(Good for Your Soul.) A Guest Post from TJ Bennett.

When I started this blog, seventeen and a half years ago, I had no idea how "big" it would get. How much a part of my life, my who-I-am it would be come.

What's more, because I didn't foresee the veritable death of the advertising trade press (which mostly prints agency press-releases or runs 40 under 40 lists and calls it content) I didn't realize that in some manner, my blog and a few others, would become important as sources of "truth" in the ad industry. 

I also didn't realize how many people would count on Ad Aged because of that. I don't have Nielsen data or any readership information other than what's supplied by LinkedIn--but just judging by the likes I get and the notes from various industry scions, Ad Aged has more than a little sway in the industry.

Because of that, I've begun reaching out to people I know. If I think they have something important to say, I've begun offering them "space" in my blog. 

Late last week, I offered Ad Aged to TJ Bennett. TJ and I don't know each other well. We worked together briefly when I freelanced at Hill Holliday in New York back in 2006. And we reconnected back in July or August on TJ's really outstanding "Desuckify Work" Podcast. TJ's hosted something like sixty episodes. They all discuss how we can help an industry that's lost its way perhaps get on track.

I asked TJ if he'd like to write something for this space. Something that can help TJ help people Desuckify Work. TJ is about helping people. Helping make work better. TJ's that all-too-rare type of human: a mensch. Someone who's kind, helpful, caring. 

Someone with a soul.

If you feel like talking to someone with a soul, TJ is a good place to start.

Here's his post.

Thanks, TJ.

When I was 23, I had my blood scrubbed and returned to my body three times per week. 

It kept me alive. And I fucking hated it. 

23 years old and I’m stuck in a cold, sterile room for four hours with two shotgun needles jabbed into my arm instead of shooting the shit with my roommates in our mismatched living room after work? 

23 years old and I’m surrounded by the gaunt, gray faces of my fellow dialysis patients instead of the bright eyes of my youthful peers at that after work place I kept hearing about? 

23 years old and I’m spending eight days in the hospital fighting blood clots in my lungs instead of spending yet another week doing whatever the hell I damn pleased with a body that worked like a normal young person’s? 

All that time hooked up to machines makes you question some things. Like who you are. What actually matters to you. And what is life, exactly?

Thanks to the kidney my beautiful brother donated six months after I started dialysis, I’ve been able to spend the last 31 years trying to answer those questions. I’m not sure I’m fully satisfied with what I’ve come up with so far, but I’ve come to enjoy the trying. 

When people ask me why I became a coach, that’s usually the best answer I can give. I enjoy the trying. And I enjoy seeing others enjoy it as well. 

That’s really all coaching is—trying. You may see some folks on LinkedIn promising BIG results like 10x-ing your productivity or scaling your business to 8 figures in 8 days, but that’s not my jam. If you really want to 10x something, I’m here for you. But I’m not sure it will have more impact than the simple act of trying. 

Trying to learn more about yourself. Trying to listen more. Trying to find meaning in your work. 

Yoda is famous for saying “do or do not, there is no try.” And he’s not wrong. We need to do things. 

But we also need to do those things with a mindset of wonder. There is wonder in trying. In yearning. In discovering. In doing things with zero faith that they will turn out the way we want and still saying, “sure, why the hell not.”

People are often surprised by my transition from creative to coach. Perhaps they expect an HR person to be a coach. Or even an account person. But a creative?

Yeah, a creative. 

Because coaching is one of the most creative acts I’ve ever experienced. My clients are creating something new for themselves every time we meet. Every time they commit to doing something different or scary between our sessions. Every time they try.

I even ask my clients to write a creative brief when we start our work together. Inviting them to use their beautifully weird mind to solve whatever challenges they’re facing, with the same smarts and scrappiness they’ve used to crack client briefs. 

There is no greater brief than this one. And yet we so easily put it on the back burner while we work ourselves to death selling cell phones or SUVs. 

