Magic.

I'm reading a terrifying book right now by a reporter called Elle Reeve. It's called "Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics."

You can buy it here. And read the review from The New York Times here.

The subhead of the Times' review hints at why I find the book so frightening. It reminds me of the reportage I've read from post-WWI Germany, during the cacophony and hardship leading up to the ascent of hitlerism and nazism. "In 'Black Pill,' the journalist Elle Reeve finds that the once-fringe alt-right is dead— because now it’s mainstream."

But, Ad Aged being a blog on advertising, of course, there's an advertising point in bringing up 'Black Pill.'

If you look at the political era we're living in especially under the malign spell of trumpism, I believe--broadly--that it can be characterized by the inability to distinguish make-believe from reality.

We heard this some years ago from a trump acolyte, kellyanne conway, when she forwarded the perverted notion of alternate facts. Alternate facts are the hallmark of the maga movement. 

From small to large, we are being sold an alternate reality. One that doesn't exist. 

How bad things are under the current administration. How good they were during the trump years. How golden and great america was when you could hang black people with impunity, when women were subservient and the nation was largely white. How one-million didn't die of Covid. How invasions of sovereign nations are good as is police violence. How the democrats eat babies and can legally kill four-months old.

The list is endless.

And advertising is just as bad.

In our commercials, our press releases, our self-promotions, we've conveniently ignored reality. We've made getting a new phone, or the last nacho chip the apotheosis of living. Every car commercial is filmed on a traffic-less road. Every phone-rep is pretty and happy and helpful and unencumbered by an ineffective bot or a four-hour hold-time.

Advertising, like politics, no longer reflects the world people actually struggle to live and make their way in. The spate of pharmaceutical commercials makes matters worse. All you have to do is take a pill, then gallop off to spin in a field or push your grand-children on a swing set propitiously placed on an empty beach with no micro-plastics in sight.

As an industry, we have retreated from a reality-based world, preferring causality, certainty and magical thinking. We lie about the people we hire, the people we depict and the very saliency of our work. We lie about its effectiveness and its creativity. We pretend things ran when they didn't. Then we buy ourselves plasticine trophies and tell the world about the things we "won."

As we trade in un-reality, reality is pushed to the margins. It's largely gone in so many realms.

Of course, the worst reality, in politics and our profession is the one we don't even realize.

We've come to believe magical thinking. 

And of all the lies we tell, we don't realize that most prominent are the ones we're telling to ourselves.

No lie.

My Junk Drawer.

Last November, though I didn't really need a new computer, I decided to get a new computer.

As a person interested in tech, I had read fairly gushy reviews about Apple's new chips and their speed and capacity made me interested. What's more, though my 2012 Mac with a solid state hard-drive is blazing fast and had two-terabytes of memory, and my 2018 Mac (a parting "gift" from Ogilvy) was also in good trim, I wanted the latest.

Just as it wouldn't do for a salesman to be driving to sales calls in a 1962 Studebaker Lark, it doesn't look good for an advertising professional to have out-dated tools. I remember Pytka making a big baroque deal about a special set of lenses he had. I don't really know what was special about them if anything, but certainly the pretense had its effect. A bit like having your own custom-made two-piece cue stick.

I purposely get as large a hard-drive as I can when I get a new computer. And while I back things up daily on more different clouds than are currently wafting over Scotland, you can never have too much storage.

Two terabytes (2TB) I've found out, is enough space for the following:

If you know me, you know I take calculus like the above as a challenge.

My business and my skill are on my computer, and I'm going to use every byte of my 2TB.

So, I cart around a 64-page auction catalog of stuff owned by Paul Rand before he died. I have thousands of files of things I like, books I want to read, strings I might want to someday pull.

I have a 29-page list of URLS from various sites of complicated things explained simply.

Sometimes, in fact, I feel a little like one of those homeless guys I used to see on the Upper West Side when I was a boy who would write crazy galaxies of random numbers on greasy old paper bags.

Oddly enough though, especially when I so often work without benefit of a partner, these things help me. They unstuck me when I'm caught in a mental log jam.

