The last thing you want to do in the workplace is to give a consistent level of effort. Consistency, in this case, is a recipe for failure. The only way you know what you’re capable of is by burning out. If your brain is your engine, then it’s beneficial to redline it to see what happens. If not, what exactly are you conserving yourself for? To be well-rested for a weekend at the park or the possibility you will be called upon to perform backbreaking physical labor on short notice?
I doubt it.
Holding back makes perfect sense at an eleven-course prix fix extravaganza, where stuffing your face with quail eggs and duck pâté will create an impasse mid-meal. By the time the meatier displays arrive on the table, you’re spent, embarrassed in front of your friends (fellow diplomats and heads of state) by your unwise zeal for appetizers. Dessert is still to come, they say. You know that, but you’re finished, far from famished. It’s a mistake you hopefully won’t make again.
But harnessing your energy at the office is an entirely different matter. On the one hand, 8 hours at work is something most can and do accomplish in their sleep. On the other finger, there’s very little besides overwhelming social pressure preventing you from sleeping at the office and expanding the workday from 8 hours to infinity.
The building itself might have rules and regulations that either frown on or outright ban people from turning their desk into a minibnb. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try. Burnout tends to signal hard work and undiagnosed mental illness. Both of which are major assets in any creative agency.
There are important benefits of burnout very often overlooked by those in the touchy-feely cults of positivity. What they are forgetting is that in most instances, out of the ashes comes something much better. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. True burnout means landing on the street, losing everything and everyone in your life only to receive a bump in salary and title shortly after slamming into rock bottom.
Speaking of rock, The Cloisters, tucked away in upper Manhattan amid the hills and protruding schist, is not my second home. I don’t spend my days there, nose buried deep into the spine of delicate medieval texts. But the nose is an organ unforgiving of tomes, dooming many a scroll with a peaceful sneeze. The thought of sustained nasal distress is enough to send a pack of budding scholars to a little known but decaying ledge. Though not at a museum, I do spend most of my days cloistered from reality. And reality, as you know, has always been pay what you wish. What’s troubling me is a unique set of famous tapestries. They are of unicorns. Unicorns prancing, unicorns dancing, unicorns doing spot-on political impressions. I think we can learn a lot from these wall rugs, especially in the business world, especially today.
Unicorns are real. What else could explain their existence on these faded, hanging threads? Imagination? I’ve imagined lots of things, but nothing like that. Flying horses, maybe. Fire-breathing horses, perhaps. But a horse with a horn? Now that’s too much. Totally beyond the pale. The very idea doesn’t compute. But the advertising industry could use more than a few unicorns, feedbags and all. And for those loudly praying at the green feet of the almighty dollar, it’s a win, too.
I’m told all the time that every big agency is brimming with unicorns. They are the ones driving creative work, pushing boundaries and signaling things are different. It helps explain the awards and the good press. But I’m not seeing it. Though I am looking in all directions for it. And I know the sharper-than-your-average-Vermont-cheddar binoculars sitting at my desk aren’t to blame. Everyone eats at their desks, but no one eats hay. I’d expect that and much more from a mythical equine, dead set on disrupting the ad world one horn at a time.
The truth is that unicorns are just like everybody else. They put their horseshoes on one at a time.
In search of unicorns I hit the racetrack, a place my adopted borough is quite famous for. But horseracing too, suffers from a decided lack of magical beasts. Every other industry it seems has gotten religion on the unicorn question, boasting that the average person is well-above average. The track’s different. No unicorns. Just gamblers. I’m starting to think that maybe unicorns aren’t real. Still doesn’t explain the tapestries at the Cloisters. Maybe what we consider horns were simply the olde tyme equivalent of birthday hats. The pointy ones that never quite sit right on your head, continuously irritating your chin. Honestly, it's hard to have your cake and eat it too after several centuries rotting in a hardly climate-controlled monastery basement.
But real or not, we don’t need more unicorns in the office. We have enough to make King Arthur proud. But unicorns wouldn’t know the first thing about burning out and rising again. But a phoenix would. These are the animals that HR departments ought to be scouring the Internet in search of. Agencies need more flammable candidates, those bursting with ideas as well as fire. We need phoenixes at all levels of the business, not merely in leadership positions. Or is it phoenis? Phoenii? Phoenician? They are, as Igor Stravinsky might say, firebirds.
We’re told to be spontaneous, to act naturally. Okay, fine. That's all well and good. After winning an important new business pitch, the sight of a hardworking co-worker going up in flames is the final spark needed to best the competition.
What’s more spontaneous than combustion?
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