Are You Kidding Me; Planning For Retirement?

I didn’t plan a single step of my career, so why would I start thinking about abdicating now, at the early age of 71?

I recommend my unplanned ways to no one. It just happened to work for me.

I don’t know what guided me—or what the thing was that kept me unguided. But I do remember a college admissions officer once saying to me—as a compliment—that he was glad I didn’t know what I want to do and wasn’t one of those applicants who decided at age 15 to become a dentist. 

My lack of any destination meant my working years were one accident after another. These happenstances made it easy to ignore long-term career goals. I only saw as far enough ahead of me as the next exciting opportunity that dropped out of the sky, was placed at my feet, or the few that I sought and received with minimal effort.

Don’t get me wrong. I never thought of myself as especially smart or in demand—just that I was an exceptionally lucky recipient of a series of opportunistic phone calls that spanned 50 years.

Here’s the arc of the story:

First, I talked my way into an ivy league school. I did the bare minimum but got into a great graduate school in journalism where I learned how to write. Soon enough, I got a call to come work at a magazine. There, I stumbled on some inside poop about McDonald’s and wrote a cover story about the company which won a journalism award. And that won me a phone call from the head of McDonald’s national PR agency to come to work for him. I did that for a while, but in short order got a call from the agency’s parent company president who said I should stop “fucking around” in PR and come upstairs to work with the “big boys” in the ad agency. I did that, got promoted, transferred to their west coast office, worked my way up that ladder, then got yet another one of those fortuitous calls to move back to Chicago and join advertising legend Hal Riney’s office there. Those were five wonderful years, until I got a call to open a Chicago office for another west coast-based agency. With great partners and a young team, we ran up the score, until another call came asking me to merge it into a once mighty Chicago agency, down to its last client—an enema brand. 

Seriously. 

All my old clients came with me. And then, yet again, I got a call to move back to the west coast to join another division of that agency, where one of the clients I represented called and asked if I’d leave the agency business and join his law firm, where I’ve been CMO for the past five years, and work on that firm’s business along with civil rights attorney Ben Crump, whose firm we own in part.

All pretty haphazard, random, lucky. No clear path, all zig zagging. 

I wouldn’t have had it any other way

Perhaps I’ve missed a lot. I’ll never know, but I don’t feel that way. What I do know, as you’d expect, is I’ve made no plans to retire.

Editors Note: As you can read, our Editor-in-Chief shares the same last name with our Contributing Editor. You can stop the second-guessing; Bill and Tom Marks are the Marks Brothers!