The Ten-Year Rule
(And How To Avoid It)

Here’s a hard thing to accept.

The great work in most creative careers is made within a span of ten years.

Think about it. Whether it’s musicians, artists, filmmakers, or designers, it’s always in a ten-year period that they create their best, most outstanding work, the work that will define and sustain their career for the rest of their life. Once they’ve made their breakthrough, established a genre, or made their point of view easily recognizable, they are then able to repeat what they’ve created.

Wherever you look in the creative world it’s the same. Mick Jagger can travel around the world singing ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and twenty thousand people will turn up and applaud him – over forty-five years after he wrote it with Keith Richards. Or Lucian Freud who, once he had established his reputation as the greatest portrait painter of the late twentieth century, kept on painting portraits for the rest of his life.

To keep repeating the same thing once you’ve achieved greatness is perfectly acceptable with many art forms. But for some, such as advertising, you will need to have a new idea every day. And that idea can’t be like the one you had yesterday.

Constant innovation can be exhausting and it’s one of the reasons why advertising is so often seen as a young person’s industry. There aren’t many seventy-five-year-old art directors in our business.

So, how do you avoid the ten-year rule and continue to create great creative work across a fifteen-, twenty- or even a thirty-year career?

Here are some simple answers, a summary in short of all that’s come before:

Don’t become a cynic.

Surround yourself with great people who aren’t afraid of challenging you.

Stay engaged and remain curious about the world.

And last, but not least (and perhaps the real reason why the ten-year rule kicks in once success has been achieved): Remember money isn’t a philosophy, it’s a tool. It’s the last reason why you should do anything.