My clients put some pretty lofty stuff in those briefs. Finding a career that makes their soul happy. Discovering their purpose. Becoming a better leader. Creating an agency that is great to work at and does great work.  

I have the honor of walking along side of them as they take those uncertain steps towards something new. Some better, maybe. 

They are trying. 

And that makes my soul happy. 

A 600-Year-Old Lesson on Advertising.

Dan Jones is an historian. A major historian. And in my unqualified opinion, one of the most important historians writing today.

His great book, "Power and Thrones," is a must read. 

If you want to know how the world works, if you want to feel the sweep of history, if you want to understand how little things can have have thousands of years' of impact, and if you want to finally read about the effects of climate on our planet, pick up "Powers." Yes, it's almost 700-pages long. But each page is important and riveting. (I'm not sure how many crappy TV shows you can watch in the time it takes you to read 700 pages, but my guess is you'd be better served here.)

Right now, I'm 93-percent of the way through Jones' latest book, a 500-pager called "Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King." It might be the best book on how to run an ad agency that I've ever read.

That's right.

A book about a 15th-century king can tell us how to run a 21st-century business. Even a pseudo-business like an ad agency.

If you're educated in the old school like I was, you might have some nickel-knowledge of Henry V based on various plays by Shakespeare. His characters, Falstaff. Hotspur. Hal. Richard II, and Shakespeare's Henry plays all gave us a picture. And an interesting one.

Shakespeare indexed heavily on the wayward youth, Prince Hal, growing into a staunch and solid hero of a king, Henry V. What's more, his "St. Crispin's" speech should be listened to at least once a year. In fact, I wish kamala harris knew it, used it and understood it as our country writhes through its trumpian torment.

But, for all that. 

Why is the Jones' story of a king from 600-years-past a lesson for today?

Let me start with something big and small.

During my last five years at Ogilvy, I never once saw a senior suit on the creative floor. Just walking around. Seeing how people are doing. Looking at their desks and seeing pictures of their kids. Seeing the be-head-phoned creatives working to create. Watching hundreds working through lunch or through weekends, trying to create something fun, smart, human. Walking about, getting to know, support, show love for the people doing the work.

Just once in my 40 years in advertising, did I meet a holding company head. And the wall-eyed-dweezil lied to my face while condescending to me.

Henry was different.

Though at just 16-years an arrow shot six-inches into his skull nearly piercing his brain, he fought alongside his people. Alongside his people. With them, scarred cheek by jowl.

Artist's interpretation.

Today, in most societies and industries and communities, there are masses of people who get little more than the equivalent of processed cheese food. There are the few--the anointed, the to the manor-born, the mega-wealthy, the c-suiters, who never come down from their perch.

You see them hustling to their black cars at five, while you're finally getting lunch.

Some call it capitalism for the poor (that's you and I) who have to fight molar and nail for every scrap, and socialism for the rich (they're fed by the state.) It's another version of the old saw, "the rich get richer and the poor pay taxes."

The holding company executives never see, acknowledge or thank those who have made them rich. They're so removed from actual work and life, they believe their shit don't stink. 

Shit stinks. No matter whose it is.

As Jones writes about Henry V:

"it becomes clear that this has been an astonishing victory for Henry. For a king to have put himself in the face of such peril for so long speaks to his physical aptitude for fighting and his willingness to gamble everything if he detects the faintest scent of victory. That Henry has inspired his small and weak army to overcome the larger, fresher, more confident, and more glamorous French one is not just the basis for a dramatic legend: it is a military fact."

If you're a client, think about this.

You never see the people you spend the bulk of your agency money on. The rich people you pay for never put themselves at peril for your success. 

They aren't there for the creating. Only the accounting.

It's convenient to believe, or to convince yourself to believe, that the systemic sides of business operate machine-like. 

But no social organization, government, team, or company doesn't run on people.

It's the people, stupid.

It's people.

You know.

Those things we ignore.

Ouch.

It's funny how when you're old, little things can remind you of who you've always been.

