The Value of Being a Multi-Hyphenate

The economy is changing... again.

And again. And once... no, twice more in the time it took me to write the previous sentence. Compound that ad Infinitum and you've pretty much summed up the conundrum of being a worker in the our post-modern society. It's near impossible to be prepared for the present while anticipating what's around the corner.

What I'm saying here shouldn't come as a shock.

Our ever changing global economy is a fluid, ephemeral machine and as time progresses certain skills within it become less valuable - while other emerging skills accrue value, blow up - then just as quickly as they arrived, become irrelevant and die. Remember flash animators? Neither do I.

The sad part is, we're all competing in this over-crowded, misguided skills economy whether we like it or not and if you're not prepared to take the bumps along the way, you're going to get knocked off. I know this all to well, because this just happened to me.

Previously, I worked as a Producer at a large, broadcast-centric ad agency. While I was in their glorious employ (i'm being facetious btw) I worked on huge, Fortune 100 clients whose approval process moved at a snails pace. Some of these projects dragged on two to three times as long as they needed to because it was easier for the client to delay the right decision than it was to be held accountable for the wrong decision. The paralysis of groupthink it REAL.

As the old adage goes, "It's easier to say no and go to lunch then it is to say yes and go to work."

And much like the clients we served, the agency I worked for was a bloated, slow-moving beast resistant to change. Complacency is damning. I watched it happen all around me, like a slow-moving vine ensnaring everything in it's path. Until eventually... it got me too. The sad thing is, I didn't even see it coming.

After three years of catered lunches, delayed briefs, rushed timelines and overzealous account people, I too had became complacent. The only difference between me and the old guard that ran the agency was that I was too young and too broke to resist change the way they did.

I learned enough in those three years to realize that it's not enough to do one thing well. You have to many things. And you also have to be really good at ALL those things too. That's the hard part.

You have to be a multi-hyphenate.

I can say in good faith that i'm a Writer/Director/Producer and Editor. I admit, I'm better at one or two of those things than I am at the others. But, that's my secret. And that's part of what it takes. It's okay to know your strengths, so long as you're working to shore up your weaknesses.

All in all, the reason I'm writing this is to really hammer it in that you're probably not doing enough. The economy is fickle and will not wince to nudge you out. So, I encourage you to learn more skills. I know it's a terrible trope at this point, but your best investment is in yourself. Really, no one cares more about you.. than you.

So, buckle down - learn some new skills and grow as the economy swells. Otherwise, you're gonna get knocked down.

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