Earn your seat on the ass-kicking machine.

What Southern Indiana, manual labor and a recovering addict taught me about originality.

Walk into any office building in the Midwest. Look down. You will find yourself standing on a sea of carpet cut lower than a putting green. Kneel. Run the palm of your hand atop it. You feel the coarseness? It’s tough stuff. With enough pressure, it could sand down the calluses of a rhinoceros. It’s also stain-resistant. If that rhino were to drop trou and take a shit in the conference room, any decent janitor could have it good as new before the evening’s holiday party. It’s flame-resistant, too. If a fire were to break out because some asshat trying to drill through the Earth decided to manufacture flamethrowers, the landlord who owns the building could get sued back to the Stone Age.

I got paid $15 an hour to tear this carpet up and replace it with new carpet that would last another couple of decades beneath the busy feet of Corporate America. It goes without saying a utility knife wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, our weapon of choice was the Terminator. This $40,000 commercial-grade floor scraper resembled a John Deere riding lawnmower, except it was electric blue and weighed in at just under 3,000 pounds. Its glaringly bright color profile wasn’t for aesthetic purposes. It needed to stand out like a pair of bare breasts in a convent to prevent those working nearby from discovering their misplaced foot had been leveled to the flatness of a crepe. Unlike a riding lawnmower, the Terminator only possessed two back wheels. The front of the machine balanced on a steel blade called a Tile Tooth. Each one of those teeth cost $70. Some days, we’d run through twenty of them.

I was advised by my boss—a ruddy-faced man named Mark Handlin—to never stand anywhere near the machine when it was running. I found out why the first day on the job when the Terminator ran over a hidden bolt buried underneath the carpet. The Tile Tooth stripped the head off the bolt and flung it 25 yards through the room. It lodged itself so far into the drywall, you’d need an army surgeon to dig it out. I jumped like someone fired a rifle over my shoulder. Everybody else in the crew didn’t so much as flinch. Ricky, the crew manager, simply nodded at his second in command, who then grabbed a bucket of putty and saw to patching up the hole. I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to watch the Terminator work. It would start from one end of the building and slowly work its way down—balancing like a XXXL figure skater atop its miniature guillotine—carving up the carpet in these long ribbons that resembled a shaved wheel of moldy Swiss cheese. I rarely got to drive the Terminator—my job was to pick up after the machine. Regardless, it was a privilege. I found myself silently cheering it on as I trudged behind it with a heavy-duty trash bag, grinning from ear to ear anytime it whittled a particularly long ribbon with its giant incisor.

When I tell stories of my days tearing up carpet and vinyl flooring, it’s usually to signal that I’m meaner than my competition. I’ve never been bashful about my toughness. It’s all I have. I’m not talented, but I’m tenacious. Put me in a room with any other advertising executive in America. Tell us whoever makes it out alive gets the Nike account. I can’t say for certain I’ll be the one that walks out of the room. But, if I’m not the one who walks out of the room, the one who does will be missing an arm or a leg or both. Today, however, I retell this story for a different reason.

Writers, artists, designers and creative directors talk often about originality. It’s an overused term. But, it’s an important one. It’s originality that allows your work to stand out in a crowded room like the electric blue paint on the Terminator. Unfortunately, nobody ever tells you how to be original. Naturally, you begin believing that originality is something you’re born with. It’s like a cock the size of a sawed-off shotgun or a head of hair so full it could choke a horse—neither of which I’ve been blessed with—you either have it or you don’t. But, originality doesn’t work like this. It’s not won in the genetic lottery. It’s not bestowed upon you by some higher power. It’s not invented out of nothing. It’s the fingerprints your life experiences leave behind on the things that you create. Originality is earned through life experience—and so, it’s not enough to simply create. You must also live.

As I mentioned a moment ago, I’m not the most talented writer, artist or creative director. However, I feel fairly confident in saying that when someone reads my writing or experiences the work that Honey produces, they know my hands touched it. They might not love it. In fact, they might hate it. But, they know I touched it. Having grown up in Southern Indiana—working bizarre jobs like picking up after the Terminator—I’ve had a unique set of life experiences that not every creative person is exposed to. More than this, I’ve spent a hell of a lot of time around the kinds of people that are often overlooked by writers, artists and agencies.

When my two brothers and I were holed up in the cabin of my grandfather’s 1989 Dodge Dakota and he let out a fart, he would belly laugh—nearly choking on his Nicorette gum—and exclaim, “That would gag a maggot.” When the three of us would pester the hell out of my mother—who worked from home before working from home was vogue—she would close her office door with a look that would stop a rhinoceros mid-charge and say, “Don’t knock on this door unless it’s blood, smoke or fire.” When my Uncle Mike gummed up his knee and it swelled so damn big he had to cut his leg out of his jeans, he hobbled up to the horse barn, turned over a 5-gallon bucket, took a seat, lit a cigarette, sanitized a horse syringe with his Zippo lighter and then sucked the fluid out like he was getting ready to baste a Thanksgiving turkey.

Where I cam from, you didn’t get screwed. You got fucked six ways to Sunday. You weren’t exhausted. You were rode hard and put away wet. Your list of to-dos wasn’t extensive. It was so long it could choke a horse. You weren’t a glutton for punishment. You were a dumbass that kept slipping quarters in the ass-kicking machine. You didn’t run fast. You ran like you stole something. You weren’t a good athlete. You were a dog that could hunt. You weren’t cunning. You were smart like a fox. This grease poetry seeped into my vernacular like motor oil in a handkerchief. To this day, it informs the way I write.

More than this, I was surrounded by people who lived outside the creative industry’s usual field of vision. I’ve always wanted to be the kind of writer, artist and creative director who can just as easily speak to a venture capitalist in New York City as I can a plumber in Henderson, Kentucky. To do this, you must surround yourself with people from all walks of life. In the same day, I’ve shaken Anna Wintour’s hand at the Met Gala and shared a cigarette with a homeless Vietnam vet who heard whispers my ears couldn’t catch.

One of the guys I worked with during my days tending to the Terminator was actively trying to kick meth. He had tracks running up his arms. Half his teeth were missing, while the other half were barely holding on. To silence his demons, he would drink three to four Monsters a day and burn his way through a pack of cigarettes before lunch. When you work beside someone like this every day, you stop seeing him as an addict. You start seeing him as a person. A friend, even. I remember one afternoon, he asked me to read him some of my writing. I read him a poem I had written the night before. This was long before I ever published One Minute, Please? After Her and Guillotine. As I read the poem to him, he fell quiet. He leaned back in his chair, stared up at the water-ringed ceiling and listened. Once I was through, he looked at me and said, “I always thought poetry was some fuckin’—I don’t know—sissy-ass shit. But, I like this shit. I like that I know what you’re trying to fuckin’ say and shit.”

It’s been over a decade. Yet, I think back to this moment constantly. No matter how much I develop as a writer, an artist and a creative director, I hope I never produce anything that my old friend couldn’t comprehend—anything that doesn’t pay homage to the land that birthed me and the men and women that brought me up. Originality doesn’t come from trying to sound unlike everybody else. It comes from honoring the one precious, imperfect life you’ve lived: the jobs you’ve worked, the bullshit you’ve endured, the women you’ve loved, the mistakes you’ve made, the friends you’ve known, the rooms you’ve entered and the language, perspectives and memories you’ve carried out with you.

The more specific the life, the more original the work. But the work still has to reach people. It has to be understood. And so I hope I’ve made myself clear.

By Cole Schafer.