Back in April, when I was applying for strategy jobs in advertising, I had no idea how to go about it. There were no job posts, and I didn’t know any people in the industry. Since I was clueless about any sort of conventional procedure, I decided do something different. I decided to write an unsolicited application that came from the heart. I ditched the usual language, which I felt was riddled with platitudes, and put it into my own words. I wanted to show who I was, and that I could string something together that resembled a compelling idea. The idea was “dreams are meant to be shared” which I tied to my personal story of chasing my own dreams. You could argue that it was overly personal for a job application, but it was as much for myself, as it was for the job. I was in a process of becoming, so I didn’t care how it would be received. It had to be personal.
I sent it out to a dozen of agencies, some of which I handed out physically by knocking on office doors. That shit works, by the way. On the back of the application was a handwritten “it’s only crazy until you do it”, which was a statement from Nike’s “Dream Crazy” campaign. A decent amount of agencies came back to me, and a few led to an interview. It was an interesting experience, because I certainly broke many of the rules of the normal application process. And breaking those rules felt amazing. I didn’t get a job, but I learned that I could get myself noticed if I stuck to my guns. I could come up with my own ideas, and I could confidently express them. I think, subconciously, this is where SAASTA had its birth. But enough introduction, here is the excerpt of my application:
Dear hiring team,
I’ve always had a dream of becoming an athlete. In January 2025, I joined a team to pursue elite running. I made drastic changes to my lifestyle and was finishing in the top 30 at the 5K Danish Championships within a few months. Soon after, I was overtrained and mentally exhausted. I quit to focus on my well-being. While I got to be an athlete, my dream was short-lived. I also had a dream of inspiring others to become an athlete. In the fall after finishing my studies, I moved to Madrid to study a master’s programme in Sports Marketing. Unfortunately, the programme had little to do with inspiration and I decided to withdraw. When you like to dream, you are prone to being sold one. My dream-chasing put me on a lonely path. I felt naive and greedy for thinking that leaving everything behind to follow my dreams was a good idea. That felt like my shot. Now, I’m back in Denmark. Finding my feet again. Learning that I can pick up the broken pieces and craft my dream instead of chasing it. It starts with sharing who I am and realizing that I’m living it right now.
In 2017, I was on a school trip to San Francisco. We visited Stanford University and received a lecture by an inspiring professor. He dared us to dream big and be the difference we wanted to see in the world. I’m from a small country, so I was baffled at the audacity to go big. While I wasn’t quite ready at a tender high-school age to take on greater societal challenges, it lit a fire within me. Years later, I created a fundraiser for a school in a favela. I raised awareness by challenging my audience to donate if I achieved my goal time, telling stories about my fascination with Brazil as a kid, handing out flyers, securing sponsors, organizing community runs and creating content. The donations from the campaign gave ten kids from the favela one year of English education and a tad bit more hope of pursuing their own dreams. So why do I want to be a strategist? I guess, to have the permission to dream up big ideas, and to do so with other people. Dreams are wonderful, but as the humbling forces of life taught me, they are meant to be shared.
As a dreamer, I’m ambitious and full of heart. Restlessly searching for answers. Sometimes struck by self-conciousness, but always striving to be myself. I was a faint-hearted kid who stayed away from harmful stuff like sugar and alcohol, and didn’t break the rules that all the other kids did. A lot of things scared me, and that felt like a strap. Taking life by the throat meant fearlessly embracing the world and some of its indulgences. I travelled a lot. Partied a lot. Threw myself into every experience with full force. This included my exchanges, first to a university renowned for its sunshine and social life (also for its innovation which was a perfect coverup) and then to Brazil where I could kick it with the locals in portuguese and loosen my inhibitions to earbreakingly loud bail funk. I had an innate desire to break free from my restraints by being independent, cool and culturally savvy. “Choose a career for who it allows you to be”, I heard a purpose guru say in a TED Talk. Being a strategist would allow me to be those things. As a strategist, I can combine creative, analytical and strategic thinking, and I love to tie it all together through compelling storytelling. I’m a vivid and eager communicator who can convey insights clearly through a variety of media, including role-playing (please let me do role-playing). I’m also an immersive researcher who can sometimes forget all earthly responsibilities to fully dive into a subject. An area of improvement my friends and family appreciate that I’m working on, but I’ve also learned that inclinations are not there to be resisted. They are there to tell you and me that I should be a strategist.
In all honesty, I’ve had no idea what I wanted to do with my life since I came home from Madrid, partly because I’ve never liked the idea of blazing along a conventional career path. I really try to follow my heart. When I watch an ad like “Dream Crazy”, I feel something special. I want other people to feel that. Make people’s dreams run wild, like mine do. Make people in Denmark dream about people in the favelas. Everyone has dreams, but where I come from, we don’t talk about them enough. We should, because dreams are meant to be shared.
Best regards,
Lukas
When I read it back, it still makes me emotional. I was digging for truths about myself, and the need for me to dream and make other people dream, feels nearly as essential to me as air does to my lungs. It was the culmination of six months of self-examination aided by many honest conversations with my family and friends, and an uncomfortable, yet life-changing, encounter with therapy. I was trying to understand myself and why I made things so hard for myself. I was chronically scared of jumping into a job and to open the next chapter of my life. Like a serious case of attachment issues. In my guessworking of what I should be doing, I was bouncing uncontrollably from one profession to the other. I believe my unwillingness to take that step originated from a deep feeling in my gut that I could figure out exactly what I wanted to do, if I just kept digging within myself. I stuck my nose into any book that held clues on my purpose, covered my wall with people that inspired me, and I lashed out creatively with all sorts of quirky projects in a way I had never given myself permission to before. I was quite simply searching for the meaning of my life.
