Swash Labs Turns 10

Established April 27, 2011

I used to say, with some dramatic relish, that Swash Labs was my last chance. I'd burned the boats, and there was no Plan B. Either this worked, or I was doomed to failure, penury, and disgrace.

In hindsight, I think I recognize this for the youthful grandstanding that it is, shot through with both relief and grief, deeply rooted in the last moments of my adolescence. From a young age, I knew what I would be: a successful composer and musician. Injury destroyed ten years of belief and confidence not long after I turned 19, carpal tunnel and nerve damage caused by an insane practice regimen to which my young percussionist's body was simply ill-suited. It took me years to start to let go of that set of predestined outcomes, endpoints to which I had aligned much of my identity. Even though plenty of good things happened to me before I turned 25, I welcomed disappointment, frustration, and shame into my heart. I felt these feelings because I did not become what I was supposed to be. I sought them out and allowed them to summarily poison my perception of pretty much everything outside of my personal relationships. 

At 42 years old, I think I finally know why. Letting go of music and embracing the other stuff I enjoyed (and was fairly good at) felt like quitting. Succeeding at other pursuits felt like I was giving up on a gift, like I was abandoning what made me really special, leaving behind a predetermined path, a fate with a clear destination, even though the actual way to get there was murky and ill-defined.

Since then, I've become a dad, and I have a kid who has undeniable musical talent. I know this because how she experiences music is fundamentally different than how I experienced it. She has ears I would have killed for and a connection to her instrument — her voice — that is free and easy and blissful. My life as a musician was different. In observing her limitless, effortless command of her abilities and her enormous capacity for learning and integrating new and advanced concepts, I have learned something that I could not fully understand until this year. Until last week, in fact.

It isn't just that she has more musical talent than I ever did, but rather that music was always a struggle for me. I was never a natural. I did end up being pretty good, and I could eventually perform and write music at a high level for how old I was and for where I came from. But that was a skill set much more than it was the product of or reflection of natural talent. I ended up injured because I practiced myself into oblivion. I had no choice: I had to fight for every new rudiment, every new insight, every new thing I couldn't hear or see before.

The only pursuit in my young life which resulted in outwardly observable success had been a struggle for me from the jump. So, somewhere along the way, I started to equate success with struggle. If something was easy for me, it didn't count, somehow. I was pretty good at making friends, making people laugh, telling stories, writing stories, writing poetry, critical thinking, research, and deep analysis. I discovered I had some talent for political analysis and social science and for writing about both. Unfortunately, none of it interested me as much as music.

So, somewhere along the way, I started to equate success with struggle.

Rather than embrace these things as a new path, I stubbornly fought it every step of the way. I could not be objective about my own shit. Finishing an undergrad degree in political science and going to grad school in the same scholarly neighborhood felt like a trap or a bitter obligation even though there was simply no way to do the same with music. It felt like something I was doing instead of what I should have been doing.

I know now that this was stupid. I know now that, except for the normal friction and sadness that sometimes follows in change's wake, all of the frustration and drama I endured was by choice, and optional. I thought suffering was not only legitimate but necessary and required.

After ten years, I feel fully justified in saying that Swash Labs is successful. I think I know the difference now, that something fun or easy or fulfilling or rewarding isn't disqualified from being successful and good because it isn't a constant beating. Running a small business is hard. It can be flat-out grim and harrowing. It can sometimes be much harder than any youthful or overwrought quixotic quests I undertook in my pre-Swash years. But the good stuff that comes with running Swash Labs — working with good people, getting to tell stories on behalf of clients we like and can believe in — so far outweighs the stress that the stress doesn't really matter to me anymore.

Before anyone comes to work at Swash, I usually tell them, candidly, that I don't really know what I'm doing and that I could crash the whole boat at any moment. I tell them this partly because I know being a grown-up is a huge scam and that none of us knows what we're doing. More to the point, I also tell them this because I want to be transparent. I want them to know, in real terms, what they are signing up for. So far, no one has turned me down as a result of that talk.

Over ten years, we've changed each other's lives by inhabiting and thriving within our rag-tag band of rebels and misfits. Our work together has changed the paths and futures of dozens of businesses and organizations, representing tens of thousands of people, all over America. If I need an antidote to the poison I fed myself in my first twelve years or so out of high school, it is unquestionably contained in what I've done with the ten years after that.

Thought leaders and CEOs are supposed to write blogs about their businesses that feel very different than the one you're reading right now. I know that gurus and industry disruptors should only signal that some parts of their pasts were difficult by discussing them at some vague and insulating distance, through the sterile lens of a post-mortem or an after-action report. I don't want to do that bullshit. I want you to know how these last ten years felt.

I am telling you a personal story about how I unlocked joy in a big, previously inaccessible part of my perception of my own life because I want you to know how that feels, too. It feels great. I want to share that with you. 

I felt every second of the first ten years of Swash Labs, and I spent some of that time saying things like, "This has to work, I burned the boats, there is no Plan B" because I was scared. Some of that was impostor's syndrome, but even that is fundamentally tied to the bad idea I was harboring, that in order for something to be successful and legit, it had to hurt, at least more than it felt good, or fun, or right. 

I want my kid to grow up knowing that it is possible for something to be fun and worthwhile at the same time. You do not have to roll endless rocks up infinite hills. You do not have to suffer in order for what you are doing to be taken seriously. You can throw yourself into anything with energy and abandon and find reward and fulfillment in return for your effort, and that ultimately what matters is how you feel about what you're doing and why. It only took me 42 years for me to learn that lesson. I am fortunate that I have spent the last ten of those years working with some of the finest people I’ve ever known.

My kid loves music, and it is easy for her, and she's good at it. The only real requirement on that list is that she loves it. Whether she becomes a pop star or just loves singing in her car while she does something entirely different with her life has no bearing on the original and most vital relationship between her and music: that she loves it and it makes her feel good.

The important thing, then, about Swash Labs at ten years old, is that it works, and it is good, and that it feels good. It feels right. By lived experience, I now know that you can start an ad agency entirely for the express purpose of creating a good place to work, a place where you want to work. A place where you can work with people you like to work with, and where telling stories about people and organizations you believe in is not only enough but is in fact the whole mission.

When we are young, we ask ourselves young questions. What will happen to us? How will things turn out? I always think these questions belie the real query, one that is less concerned with external forces: What will we become? I now understand what Patti Smith meant when she wrote that these kinds of questions lead us to each other and that we become ourselves. Of course we do. We have no choice.

Every day is a new last chance. Every day we burn the boats. There is no Plan B because we are here, becoming ourselves, and we can't become anyone else. What else is there, but to love each other, and to love ourselves, and to live our lives, and in between all of that, to tell the stories in our charge?