In any creative endeavor, it’s possible to define success as the big win, the moment when your dreams match reality. Success is the end of imposter syndrome, stability and finally making it to the other side. By this definition, it’s clear that success isn’t going to happen. It’s incompatible with the reason you do this work in the first place. Sure, some projects are going to work. It’s quite likely your reputation will grow and more people will give you the benefit of the doubt. But a success? Once and for all, through and through? You can’t have that at the same time you’re the creative per ..read more

Does your brand have a personality? When people expect you to act a certain way, you have a brand. And that expectation is worth understanding. Can you help us understand whether you’re a cat or a dog in the way you react, respond, delight or sneak around? And if you’re a dog, what sort ..read more

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke Try to imagine the you of twenty years ago holding a Rabbit R1, or using a cell phone or being able to listen to every song, ever recorded, for just a few dollars a month. We don’t just take these once magic items for granted, now we express frustration that they’re not better or cheaper or faster. The fade is real and the half-life continues to get shorter. It’s a sort of hedonic treadmill of tech, where we not only take a breakthrough for granted in just a short time, but we also raise the bar for what c ..read more

Some restaurants keep a photo of the local reviewer in the kitchen. The thinking is that if someone notices she’s in the building, everyone can up their game. And some musicians wait eagerly for A&R person to be in the crowd. If they really kill it tonight, a record deal might ensue. The most resilient approach, of course, is to act as if. What if this is your most important post, or your last one? What if the email you’re sending is going to be forwarded to your boss? What if… We can’t know for sure. But we can act as if it’s going to happen ..read more

…but hurry. The words matter. Rushing has a built-in excuse. Rushing pushes us to skip steps or ship junk. But hurrying acknowledges how precious this moment in time is. It honors our good fortune to be in this place, able to contribute something generous ..read more

Many marketers spend time with their CRM systems. Expensive cloud-based tools that automate Customer Relationship Management. Maybe customers don’t want to be managed. They probably don’t. It might be more useful to think of our most important work as customer relationship leadership. CRL is voluntary. It’s done with customers and for them, not to them. It’s not an app, it’s a point of view. The new price-fixing scandal in the oil business helps us see what happens when industry leadership spends most of its creative time thinking about doing things to customers. This is a symptom of collusion ..read more

The intentional, noticed choices are obvious. “Vanilla or chocolate?” But most of the choices we live with are unseen. They’re expensive, challenging and invisible. When we plan an event with an outdoor component, we’re choosing to be anxious about the weather in the week leading up to the big day. When we buy something with a credit card, we’re choosing the long-term cost of paying the ongoing debt. When we stick with a deadend job instead of quitting today, tomorrow’s angst was a choice. These invisible choices are all around us, often hidden by forces that would rather we didn’t think about ..read more

For the last thirty years, the easiest shortcut has been convenience. If a marketer or a politician or an institution wants to gain acceptance, make it convenient. Tim Wu has pointed out that we’ll trade almost anything to save a few moments of hassle or thought. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been spending our time and money on comfort. They’re not the same. Convenience in the short run often comes at the expense of comfort. The comfort of resilience, of kindness, of long-term satisfaction. The comfort of offering someone dignity, a hand up or knowing that we put our effort into something useful ..read more

Not what we see when we’re present, but what do we see when we imagine we’re present? In the early days of photography, the world was black and white, and sort of flat. It’s worth noting that no one who saw these pictures complained about the fact that they didn’t exactly match what the world was like… it was normal. Color changed our perception of what normal looked like. Movies and then Technicolor made the world seem more vivid when it was normal. But then we took a big step backward. YouTube, compressed MP3 files and grunge typography made the world a bit compressed and janky. When we’re s ..read more

Life can be irritating. And sometimes, we can make a choice. The thing that’s vexing you: is it a situation or a problem? Problems have solutions. If we care enough, we can find a way to solve a problem, but it might cost more money, require more effort or involve more risk than we’d prefer. If we’re ready to ease some of the constraints, that problem might go away. Situations don’t have solutions. That’s why we don’t call them problems. There might be constraints we are not prepared to confront, or the structure of the situation may simply make it impossible to change. If a problem is vexing ..read more