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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.”

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.

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.