Right Place, Right Time: Luck as a Creative Act.

Every year, I meet with a lot of young advertising students. To connect. To review their portfolios. But mostly, to inject a little bit of optimism into their lives. Because finding a job in advertising or anywhere right now for that matter, is a slog. Especially when you’re just starting out. Getting your proverbial foot in the door typically means getting a whole lot more doors - virtual or real - slammed in your face. Just getting an email reply is a feat in and of itself ! I really feel for them. Not to mention all those junior and senior employees affected by the recent layoffs across various industries as of late (not just advertising!) It’s all pretty discouraging. 

One of the things I find myself saying a lot to students I meet with is this: advertising is all about being at the right place, at the right time. Which is all nice and all, but I'm sure like the students, you are thinking: “Great. Thanks for that brilliant wisdom. How the ‘eff do I ensure I'm at the right place at the right time?!”

Let me take you back in time for a sec…

When I was just a whippersnapper of a copywriter graduating from Humber’s post grad copywriting program, I had a fellow classmate and friend Joanne (not her real name). She was talented. Hard working. Determined. ALL of the things you need to be when you’re young and ambitious. We both landed internships but from there our paths diverged. After a summer of borderline indentured labour at TBWA\Toronto (I kid, I was actually one of the ‘lucky’ few that actually got paid which was rare at that time!) they offered me a full time job. I was paid a whopping $25K annual salary which meant that I had to have a second job (bartending at the famous/infamous depending who you ask, Bar 606) just to make ends meet. But it didn’t matter.  I had my first official job as a legit copywriter (a huge shout out to Simon Creet and Simon Duffy for taking a chance on me). 

My friend on the other hand secured an internship at a small, hot boutique agency but at the end of it, she wasn’t nearly as lucky. Being a small operation, they just didn’t have the budget to bring her on full time. It was not her. It was them. Having the hot shop on her resume though landed her another internship at a much larger network agency. But that agency lost a big client and they too were not able to offer her a full time position at the end of her internship. Believe it or not, this happened to her a few times. A year later, she was still without a full time job, seemingly ready to throw in the towel. 

But she didn't. She recalibrated. Tried another market. And finally landed a gig at one of the industry’s biggest up and coming agencies that was just exploding on the scene in Montreal. Her career skyrocketed. And she’s been working as a very successful copywriter ever since. Did she just get ‘lucky’? 

The moral of my story - sometimes quantity is more important than quality. It didn’t matter whether Joanne was at a hot shop or a big network agency. She just kept finding herself in the right place but at the wrong time. She needed more time and more opportunities for the stars to align. Had she given up…she wouldn’t have found herself at the right place and at the right time for the amazing job that she was destined for. 

LANDING A JOB - getting the right introduction at the right time. 

I use the above example with young creatives a lot. Because it’s proof that even talented and very successful creatives need a bit of luck. But the funny thing is, luck is actually something we create for ourselves. Or said differently, manifesting luck is really just creating the conditions for serendipity to strike. 

So how do you create these conditions? Well, I encourage students to interview. A lot. Every day, reach out to at least five people. As many creative directors, creatives and creative resource managers you can get a hold of. But don’t stop there. Talk to people in adjacent industries or unrelated roles too. At the end of each meeting,  ask them to give you three more names. What you’re trying to do is just get in front of people. No matter how random or unrelated someone’s role or position may be to what you’re looking for. This process is all about quantity over quality. Scour LinkedIn. Ask for introductions to people you see in others’ networks. By meeting with different people you open yourself to potentially new connections, new opportunities and even more new organizations you may not have considered in your original search. You never know who might be in a position to hire you or know someone who is. Ultimately, you just want to be in their path when they are ready to do so. You need to meet the right person at the right time. 

Sometimes that means being bold. I’ve seen some rather brave LinkedIn posts lately: people openly and candidly posting about how unhappy they are in their current roles. At first, I scoffed at their posts, even while admiring their bravery. To publicly voice your dissatisfaction with a current job or boss and asking your network to keep an eye out for new opportunities is gutsy. Putting yourself out there like that is not easy. But the more I thought about it the more I saw the method in this madness. It’s actually a really smart networking strategy. 

