Sofia Larsen

I would say perseverance. There's been a lot of setbacks or uncertainty throughout time, but the perseverance to just have a goal in mind and keep pushing toward it has been worth it, because there's been a lot of points in my career when I could have just been like, okay, if the universe doesn't want me to do advertising, I'll just go do finance or something. But just having a clear goal in mind and pushing for it, I think, is what I would attribute my success to.

The best career advice I've ever received is that failure is good. I learned this when I was doing door-to-door sales a while back, because it's something that a lot of the best advertisers started out doing. I just wanted to kind of learn, and something I learned doing that from my manager was that failure is a mindset. Failure can either crush you, or it can propel you to work even further, closer to your dreams and what you're trying to accomplish, your goals. Going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm is super important, because otherwise, it's really easy for those aspirations of yours to be crushed.

I would say that it's really important to be yourself as much as possible. Especially in an industry where a lot of your bosses and your managers are probably going to be men, it's easier to kind of shrink back and just kind of fade into the shadows, but it's really important to voice your opinion and to make sure that your own unique take on an ad or a strategy for a campaign is heard, even if you're the only differing voice in the room. If everyone's saying the same thing, it's good, actually, if you disagree, that you voice that opinion.

Opportunities-wise, advertising is such a great industry because you can do it from anywhere. You can do it for pretty much any industry. You could do it in-house with a company, just be freelance, or work in an advertising agency. And so there's just a lot of freedom to do, live life on your schedule, or your terms. As for challenges, I'd say it's mentally challenging sometimes, because a lot of ideas that you come up with, create, and learn to love, because you've been working on them for so long, will get shut down either by clients or creative partners. And then there's just a lot of work that will have been for nothing, and that's just something that someone just kind of has to get used to in advertising.

Authenticity is what comes to mind right away. I feel like, especially in advertising, there's so much copycat in the industry, especially in social media advertising, where everyone's kind of just following each other. But I feel like the best work is, in advertising but also in your own life, just being authentic to the brand you're working for, but authentic to who you are, and your own little quirks. Not trying to be somebody else, or not trying to be another brand. I'd say that's the number one value. Maybe another one is just being bold. I guess that kind of goes into authenticity as well, because I'm imagining it both in being bold in who you are, or not being afraid as a brand to be bold and kind of shake up an industry.