Just now, by the way, I came across a book called "Charles & Ray: Designers at Play." About Charles and Ray Eames. I quickly ordered it both in hardcover and Kindle. Together, they cost about the price of a small salad at Dean & DeLuca. 

I quickly copied the book onto a word doc and made a reduced-sized PDF of it. I'm a little crazy that way.

Then just a minute ago, someone I hardly know pointed me in the direction of this book.

I like reference.

There's a good chance I'll never use that reference. There's a slightly less good chance I'll forget all about it. But I have it, and just maybe it will come in handy and illuminate the dark corners of an idea someday.

There's so much great stuff in the world. And advertising people and clients are looking to stock and A.I. to do things rather than working to make people think and smile. And actually like a brand.

That's the triumph of bland over brand.

Here's the thing.

I can out Collyer the Collyer's.

I'll run out of ideas and stimulus before the world runs out of storage.

That might not be true. But I'll save it anyway.

The Power of SU.

I guess around 1980, after an entire life of having baseball heroes, I gave up on baseball and heroes.

Maybe it was admitting to myself the dirt and the corruption in the game and realizing the golden-hour images created by sportswriters were as far from the truth as Ahab was from being a four-minute miler.

The great writer Mark Harris once wrote, "the only hero is the man without heroes." And in my mind I started distinguishing between heroes and people who did heroic things. You can be a schmendrik and do heroic things. And most everyone has a fair amount of schmendrik in them. After all, no one's perfect, or even near perfect. 

To paraphrase the old Noxema commercial from the 60s or 70s, "the closer you get, the more you are a schmendrik."

Eventually you realize that heroes, like everyone else are flawed. Give up on perfection and idealization. So I gave up on baseball heroes and started embracing writers I loved. 

I was methodical in my embrace. 

I would get my hands on everything they wrote and read it and if I could afford it, buy a copy so I could refer to it any time. 

Joseph Mitchell was one of those writers. In 1938 he published a book called "My Ears Are Bent." Later on he saw things in the book that he didn't like and it remained out of print for over half-a-century. 

I finally tracked it down at the New York Public Library on 5th and 42nd Street. The book wasn't circulating and I read the whole thing on microfiche. Later, still in pre-internet days, my wife found me a rare copy. I wrapped it in cellophane, put it in a plastic bag and have it still today. According to abebooks.com, though it's since been republished, my original copy is worth more than my car. 

I think a lot of people are as obsessive as I am. I'd imagine a lot of guitar players try to copy Robert Johnson, BB King, Django, Rosetta or Jimi. They learn every riff and lick. That's part of the "autodidact" that lives in so many of us.

Another of my writing exemplars is Robert Caro. I've probably written more about Caro in this space than anyone else. Besides reading everything Caro's published, I've seen him speak about twenty times. And I await the publication of his final volume of his five-volume magnum opus on Lyndon Johnson. Caro is in his late 80s now. Along with about a million other Caroites, I'm hoping he finishes volume five before he dies. Or before I do.

The other night I was upbraided by H, my long-time friend and GeorgeCo., LLC's Account Director. We had a client call and in my eagerness I went off script. I even talked over H, which I shouldn't do--for more reasons than I can enumerate.

I remembered something I learned from reading Caro. Something I am trying to actually incorporate into my life.

When Caro interviews someone, he writes SU all over his notebook's pages: Shut Up. 

In other words, as in the passage above, "Silence is the weapon, silence and people's need to fill it..."

I've seen this technique from Owen, my therapist of one-hundred years. 

I've seen it from Errol Morris, the Academy Award-winning director I spent weeks with shooting this long commercial. You can see a small glimpse of "SU," in this spot I did with Errol long ago and far away. At around :15-:22. (BTW, this spot does more to explain the potential efficacy of AI than anything I've seen since.) He leaves in a pregnant, uncomfortable pause. It makes everything feel realer.

OK.

I'll SU now.

Dust to Dust.

Damn.

I've been busy of late.

Almost too busy to feel the myriad aches and pains that come from being old as dirt. And walking sixty miles a week.

