A dozen years ago, I was sitting in a meeting in the New York Times building, right in the path of an avalanche.

The Times sales team was showing us a new article they were about to publish: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen in a newspaper — interactive graphics, animated simulations, aerial video. It took six months to create and went on to win a Pulitzer and a Peabody.

But in that room, it felt less like a triumph of journalism than a warning shot. What they had pulled off — the kind of technological innovation it demanded — was precisely what advertising agencies were incapable of doing. Our business model was built on following clients’ requests, not reinventing the medium. The mountain was moving.
And it was headed straight for me and my job.

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Advertising had already started its long slide. Budgets were being shoveled into banner ads and Google search while agencies kept clinging to TV commercials and glossy print spreads, the craft we’d perfected over decades.

I was an EVP at one of the most successful agencies in New York, but I could feel the ground shifting under my feet. My bosses, men in their sixties who barely used email, just stared blankly when I tried to explain what I’d seen at the Times.

The Mad Men era was over. The avalanche was coming. They were snow-blind.

Soon headhunters called with new offers: big packages, new titles, other cities, midtown towers. I went through endless interviews for a job at MSNBC.

But each opportunity felt like the same mountain in different weather. And every one of them, I knew, would be buried eventually.

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The truth was, the avalanche wasn’t just out there in the industry — it was inside me too.

I was 52. My first wife, Patti, had died a couple of years earlier. That loss had stripped away any illusions about time being infinite. My son was off at college, starting his own life. And I was in love again, ready to build something new with JJ.

I kept asking myself: how many more chances would I have to do the things I really wanted to do?

Books. Essays. Drawing. Teaching. Talking to people about art and helping them make it. All of these were tugging at me, but they felt impossible to reach while I stayed safely in the world I knew. If I remained where I’d been for 40 years, I was certain I’d get pulled back into another agency job. The inertia was too strong. The avalanche would sweep me back under.

One day I met JJ at a little patisserie on LaGuardia Place. I told her what I really wanted: to walk away from advertising, to build something of my own around art, to write and speak and teach, to live differently.

She listened, then said, simply, “Do it.”

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I was terrified. I didn’t know how to be a teacher or an entrepreneur. All I knew was advertising. But she was right. Comfort and security were illusions. I’d been clinging to them for years and they’d already started to collapse like wet powder. We agreed we could live on less, and that maybe “enough” was all we really needed.

So I gave notice. I packed up my office. Colleagues dropped by to confess they were thinking of quitting too. Around the same time, JJ was offered a new job in Los Angeles. We packed up our bags and our dachshunds. I set up a makeshift studio in the garage of our little house on Michael Avenue, and bought IKEA furniture that inadvertently replicated the layout of my old office.

But some nights I dreamed about walking along the I-10 freeway, on the wrong side of a cyclone fence, scuffing through trash and abandoned hubcaps — convinced I’d ended up a derelict with no prospects, the bitter perfume of burning bridges in the air.

And then I flew to Amsterdam to give a talk, had coffee with Koosje, and began to sketch out the idea that became Sketchbook Skool.

It was messy. It was frightening. I woke up some nights in a sweat, sure I’d made the worst mistake of my life. But a dozen years later, I have no regrets about fleeing that avalanche.

The many disasters I concocted never came to pass — and there were others I could never have imagined: the ups and downs of Sketchbook Skool, the pandemic, leaving New York for good.

And I made it through them all, stronger and wiser, living a life that’s more authentic and aligned with my true desires. I’ve learned to be more open to change, to fear the future less, to trust in my abilities and resilience. To recognize that life will keep carrying me across different landscapes. I’m glad I stepped off the old mountain when I did — and found a different life waiting below.

Your pal,

Danny