Senior Manager, Shanghai Digital Practice
Edelman, Shanghai City
LinkedIn: cn.linkedin.com/in/amandamooney
My phone is dead. My face is burned. My shoes are rubbed with new dirt from a new place. Seven flights in the past twenty days and I’ve landed here in Sarawak. I am very tired but I am very happy.
I am also three months late on an assignment to write a short piece for this book.
Tired, sunburned, very far from home and quite late, but happy.
Over the past twenty days, my office has moved from Shanghai to Kuala Lumpur, to Johor, back to Kuala Lumpur, to Penang, to Kota Kinabalu to Sarawak… from the homes of ten once-strangers-turned-friends, to the base of Mount Kinabalu at sunrise to the kampongs of Penang, to the backseat of a car driven by a kind seventy-year-old “uncle” who calls himself Gandhi, to the banks of a river discovered with an ex-sniper, and up thrilling but terrifying back roads in the mountains and jungle just before dark. Fourteen-hour days, with a crew of three, carrying more than a terabyte of footage, photos and interviews.
Eyes heavy, camera full, but happy.
My job, in title, is senior manager for Edelman China. In practice, I work with our teams and clients as a researcher and planner to help craft brand strategy. I work to help companies understand the lives, needs and complexities of the people that make up their customer bases. I work to help build or inform products, experiences and programs that help serve both corporate ambition and customer aspiration. I work with the hope and belief that the essential connection that exists between both, if focused in the right direction, can do a tremendous amount of good in the lives and communities of customers.
Tonight my work has taken me here to Malaysia as part of a film and research project that will span at least six countries: China, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and India, with new countries likely to follow. The project is called Words of a Generation. It’s a personal window into the lives of people who have lived through rapid change in each country. It uses the emotional impact of film and the true stories of real people to help ground companies in a more personal connection with customers in these fast-moving societies. It started as a small idea I created and sent to our APACMEA (Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa) CEO nearly a year back. Now it is an all-consuming project that will drive at least the next year and a half of my life and will result in more than thirty-five films.
Outside of this project, I have no life plan. I have no idea when I’ll settle down, or where I’ll settle down, or if I’ll ever settle in one place, or if I’ll get married or have kids or return to the United States. The only thing I know is that I’ve somehow landed here tonight, working on a project that I believe in and love. It is just a start, and I have so much to learn and sometimes it is very, very hard. But it is a chance very few get.
And it is a testament to a single, lasting lesson I learned in the Breakthrough Thinking class.
In class, five years back, we were asked to start taking artist dates. We had to consciously take steps to break our daily routine. We were told to walk to class using a different, slower, unfamiliar route. We were told to take the time to listen to an entire album from a genre not typical of our taste. We were told to act often and purposefully to move outside of our place of comfort.
This simple idea pushed me to move my work to New York after graduation and then to run away on instinct, without planning or experience, to Chicago. It pushed me to plead for the chance to move anywhere outside of the United States, anywhere that felt remotely unfamiliar. It gave me the courage to say yes when a chance to move to China finally came. And it encouraged me to email a small idea—the first iteration of Words—to our CEO and then to follow that idea through with long days, unfamiliar treks, first hellos to people met in new places and an overwhelming but rewarding mountain of work.
I come from a nowhere place. A place I love, but a nowhere place nonetheless. I come from a family that has never had the chance to see the world like this. My mom just got her first passport this Christmas after I printed and filled out the application for her. And now I’m here in this hotel in Sarawak.
I have no life plan or career plan. I’m not sure what I’m really qualified to do in my work. I’m not even sure when I’ll be able to get a full night’s sleep. And for the next year and a half at least, I won’t be in any one country for more than one month at a time.
I am quite happily lost at the moment in many respects. Five years of artists dates and I’ve landed only on this.
Creativity, or creative opportunity, at least — as I’m not even sure if what I’m doing would qualify as creativity-with-a-capitol-c yet — it isn’t a thing, or a kind of magic, or even necessarily a talent. Creativity is something that happens in the space between purpose, endurance, question after question and the fear-mixed-with-excitement blind spot at the center of what’s unfamiliar. Everyone says this kind of thing but few know what it really feels like.
It isn’t a search for cool. It’s caring about your work so much that you work through whatever it takes to try something new. It’s knowing that you’ll be uncomfortable and exposed and wrong most of the time and certainly always just starting out and that, whatever it is, it may never work in the end. It’s bags under your eyes, hitting “send” even if you’re quite unsure, an uncomfortable conversation or even just a scary ride up a mountain road so you can see something new. It’s leaving home and missing home but really trying and really searching for something.
Tonight, for me, it’s here. A long night awake in a hotel room seven flights from Shanghai—my home for now—and an assignment for this book that’s three months too late. It’s a first sentence on a topic too big to describe, followed by a first draft of a few hundred words. It’s a start.