I was never a fan of group projects. In my view, they were the type of assignments teachers would come up with when they just needed more time to fill, but in high school, it wasn’t so bad. With our small class sizes, everyone was used to working together. But I’ll always remember a group project in my freshman year marketing class in college, which had more students in it than my entire high school graduating class put together.
I was put into a group of four with one woman and two men. The woman and I met up in our designated group work room in the library. Thirty minutes after our agreed-upon start time, the men still hadn’t shown up and weren’t responding to text messages. So the two of us put the entire thing together and assigned the others the slides they would discuss. The day of the presentation came, and as expected of myself at age eighteen, I got up there and bombed. Hard. I’m fairly sure no one past the center front two rows could hear me. The notes I’d written on the index card in my hands all blurred together.
“That can’t happen again,” the professor told me. “This is college. No one is going to come and save you.” Point taken.
It wasn’t long into putting on shows professionally that it really hit home that being in the working world was a group project in and of itself. One where picking up the slack of others isn’t as simple as putting together a slide or two in a presentation, and where the consequences for failure within the group can be far more severe than a less-than-favorable grade.
“Is that even your job?” Jenny asked me late one night on our first tour together.
“Half the stuff you see me do isn’t my job,” I say.
“Then why are you doing it?”
“Because if I don’t do it then no one will do it and everything will go to shit.” She shrugs.
“Why not just let it go to shit?”
“Because if it all goes to shit, it’ll be my fault, I’ll get fired, and then my entire life will be over!”
Turns out you can only put up with so many sleepless nights before a little dehydration and your period has you fainting on a sidewalk in Texas. But Jenny had a point, and I was catastrophizing.
By the time I got to grad school, I’d been working for a good few years with a healthy list of crazy stories to choose from. I’d more or less gotten over my need to prove myself to other people and was focusing on personal development. That’s how I ended up at a conference room table with six men, which consisted of the five other students and the teacher. Had they been all women, it would’ve felt a lot like high school. Alas, it was far from it.
I liked to call the class my “management therapy class,” because most of the time we’d just get asked questions about situations we’d been in in the past, what we learned from them, and what we’d do differently if facing the same situation in the future. Everyone else in the class either came from a purely theatrical background or was there because they were purely interested in theater. So in the rare times I’d chime in with a story about hip-hop artist X or popstar Y, not even the professor knew what to say. But then one day, a question was posed to the class: What do you struggle with the most as a manager?
The kid fresh out of undergrad volunteered first. He was obviously smart or, at the very least, was so convinced he was smart that everyone took it at face value. But he didn’t have any professional experience, so being in this program would likely put him in the tricky spot of being overeducated and underqualified.
“I find I struggle the most with overconfidence,” he says, and I need to try very hard to stop myself from laughing. I’d never heard such a claim in my life, though - to his credit - at least he’s a little bit self-aware. But unlike me, everyone else nodded vigorously in agreement. What followed was an hour of storytelling from each of the men around the table, talking about how they got put in positions they were very much underqualified for, but went at it like they knew everything. They each failed miserably, some of them making mistakes that had price tags on them of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, with each mistake, the man who hired them would just act like it was a matter of bad luck and they’d be given another chance. So up the ranks they went, feeling like imposters because they still had no idea what they were doing.
My brain was exploding. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Women talk about “imposter syndrome” all the time. Still, it’s usually in the context of them being qualified, if not overqualified for the task at hand, but because of social conditioning, they feel like they don’t deserve the position or that someone else available could do the job better than they could. Here we were talking about men who legitimately weren’t qualified, got the job anyway, messed up spectacularly, but got a pass because “shit happens.”
The male bonding that was happening at that conference table in front of me in real time hit me like a ton of bricks. The realization was clear as day: These men live in a completely different version of reality than I do. And considering I was in my late twenties at the time, given all the absurd adventures I had been on up until that point, I felt foolish only realizing the wider extent of the situation so seemingly late in the game, as someone who often feels like clarity in that sense is rarely an issue.
I momentarily thought about those two guys in my marketing class. And that’s when I started to notice, once the COVID shutdowns eased up and I got back to work: The multiverse of the group project.
Always at the top of the organization was a man. An eccentric man. The type that would be good at schmoozing, which is valuable if your main job is bringing in more business, but nonetheless would be derided in a woman. Partnered with him would be a woman typically in charge of coming up with and executing the plan within the parameters of the nonsensical ramblings of the guy in charge. She is always miserable and she contemplates going to work somewhere else, but at the end of the day, she stays where she is because it could be worse. Taking the leap is too risky in a world unforgiving of female failure.
