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

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.”

Jobs are now spectator sports. That’s why thinking must happen in public. That’s why we are suspicious of introverts and their inner lives. That’s why we need everybody together at all times even if somebody tries to take a day off.

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

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.

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.

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.

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,

Perhaps the silver lining of the impostor phenomenon is this: It’s a sign you want to improve.