For about a year now, I've been struggling through a painful right hip. About six months ago, it started getting wincing bad. About a month ago, I started seriously thinking about seeing a doctor about the prospect of a hip replacement. (Not a hip-replacement. A hip replacement.)

Last week, amid what was one of the busiest work weeks of my life, I decided I needed some time away from the Gingham Coast and took the Amtrak train back to the city. The last time I did so, I took a cab up to my apartment from Penn Station. It took about an hour and it cost me about $70. It's a four-mile trip.

My wife let me forget neither of those facts. "You have your Metrocard," she asked-and-answered. "Take the Q from 6th and 34th, and you'll be at 83rd and 2nd in two shakes of a rat's tail."

Obediently, and against my snobbish better judgment, I agreed. I'd take the egalitarian train. Not an elitist cab.

 

What I didn't calculate was that in compensating for the not inconsiderable pain in my right hip, I successfully threw my back out. I limped through ever-crowded Herald Square lugging my overnight bag and walking like the worst of the guys above. Shot through with buckshot. Barefoot. And pained from god-knows-what, and probably Dysentery.

But, as they say, "Dig We Must."

In long short-order I made it back to my apartment, sweating and cursing with the unseasonable 80-degree late-October climate-change-denial heat.

Unfortunately, a raft of repair people were in my New York apartment when I arrived. Repair for the apartment. Not for me. And I hastened them along. Just an hour after I got into my apartment, I had a client call--and I didn't want to wrassle the toilet repairman while I was reconnoitering my way through a host of confusing and conflicting client comments.

When the call ended I was what our British friends call, "knackered." I sat, finally, in my favorite chair, drew myself a tall-cold glass of seltzer water and ordered some Chinese food. I hoped to not be disturbed for the rest of the evening.

That was not to be. 

There were noisy Halloweeners in the hallways. My wife and children called, and I remembered I had scheduled a client call for Friday and I hadn't read what I needed to read. What's more, my longest-serving client had called that morning. He too had something pressing.

There's something about people of my generation. Or maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's having grown up poor.

We have a hard time stopping.

We have a hard time saying no. 

Even then we know better, we haven't learned to no better.

Even when age peers say, "George, when are you going to cash in some of the chips you've accumulated? When are you going to take a load off your feet?"

This morning, Saturday morning, against my better judgment and against my assorted pains, I went out for my morning walk.

I said to myself, "George, you don't have to do four miles. It's ok if you do two." But I did my full distance--and then tacked on an extra half-mile to get to the last newsstand in Manhattan that still sells the paper Wall Street Journal.

I remembered, as I was limping, my late twenties basketball days, when I would play until I bled against the kids in the local school yard. I'd open the door and immediately say to my wife, "don't be angry." 

An eye was blacked, a nose was Terry-Malloyed, or a knee was bloody.

That comes with the territory if you're playing ball in shark-infested waters. 

And when aren't you?

Mid-day Friday, I had one of the client calls I mentioned above. The client is pro-bono. But she runs a huge organization doing important work, helping hundreds of thousands of kids who need help. What's more, she was nice and smart and thankful. Agencies one-hundred times the size of GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company would give their left arms to have a pro-bono account like this. 

At the end of the call, the client said to me and H, my account director, "Thank you so much for all you're doing. I can't tell you how grateful we are."

I said to the client, "We're lucky. H and I like each other and we like working together. I like you and I believe in what you're doing and your cause. I'm glad I get to do all this."

If you want to, you can find plenty of reasons to phone it in. Or to half ass an entire day, or an assignment, or anything you choose. During the World Series, a Yankee pitcher who's signed a $300 million contract didn't run over and cover first on a simple play. Even if you make $300 million, no one pillories you for shit like that anymore.

Except I do.

Lassitude can cost you the World Series title. Like it cost the Yankees this year.

Lassitude can cost you more than a World Series title.

It can cost you your self respect, your pride, your soul.

