The 3 Types of People We Encounter in Our Design Careers

This essay was written for the Makers of Sport® newsletter in February 2016. Monday Musings and Weekend Reads were the written editions of the newsletter that accompanied the podcast; the archived email is on Mailchimp. The newsletter's links and announcements are trimmed here.

This past Friday, I was asked to give a brief speech to students at the American Advertising Awards (formerly known as the ADDYS). The ADDYS are an award show for creatives, advertising and marketing professionals throughout the U.S. Each city that has a chapter of the American Advertising Federation (AAF) puts on an awards show and judges are brought in from out of market to judge the work. In Lexington, Gold and Silver awards are given and the Gold ADDYS move on to a regional show and then to the National ADDYS (usually where some major brand or agency like Coca-Cola or DDB gobbles up all of the awards with major budgets).

I've won probably 50 ADDYS over my career, but this year I bowed out and decided not to enter anything because I'm weighing the importance of design awards and their subjectivity. But that is outside the scope of this particular email.

Anyhow, I was asked to give some advice to students that had entered the awards and then announce the sponsor of a $1,000 scholarship that one lucky student received. I decided to speak about the importance of relationships and the types of people we encounter in our careers. I felt this speech also fits with you because we are all lifetime learners and win business or get hired through relationships. So, below is the speech (edited a little) discussing the 3 types of people we meet in our careers and which one you should strive to be.

*Hello, I'm Adam Martin. Former chairman of AAF Lexington. I'm here tonight to introduce the sponsors of the student scholarship.

But first I want to take a moment and speak directly to the students in the audience. Right now you're young, you're maybe about to graduate, you're hungry. You have a fire that is burning inside you and a passion and willingness to work for an agency you admire.

I'm a lifetime learner and am very passionate about teaching and helping others what I learn along the way. In fact, I have a podcast that's mission is to do this very thing, for free, weekly.

Throughout the long journey of your career, you're going to encounter many types of people along the way. Relationships, as everyone in this audience knows, are very important in our careers. So I advise you to network as much as possible and be genuinely interested in the people that take time to meet with you.

The creative business is often times about intuition. And we has creative people have great intuition. We can sense when someone is serious, when someone is being transparent or genuine, as well as when someone is insincere—when they don't care about who we are and view us as a sale, a number or stepping stone.

You can categorize most of the people you encounter in your creative career into three groups. *

You have the people that are passionate and genuinely care about other human beings. They see business as a zero sum game and they want you to succeed as much as they succeed. They will help you greatly along the way to try to succeed. They generally view the world from the lens that a rising tide floats all boats. They also make great creative directors because they always give credit where credit is due and they are never putting their ego above others.

Then there are the people that are apathetic. Those that go to work because it's a job, it's a paycheck. They have lost their burning flame. Maybe they have just let life get in the way and they don't put time into caring that much about helping others. They aren't necessarily bad people, but you'll never see them volunteer for non-profits or go out of their way for anyone. They'll shoot out the door at 5:00pm and leave everyone else in the middle of a deadline. They tend to do the bare minimum. You'll ask them to review your portfolio or forward along your resume and maybe they'll oblige, but then will file the email away never to be seen again. They don't necessarily dislike you, nor are they being deliberately malicious, they are just not going to go out of their way to help you. They are generally too self-contained.

Lastly, there are vultures. Vultures might be talented, or they might not. They are a lot like number 2s in that they are not going to go out of their way to help you, but the main thing that distinguishes them is that they are actively hoping and wishing for you to fail so that they can come in and pick up the scraps. They are circling around you, your work, your clients...waiting. They tend to have narcissistic or sociopathic tendencies and consider themselves great what they do, even if sometimes there isn't much proof of that. Not always, but sometimes scandalous, maybe lying and cheating. But, generally they will do everything they can to stay a step ahead of you and make sure you remain "beneath" them. DJ Khaled — who I'm sure many of you know, and if not, you may want to reconsider what you are choosing to do for a living — calls these people "they". You'll want to avoid "they" as best as you can. "They" may even be in this room tonight. "They" might not even know it because "they" have become numb to it.

*You will be able to recognize these three different types of people over time by using your own intuition and trusting your own gut. I advise each and every one of you to always strive to be a number one. But be careful who you trust and always give back to your craft or industry as much as you can. If you do that, eventually the pendulum will swing back in your direction and you begin receiving 2-fold what you have given.

Presenting the student scholarship check tonight, are a few people that I know for a fact fit number one. They are givers. [I go on to announce the presenting sponsors]*

Have a great week, y'all.

Cheers,

Adam