So, while I try to write a couple of blogposts on the weekend so I have "content" for the week's upcoming posts, here it is Tuesday afternoon, and I have nothing for tomorrow. Which sends the worst fear--the fear of failure--coursing through my veins.

As I've said many times before, when you write a blog every day, or scout for talent, or play the ponies, you're always on the look-out for the next thing that will fit the bill. 

Same when you're dedicated to a client. Reading about their business and their industry and their competitive set is a part of your job.

We lost that in advertising when we went from AOR to whatever we are today. To be really good at something means you're not a dilettante.  You work at it, always. You're on, always. You're like a military commander. You might have a battle plan, but you always searching for a weakness. Your own or your enemy's.

Me? When it comes to blogging,

I'm always looking for a topic. 
I'm always looking for a hook.
I'm always looking for a joke.
I'm always looking for something to write about.

Maybe Marcus Aurelius said, "If you wish to find a lot, seek a lot." If he didn't say that, he might have, so I'll pretend he did by translating those words into algorithmic Latin: "Si multum vis invenire, multum quaere."

There's a lot of blather in every industry that seems to work to make things unclear and therefore complicated. The idea behind complication is "You have to buy us, because the blank business is hard, and only we can figure it out."

That's why you get bushwa like this:

But ninety-nine percent of advertising, and most everything else, isn't really judge by the blather above. In fact, we'd all be better served if agencies somewhat quoted Art Blakely. "We do work that washes away the dust of everyday life."

I've been scribbling back and forth with a friend of mine from the business. We've been comparing scars from the business most of which derive from people who think that showing a trace of humanity is somehow a sign of weakness.

I wrote to him just now,

They’ve intellectualized themselves out of humanity.™

With no humanity, the dust of everyday life collects and concretizes. It tries to put laughter into a spreadsheet and marketing into an if-then proposition.

I don't watch a lot of TV. About two hours total a week.

And I have every ad blocker in the universe activated to try to keep from being stalked and restalked, targeted and retargeted and always on-assaulted by people who want my money and want to give me nothing in return.

My joke about NBC's coverage of the Olympics, which I watched a bit of this weekend, is "it's a shame they had to interrupt all those pharma commercials with a swim meet." But when I do see something on the air, 99-percent of the time I construct the powerpoint checklist of all the hoops that were leapt through and all the bullet points that were screamed before someone in a suit one-size too small said something like, "that will be an effective piece of marketing communication because it hits on bullet points seven through 23, including codicil six b of the aforementioned appendix to page 57 of the brief.

Golf claps.

What I never see when I turn on whatever tube I spend too much time on, is humanity.

Truth.

Empathy.

Wit.

Love.

About 99-percent of what we do passes quality-control and meets the boredom-distribution dispersion disbursement.

About 0-percent passes humanity-control.

We're accumulating too much dust from everyday life.

It's a Bargain.

If you know me at all, in real life or even just through reading this space, it won't be long before I start talking about some book I've read. Not only do I read a lot, I also have what today is called an eidetic memory: it's near photographic. So, I remember what I read and through some perverse vagary of fate, or a dark malign curse, I can relate what I read to things that are happening today. Books seem like natural parts of conversations I'm having. 

I'm sure that estranges me from 97.9-percent of the people I interact with.

Finding the next book is a challenge for any reader, especially readers whose interests are wide-ranging. What's next? What's new? What sounds cool? What can my brain handle at the moment? These are all parts of the equation that answer the next-book dilemma.

If you're a reader it helps to read about books. Years ago, if you were a New Yorker, you could walk along Broadway on the Upper West Side, or Madison Avenue or Lex on the Upper East Side, or, even Fifth Avenue in Midtown. You could reliably expect to find a book store every five blocks or so. 

Today, though, virtually all those books stores are closed. They seem to have been superseded by nail salons.

To browse books today, to see what's out there and what's coming, I rely on two of amerika's last remaining newspapers: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Occasionally, I get a recommendation from The Economist, which generally reviews a book a week, or The Washington Post. And occasionally, I'll get a recommendation from a friend, or even bezos' monopoly. But seven out of ten books I buy (and like most bibliophiles I buy more than I can read) I get from the Times or Journal.