Those are prices I'm not willing to pay.

Ad(d)s.

If you follow me on Linked In, as I'd imagine many people who read my blog do, you've probably seen the ads I run for the agency I've founded, GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company.

I started running these ads for GeorgeCo., before there was a GeorgeCo. I realized some time back in 2018 or thereabouts that I had about 2,000 connections on Facebook, 5,000 on Twitter and 10,000 on Linked In. (I've since canceled my Facebook and Twitter accounts.) 

Looking at those numbers I had an epiphany of sorts. I didn't have "connections," I had somehow built a media channel. Today, I have about 30,000 Linked In connections. That gives me the "circulation" of a small magazine. I know enough about journalism to know that it's not unusual for a small circulation "organ" to have undue influence in a community, profession or even in a country. I.F. Stone's liberal newsletter comes to mind.

To be all Yogi-Berra-esque about it, "nobody read it, but everybody read it."

Since I had that small epiphany about my "reach," I've probably run about 1,000 ads for my agency. I've even collected a book of 81 of them called "George on Advertising," which I send to prospective clients. My ads won some sort of expensive trophy and award in Communication Arts' Advertising Annual 63.

-- 

--

And some have gotten literally hundreds of thousands of views. More important, views from the right people. Like CEOs and founders of potential clients.

Once in a while, I run something and I get a text like this from an agency luminary.

But more often than not, these thrice or four-times weekly, or two-times weekly ads, just do their thing. They're like an old diesel engine. They just keep going.

In fact, these ads--not the content but the form--were written to answer a brief I gave myself: Without phoning, texting or emailing the legions of gatekeepers who exist to keep job- applicants/supplicants from annoying actual creative people, how can I keep GeorgeCo., top of mind? 

How can I keep GeorgeCo., top of mind in a world where there are more gatekeepers than gates?

How can I keep GeorgeCo., top of mind among people who are getting thousands of calls a day from people looking for essentially the same work I'm looking for?

How can I keep GeorgeCo., top of mind when giant brands like Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Nike and others spend billions of dollars and they can't stay top of mind.

That's a brief.

A tough one.

My ads seemed to answer those bells. Or in Faulkner's words, "those last ding-dongs of doom."

But this is a post not about my ads, believe it or not. 

It's a post about causality.

Too many people in the advertising industry--or who use advertising (which is just about everyone) think advertising should have what I call a "Tuesday-Wednesday Causality." ie, you do something on a Tuesday and you see results on a Wednesday.

Very little in life has hand-in-flame happenstance. Most things take gestation. And most things involve an annoying amount of chance and/or luck and mostly, unpredictability.

When I played baseball, I coined the phrase "a wasted double." I used it when someone hit a two-bagger early in an inning and we couldn't bring him in for a run.

Much of life is a wasted double.

Or might be.

Because you can't attribute anything to them directly. 

But from the distance of 50 years--the approximate time since I stopped playing ball--there is, in a sense, no absolute wasted double. You might not have scored from that double but maybe you rattled their pitcher. Maybe you put doubt in their noggins. Maybe you gave your own teammates (or your own self) a soupçon on confidence.

You can't really argue with Sir Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion. Every action does lead to an equal and opposite reaction.

You just don't know when, where or how. What's more, the more someone says they do know, the more full-of-bushwa you should know they are.

So that's why GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company runs so many ads.

They get me known. 

They get me business.

They make people laugh. 

Or think.

They get reposted.

And they make my phone ring.

I just never know when.

(Usually when I'm busiest. Like now.)

Scat. Cat.

I started thinking about scat singing a couple of days ago. 

Not scatological, of or pertaining to shit.

But the jazz inflection that used the human voice as an instrument substituting made up nonsense sounds for musical effect.

Like in the clip above, with Ella and Mel Tormé playfully dueling.

I suppose scat has been around as long as language itself has been around.

Not all that long ago in The New York Times there was a great piece on archaeologists using AI to fill in some of the missing pieces in Gilgamesh--one of the world's oldest known books.

