How To Have a Great Career and some Life Lessons from Philip VanDusen

Hello everyone, I'm Philip, welcome back, this video is going to be really different. I

have

n't made a video like this before and this is my first hundredth video that I'm posting so I thought it might be an anniversary video. Interesting to do

some

thing a little different. I've been talking about making content that's a little more vlog-like and this is a

great

opportunity to do that. I've been getting a lot of emails and comments from people who are feeling a little lost, don't really know where to go, are feeling stuck or possibly feeling abandoned or too old to start doing what they want to do and as you can see I

have

gray hair, I've been around I've had a successful

career

for a long time up to this point and I wanted to share a little bit about my

career

and also share

some

of the

life

lessons

, some of the professional

lessons

that I've learned and I hope you can be. "I can help some of you, so I wanted to take this opportunity to do that, so this video will be a little longer and probably a little less edited than some of my other videos, but I hope you guys do." Bear with me and if you don't want to change the channel anyway, first of all, my career has been

great

.

I've had a 30-year career in branding and design and it hasn't been incredibly linear. I talk a lot about career. websites and how you know, careers have advancements and changes and you have to deal with adversity and you have to deal with changes in the job market and what's happening in the world and I've had a lot of that and I wanted to share a little bit of that with you. In fact, I started my career as a fine artist. I started as a painter. I had my master's degree in painting and what I wanted to do at first was to be a fine artist and as I progressed. in that and I realized that I had to make a living, I decided to teach and in the period of time that I was doing when there was no Internet there were no computers, so that dates me completely, but that also figures a little in my history having to deal with that evolution in society in regards to my career and that's how I obtained my master's degree in painting.

I was looking for a teaching job and it was almost impossible to find a college level teaching job anywhere, so I was looking for almost five years working. in restaurants and galleries and stuff just to make a living, so I finally got a teaching job in the south of France and I was able to go there and I was teaching printmaking and photography and I had an amazing time there and produced a lot. of fine art monotype prints and when I came back I moved to New York City and started a t-shirt company and I started putting some of those monoprints on t-shirts and I learned very quickly that I loved doing the design part of I wasn't very excited to do the sales part.

I worked walking all over the island of Manhattan with my sample case selling my t-shirts and you know, at that time it was like the beginning of the computer age, but I was very interested in fine arts I had a mentality, you know, I hated what I was seeing was computer art at the time, I hated commercial art and I was very, you know, I was a real artist in my head who was also struggling with a way to make a live and I finally went and worked for one of my competitors , a larger t-shirt company and a section of Brooklyn around a five million dollar t-shirt company and I came in as a designer, moved up very quickly to art director and creative director and managed other people and discovered very quickly that managing To other designers it was a lot like teaching, except they paid you a lot more money and you weren't out of work every nine months, so it was an epiphany. and it was the beginning of a great career.

I worked for that company for about five years and then eventually went to work for a much larger global fashion company and was there for about eleven years. I rose from senior designer to VP of design and oversaw packaging and graphic design for products, t-shirts and apparel, as well as CAD, textile design, trends and colors. I oversaw all of those groups, so I grew over a period of 11 years from a designer to design manager to creative director and in that time I learned that you know corporate finance and budget management and people management and you know how to set goals for people and growing designers and how to deal with, live and work in incredibly complex and matrixed ways. into the corporate environment and that was really a defining period for me, after eleven years there was a big reorganization of that company and I was let go and that was quite shocking.

I found myself without a job and at that point I decided to take advantage of my understanding and knowledge, my new knowledge in packaging and I went to work for a global design agency and when I worked for that agency I didn't know anything about brand strategy. I knew about product design and apparel design and t-shirt graphics, but when it all came down to brand strategy and you know the competitive audits and the whole scientific methodology of brand development. I didn't know any of that and I was getting to a very high level at a global agency, so when I worked with that agency and then another, you know, agency, a while later I worked with, you know, some of the biggest brands in the world. , some of the biggest Fortune 100 brands, actually, you know P&G Johnson Johnson Chevron Petsmart, you know Pepsi Cola, Coca Cola, Diamond foods, I mean, the list just goes on. again and again, you can see my portfolio and my website.

