The version we keep rewriting
There is a version of advertising I fell in love with that no longer exists.
I am not sure it ever existed quite the way I remember it. But that is precisely the point.
When I think about the early years, the late nights that felt electric rather than exhausting, the clients who took risks, the campaigns that felt like they meant something, I remember a feeling more than a fact. A sense that the work mattered. That we were making something worth making.
What I remember less clearly are the impossible briefs. The clients who changed their minds on the day of the shoot. The politics of large organisations that had nothing to do with the work and everything to do with territory. The slow accumulation of small compromises that nobody talks about but everyone makes.
Memory is a generous editor.
Over time, I noticed that the industry I was working in felt increasingly unfamiliar. The priorities had shifted. The pressures were different. The qualities I had valued most, the creative courage, the willingness to be wrong in interesting ways, felt harder to find. And the gap between what it was and what it had become grew quietly wider.
What I did not notice at the time was how much my memory was widening that gap.
Because I was not comparing the present to the past as it actually was. I was comparing it to the best possible version of the past. A version that had been quietly polished over years until it was almost impossible to compete with.
That is the thing about how memory works. It does not just make the past feel better. It makes the present feel quietly insufficient, even when it is not.
Leaving advertising was not a rejection of what it had become. It was an acknowledgement that what it had been, or what I believed it had been, no longer lived there. And that is a different kind of grief. Not for what was lost. For what you realised you had been carrying.
The benchmark we rarely examine
What struck me in writing this week's article was how rarely we examine the benchmark we are using.
When something stops feeling right, a role, a relationship, an industry, a city, we tend to assume the problem is the present. We diagnose what is in front of us. We look for what changed, what went wrong, what is missing.
What we almost never ask is: what are we comparing this to?
Because the comparison point is often not reality. It is memory.
The pattern I keep seeing, in my own thinking and in conversations with others, is that the gap between where we are and where we want to be is sometimes not a gap at all. It is a distance between the present and an idealised version of the past that never quite existed in the way we remember it.
That does not mean dissatisfaction is wrong. Sometimes things genuinely deteriorate. Sometimes the present really is worse.
But it is worth asking, before you leave, before you stay, before you decide, which version of before you are using as your measure.
What I'm noticing
On leadership
A senior professional told me this week that they feel most confident in rooms where they already know the answer. It struck me as the most honest description of why smart people stop growing. Confidence and curiosity are not the same thing, and somewhere along the way, one quietly replaced the other.
On life
I have been thinking about the things we keep doing long after they have stopped working. Not because they work, but because they are ours. Habits, patterns, relationships, self-descriptions. Ownership makes them harder to examine than almost anything else.
On culture
Star Wars fans do not miss the original trilogy. They miss the feeling of watching it for the first time. The films have not changed. The memory of experiencing them has been remastered into something the actual films could never match.
The question leaders rarely ask
Am I holding on to the past because it was genuinely better, or because I have forgotten what it cost me to stay there?