When Gilgamesh was first told 5000 years ago around a campfire under a sky with a trillion stars in Mesopotamia, the people who retold the tale didn't have PowerPoint slides to read from. Gilgamesh, like the Hebrew Torah (not the Christian sequel) like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, sprang from an oral tradition.

That's not as dirty as it sounds.

It just means stories were told aloud, sung even, and memorized through their rhymes and melodies and repetitions, like rosy-fingered dawn and wine-dark seas. My guess is even the best reciters of such tales on occasion got lost in their sauce. They forgot their way. They meandered (which, btw, is a river, the Menderes, in Turkiye.) So they did the Sumerian, or Aramaic or archaic Greek equivalent of scatting.

When Ralph Kramden was caught with his size 44 pants down and humina'd, that too was scatting.

Today, about fifty times a day I see something, usually from a 
SME or a thought-leader or a KOL (key opinion leader) or an agency website, press-release or executive. 

I respect the written word. And I generally try to read what lands in front of me. But, like I said, about fifty times a day, I see pure nonsense. Either platitudes, un-founded pontification, or something so ungodly and obtuse and confusing that I get pissed off. The worst are the instances of people trying to sound smart when they don't actually know what they're saying, what it means or why they're banging their particular drum. Then of course there are the flat-out lies. 

Most of the commercials we see, 49-seconds of awful side effects, I'm Dick Weed, and I approved this messages, just $49.99 for the triple-play bundle, the so-and-so winter leasestravaganza are all scatting.

All this is scatting.

Scat. And scatter. Lest you splatter.

Out of Time.

My favorite author, though that's a ridiculous assemblage of words since I have ten-thousand favorite authors, is a person who wrote for the New Yorker for most of his life, Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell left equal part legend, myth and millions of words behind. Some time after he died, someone at the New Yorker published part of part three of Mitchell's unfinished memoir.

I've carried a digital copy of Mitchell's piece around with me since it was first published almost a decade ago. I read it about three times a year, pretty much every time I get fairly depressed. The piece does a good job making me feel worse. That worsening eventually lightens my load. It reminds me that I'm not, after all, all alone, and slowly at the speed of a stalagmite, my diminuendo of a mood begins to soften.

One of the oddities attached to my love of the piece by Mitchell excerpted above is my seeming inability to remember its title. 

I am blessed and/or cursed with what we used to call a photographic memory. Today--in the spirit of trying to make everything inaccurate, technocratic and obtuse--we call photographic memories eidetic memories. I don't know why. I don't know what was improved via that linguistic shift.

Despite my memory, I persist in calling Mitchell's piece not "A Place of Pasts," but "A Man Out of Time." 

I suppose the highest praise we can have for someone else's writing is when we change it somehow and make it our own. I've taken Mitchell's piece and made it my story. Because I am a man out of time.

As Mitchell travels down the byways of his past, I spend a lot of time traveling down the winding routes of my memories. Of course, I still live in this horrific trumpian era where reality is topsy turvy and foul is fair and fair is foul. 

I still live today, and work today, and make a living today, and talk to my family and people today, but today feels so often so void.

The other day, these words from Cole Porter hit me from my ear buds. They struck me as Macbethian as the Macbeth above, which I always trot out to mark the chaos of a disordered universe.

"The world has gone mad today

And good's bad today

And black's white today

And day's night today..."

Of late, one way I mark my Man Out of Time-ness is by going to abebooks.com and ordering books I read when I was a boy. 

Many of these books I stole from my absent father, who like me found comfort in surrounding himself with inanimate objects, mostly books that were old when he was a boy, that he probably stole from West Philadelphia High or snuck out of some lending library somewhere.

One such book arrived just now. It's called "The World Since 1914" and it cost me just $7, with $4 in shipping to get it to my small house in Connecticut from a tired old bookstore in Cincinnati, Ohio. You can tell I want something badly when I pay almost as much for shipping as I do for the book itself.