I've worked with a lot of big brands and it was an incredible learning experience and a huge learning curve for me coming out of the high level role I held in the fashion industry and working in the global brand agency world for about eight years and then I finally made the jump to one of the global food brands, you know, the largest soft drink brands in the world and I worked there for a period of time where I left that position or decided to leave that position. He had really reached the point of exhaustion. It was a global position.

I was working 68 in our weeks. I was traveling a lot. It was very, very stressful. I was losing. Sleep I would wake up at 4 in the morning with panic attacks I also had some family things that maybe they wanted my parents to be in the middle of a process of getting old and eventually passing away and it was also a big emotional change and I just decided to leave it I decided to abandon everything that part of my career and I had to discover what I really enjoyed about what I was doing. I wasn't sure I was really enjoying what I was doing. and I needed some time to think, so I took a year off.

I was very fortunate and the fact that I was compensated well for 18 years and was able to take some time off and in that period of When I fully restarted I decided to start my own agency. I started building my own personal brand. Up until that point, I had only had an online slideshow portfolio with basically my resume on one page. It was completely rudimentary and did not have any personal information. brand I didn't know anything about email marketing. I didn't know anything about social media marketing. I didn't know anything about content development and it was a complete reset and I had to learn an incredible amount of things and in the last three or four years I have completely changed. what I do and how I approach my career I took everything I knew about fashion and everything I knew about global brand agency and applied it to my own career at my own brand.

I've been building brands for other people and other companies. for over two decades and I've never really focused on building my own, so now that I've been doing it, one of the things I'm doing on this YouTube channel is sharing a lot of what I know about my global community. brand work and also my corporate work and scale it down so I can help entrepreneurs and designers grow their careers and grow their brands the same way I grew mine and the way I've helped other people do grow their brands in other companies to grow their brands.

Obviously I haven't done all that work myself. I've always managed large teams and done my work leveraging the work of others as a leader and creative leader in organizations, so you know one of the big theme here is that as massive changes occurred in my career, I had to relearn. very new things, for example, when I went from fine arts to work in the clothing industry, there were no computers and suddenly there were and I had to learn to know computers and the best thing is that when I entered and started learning the first Photoshop with the first illustrator, I loved it and took to it like a duck to water and you know, I spent the afternoons. reading those old 500-page printed Photoshop, you know, manuals to learn everything about the program, I loved it, but that was one of the defining moments of my career where I hated commercial art, I hated computers, and suddenly , when I tried it and got it.

When I started, I realized that I loved it and that I had a great aptitude for it, so it was one of those web moments in my career where I put this serious work aside and everything changed, but as it changed and As I faced that adversity, everything opened up for me and then when I went from the fashion industry to the agency in the world, it was kind of a catastrophic event. I got laid off and moved to the agency side and had to learn a whole new type of skills and a variety of things to be successful and grow in that industry, then when I came back to the company and finally got out of my account, when I went out on my own, I realized that there was a huge variety of things.

As I said a while ago, I didn't know and then I had to learn too, so there are always challenges that you face in your career that you have to address, that you have to assimilate and deal with. So in a way, I know you know this video is like the long video babble that I always say I don't do, but you know something I've never done and I thought I'd try to share it. It's a deeper level where you know who I am with my audience, so now in the video comes the moment where I talk a little bit more about the general

life

lessons and professional lessons that I've learned in this career.

The fair part of this is that you really have to be prepared and ready for the massive changes that happen. Those changes could be getting laid off or some kind of reorganization or some kind of life change, you know, the death of a spouse or a friend or a parent knows that having to move for whatever reason from one city to another, from one country to country, things get in our way and having to address, change and deal with those changes will happen no matter what and therefore we will not deny it. and stand up to face those challenges and face those changes and accept them and learn from them and look at chaos and change as an opportunity to learn and grow instead of being stifled or shut down or shut down.

I know that feeling defeated is really hard to watch, but when those changes happen, you have to look at those moments of change as an opportunity to learn, grow and step up in your career network and be taken to a new level, and it is That's why I'm sharing a little bit about my personal experience because every time I meet those kinds of people, you know that the strong impact of adversity eventually comes through attention and hard work, and you know that the energy is It became something over time, not immediately, but over time. time on something really positive for my career and yes, maybe I've been lucky, but I'm not really lucky.

