a strategist’s convictions

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

The irony is that the hard parts, like writer’s block and openness, is where there’s self-examination, progress and growth.

And if we’re not pursuing creativity for that, then why are we? The clicks?

As a strategist, if you want rare insight, you need to have access to rare perspectives and those come from people, not publications or posts on social media.

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.

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 .

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

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

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

the way we sell ideas in the first place. Concepts are much harder to make fun than executions. They also are most open to interpretation, turning future rounds of review into wrestling matches between difference in expectation.

We spend so much time thinking about the big idea, the joy of the output suffers.