Work With What You’ve Got

The scariest thing about hitting the career-reset button is letting go of experience you’ve cultivated your whole adult life. Letting go of the things you became an expert in, that put food on the table and, like it or not, came to define you. Ever notice that one of the first things people ask you when you meet them is, “What do you do?” When you scrap this aspect of your life, erase large swatches of your resume, it makes you feel frighteningly vulnerable (and possibly a bit dramatic). What is my value? What can I bring to the table? What if I fail and go broke?

One of the benefits of starting out at a small agency is that I get the opportunity to work alongside people on every side of the ad business. I can smell the peanut butter and apples that the Project Manager eats in the morning and listen to our Media Director make buys on the phone. I can stand up and throw something over the wall to our Account Supervisor or watch our VP Creative Director work his design magic.

This close proximity gives me the unique opportunity to use two pieces of advice I was given before my internship – ask for work and learn what everybody in the office does. At the beginning of the internship, at a time when there was less writing to do, the asks gave me the opportunity to help our busy Account Strategist. The projects started out small, with “Can you pull all the social media of the competition for X client?” or “How about the logos of the competition for Z client?”

Here’s the thing. I grew up alongside the internet. I used just about every version of AOL starting with 1.0. I was in chat rooms before they got creepy. My librarian in 7th grade told us students about this great new search tool called Google, heard of it? So I’m familiar with internet rabbit holes. For those of you that aren’t, that’s where you power up your computer to pay your bills, and three hours later you’re on YouTube watching moon lander conspiracy videos.

When I was asked to pull competitor social media and logos, that’s what I did. But I also I buckled up and let the internet rabbit hole take over. Who are the competitors? How popular are they? What are people saying about them? I noticed that less-known competitors could be found buried in news articles, blog posts, and yelp reviews. I found everything I could that was even marginally related to the ask. I did what I’ve been doing in my free time since I was a kid, but in a far more focused way. Did I find another way to be useful when the services of my pen are not required?

Strategist pleased, she gave me more work. Bolstered by her encouragement, back into the internet rabbit hole I went, each time looking for more, more, now asked to thinking in terms of hypothesis, analysis, conclusions. Providing evidence to support my interpretations. Wouldn’t you know it, that sounds a bit like the scientific method to me! And what’s this I have here? A molecular biology degree? Well I’ll be damned!

After several of these projects, over a lunch check-in with my supervisor I was asked if, based on my experiences so far, I was interested in pursuing copywriting with a strategy bent, or strategy with a writing kicker. I was stunned. Me? A strategist? This is an option? It felt like someone told me I had a superpower I didn’t know about. Strategy Man. Internet bloodhound crossed with methodical scientist. Sleuthing and hypothesizing, digging and analyzing, collecting and concluding. Ready to learn and grow, facing increasingly challenging villains.

Discovering this other thing, this other way to be useful, felt like a huge step in my journey. It was great to find that I could contribute in a way that wasn’t just writing, a skill that can often feel nebulous and abstract.

Things can change fast if you let them. A few years ago I didn’t know what a copywriter was. A few months ago, I didn’t know what strategist was. Inviting change into my life opened doors I didn’t know existed. Asking for work has revealed to me skills I didn’t know I have. All of us have something new and different to offer – skills that are right under our nose, skills that we aren’t aware we can use constructively. They’re there to discover, if you’re willing to look.