the rest of the world.
Now most of the world kind of hides behind their hands as they laugh at our puny little 4G networks.
The International Advertising World certainly does laugh at our puny attempts at sophistication.
"Silly Puritans." They remark upon viewing the latest promotion for some Vegas Casino.
Silly indeed. We need to work on that. Less sophomoronic, please.
I was always asked: “How do you do it?” after writing and producing as many as seventeen to twenty radio and television commercials in a single week.
I don't know. I didn't think about it. I didn't count I just did.
Forty years. And I'm still not counting.