Who Are We?

Never Let An Identity Crisis Go To Waste

Hey there Peaceniks. I need to ask you a question. Who are you?

Every summer, I go through this exercise. “Who am I?” When I was young, it was for summer camp. Or for the coming school year. Who did I want to be that summer? This school year? Smart guy? Stoner? Funny guy? I had a normal-ish childhood. Sleep-away provided me my first chance to figure out who I was outside the kids I saw every day at school, three times a week at Hebrew school, in little league, and at cub scouts.

Then, the summer before the start of middle school, my parents split and I moved to a very different town, where I didn’t know anyone. We went from being one of the up-and-comiest families in town, to a single and working Mom (first-gen latch-key), a shitty condo, and an enormous, rich township of kids who got cars before they got permits.

So, those summers between 10 and 15, I spent a lot of time thinking about who I wanted to be. The summer I turned 14, I discovered a theater program at the local high school. That was the summer I decided a big part of who I would be the rest of my life.

Choosing the business of show as your life’s pursuit at 14 was clarifying. It was the driver of all of my career choices from that point on. It also became a constant point of contention, aggression, obfuscation, and calamity for my family. My father flat-out refused to discuss it as an option. When I was 16, the guy who walked out on my family, and pretty much dropped out of society, told me I “can’t major in theater, because it’s not a real job.”

That summer before freshman year, I had to decide who I was. My father’s son, or my own person. That fall, I did what I wanted.

I didn’t major in theater, but I headed up a student run company. I avoided class and just made theater and got stoned. By the last summer before what was supposed to be my last year in college, I hadn’t been to class in over a year, and had been relying on pizza delivery, a supportive and gullible mom, and very a flexible scholarship office at UMASS to pay bills. And I again found myself deciding who I the fuck was.

Thankfully I had a therapist who specialized in fucked up peter pans. He was the nicest and smartest man I think I’ve ever met. That summer, after listening to me try and talk myself into summer stock theater in middle bumfuck, PA, this scholarly, quiet, grey-haired gent looked me in the eye and said “You think you’re such a big shot, why not go to where the action is? If you want to be professional at this business, you gotta go where the business is. Otherwise, you’re just putting off the real test of who you are.”

Damn Doc. Ok then.

I officially dropped out of school (exposing to everyone I knew the fact that I hadn’t attended class in at least 5 semesters), sold my baseball cards and comic books, won some money on a game show (another story), and moved to New York. Summer of 1990. AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve altered the entire sequence for poetic license, those who know can sue me, and everyone else should rest assured the essence is represented.

Each of my 34 summers in the city, I dedicated time – serious time – to contemplating the meaning of my life (yes, sometimes high). In each case, the inward exploration – the time invested in considering what I want and why; the dedicated focus put on what I can do better and what I can do more – always produces revelations and results.

The choice to go after the Head of Marketing job at The New York Shakespeare Festival – a job I no way, shape, or form deserved – was made during one of those sessions. I got it. It transformed my life. My gamble on starting a marketing agency with a few friends, taking on the Broadway Advertising/Communications Industrial complex, at age 29, with a brand-new baby, giving up my salary and benefits, and abandoning my hope for a career as an artist… Was also the result of a Deep Sativa Walkabout. It changed my life, again. Selling that agency five years later to take my first job in TV, came after a self-inflicted summer of anxiety and fear about providing well for my family of four (by then) and wanting a platform larger than the stage.

During the course of my life, I have turned these summertime self-reflective swims into a self-fulfilling cycle. I structure my year around it. Summer is always for renewal. For change.

The team at ESHAP spends the summer working on our fall thesis. We do research into and beyond our field, we compile data about where we think the Universe is going. Last summer, this helped us create the concept of the User Centric Era. The summer prior, we developed our Hierarchy of Feeds.

Personally, I dedicate a lot of time every summer on who I have been the year prior, and who I want to be – and why – in the year ahead. Coincidentally, or call it karma, major life events also seem to find me between the summer and fall solstices. Both my kids were born in August, exactly three years apart. Last summer, I found out I have cancer, the same week I directed my first play in 25 years. This past June, that baby daughter I had when I started my business 28 years ago, got married - at a summer camp.

This past summer was momentous. In May, I helped produce my first Media conference. Two weeks later, we had that wedding - easily the best day of my life. Then I went to Europe for two weeks with my wife – the longest trip we’ve taken alone in 30 years. We had an amazing time. In July, I started treatment for cancer again. Then I took my mom to Copenhagen - the first real vacation she and I have ever taken together. It was the best summer of my life.

During treatment over the summer, as I sat in the chair for four hours, getting infused, I started my yearly process of contemplation again. Like a snake shedding its skin.

I’ve been asked, and I have written about, how I have been able to pivot my career so many times, and with relative success. Of everything I can think of, this yearly ritual of self-inspection, self-correction, and self-propulsion is the most important. I’ve often said it’s the effort to know who you are, why, and the ability to articulate those to others, which differentiates those who get to where they want to go from those who don’t.

So, let me ask again: Who ARE YOU?

When was the last time you asked yourself that? When did you last ask why you do what you do with so many hours of every day? Have you asked yourself what you want to do? What is most important to you, right now? Even if it’s money. Or power. Or personal satisfaction. Or the ability to turn it all OFF whenever you want. Or to work from wherever you want.

Can you answer, easily and specifically: Who are you? What do you want? Why?

If so, seriously, great for you. Unfortunately, many of us are struggling with these very questions – especially at this time when tens of thousands of us in Media and Tech are being laid off and some of Media’s most indelible brands teeter on the edge of implosion.

I have PTSD from two of my last “jobs.” Thinking of them still makes me feel like the summer my parents got divorced. For a sizable share of us, our jobs, our titles, the trappings of our corporate careers are welded onto our personalities. It is hard to tell folks that the weld broke - that the title, budget, and authority we used to have don’t follow our name anymore.

Now, with mergers and acquisitions all around us, and layoffs coming down like hurricanes, it it the perfect time to try some deep contemplative thought about who you are in our community, what you really want to do, and why it matters.

I’ve been through this many times, and I’ve worked with others on their journeys. So, I have developed repeatable tactics to help focus the process, regardless your level or career, and increase the likelihood of satisfactory results.