The final seasons of Mad Men coincided with the beginning and end of my career in publishing.
My final job in publishing—my first was “marketing” obscure books in the academic books division—was in the Dictionaries division at Oxford University Press, creating original web content—mainly blog posts—for the now-defunct Dictionaries website.
When I first took the job, I loved it. It was a creative position, which let me write about anything I wanted, so long as it had something to do with the English language. It started off as a dream.
Until it soured on me.
The souring was simple: after a year in the role, I ran out of ideas. Months from what would be the end—me side-stepping into A/E/C marketing—I would sit in the office for eight hours a day and feel lost. I’d exhausted my cache of fun facts about words, reduced to hitting the “random entry” button on the OED website, hoping something juicy would turn up.
How would I find the next idea? I would do it one click at a time.
These tactics worked, but barely—I eked out the blog posts I needed to produce each week…and that was it.
It was during this career funk that I watched the final seasons of Mad Men.
Rewatching Mad Men years later, I’m struck by one of the show’s themes: the best work happens outside the office.
The series even closes on this theme—with Don Draper cliffside at Esalen, having skipped out on his office job for months, dreaming up the idea for a famous Coca-Cola ad spot.
But it’s throughout the series that we see Don and other characters away from their desks (and often outside work hours) having their great ideas and epiphanies that move their careers forward. They are rarely in their offices when inspiration strikes.
Seen this way, the series functions as an exploration of Margaret Heffernan’s advice, which I’ve lauded elsewhere:
No one ever had a great idea at a desk.
It’s funny to look back at my brief career as a content writer, and realize that the thought never crossed my mind.
I could have left the office.
The Oxford office was in a busy area of midtown Manhattan, walking distance to Grand Central, Bryant Park, Korea Town, Penn Station. It was a block away from the Empire State Building!
Who knows what ideas were out there that I missed.
Taylor Coe 