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

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.”

The journey for most strategists is from truths that are banal and don’t give anybody an edge to truths that are surprising and give many people an edge.

But some running is better in the head. This running is called “strategy.” Because if everyone is running, who’s thinking? And what game is this? And isn’t there another game we can play?

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 your colleagues feel, too. Often that feeling is resentment. There is status in a word like “strategy,” and so the word can become an appendage to many titles to signal little more than “I can think and I can even do it with my brain and please take this seriously and give me more money.”

Next time you feel it, tell yourself that’s not you feeling like an impostor. Tell yourself that’s how it feels to care about doing something well. Then go do it. It’s one way to feel like a friend to yourself and not like a powerless outsider.

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

Savings are for your piggy bank. These are thoughts you’ve stashed over the years. They are observations, quotes, what-ifs, and research waiting to spring into the world. They marinate in your vault, and they emerge with interest.

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

Creativity needs private time, and, when ready, creativity then needs public fame.