Strategy Is Your Words: A Strategist's Fight For Meaning

Beautiful creative companies build themselves on behaviors that serve the creative mind—all of the creative mind. That includes the creative mind’s strengths and weaknesses, its need for quiet and for stimulation, its need for validation and its struggle to accept it, its need to create for the sake of creating and for this act to happen daily, its

Strategy makes people feel. It makes you feel. It makes your colleagues feel. It makes your clients feel.

Quips, meanwhile, make you smile. They are you observing your world and your thoughts as they collide, while enjoying the eccentricity of each collision. They are intelligible and emit from an internal entertainment system. You might need noise-cancelling headphones to hear them but once you tune in, you start to see them as more than mere distract

that is quick to welcome in confusion and low self-esteem benefits from imaginary allies and new language. Aggressive self-talk really can help: “Screw you, critic. I have something to offer. I’ll work it out in public. If it costs me jeers from unforgiving people, then that’s OK. I’m the one who has to live with me. Nobody else has to do that.”

A brain

Darling memories will lend their own furious support. “Remember that time we helped reverse the fortunes of a client? Remember the first brief we presented? Remember that conference presentation? That crazy weekend of writing a pitch that won the business?” You can try to fend off the impostor phenomenon through a clear sense of your own meaning, a

Information has never been so available but your job isn’t information. It’s the inner life of the information, the tenuous tension between clusters of information that don’t seem to belong together but can if you playwright them to.

Strategists are mediums. Your work is to channel other people.

There is one person who sees you as an artist. It’s that chief marketing officer who’s built a career on visceral creative work and demands to have a strategist in every meeting. This is a rare subspecies on the brink of extinction, but such mortals do exist. Often they recognize the art and the artist in themselves, and they want strategy, present

The lone-wolf identity is also a preemptive strike at rejection, because people can’t reject what doesn’t seek acceptance.