The F-Word

By Marina Vasilieva and Taylor Thornton.

As an industry that prides itself on thinking, we often find ourselves overthinking way too often. 

We fear people will see us as weak if we are anything but a confident, considered and self-assured creative. We pretend our imaginations don’t skid off the road and conjure an elaborate and self-destructive car wreck of a narrative about what people actually think about us. We fear people won’t think we’re good enough. We fear being outed as fraudsters. We fear the next fall will untangle our carefully constructed careers.

This month we’re throwing an almighty fly kick to the metaphorical head of our fears.

We have had enough of the f-word controlling our lives.

We’ve met people with open arms and yarns, and turns out, by some miraculous discovery, quite a few very good people in our line of work are dealing with the same shit… But no two waves are the same right?* There’s plenty of ways to ride the wave and it doesn’t have to end with a vicious stack.

Okay, let’s take another common fear like flying, and imagine this is an episode of Air Crash Investigations. We’ve studied the flight paths, possible conditions, and dipped into the dreaded black box to find exactly what people think before it all goes south. So, you are the pilot of your career, and consider this flowchart a crowdsourced manual of air traffic controllers helping you survive the turbulence of your fears and land your big plane on that small runway.

*Taylor is facing his fear of being considered kooky for sharing a surfing analogy in an advertising therapy session.

Click here for an enlarged image of the flowchart.