Of course, the book was obsolete when I first read it during the peak of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. I'm not even sure if the Since 1914 part included the entirety of World War II. I believe the world in this context stopped with Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, which I fear in the coming years many of us might regard as "quaint good old days."

But what makes me feel like a man out of time were the maps and illustrations in the book. They folded out. They were large. They were colorful. They were lightyears better than any map I can find online today. (Today, online maps rarely have scales. So you don't know the size of things or the distances between them.)

My sense of being a Man Out of Time comes from a simple modern predilection. Modern people throw things out without ever assessing whether or not what's replacing the thrown out object is actually better than what was tossed, or if it's just newer.

For instance, in order to have a "computer in our pocket," we've thrown out looking things up. We've thrown out noticing our surroundings. We've thrown out carrying around a paperback, or even the lovely little act of writing down a pretty girl's phone number on a torn piece of scrap paper. We've thrown out boredom for playing Tetris. And humming to ourselves for every song ever recorded.

More to the point, we've thrown out color maps. We've thrown out history. We've thrown out time and perspective, for the cacophony of always on chin-wagging.

We've thrown out old people with memory for young people to whom Justin Bieber was an era and fascism a set of cool flags and uniforms.

Every day I fight for the saliency of not giving up the out-of-time-ness of the advertising principles I believe in. That people won't buy something if they don't know what it is or what it does or why it exists or what makes it different. Every day, I go to the mat asserting that facts and information, neatly, cleverly and succinctly expressed matter more to brands than Dua Lipa or a spandex shrouded victim of botox. Every day I'm on repeat saying "a brand is a promise." Every day, I try to sell my 4 Ds and 3 Ms.

Etiam si omnes, ego non.

A Man Out of Time.

Even if all others, not I.

Friends.

I lost my best friend almost three years ago.

Just after Thanksgiving in 2021.

Fred was on the cusp of turning 64. As was I.

Since then, I'm not sure if I've had a heart-to-heart with anyone. A real heart-to-heart.

I'm not sure I'll ever have a heart-to-heart ever again. There's no one left who I let in. Who knew me when I was being formed. There's no one left.

Fred and I had been friends since we met in the hallowed halls of an elite private school in leafy Westchester county. Though our upbringings weren't, perhaps, as fecund as the suburban trees all around us.

There wasn't one thing in particular that made us close. It's oblique to say it was our "world view." But it was. And let me explain.

Fred and I both liked old movies. 

Gangster movies like "White Heat," "Public Enemy," and "Angels with Dirty Faces." We also liked sports movies like "Pride of the Yankees" and "I Am Third." 

But most of all, we liked Jimmy Stewart movies. Particularly, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," and "It's a Wonderful Life."

One day, when we were approaching 60, I realized why we liked those movies. 

Fred and I rooted for underdogs. 

For the little guy, fighting titanic forces. We rooted for Tom Joad, not the bosses. "Wherever there's a cop, beatin' on a kid; I'll be there."

I remember saying to Fred as I had this realization, "Fred, I think no one roots for the underdog anymore. It's ok to slug people. It's ok to buy the best team. It's ok to squash people if they don't agree with you."

We talked about bullies and bully-ism, which we both despised. 

Maybe the apotheosis of non-bullyhood we learned from Frank Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," particularly the words I've quoted above. Particularly particularly "a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a little looking out for the other fella, too."

Capra knew about being beaten. You couldn't create this from a dilettante's point of view.

That notion seems as cornball today as expecting the rich to pay their fair share. Or any similarly hoary idea, like "one-person, one vote."

I think about this today because one of the trade magazines is once again (devoid of real ideas) publishing yet another 40 under 40 list.

This in an industry which if there were any over-sight and regulation would be sued for massive age discrimination while they bang their own self-inflated drums and bellow about how diverse they are. 

Or if anyone was watched, an industry that would be scorned for banging on about Agency of the Year or Network of the Year awards while they have shed over the last decade or so about two out of every three employees.

