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

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.

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.”

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

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

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.”

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

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

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

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