Agalia Tan

But that was just it – we were doing it our own way, at our own pace.

Comparison is the thief of joy and sensible business strategy too.

• “Are you two a couple?” - which has become a recognised catchphrase


• “Would you mind telling us the story of how you first met?”


• “X years in, what's your favourite thing about her/him?” or
  
  variations like "What's the secret of X years together?" - the
  
  interviewer always establishes the length of the relationship


• "What are your names?" marks the

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Nelson Cowan, a leading researcher on working memory, tells us the Magic Number is 4±1. Meaning, we can only focus our attention on three to five meaningful chunks of information before our cognitive capacity overflows.

Information expands to fill the space available, and in our 24/7 culture and modern media environment, the space available is infinite. This means there are now more news stories than there is actual news. W. David Marx calls this the Parkinson’s Law of Media.

Two simple rules:

1. You get better at what you practice.


2. Everything is practice.

We are so focused on evaluating our social networks and broadcast platforms from a distribution perspective that we often forget to analyze the other side of the two-sided content marketplace: creation. But our current internet culture is as much driven by frictionless distribution as it is by frictionless creation. We can’t process and sort... See more

Ad legend Bill Bernbach letter on creativity, written in 1947:

Dear ________:

Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too, and I don’t mind telling you I’m damned worried. I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of

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Strategists are trained to spot patterns in the world. The harder task is interrupting the ones running your own life.

Insight is not intervention. You can name a pattern, teach a pattern, even warn yourself about a pattern, and still obey it. The work, I think, is to catch yourself a little earlier - to notice when the body starts to close, when... See more