On Wednesday, my elder daughter's birthday, I read this review in the Journal. You can read it here, if you can get past the Journal's Draconian paywall.

Regardless of that, here's the bit that started my remaining synapses firing:

Like many heavy readers, I had read Elizabeth Kolbert's "The Sixth Extinction," in which she introduced me to the word "Anthropocene." A coinage used to describe the epoch we created, where the effects of humans are changing life of earth and, in fact, the very survivability of life on our planet.

But to my eyes, Faustocene was a cut above anything I've read over the last twenty years. What's more, as amerika gallops toward a trumpian dystopia (whether or not he claims victory in the election that's just three months away) we seem more of a Faustocracy than a Democracy and the words of the "weird sisters of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" ring in my ears. Those words might be, in fact, the taglines of the Faustocene Era. Though I suppose I'm committing the sin of melanging Marlowe and the Bard.

Faustocene sums up everything we're living through, today. A cosmic deal with the devil for earthly riches, or sex, or luxury in return for a damned future. Except the future, the burning lake future, is happening right now.

Of course I think of the Faustocene deals the big names of advertising made when their millions were no-longer enough and they sold their agencies and their workers' futures for instead multi-millions to short men in expensive suits who dealt with agencies like they were cards in an under-cranked three-card Monte scam. For all the promises made by the private-jet-jettisoners, I can think of no human benefits that come from the consolidation of capital, unless you're the one it's consolidated around.

In any event, I haven't yet read "The Devil's Contact" by Ed Simon, though I do generally like books that depict cloven feet on the cover.

But you don't have to read everything to get something out of what you haven't read.

I learned the word "Faustocene."

Expect to hear it from me.

As we continue to live it.

Trying is Living.

As I type this post, I'm in the middle of a challenging creative project working alongside my ex-boss, S, the ex-Chief Creative Officer of an agency once called Ogilvy & Mather.

Working with someone like S has it's challenges. It's like going for a run with someone slightly faster than you or playing tennis with someone slightly more skilled. You have to either work to try to achieve their level, or you drag both you and him down. It's a choice you have to make.

A lot of people didn't like S when S was at Ogilvy. He wasn't the red-hot, burning-ardor football coach locker-room bonfire pep talk kind of boss. I spent a lot of time analyzing how S worked. And why so many people failed working for him, and why I was determined to not fail--to succeed.

What S did was set a standard.

There was no noise, excuses, or back-pedaling around S's standard. It just was. 

When you worked for him, you either had to meet that standard or you didn't. If you didn't, you were sent to creative Siberia. Especially if not meeting his standards was the result of not trying hard enough.

I was S's 'second' when we worked together. Often S would get the eight-page ad to write, in addition to over-seeing the entirety of the creative output on the account we were working on. Invariably, I would send S an email when he got that huge assignment (the one I wanted for my own portfolio and advancement.) "If you need any help on that ad, or even if you want to split it, you take four pages and I'll take four, just let me know."

I never pushed things. I just let S know I was available.

Invariably, he'd come to me somewhat hang dog. "Thank you. I'd love your help."

It was one of those things. My life might have been simpler had I kept my trap shut. But that's not really how life works. 

Before long, S had handed me the eight-page mantle. I'd start stuff and we'd trade "the pen" back and forth. It worked for each of us.

Now, as I said above, we're in the throes of a big assignment. We each went off an did our own thing, came back, tinkered and presented one collective response to the client. 

A lot of going off and doing our own thing is how problems get solved. When you're a writer--a writer in a competitive world where your livelihood depends upon pleasing clients and, therefore, getting more work from them, you solve problems not by talking about them. You solve problems by writing lines. By having ideas and testing them, through writing, to see if they work. If they are expandable. If they can hold a lot of ideas.

Yesterday, I had a phone call with another client. I said something like, 

"You've given me 2,000 words of briefing in four separate decks. The brief is big. Any brief of that size is going to have some logical inconsistencies in it. It's no different from the Treaty of Ghent or the Nicean Code. My job is to take those 2,000 words and conflicting thoughts, and turn them into eight-word units that provoke, excite and lead the viewer to want to know more. I call that a headline."

