More or less, here’s how it goes. You worm your way into an agency. Maybe you’re just out of ad school. You’re lucky enough to get a job as a junior art director.

You impress somebody. You get promoted to art director. You win a few awards. You impress somebody else. Now you’re a senior art director.

Couple of years go by. Bam. Another promotion. This time, to associate creative director. Then group creative director. You are a hit. You are a success. But there is something you still are not.

That’s right. You are not Creative Director. And until you are, well, what are you really?

I don’t know about you, but most of us have grown up believing that making CD is, indeed, the holy grail. And why not?

After all, CDs have power. And in this business, power is good. Would it not be cool, you say to yourself, to sit in judgment. To decide what is brilliant and what is shockingly lame. What gets entered into the shows and what doesn’t.

I know I believed this.

Someday, I told myself as I licked my wounds from having my campaign savaged by that incompetent hack in the corner office, I’ll be sitting in that chair. And when I do, man, I will be on total cruise control. I’ll be judge and jury. Savior and executioner. Life will be good. Hell, life will be fricking awesome!

And then something happened.

I got my wish.

Yes, I was judge and jury. Yes, I was savior and executioner. Yes. Yes. And yes. It was everything I knew it would be and a whole lot of other stuff I never anticipated, none of it good.

I don’t know about you, but as a writer, what I like to do is, um, write. Trouble is, I find it really hard to get a coherent thought out of my brain when some art director—we’ll call him Jack—is in my oYce whining about how he found his partner’s—we’ll call her Jane—pay stub in the supply closet and he’s been here six months longer than Jane and it’s not right that she’s making more than he is and what am I going to do about it because he just got an oVer to work on the Hippoburger account over at Asylum Advertising and he really would rather work for me but fair is fair and, as he now knows, he can make more cleaning griddles at Hippoburger than the piddling amount this place jokingly calls a salary.

I learned something about myself that day.

I learned that what I care about is writing.

I also learned that if Jack and Jane and Keith and Miranda and Shawn and anyone else wants to go work on the Hippoburger account at Asylum Advertising, well, good riddance. What a terrible thing to say. I know. But honest. And that’s my whole point. If you want to be truly happy in this business—I mean, deep down at the core happy—you have to be honest with who and what you are.

I happen to think Bob Barrie is one of the most gifted art directors ever to walk the planet. I also think he’s one of the smartest because after 25 years, Bob Barrie still considers himself “just” an art director.

“I think there are few things sadder than a creative who excels at their job, is inappropriately forced into management by their company or their own insecurities, eventually flounders, and burns out too fast and too young,” Bob told me. “I’ve seen it happen time and again.”

Could Bob have been CD at Fallon? Undoubtedly. Has he had his chances to run big time creative departments at agencies all over the country, all over the world? Bet on it. And yet, Bob is, and always has been, content to be an art director.

I don’t know Janet Champ. Never met her. But I have always admired her. She remains one of the most intelligent and thoughtful writers that I can imagine. And to the best of my knowledge, Janet is too much in love with the craft to let it take a back seat to managing other creatives.

Stephen King wrote a short story once called “Sometimes They Come Back.” Well, sometimes CDs come back, too. They come to understand that while the money is better and the office is nicer, there’s something not right. Something is missing. Lyle Wedemeyer was CD of Martin/Williams. Did a great job from everything I hear. But I understand Lyle is back to writing ads again. So the climb up the ladder isn’t always a one-way trip.

Don’t misunderstand. Some people can do both. How they do it, I’ve no idea. It seems physically, if not psychically, impossible. Yet it happens. To be able to nurture and guide and fight for other people’s work while somehow managing to keep your personal creative edge, this is a rare gift.

The real question is, why do people who just like to hole up in their office fiddling and diddling with ideas and words and images, feel the need to move up? I have never been able to understand why agencies are willing to pay great gobs of money for being a terrific manager and substantially smaller gobs for those who prefer to labor in the trenches doing terrific work.

As Bob Barrie says, “I’ve been fortunate to land at a place that doesn’t punish me politically or financially for wanting to remain an art director, and I believe that is rare.”

Is it ever.