Thoughts about mentors, funerals and what happens when you're no longer the "Next Generation"
Issue #134
Editor’s Note:
I began this newsletter first and foremost as an excuse to write and to see if I could create and keep to an editorial calendar. The secondary goal was to have a platform that allowed me occasionally say things that I felt needed to be said. I never intended it to be a prime driver of my consulting practice or a profit center.
In many ways, it’s been more successful than I anticipated but not successful enough that if the “paying” business got too thick or too many other things were going on, it would have to take a back seat.
So that’s my half hearted explanation to you, my hopefully faithful readers, why you haven’t seen anything from me for a few weeks. For one, the paying business, especially during AAM filing time, takes precedence. In the other, more personal, well, I hope the thought exercise below shines a bit of a light.
As I was driving home from the Westminster B&N store a few weeks back, the thought occurred to me that no matter how hard you try, you can never entirely prepare your children, or yourself for “what comes next.” There’s just no way. Sure, there’s the news, there’s magazines. Bookstores and libraries have whole shelves devoted to self-help books that have titles like “27 Things to Prepare Yourself for the Zombie Apocalypse”. But when the zombies show up, do you remember those 27 things? Well, if we’re lucky, we figure some sh*t out and we make it work. All that preparation may have helped. Or maybe not.
No matter how hard you try as a parent, there’s no guarantee that when you send your children out into the world, they’re going to know everything they need to know. Ideally, you’ve set them up to know enough to figure things out. Before my oldest daughter went off to college, I prepared a three ring binder for her filled with notes, info graphics and titled it “Everything You Need to Know While You’re in College (But Were Afraid to Ask).” She didn’t get the joke (Wrong generation) and I discovered, when I went to help her move out of her senior apartment, that she never used the binder. She preferred to figure things out on her own.
It was the same for me. As a twenty something living on my own in Chicago and far away from my home in Western Massachusetts, it dawned on me one day that despite all of the coaching my Mom and Dad gave me shortly before I moved west of the Berkshires, that there was a remarkable amount of stuff I was completely clueless about. It was the same for each job I had as I moved from a Regional Sales Manager, to an Assistant Director, to a Vice President (Which sounded nicer than it really was). There was a lot of things I had to figure out through trial and error.
If you’re fortunate enough, you will find mentors along the way who will prepare you to be a “leader” when you hit the peak of your career. I was fortunate in that regard. When I landed in Chicago as a “Regional Sales Manager” of the smallest and least important national magazine and book distributor, there was a select group of old timers who worked for the major national distributors in the “Publisher’s Room,” and they watched my training with some disbelief because the person my company sent to train me in the ways of single copy sales had no clue as to how the local wholesaler operated. Everything he told me was guaranteed to put me on the outs immediately with the Chicago wholesaler. As soon as he left, one of them sidled up to me and said, “Let’s go over some things because you seem like a nice kid and I don’t want them to eat you alive.”
Over the next decade, I would frequently turn to Jerry when I was working locally for advice about pretty much anything work related. And sometimes not so much work related.
My next two employers were seemingly uninterested in expanding my knowledge base. They were my bosses. They told me what to do and me being me, sort of did what they told me to. It wasn’t until I found myself about to become self employed that I found my next two mentors. They taught me how to run a consulting business. Ralph and Irwin were the epitome of “consultants” in the 1980’s and 1990’s world of magazines. This really was the golden age of big dollar publishing and two martini lunches and their client list was one to die for. Most of their publishers were, if not A list, they were A- list. The list of launches they successfully managed was the length of an arm and the jobs they held before going out on their own were some of the mostly highly desirable publishers you’d want to work for.
Some of their advice was simple, but remarkably useful: “Don’t write a report while angry.” “Show, don’t tell.” “Give the clients something to see or read each reporting period.” Yes, standard boilerplate stuff you’d find on LinkedIn, but for someone who’d mostly been working by rote, incredibly helpful.
Ideally your mentor will vouch for you and advocate for you. Jerry endorsed me for my second job and gave me excellent advice on how to handle my new boss. Ralph and Irwin pointed me in the direction of many of my new clients and at one point, when competitors tried to undercut me, stepped in and helped me retain my clients.
How do you repay your mentor? You can do it by paying it forward and by offering a helping hand when you can.
Eventually everyone ages out. The structures of a business that you trained for leadership in change. Sometimes what you’re looking at is barely recognizable. In the world of magazines and in the shallow, sometimes stagnant sea of magazine circulation and marketing, the structures that allowed for big personalities and big clients vanished years ago. I used to joke with some colleagues who are in my generation that we were supposed to be the “Next Generation” in charge of all of this. And now of course, there is no “all of this.” The world as we knew it has vanished.
That’s fine because we’ve adapted. We’ve changed. We’ve learned new things. That’s what I’ve been doing for what now feels like my whole professional life. If we can, we mentor and help the new people who come in after us.
The people who helped shape my career are gone. All that are left are some memories and notes from their family saying thank you for the donation. Or the letter with your memories of him. Or for attending the service. It is a weird experience to notice that people are “disappearing.” I imagine there’s another word for that but that’s the one that keeps coming back to me.
My father, who was also in the magazine business, passed away six years ago. This summer marks the beginning of what was his ultimate decline and passing a few months later. It was a time of phone calls with my siblings, repeated plane rides to my parents home. It’s something that I think about every year at around this time. It’s not something you want to think about, but you do anyway.
My mother is 93. She’s been failing for the past year. This past month has been particularly hard on her. She is a former first grade school teacher in a Title 1 school. She was a docent at a zoo. She was an editor of her school newspaper and that inspired me to become a writer for both my high school and college papers. Last week we moved her into hospice care. How long will she be there? We don’t know.
So it now appears that I am at that age when people “disappear.” They go. You never see them again. But you do have memories.
If you are lucky, you will have had parents who tried to prepare you for the world. They’ll ultimately fail. Not because they’re bad parents or incapable parents. They’ll fail because the world is constantly changing and at best, they will prepare you to figure it out on your own. If you’re really lucky, and I hope you are, along the way you may meet a “Jerry” or a “Ralph” or an “Irwin” and they’ll show you the ropes. They’ll tell you you’ll be fine. It will all work out. They’ll encourage you to pay it forward.
You’re moment of magazine zen…
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