On having thick skin

"Early on in my career, while at my first job at a large ad agency, my boss, the creative director - - who believed he was the Obi Wan Kenobi of universal creativity - - actually threw pages of my work across his desk at me and bellowed: "You call this good writing?"

A heartbeat later, I threw the pages back at him and said: "Yes, I do." I believe it was simply a primal push/push-back reaction on my part but it seemed to work. Obi laughed and said, "Good. I was testing you. You'll make it in this business, you have a thick skin."

And, boy, did I need it working under the rule of that guy. A year or two later, when Obi was out of town on a photo shoot, a rush project came in and landed on my desk.
I developed a couple of campaign concepts but, in the agency's hierachy, all work had to be shown and approved by Obi before it went to the art department and later
presented to the client.

But wait - - Obi was delayed in getting back. I not only had to work up a campaign concept and direct the artist in execution (something Obi always did), I had to sell it to the client myself.

Knees shaking, I made my presentation. The client loved it. The Account Manager loved it because the client loved it. And the agency's CEO loved it because with all the love in the room, he knew he could charge the client up the kazoo for these ads. But I digress.

By the time Obi got back, the ad campaign was halfway to publication. He summoned me to his throne room - - I mean, his office - - and, as I walked down the hall, I had a brief moment where I thought I might actually get a pat on the back from him.

Silly me. Obi went ballistic.

"This is horrible! If I had been here, the client would have never seen this. I hate this kind of artsy fartsy stuff. I hate these headlines. I would never write anything like this. No. Never. I'm very upset, get out."

I simply shrugged and left because, after a couple years under Obi's rule, my skin was really thick. But the moral of this story is yet to come. Several months later, the agency was selecting ad campaigns to enter in the Addy Award competitions. The CEO ordered Obi to enter mine - - the one he hated. Obi argued with him, "That work is not up to par." CEO said, "I like it. Enter it."

Not only did my artsy-fartsy ad campaign win the local award, it went on to win a regional award. And, when the client opened a new location, he specifically requested me to develop even more ads in the same conceptual vein.
In short, Obi was out-voted.

This experience taught me something very important-- one negative opinion means nothing, you have to run your work by several people to get a realistic idea of its merits or failings. And when critics react emotionally, (i.e. "I hate this.") the subtext often means, "You don't write like me so this must be bad writing."

I say, welcome the malicious reviews, they serve a purpose, they're helping you develop the thick skin of a writer. It's something you'll need in the film industry which, I hear, is even more brutal than the adverising industry. "

Susan Castellano

__________

 
"There have been many studies of elite performers--international violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth--and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the cumulative amount of deliberate practice they've had. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself."

"The psychologist Paul Meehl, in his classic 1954 treatise, Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction, described a study of Illinois parolees that compared estimates given by prison psychiatrists that a convict would violate parole with estimates derived from a rudimentary formula that weighed such factors as age, number of previous offenses, and type of crime. Despite the formula's crudeness, it predicted the occurrence of parole violations far more accurately than the psychiatrists did. In recent articles, Meehl and the social scientists David Faust and Robyn Dawes have reviewed more than a hundred studies comparing computers or statistical formulas with human judgment in predicting everything from the likelihood that a company will go bankrupt to the life expectancy of liver-disease patients. In virtually all cases, statistical thinking equaled or surpassed human judgment."

"The first documented postmortem examination in the New Word was done for religious reasons... It was performed on July 19, 1533, on the island of Espanola (now the Dominican Republic), upon conjoined female twins connected at the lower chest, to determine if they had one soul or two. The twins had been born alive, and a priest had baptized them as two separate souls. A disagreement subsequently ensued about whether he was right to have done so, and when the "double monster" died at eight days of age an autopsy was ordered to settle the issue. A surgeon, one Johan Camacho, found two virtually complete sets of internal organs, and it was decided that two souls had lived and died."

--Complications by Atul Gawande (A surgeon's notes on an imperfect science)

__________