There’s No Such Thing As Destiny
I haven’t bought Nick Hornby’s latest, but I will admit to having read Fever Pitch at least ten times.
Although I wouldn’t recommend it that warmly if you’re not an Arsenal fan, it does provide some excellent insights into life beyond Highbury.
One of these is the observation that many players feature on the way through the ranks from school team to county team to doing trials for a proper club, to their youth team, to their squad, to their first team, and despite being really bloody good at football, they might be dropped from the process at any time.
It’s a fine lesson in the futility of believing in your own destiny. No one has a right to make it, no matter how entitled they feel.
I was reminded of this the other day when I was looking through the comments of this post. Someone suggested that the Creative Department stopped being so respected after the early 90s recession and is now many miles from the vaunted position it held in the 80s.
That might seem like a shame to some degree, but actually it’s nothing of the sort.
Creatives have no right to any kind of position, respect or primacy in any situation. Across London and the world there are some places where creativity is held in much higher esteem than others, but that’s only the case because a combination of people want it to be that way and work towards that goal.
Creativity is a like a muscle that needs work and commitment to grow.
Without that attention it will simply atrophy.
If you let it.
Or want to do something else.