March 22 - Egos
I am SURE that I have written about this exact idea in past Marches, but it’s too near and dear to my heart today to not write one more post about.
A little bit of background is necessary for today’s topic. I am an art director, which essentially means that I come up with big ideas and make things pretty for a living. Campaign ideas, commercials, print ads, digital ads, you know. The works. If you’re really curious, feel free to check out the rest of my website.
Feedback in general can feel really personal. One of my old bosses put it best when she pulled myself and my copywriting partner aside after a particularly brutal client call and said, “Don’t worry. I get it. We’re all insane to have chosen this profession. Feedback doesn’t just feel like feedback when you’re a creative, it feels like a brutal attack on your freaking soul. You haven’t made a mistake because of a faulty equation or failed to make a sale. You’ve used your beautiful brains and your talented fingers to create these wonderful things and then a bunch of non-creative people decided that they didn’t like them. If the two of you want to take the rest of the day to mourn, that’s totally fine. Your creative children just got, and I don’t say this lightly, murdered.”
I had an internal call today meant to go over some ideas my partner and I had put together before our client presentation on Monday. For the most part, our concepts went over incredibly well. After all, these was our third attempt. One of our account leads, however, really hurt my fragile creative feelings.
“Well, we’re closer.” She began. “But we are not there yet. We need to fix…” And she proceeded to list off three INCREDIBLY fixable problems. 3. Out of a 70 slide presentation. And literally, people, we are talking sentence structure.
I immediately got a little warm.
It’s sort of like when you clean your room because your mom told you to and she comes in and says, Well, it’s better, but you clearly forgot to dust that one bookshelf.
Or when you’ve painstakingly planned out an entire dinner party and the guest you were most concerned about impressing says, Wait, is there no dessert?
I wrote down everything she said, implemented the feedback immediately after the call, and sent through the updated presentation link. But I might have also let myself get a little teary (if you remember, I also have not been sleeping very well which may have played a part here).
The ego is a fragile thing, especially when your work feels personal.
