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.

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

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

A brain

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

Too much time with other brains tires, deflates, and flattens them. Social interactions make them feel packed away like a folded airbed. So they stake out a life on the outskirts of human settlement, in the vibrant backcountry of their own minds.

An artist gathers information, generates ideas, and then crafts and displays ideas with which people can update their mental operating systems if they so choose. These ideas dangle outside the hyperbaric space hut. If a tribe lets them enter, the ideas breathe. “I see things” is art about to happen. Your canvas is every conversation, meeting, email

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