That might have been kind of dickish. But that's ok. The client said, that's right. That's why we come to you. To pull something out of a septic tank of too-much-information.

Not too many days ago, I read an article in the New York Times about the architect, Louis Kahn. I promptly ordered a book the article mentioned on Louis Kahn's notebooks, primarily because Kahn thought through his sketches. Here's a blunt example of that.

Moments later, I stumbled upon news of an upcoming exhibition at the New York Historical Society on the 50th Anniversary of my writing hero, Robert Caro's famous book, "The Power Broker." The article is my favorite kind. It had lots of pictures. Including this one below, that shows a bit of Caro's process when he writes. It ain't a walk through the park.

When S and I work together, or when I work alone, my head and desktop look like the above.

You solve problems by working to solve problems. Even when they're solved, you test them to make sure they were well-solved. Most writers do that through writing. 

That's why I write a blog post every day. Good thinking comes from good writing and good writing comes from writing. And good writing is a business advantage.

Alone or together, making it is working at it. 

It's scribbling. It's crossing out. It's trying again. It's not being content to do the same thing in the same way even if it's worked for you one-hundred or one-thousand times. It's saying 'how can I fuck this up and make it different? And by making it different, make it better?'

That's as life-affirming as I'm going to get.

I don't want anyone accusing me of being an optimist.

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

...Or near strangers.

Dear C___________,

Thank you.

I know we worked at the same agency almost 15 years ago, but I really can't remember having had any substantive conversations. I'm not really too much of a snob, but we were all younger 15 years ago. Even so, I was still old and probably dealt more with your boss, or boss' boss than I dealt with you.

Of course I remember your name. It's a funny name. But though we're zucker-connected and LinkedIn, I'm about 96-percent sure I couldn't pick you up out of a line-up.

It happens now and again, especially when I'm in New York, that I'm in a grocery store, or a restaurant, or walking somewhere and someone yells at me from afar. "George!" 

We start talking and if she's with me, my wife looks at me quizzically. When the someone leaves, my wife says, "who was that?" I usually compose myself for a moment then say something sagacious like, "I have no fucking clue."

C, you were one of those people. Sorry. It's true.

That said, thank you.

Thank you for referring a client to me.

At first I was dubious. As I said, I barely know you and hadn't heard of your client. But they turned out to be great.

I gave them a good proposal--expensive, but fair. They accepted it. No haggling. And they paid me fifty-percent upfront. A show of good faith.

They were good on the phone. Respectful of the work, my opinions and expertise and my time. They allowed--heaven forfend--a bit of kibbitzing. They didn't mind me being me. 

After the first round of work (of course, I over-delivered) they fairly applauded. Gave me cogent feedback--not twelve different tranches of feedback from nineteen different people at eleven different times--and then they paid me a second installment of twenty-five percent.

C, thank you.

You don't know how rare it is to have clients treat you with the same kindness and consideration you'd treat a plumber who comes into your home. The simple "value exchange" of, this plumber is a professional who deserves my respect is often missing. In fact, I have another client--one of the giant agency holding companies--who are 130-days late paying me and every time I ask where my money is, they concoct another device to blame the delay on. The last one made the least sense. They're waiting for the money to clear from their bank! Can you imagine saying that to Lily, the kid who babysat for you when your kids were small?

C, you're on staff, so you probably don't know how much running your own business depends upon, in Blanche DuBois' words from Tennessee Williams' "Streetcar Named Desire," "the kindness of strangers."

Running your own business depends upon the kindness of people you barely know. They're often people who without knowing when or how, you impressed somehow. Those are the people who refer you to people. That's often--even if you're a big agency--how you get business.

Of course, if you get three referrals a month, probably only one fully works out. That ratio probably sums up the calculus of life. But if you've played your cards right and you deliver the goods, that successful referral will get three more, in addition to the ones you get from your established network and your own new business efforts.

C, again, and I'm not laying it on thick, this is with all sincerity and gratitude, thank you.

