There's something you need to know about me... I'm a middle aged 'has-been'. It's true. What appears to be an artistic passion for West Ham through art and films, is actually a 50-year-old bloke topping up a career cut short by modern media.
Since 1989, I had been working in the creative media and advertising trade, picking up accolades, awards and records across all of the world's renowned agencies. Then one day - it's over. Let me tell you how and why....
Wonderful European nights have earned David Moyes Credit - but credit only works if someone is buying.
"It's nothing you have done mate. We all know that they are swapping out art for ideology and our days are numbered..."
The conversation went a little like that, on my last day in a London Ad agency. Whatever the actual words were, the point was, you don't become bad at your job overnight. It's the landscape around you that changes.
The same can be said of David Moyes. Things have changed. Things around him have changed. He's no longer the man for the job - a job that is different to the one he came to do. It matters little if the results improve.
The sequence of events are all too familiar.
When your time is up, you will always have, in retrospect, a swan song. A morale boosting accomplishment - the surprising award that finds it's way to you, just when you thought that people were starting to doubt you. This for Moyes was European qualification, followed by a European run.
I had this too. The big gig. The beer adverts that people still talk about. But maybe I was just the right guy, in the right place at the right time?
Was Moyes this too?
What follows the swansong is the beginning of the end. The verification that you are still admired as the man that can do the job, makes you formulaic.
You continually repeat what worked, hoping to achieve the very same glorious result. You are headstrong, confident, but so blinkered that you don't see your environment change.
That's when it's too late. It doesn't matter about the credit in the bank, because when your role has gone - nobody is buying anyway. It happens fast - because your job is an important one.
Arrogant staff will label it "being a victim of your own success". I could never say that about myself, and I cringed when Moyes implied it in a recent press conference. Sometimes it's best to say "I'm lucky to have a job that isn't digging the road" - because that's the truth.
What is also the truth, is the fact that when you finally put your tools down, you do notice that often other people actually do have better ideas than you.
My most popular two paintings (shown below) were in fact the ideas of two others. Both older men than me. Both still in great demand for work.
I think other people will actually have better ideas than David Moyes too now. But I can recommend sitting up to the easel when he also realises the same thing.