Ogilvy had 2000 people when I rejoined in 2014. They probably have 300 today. You do the ciphering.

It's sick.

And I'm sick of it all. 

And I'm sick of the sycophants who gallop along and applaud the bullyizing, the lies, the unctuosity and the hyprocricy. I'm sick of being owed by giant clients who Net120 you--and then proclaim how they support small businesses.

Oh, and the complete absence of "plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a little looking out for the other fella, too."

Listening.

Steamfitter, by Lewis Hine.

For about twenty years, I was an avid long-distance runner. 

Having had a father who had his first heart-attack at just 39, and a second at 44, I started running so I wouldn't follow in his stolid infarcted footsteps. 

Soon, I started speeding up my footsteps. And wearing cheap canvas Converse sneakers, I'd course a mile in needle-strewn Riverside Park, then two miles and longer. 

Slowly I began to enjoy running. I liked the alone time, the concentration and the mind-wanderingness. I liked that I lost weight. And I liked, that I could set goals for myself, train appropriately and meet those goals.

Before too many months of running, I started running marathons. There are longer races, of course, but 26.2 miles, 42 kilometers is maniac enough for me, and I never raced any further.

Thinking about running and my life today, which is as an old man who makes his living at a keyboard, what I most learned from running was a way to listen to my aches and pains.

What I most learned was Nick Adams'-esque. That there would be good days and bad days and in-between days. But that you would always be in the day you were in, until that day was yesterday, and then tomorrow, it would be that day again.

I learned from running that on the good days you temper your enthusiasms by reminding yourself that tomorrow might feel like a steep incline. And that on bad days, well, they're inevitably  counter-balanced by a good day.

When you run marathons, that good/bad battle can take place amid all sorts of increments. You can have good/bad days. Good/bad races. Good/bad miles. Even, and no, I'm not exaggerating, good/bad yards. Every section of every moment or distance can be parsed and analyzed. Your wind can feel deep and strong while your right hip hurts, as mine aches all-day and all-night now.

What happens when you train for something is you acquire--beyond all else--listening skills. You hear what's going on with your self. You have an understanding, an awareness and a depth of knowledge as to how to handle a million-and-fourteen different situations. Mostly because you have handled them before.

Last week, I was well-paid to rewrite a couple thousand words of website copy for a startup with all the foundational solidity of an amoeba. To make matters worse, those thousand words were all in a google document and I like working in google docs as much as I like losing a filling in a molar.

H, the woman who manages GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, was blithe and oblivious about all this. Like a spectator at a six-day bike race, like the kind they used to have around European velodromes in the 1920s, H observes the action, not the pain. She sees me going around and around without hearing the crunch of bone on bone or the snap of a tired sinew.

That, in a nutshell, is why the best choreographers used to be dancers themselves. Or the best race car drivers know how to fix their machines. They have an understanding of the mechanics of the movements they're demanding. That's why most project-managers and administrators suck. They want things fast but they never actually have to find those things themselves, or physically chisel letter-forms in marble. 

They want the dance move without knowing the strain. Or the tremolo without knowing the tremors.

But that's where if you've trained a lot, your listening comes in. I had those thousands of words to clarify, euphony-ise and otherwise improve. I dreaded doing all that, but I knew that each word I faced was just another footfall in a race that's 20,000 or 10,000 or 30,000 footfalls long.

That's what most people--certainly most agencies, where the average age of creatives is just 31--don't understand. 

Let's finish these footfalls with Nick and Ernest.

“He had already learned there was only one day at a time and
 that is was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow would be today again. This was the main thing he had learned so far.”

That's not an easy lesson.

Nick Adams learned it in the north woods as a teenager. 

I learned it in a beige cubicle in front of a Selectric.

It's listening and observing the needs. Listening and observing the pains. Listening and observing the self. And knowing how to handle the yesterday, the today, and just maybe, the tomorrow.