Running an independent business is hard. Doing things counter to the status quo--the way others are doing them--is hard. Rolling the dice everyday in the hopes that revenue will materialize is an iffy proposition. And like most people, I wasn't born and I'm not endowed with a great sense of confidence.

Thank you for having confidence enough in me to give me a referral.

You also gave me hope.

xx

Electric Company.

The first brain surgery took place about 3,500 years ago, about 1,500 years before Christ was allegedly born. Well before that, almost since the very beginnings of homo erectus--or when humans became bi-pedal if the word erectus is too jd vance couch-fucky for you, our species has been thinking about the brain.

Until about 500 years ago, no one really knew what the brain was for. Humans had figured out eyes were for seeing, noses for smelling, hearts and lungs for breathing, but the brain was terra incognito. 

Most of the storied Greek philosophers thought the heart was the seat of emotions and thoughts. That's why we say we 'learn something by heart' or our heart's broken, or something is
heartfelt. The greatest doctor of long ago was a Greek (from today's Turkey) called Galen. Though he practiced about 2,000 years ago, much of medical dogma, at least until the "enlightenment" which started around 500 years ago, had been codified by him.

Around 1500 or so, philosophers and medical men (it was all men) started thinking about the brain. Gradually they came to accept it was the seat of thought. But no one could figure out how thinking about something in your brain could convey that thought to say your hand in an instant. 500 years ago, the metaphors we used to try to understand were mechanical. Like gears and pulleys. They didn't convey speed. 

So people thought thoughts had to be conveyed by things they understood, like fluids. And no fluid can move as fast as the speed of thought. It wasn't long before they brought god in to answer the unanswerable. It was the special gift of god that allowed thoughts to travel and all that. That gift was evidence that we were created in god's image and god loved us. 

(There's a lot of god still explaining the bits of science we can't understand, but that's not today's point.)

Eventually, people in Europe discovered something called the torpedo fish. They found that the torpedo fish could deliver a strong electric shock. Eventually, they wondered if our thoughts were somehow transported by electricity and at the speed of light. So, reductio ad absurdum, human thought is all about electricity, energy, fast-twitch.

All this brings me to the obtuse point of today's post.

For the last forty years or so, I've been getting briefed, creating work, showing work and working with people from various different agency disciplines. Under today's benighted rule of human-resources, we're supposed to accept and welcome all sorts of neuro-divergence and all sorts of different work styles. That's demanded of us by the people who try to run our work lives though they produce no work themselves.

For all the years I've been working with others, i.e. for my entire life, there's one quality that marks all successful people: electricity. 

That is, they're not passive. They're thinking. They're listening. They're offering. They're learning, gleaning, reading, taking in information. They crackle with enthusiasm and caring.

They have electricity running through their veins.

Too often we present to people who are about as enthusiastic and additive as a 1950s department of motor-vehicles technocrat. They have an answer for everything and it's always no. No, it's too expensive. No, they're not right. No, they're a white male. No, they've been canceled. No, that uses vowels and the client hates vowels. No Chiat did something like that in 1981. No, no, no, no.

They not only don't have electricity themselves, they act like circuit breakers. They're cosmic wet blankets. They have a problem for every solution.

Brains run on electricity.

Electricity runs on energy.

Energy runs on work.

Too many people don't do the work to create the energy and the electricity that powers brains. The people who are successful in the world, regardless of age, regardless of discipline, regardless of race, creed, color, education or what they had for lunch, have electricity running through their brains.

I often say to people, "you're a noticing machine." Or "you see things other people don't." Or "you connect things."

I've kept, for instance, a 29-page document (and growing) of urls of sites and designers I like. I am not naturally a visual person, but I work in a visual field. This list helps spur me and helps give me visual ideas when I need them.

Also, keeping the list is a commitment. Just as a coin-collector will work to notice coins, a cool-collector, if she's committed to the task, will work to notice cool.

If you have a list of cool, when someone says X, you can say, "that reminds me of Y," and show them a link. You build and build and build from there.

It's exciting.
It's fruitful.
It's about the most-human interchange there is.

That's what I mean by electricity.

Listing.

