a strategist’s convictions

THINK IN OUTCOMES, NOT OUTPUTS.

When you’re genuinely curious about the world, when you let that curiosity guide your reading, your thinking, and your creating, you become a magnet for ideas, conversations, and opportunities. When you’re interested, you’re never boring. And when you’re interesting, the world can’t help but pay attention.

I used to be a parrot, echoing other people's ideas, opinions, and beliefs, because I wasn’t sure of my own. I thought that by ‘borrowing’ and mimicking, I’d be more likeable, it’d be easier to seem cool, clever, or to belong. Looking back now, it gives me the ick—the amount of shit I nodded along to, gross. I think I was scared of looking stupid, ... See more

We say that the most powerful work operates through evoking visceral, emotional responses, yet we’ve been seemingly conditioned to believe that critiquing and evaluating is the professional necessary first step. But the fact is that we can’t truly feel an idea, we can’t truly live an idea if we’re standing on the outside and looking in being clever... See more

Perhaps the simplest and best definition of wisdom I’ve heard is “knowing what information is important.” This kind of knowing is not solely done in the intellect. Data is constantly being fed into your unconscious, then cross referenced against your experience.

Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh i... See more

The process of reducing a briefing requires great courage, rigor and repertoire.

You have to make brave choices and say a thousand times more No’s than Yes’s.You have to respond rigorously to the problem that you’re trying to solve.You have to have a vast repertoire of references in and outside Advertising in order to get to fresh thinking - and tha... See more

there’s a “liberating power in a tight brief”

For an organization to operate within society, it must be not just be mindful, but active in these changes — or “tending.” Failure to do so results in lack of resonance and more dire: disruption .