The room stood.

Every person in it, rising for a man who had arguably done more to shape what creativity meant in American culture than anyone alive. Lee Clow. The creative director behind the 1984 Apple commercial, the one that ran once during the Super Bowl and made everything that came after it possible. His firm, Chiat\Day, had famously flown a pirate flag above their office, borrowing Steve Jobs’ conviction that it was better to be a pirate than join the Navy. The flag became shorthand for a whole way of seeing: the creative class as insurgents, making raids on convention, answering to no authority but the work itself. 

Clow stood before a room full of advertising professionals in Los Angeles and called for a new creative revolution. The crowd heard itself included in that call. The crowd erupted. 

My partner Jonathan and I had flown in from Albuquerque. We didn’t stand. 

I want to say that was wisdom. It wasn’t, entirely. We had spent enough years inside that industry to recognize the sound a room makes when it is applauding itself. But I also know what was happening in me in that moment, and it was more complicated than clarity. What Clow was actually saying, that the revolution needed to be new, that a new one was required, landed on us less like a charge and more like a distress signal. The people being called to lead the revolution were the ones who had made it necessary. We had flown to Los Angeles expecting to feel like we were arriving somewhere. We flew home feeling like we finally understood where we’d been. 

• • • 

I had worn the word creative the way some people wear a title and others wear a wound. Both, in my case, and for longer than I’d like to admit. 

Early in my marriage, my wife and I stood in a Home Depot aisle arguing about carpet. This is not a metaphor. We were looking at samples and she had an opinion that differed from mine and I was genuinely offended. Not irritated. Offended. Because I was a Creative. That was the actual shape of my thinking. I am embarrassed to write it. The idol didn’t just want my professional identity. It wanted everything within reach of it. The friendships I neglected, the moments I couldn’t be present for, the health I spent without noticing. The carpet aisle is just the image I can’t shake, maybe because it’s so small. The idol lived there too. Especially there. 

I bent client work the same way. Not toward what they needed, but toward what I believed was the right idea. The problem was that I defined right by what I hoped to become. An award winner. A sage. A talent worth watching. The client was, if I’m honest, largely beside the point. They were the occasion for the work. The work was the occasion for the recognition. The recognition was the occasion for the identity. It was a very efficient system, and it produced almost nothing of lasting value. 

Then a quote arrived that hit me the way true things sometimes do, which is to say it felt like an accusation: “stop trying to be right, and just get more creative.” 

What the client needed is what should have defined right. And what the client needed, most of the time, they couldn’t even name yet. The idol I had constructed between me and everyone else made it impossible to see what that was. 

I had to do away with the idol to see the thing. 

Idols don’t yield quietly. They are easy to fall in love with, and they make you feel loved as well. They dress in the language of accomplishment and might. Brilliance and worth. They don’t talk about the sacrifices they’ve required. And often, you don’t notice they are broken until you are. 

But once they’re gone, you can finally see. What I saw was that creativity was something quite different than I thought it was. It looked something more like scrutiny—the capacity to see an organization clearly enough to know what’s actually holding it up, and what’s just been there long enough to look necessary. That turned out to be more useful, in the end, than anything I’d won an award for. 

• • • 

We landed in Albuquerque and the first thing we did was hang a pirate flag upside down in our office. 

It was a direct response to Chiat\Day’s flag. The one that had meant insurgency and creative freedom and the romance of the raid. We turned it upside down because an upside-down flag is a distress signal. That is exactly what we meant it to be. The industry had taken the pirate’s instinct, the genuine, disruptive, liberating thing and turned it into a franchise. It had convinced organizations across the country that creativity lived outside them, that it had to be imported and managed by specialists, that without the agency the client could not think for itself. The pirates had built a navy and were charging for passage. 

We stopped calling ourselves an agency. We charged our team with a different mandate: liberate creativity. Return it to the organizations that needed it most. That work required us to first understand what we were liberating. You cannot return something to its rightful owner if you don’t know what it looks like. That question took five years to answer honestly. These essays are part of that answer, continued. 

One per month. Not frameworks. Not tactics. The slow, patient work of making visible what has been kept behind walls. Naming what organizations are actually capable of when they stop performing and start becoming. 

Dave Ortega is Chief Creative Officer at McKee Wallwork.