It turns out that weak network connections are far more likely to bring useful leads. A team at Stanford, MIT and Harvard actually studied this, conducting experiments on Linked over five years with over 20 million people and proved that “people with whom you have weaker ties are more likely to have information or connections that are useful and relevant.” They define all those infrequent, distant, arms-length relationships as weak ties and found them to be more beneficial for promotions, wages, and employment opportunities. So while you can certainly vent your frustrations privately to your inner circle, the likelihood that they’ll be able to help you secure a new gig is significantly lower than your wider, business acquaintance network. This is why LinkedIn is such an incredible tool. The takeaway for my students (and anyone, really) is this: putting out the message that you are looking for work can create and/or leverage those “weak” connections, which are more likely to be the pathway to your next job. Even if a connection doesn’t lead anywhere now, it might prove useful later down the line. And as we all know in this business, you never know when you will need to lean on that network!

LANDING A BIG IDEA - having the right idea at the right time. 

This notion of quantity over quality also aptly applies to creative ideation. Instead of coming up with 5 or 10 ideas, see if you can get 50. By generating lots of ideas, mostly crappy ones, we can stumble upon something meaningful. Famous two-time Nobel prize winner Linus Pualing famously said “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.” And I believe the Rethink folks call it digging “shallow holes.” By generating lots of weak ideas, we get to the brilliant ideas at the right time (typically at the 11th hour). But it is in this generation of multitudes that we create the conditions for luck to strike. Even if that first idea is brilliant, you won’t know that until you’ve put in the work and have other ideas against which to compare your best idea. 

Today everything is about instant gratification. In the age of Amazon, if you want something, you can get it shipped to your door in 24 hours. Almost anything and everything your heart desires is instantly available, almost immediately ceasing one’s quest to keep searching. Frankly, we’ve become a bit lazy.  We’ve forgotten what it’s like to truly search and work for something. And just like Amazon, our minds will (usually) quickly and efficiently serve up some sort of an idea quickly. The problem is it’s usually an expected, obvious, easy idea that everyone else’s brain algorithm will easily generate as well. 

If you want to get to those brilliant, never-been-done ideas, you can’t check out after that first idea. And you’ve got to keep an open mind. The same way you have to keep making connections and growing your network, you’ve got to keep going and generating more ideas. Trust and keep shopping your brain for more. You’ve got to keep generating lots of those easy and weak ideas until you start coming up with the weird stuff - those are actually the unique, original, unexpected ideas may initially make people look at you funny.  Our brains are wired to reject the unfamiliar. If you get that kind of “oh i don’t know about this” thought it’s a sign that you’re getting to the good stuff. 

From the outside it might just look like you got lucky, but in generating lots of weak ideas you are creating the conditions for brilliant inspiration to strike and increasing the chances for that to happen at the right time (ideally before the client presentation.)

LANDING A WIN - having the right stuff at the right time. 

How many times have you thought of someone you admire (or maybe even have been jealous of) and said to yourself “they just got lucky!” ? Wayne Gretzky famously said “You miss 100 shots you don’t take.” Many people that are labeled by the media as ‘overnight successes’ or that got famously ‘lucky’ are actually products of hours, days and years of hard work and dedication. They put in the effort and time, creating the conditions for that serendipitous ‘luck’. If you keep swinging, it’s just a matter of time until something finally clicks. 

Taking action - no matter how small or seemingly insignificant - in order to create your own luck is the critical point here. Luck is a proactive act. Manifesting serendipity is all about action and humility. Doing something and not particularly caring if that thing doesn’t go anywhere. Professor Richard Wiseimen, In his 10 year study on luck, I think put it best when he said: “ Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, including networking, adopting a relaxed attitude to life and by being open to new ideas and experiences.”

It doesn’t matter whether you define a win as a new job, a killer idea or just landing a new piece of business.  Put yourself out there.  Practice. Take lots of swings. And the more experiences you garner, the more chances you are going to find what you’re after. Each failed action or interaction that doesn’t work out is not a sign of failure. But rather, another weak tie or step in the process of manifesting your luck.  In his now best selling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell identified the 10 000 hour rule - that it takes practicing something for 10 000 to gain mastery and become an expert. While I don’t know if 10 000 is the magic number when it comes to creating your own luck in advertising, I'm willing to bet that even if you meet with a fraction of that many people, or generate a tenth of that many bad ideas, you’re going to get “lucky.”