A friend just sent me a note asking for life-steps. One-foot-in-front-of-the-other things that can help people. This ain't Marcus Aurelius, but it isn't half bad. Sometimes not half bad is pretty good. Oh, and when in doubt, write a list.

Six Life Steps for Successful Ad Agencies.

Two Small steps.
Two Giant steps.

One Nice step.

One stupid.

 

 

1.    File. (More than your nails.)

There's a lot of great stuff to be found online. Smart people read it. Keep it. Refer to it. And share it. (Just today, I downloaded Herman Miller's brand guidelines. I added it to a file with about 50 other links to brand guidelines.)

2.    What makes you different?

There's a micron's worth of difference between one agency's website "About" section and another's. If you aren't doing something better than others, you have no reason for being. You need a reason for being. What is it?

3.    Do.

Talk is cheap. Too cheap. Showing what you do, how you think, how you behave beats talking about it. What work, what thinking are you doing, not in the past, but today? Make it shareable and make yourself top-of-mind.

4.    Love.

Be avidly, actively, assiduously nice. Get back to people quickly. Answer questions without jargon. Always be on time. Always keep your promises. And always always say please and thank you.

5.    Twenty minutes.

Get in twenty minutes early everyday or leave twenty minutes late. Spend those minutes offline with a pencil and a piece of paper. Twenty minutes of thinking while you're un-plugged is equal to twenty days of distracted thinking.

6.     Get good at writing lists.

They're a helpful way to get out of a jam when you're on deadline and have no ideas.

Rubber Stamp.

I've had a heckuva busy week and I expect next week to be busy as well, so around 4PM on Friday afternoon, I headed downstairs to my office to try to write a blogpost or two so I'm not behind the eight-ball when Monday rolls around.

Yes, I'd rather have headed upstairs to my bedroom and rested for a bit.

But whether or not anyone reads these words, I've made this blog a thing. 

For years I've been haranguing clients about the need to be consistent. The need to run ads. The need to be ubiquitous. The truism is "you have to be in it to win it."  

I usually say something like, "for my entire life, Tiffany's has run a small space ad in the upper right hand corner of an early page in the A-section. No one's buying off the page. But they serve to remind people that Tiffany's exists. That's way better than the alternative."

I suppose you could call that a media strategy. I just call it smart. And I realized when I went out on my own that I wouldn't get phone calls if no one thought of me when they needed help. So how could I get people to think of me? Especially at a time when it's considered annoying to phone people. And when work can come from virtually anywhere.

Not too many hours ago I went for a walk along the seacoast that girds the little Connecticut town I split my time in. Minutes in, interrupting something melancholy by Ben Webster, I got a text from a friend who's a planner. I get a lot of texts like this. These texts are very often from people I like a lot, so they hit me hard when they express the typical ad-agency level of career unhappiness.

Where do you begin with the above?

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the business and its commoditization, how essentially, it's turned itself from a collection of independent "mom and pops" to a centrally-run and technocratically-managed big box store. Like big box stores, it's hard to get service in an agency. What they sell is usually undifferentiated. They compete on price. And they pay their (temp) workers low wages. Also, they ship about 70 cents out of every dollar to Bentonville, Arkansas or its equivalent.

As I've said so often, Etiam si omnes, ego non. Even if all others, not I. 

In other words, how can I resist my own personal commodification? While the capital that controls the industry is pushing wages down, how can I maintain my standard of living? 

Basically, I wrote myself a brief.

1. How can I get picked?
2. How can I get paid?

This post that I'm writing now is, in part, an answer to that tough brief. And is, in part, an answer to my friend's plaintive note. When you work for yourself you don't always get to work with decent human beings, but if people are asses, you can usually find a slightly punitive way of charging them. If you've lived a fairly impecunious life, you might even be able to walk away from jerks entirely.

My Account Director and I are dealing with one of those less-than-salutary people now. But the money involved is good enough for me to be uncharacteristically tolerant. Charitable even.

I did, however, investment-spent $48 to get two rubber stamps made. One for me. One for my Account Director. I designed the stamp myself. We'll use them to remind ourselves that money isn't everything.