On today’s episode of the Engaging Marketeer, Darren discusses something that he recently posted to social media and received great reaction on. It is a story of how, in school, Darren was told he wasn’t good enough by one of his teachers and how that almost impacted his decisions at a young age, which could’ve completely change the career path he took. Fortunately, Darren ignored his teacher’s advice and did what he wanted to do, which lead him to where he is today.
Darren: Now, as you probably know, I’m the co-founder of a digital marketing and web design agency. Over the years, we’ve probably designed and built in the region of a few hundred websites. We’re doing so many more now and that’s going to go up exponentially but we’ve built quite a few websites, for various clients around the world. I was the first in house web designer for GAME, back in 2000 and I designed their website many times, over the years, as well their online portal for online gaming and I designed some in-store flyers for them. Quite a few things, all of the graphics and the merchandising on the GAME website, also the digital television stuff for Sky and NTL, back at the time.
So I’ve done a huge amount of design work over the years but none of this would’ve happened had I listened to my art teacher. When I was back in school doing my GCSEs, back in 1991. My art teacher, and I’m going to name the buggar, his name was John Laughton, Mr. Laughton. He was quite a weird guy, he’s one of those people where you think “He definitely smokes weed” and I’m pretty sure he did, I don’t know that for a fact so I’m not slandering him. I thought he did and that was the assumption we all had at the time, he way have done, he may not have done.
But he said to me once, when we were going through our A-level choices, I wanted to do art at A-level and I wanted to do classical civilization, which is basically Greek and Roman literature and history. It’s Greek gods basically, if you love your mythology, then this is the kind of stuff you want to do, so I wanted to do that. But I wanted to do art as well and he told me, and I’ve always remembered this, don’t pick art at A-level because you are not good enough. And that kind of hurt. That kind of hurt because I didn’t think I was great at art, I wasn’t brilliant at it but I thought I was decent. My older brother, Paul, was much better than me at art, he was great at it. One of my mates in school, Nick, who’s a wedding photographer now, he was much better than me at art.
But I thought I was okay, I thought “I can do this, I can do the GCSE, I can do the A-level” and I had to do a creative A-level because I wanted to go on to film school to do animation and you cant do animation if you can’t draw. It’s just a fundamental fact, unless you do the whole thing 3D animated which, at the time, computer generated graphics weren’t really there. Although, mid 90s Toy Story came out so they were there at the top end but at the student end, they weren’t there. But I quite liked plasticine animation, I loved Wallace and Gromit, I’d seen some 3D animated films, made with plasticine, that the university had done. I thought “I’d love to do that, I’d love to get involved with that!”
But that all starts with doing art, I have to do art at A-level. And this guy, who’s meant to be a tutor, a teacher, somebody who’s going to help me, said “Don’t do that, you are not good enough.” And I very nearly didn’t, particularly when it is couple with the fact that my dad told me not to do it either because I should be doing something like a language, I should be doing French or German. I was crap at languages. “They’re more useful” my dad would say “They’re more useful for education! What’s this classical crap going to do? What’s this art going to do? You’re never going to get a job doing that!” I didn’t want a job, I wanted to run my own business, which I’m doing now.
But I nearly didn’t, and it was all because of Laughton, it was all because of this art teacher that said “You’re not good enough. You can’t do this. You shouldn’t be doing it, you don’t have the talent.” And when I put this on social media, I had a few other people telling similar stories about how they were told in school that they weren’t good enough. And it makes me wonder, why do teachers, why do people in authority say this to kids? Why do they give this negativity? Why do they say you can’t do it? You’re not good enough to do it? Who are they to tell you that you cant do something? Because you’ll never get people who have made it, who are good enough, saying you can’t do it. They’ll never try and push you down and say “I don’t want you coming up here and challenging me, I don’t want you getting to the level I am!” They’ll say “This is how you do it. These are the steps you have to take. You want to get up to here? This is the way you do it, this is the process. Let me help you, open some doors for you, let me give you some tips.” As I do with people now.
You’ll never get people who have made it say “You can’t do it. You’re not good enough. You’re going to fail. Don’t even try.” The only people who say things like that are the people who haven’t made it or the people who have never even tried in the first place. And they don’t do that because they genuinely think you’re not good enough, they genuinely think that you can’t do it, they genuinely think that you don’t have the talent. They do that because their worried they haven’t and they haven’t made it, therefore you shouldn’t. Because if you make it, what does that make them? That makes them a failure, that makes them someone who has failed in life, failed their dreamed, failed their goals. They’ve had to stay doing what they’re doing while you’ve succeeded. So they say you can’t, you’re not able to, don’t even try, you’re going to fail. It’s a defense mechanism that they use because they don’t want their own failures to be exposed by you succeeding.
So this is the advice I would give from this, it’s a short rant but it’s an important one. Don’t let people who haven’t made it say “You can’t!” Because they don’t really mean you can’t, they mean they can’t. The only person who can say you can’t is you, the only person that can tell you no is you, the only person who can stop you from getting where you want to be is you, not someone else. So don’t let the negativity keep you down and don’t listen to the Johnny Laughton’s of this world telling you you’re not good enough because that decision is up to you.
Thanks you for listening to the Engaging Marketeer and I hope to see you on the next podcast.
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