“You WHAT?” Jenny screamed at me over the phone as I sat at the kitchen table at my brand new apartment, lease freshly signed only two weeks prior. Gone were the days of living with my parents or with the nuns. I’d be turning thirty at the end of the year. It was time for a change - a change I felt confident making given the stability of my main gig.
“I quit,” I said. “Or I was fired. I don’t really know. But I’m not working with Blake anymore.”
Jenny’s phone was on speaker and her boyfriend was in the background, cackling. The three of us had started working together under Blake years ago and had become a well-oiled machine. And over the years, Jenny had told me the insane things Blake would say to her behind closed doors, accusing her of poor work ethic or outright stupidity or even that perhaps her period was clouding her judgment when he’d be asking for an array of things that simply didn’t line up.
“Why do you let him talk to you like that?” I’d always ask. And it was because she didn’t want to rock the boat. It was because part of her thought he was right. “The second he talks to me that way, I’m out. But I don’t think he will because he knows better.”
How classic of me, right?
The music business is kind of like the wild west. Less so now than in the past. But as freelancers, there really aren’t any norms or standards outside of the ones you set for yourself. And Blake knew good talent when he saw it, which is why he kept Jenny and me around for so long, confidently making otherwise poor business decisions with the artists he’d sign on with and the productions he’d have us put together. And just like I’d been told since I was younger, I was good at making problems go away - even better at it, working together with Jenny.
He never wanted to explain where the money was coming from or where the money mysteriously went. Payments to artists were delayed. Lawsuits had been filed by talent management companies. Rumor upon rumor was circulating, but the rush of the projects at hand was always enough to push such issues aside for later. At that point, sitting at my kitchen table, Jenny and I were fresh off of big festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza - career highs and major bucket list items for both of us. But to help cash flow, Blake wanted us both under contracts that I jokingly-but-not-really called “pimp contracts.”
“If you’re not touring with one of my shows, you can still find work elsewhere,” he’d explained a little over a year prior to this point. “But you’d work for those people under my company name. I’d negotiate your rate. Your pay would go to the company account, where I would take out 20%, and the rest would go to you.”
“You’re batshit insane if you think I’d ever agree to that,” I told him at the time only to learn that after his meeting with Jenny, she had agreed.
“He gave me an ultimatum,” I told Jenny now, “to sign the pimp contract for an honestly good annual salary or have my monthly retainer cut in half which wouldn’t even be enough to cover rent. I said no to both and offered to manage his tours purely as a freelancer, just reset everything altogether. He would no longer owe me a monthly retainer but could still hire me for my services on a project-by-project basis just like anyone else I work for so long as I am available for the required dates. But he said no. He said he’d rather hire someone with no experience to run any tour he pulls out of a hat last minute that he had full control over than to work with me in a capacity where I could move about without being tethered to his company, somehow, no matter where I went. So I terminated our working relationship.”
To my surprise, she began blaming me for not seeing the full picture, to not want to sacrifice for this startup that Blake was single-handedly running into the ground. But I suppose I deserved that for all the times I blamed her for how Blake was treating her. Eventually, she saw my point of view, even if she did not agree. Now I had no main gig and a brand new apartment. But I didn’t want to continue the cycle I had been in - tirelessly solving the problems of one confidently incompetent man. Jenny and I had gotten far too comfortable with Blake, and the consequences of that were becoming readily apparent.
Two years later, two years of me hustling like I hadn’t had to do since I was nineteen, two years of watching me make it work without Blake’s schmoozing and sketchy money practices, Jenny came to the same conclusion.
“I ended it,” she told me via text, sitting on a bench somewhere in Paris. “I’ve got other tour offers to get me through the end of the year.”
“Haven’t I told you that you’re great at what you do? Anyone would want to hire you,” I reassured her once she revealed that her boyfriend wasn’t for her decision and had chosen to continue working with Blake instead of leaving with her.
“I still want to tour with you again, though. More than anything. We had a really good thing going, the two of us,” she said. And this wouldn’t be the first time she’d bring up possibly going into business together. But for now, our solo journeys would take priority. We were on opposite sides of the world, working on completely different shows, learning new things every day, and sharing those lessons with each other while our individual reputations grew. As a group project, I referred to it as library curation. We were each adding to the shelves of our collective knowledge to borrow at our convenience.
As things inevitably are, there have been plenty of confidently incompetent men we have encountered along the way since. But at the very least, we knew what to do when the stench of the bullshit got too powerful to tolerate - a lesson learned in our twenties that was now integral to the compass being used to navigate our thirties.
If grad school taught me anything, though, it’s that the learning will never stop.