I've actually seen this happen in a lot of people's careers and I've managed a lot of people and helped guide them through their careers. and I keep in touch with a lot of people I've worked with and I see this over and over again in other people's lives as well as my own, but I'm sharing my own personal experience. One of the big defining moments of my career was when I made that switch from fine art to commercial art, from the fashion industry and finally to corporate life and at that moment I felt very defeated. I felt like I was selling myself.

I was selling myself completely, selling out my fine art ideals, but what happened was that in that change I opened up a whole new life for myself. You know, I had been struggling to make a living and really struggling to figure out what to do with my life. I was suddenly given a tremendous amount of opportunities and I grew up in roles that I never thought I could handle and to be honest I made a lot more money than I ever thought was possible in my career so I knew things opened up and The ideas I had about my life were totally redefined by shifting my attention and being open to change and dying without denial and being open to the reality of what was happening in my life, so here, when I thought I had sold out, what did i actually do?

What I really got was a fantastic career. I got, you know, a great portfolio. I was able to work with incredible brands. I learned a lot. I worked with some of the best designers in the world. I was able to manage and grow. and mentor, you know tons ofdesigners in their careers, which you know when you talk about things that go around. I always wanted to be a teacher and I loved teaching when I was in fine arts and I discovered that managing designers was a lot like teaching and Mentoring creatives throughout their careers was a lot like teaching Enya's teachings, so the love gave turns throughout my career in a very different way.

Another point that you know I wanted to make is that you know, like I said, I'm not a young chicken. but when the time came to leave the world of fine arts and move into design, I was not young I was 29 30 years old I didn't even get into design I didn't even get into a career that wasn't fine arts until I was 30 years old and I received these comments and emails from people saying: you know 24 I haven't figured out what I'm going to do with my life or you know, I'm 30 and I'm thinking about changing careers, it's never too late, it's never too late to make big changes in your life. life when I made this change from being the Kai corporate agency to being a brand entrepreneur and working in my own agency, you know that I was over 50 years old and you know that it is a significant change and you also know that it was not minor, that's why you know how to embrace that I learned more I immersed myself in it I accepted that reality and that new direction for me and that's why it's never too late it's never too late to learn it's never too late to change it's never too late to make a jog in the network of your career and another thing you know is you have to pay attention to what you hate, you have to pay attention to what you really don't want to do and look at that and say you know why I don't want to do that or why you know I hate that aspect of something because inside That's why sometimes you have to look and say that I decide that I don't want to do this. and I don't want to do that and I don't want to do anything else.

Am I putting up walls for myself? Am I setting self-limiting beliefs or career-limiting beliefs that if I relocated them or re-examined them in a different way that could really open doors for me to give me opportunities that I never thought were possible or to explore or tiptoe into? some of those things that I had drawn as lines for myself could open up something that could be really you know it's beneficial to my career and the aspects of what you love and are passionate about, like for me it's teaching, you have a way to get back to your career, no matter what you do, you will always find a way to profit or grow. or use those passions no matter what you do, so you know to summarize some of this, you know when it comes to success it's not a straight line, success requires consistency, you know, a lot of hard work, constant tenacity. learn, you know a positive attitude, but it is definitely not a straight line, it has jumps and changes of direction and it is not without pain, pain appears every time a change occurs, there is something that says you know that if you have pain, that means you are changing and So, whenever you feel pain or discomfort, it may be a sign that change is coming and change may be an opportunity.

Change leads to opportunity. So if I were to leave you a message, it would be that you know life is really fucked. In short, take nothing for granted and know that success, whatever you define, is success. When you get there, it never brings as much happiness as you think, so you really have to enjoy the journey and learn about the changes in it and the opportunities. and movement and growth as you go through your life, no one is going to give you anything, it's really up to you, it's really up to you to make it happen and deal with the changes that happen in your life, whether they happen.

They are decisions that you make to change what you are doing or change the focus of what you are doing or if it is some type of adversity or change that is thrown at you that you do not expect and now you are anticipating, but it does not mean that that is going to shut you down, It's going to close your career, all you have to do is back up, take stock, look around, see where the opportunities are and see where you can be successful, so thank you very much for watching this. I just wanted to share a little more context about who I am, where I come from, what I've done, and some of the things I've learned in my career, in hopes that you will meet some of my viewers. of my tribe members that you know have been commenting and emailing me and I just hope that I was able to share something that you guys know that may give you some insight or a way to look at something in your career that you know about. a different lens or a different perspective and with that thanks again for watching and goodbye for now