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,

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,

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.

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

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.

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.

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,

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.