Embrace your eras
Take a leaf out of Taylor Swift's book and give your old work a break
As Teneo truncated my notice period to just over two weeks, I didn't have the usual "winding down" period I've experienced at previous jobs. You might be familiar with that liminal time, when you're flitting between being 'in' and 'out', getting closer and closer to the fringes as time passes.
By your last week, you're often in "final admin mode". Tidying up your desktop, moving files and folders to places someone might find them in the future.
Even though I left in something of a hurry, I did a bit of this file hygiene. It's generally quite fun, especially when you've been somewhere for a while - looking back at old documents, cringing at the work you used to be proud of.
Someone (shamefully, I can't remember who or find the source) once said that feeling that mild sense of embarrassment from reviewing old work is a positive emotion. It shows how much you've grown and developed since writing that document.
A deck that was a previous labour of love is a snapshot of who you were at the time - your style, your outlook, your position. Opening those old documents may bring back some of the emotions you felt at the time - both positive and negative. It can be a cathartic experience, this reckoning with your past and your past selves.
And it's a process that isn't just limited to those of us working in comms - Taylor Swift is in the middle of her own reckoning, courtesy of her Eras tour. As the name suggests, and as Taffy Brodesser-Akner highlights in extraordinary detail in this joyous feature in the New York Times, Taylor is using her live show to celebrate her back catalogue and her different eras.
It is, of course, nothing new for musicians to delve into their back catalogues at their gigs. If you went to see Pulp and they didn't do Common People, you'd probably be disappointed. But what makes the Eras tour different, according to both the NYT and Taylor's fans, is the message it sends about self-acceptance.
As one fan puts it in Brodesser-Akner's piece: "You could so easily be ashamed of singing Taylor Swift in your bedroom. You could leave it behind. But she doesn't let you. She says, 'Look, I'm getting older, too.' You grow with her. What if we weren't ashamed of our eras? What if we realised they were always with us, and you didn't have to feel shame about who you were?"
What if you weren’t ashamed of your eras? You may well look back at an old deck and wince at your use of SmartArt or how many words are on the slide; Taylor's message is: don't worry. Let’s not "disavow the earlier versions of ourselves, our earlier eras".
Of course, you're not a multi-million-selling pop star, so you probably don't have the same precise "eras" as Taylor. But you might have different jobs in different places, different roles, and different responsibilities that define a particular period of your life. Moments that stick out and sum up parts of your career.
I think of promotion pushes, where I forced myself to behave differently to try and get that step. Taking the "look the part, be the part [expletive removed]" approach patented by Prop Joe in The Wire. Or when I got unexpected promotions that I can see now, with the benefit of hindsight, I was patently unprepared for. Times when I struggled and ended up leaning heavily on supportive colleagues to get myself back on track.
Remembering those difficult times brings up feelings of shame and regret, even now, when they're well over ten years behind me. So I can identify with Taylor Swift's message - own your past. Make friends with your past; don't shy away from it. There's plenty to learn that can help make your work even better.
The other interesting question raised by the NYT piece on the Eras tour, and this long-ish read looking back on twenty years of Lost in Translation, is - how noticeable are those critical moments at the time, those eras we go through? Can you spot one when an era begins and another ends, while that change happens?
On the Taylor side, Brodesser-Akner reckons they hit you hard out of nowhere, those transitions: "Eras end definitively and violently. They come while you're just trying to do your job and live your life, and one day you're sitting in Section 301, and you realise that the transition happened without you ever even realising it."
When considering Lost in Translation, Johny Pitts feels we can spot the transitions - "if we only pay enough attention". "Encoded in Lost in Translation is that kind of liminal melancholy we feel at certain points in our lives, when one era is ending, but another has not quite begun."
Looking at my history, I can honestly say I only notice those eras where there has been a significant, landmark change - moving jobs, moving out of London, getting married and having my daughter. Those other moments, like much of what we experience in our lives, can only be seen through the rearview mirror. To quote Kierkegaard, life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
Too much looking back can be dangerous - as Don Draper says, nostalgia is delicate but potent. You can get stuck pining for a time you can never get back to, no matter how hard you try. But we can’t ignore our past, or we risk getting stuck in a cycle of making the same old mistakes over and over. So revisit those old decks and documents, those great campaigns that are never far from the front of your mind. Treat them with kindness and compassion, but don’t spare the critical eye that helps you identify how far you’ve come. It could inspire you to start something new, exciting and era-defining.