Whether my reluctance to jump in and take on a responsibility in absence of perfect information about my purpose is a form of excessive entitlement, I cannot say. Maybe it is, but I had the opportunity to do so, and so I took it. And when I stand here today, I am able to live with it. I know it’s a privileged position to be in, and I will never take that for granted. Because having had that stand-still moment with nothing but inner confrontations to concern myself with will forever be the most consequential thing I will have done to figure out how I can live a meaningful life. Life will throw many more hardships at me, that’s inevitable for all of us, but I now feel in control of the things that I can. I no more feel like I’m getting dragged along by an external force that subjects my future to randomness. No matter what position I’m currently in, and whether I’m finding myself in a job for a period that could be considered dead-end when compared to what I’m qualified for on paper, I know what course of action I have to take. I know through the very action of what I am doing right now, that I’m in a good place, despite scraping a bit on the floor. I have a plan, and I can articulate in fine print what that plan is. If i couldn’t, I would feel absolutely fucked in my current position. But I can, so I don’t feel that way.
I can tell the people that might worry about me when they see me wearing a Starbucks hat and handing out coffee, that I’ll be fine. Just trust me. If I trust myself, so should you. I have a plan, and right now, I’m standing on the sideline, ready to snap at any bypassing opportunity. Now that I have chosen the path that I have, it’s time for me let go of any pride or pickiness about the job I’m going to take to support myself. Whether a job is of value, is all predicated on what applicational value it has to one’s specific context. The first applicational value of any job for me right now, is just to earn a living. Secondly, given that I want to tell stories, and relentlessly pound on the door of life’s mysteries, to somehow arrive at some tiny, universal truths, taking on a job that has nothing to do with my education, but one which exposes me to lots of different people and stories, might be a much more beneficial to my apprenticeship. It could be source material right there. I’m writing this for myself to let go of the worldview I once had, because my world has changed entirely, and so I need to see it for what it now is. When we try to grow, we are in combat with the entrenchments of our mind. To grow, we need to dismantle, recalibrate, and plow the hell forward. So let’s do that.
Taking this discussion back to the surface, I’ve reflected a lot upon how we write and find our own special application. How do we make our own bullet fly, when everyone is now carrying a machine gun in their pockets, endlessly spewing out these perfectly engineered bullets? Yeah, AI. How do we stand out in the way we are supposed to? My suggestion would be to write an application, free from any expectations on what it should look like. Write what you feel. Share yourself and your dreams as vividly as you can, and forget about the aesthetics of the writing. Just poke a whole through to yourself. When you start to jot down your uncorrupted thoughts on paper, the essence of what you want to pursue and contribute to will start to shine through, inevitably. It might strike you that you are meant for something different than what you expected, or you might understand more precisely what it is about your current pursuit that stirs you. It’s never about the tasks in the job description. It’s always something deeper. I felt a tightening to my chest as I tried to box my competencies into this airtight, corporate format. The tasks I saw before me didn’t connect with my inner sense of purpose. I wanted to tell stories and move the reader. Make the hiring person shed tears on his or her keyboard and proceed to hide away in the toilet, destroying all hopes of clocking in a day’s worth of effective work. So evidently, I was not fit for corporate, at least not without sacrificing an important part of myself. So I should probably find something that allows me to do that. I should probably find myself a setting where shipping people off to the bathroom isn’t considered sabotage, but a grand success. And where I don’t have to hide my true intentions. “I want to make you cry”. I wanted to say that in my job interviews. Luckily, I didn’t, because I might have left the hiring person, who was simply looking for a capable consultant, quite disturbed.
I think we are more special, than we sometimes make ourselves out to be. At least where I come from. In Denmark, we wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable raising our hand if somebody asked us if we think we are special. I think I am special. If I didn’t, why would I share all of this with you guys? I have my own special way of moving in the world and viewing it, and I believe that some people will find that interesting. A job application is one of the few occasions we have for writing about ourselves, and for discovering what makes us special. The story we write about ourselves is the most important story we’ll ever write. If we merely view our story through the lens of a nice, linearly structured CV and a set of corporate competencies and accomplishments, we risk putting a limitation on what we could be. We risk taking preconceived action during our years of youth to position ourselves for employment, instead of going on discovery runs or undertaking projects that do not fit perfectly on a CV, but shoots off a rollercoaster in our stomachs. In the privileged part of the world, we are afforded the freedom to do those things. I wholeheartedly believe that once we have found our special application in life, the type of work that connects deeply with our natural inclinations and our sense of play, we are set. Once we discover what that is, there is no going back. We will take that route, regardless of any rational counterargument. If it won’t provide immediate financial stability, we’ll find a way to make it work. We’ll wake up with a deep sense of excitement every day. Monday blues won’t be a thing anymore, and neither the weekend, but that’s just a privilege.
I’m not afraid of sharing my story, so I wrote a special application. You should only share with others what you are comfortable with. But what you share with yourself, you shouldn’t be. That should be the truth. So dig for the truths about yourself, write that special application, and lock it up in your drawer. The most special things might end up happening. And if you one day feel ready, you should know my 2 cents by now: dreams are meant to be shared.
Go get ‘em.
