Columns.

I only ever took one writing class in my life, and that one was only sixty minutes long, and I was fifteen at the time. Nevertheless, my teacher, Mr. Bockius, a mad-man with patched elbows taught me something I think about with some regularity. It especially pertains to when you feel stuck. Or when you need to hone in on something.

Mr. Bockius taught me to fold a piece of looseleaf paper in half the long-way, leaving you with two roughly ten-inch columns. On the top of the left-hand column, write "I LOVE." On top of the right-hand column, write "I HATE."

Then, with your topic in full frontal-lobe fury, let your pen go to work.

You'll find yourself moving pretty quickly down the columns. You'll find yourself thinking faster than you can write. You'll find yourself actually thinking. Thinking about whatever it is you love or hate and why, and best, how sometimes those two antipodes actually over-lap.

If you do this exercise--even if you just do it in your head--about the things you like to read, watch or listen to, it's a pretty easy exercise.

Here's one I just did in medias res, so to speak, while writing this post.

There's nothing profound about my list, or even especially individual. I think for the most part most people would agree with most of what I scribbled.

But here's the thing that gets me.

Think about the things you voluntarily watch on TV, or youtube, or the things you read, or listen to, podcasts, music, the original cast album of Cats.

Then think about the things you're forced to watch. TV commercials. HR compliance videos. 'Explainers.' Gas-Station TV commercials. In-flight spots featuring bonus miles.

It seems to me the modern world treats people in a 'mis-treating' way. If you consider how creative assignments start and then what gets on the air, most of them start with some adherence to my 'LOVE' column, and wind up resembling almost-wholly my 'HATE' column.

In fact, I'd argue that the "process" we're supposed to trust involves the expeditious turning of the things we love into almost everything we hate.

I think it goes something like this. With the YES, BUT column essentially the process column.

My experience, which is not inconsiderable, tells me that the more people involved in a process, the more process becomes the very point of the process. 

What do I love is processed into O O O Ozempic.

Or someone sitting on a logo and smarming.

Or kids having a veritable conniption because they're out of Tontonno's pizza rolls. 

Or 'soccer moms' saying 'my Buick got me here.'

Counting places I've done time as a freelancer, I've likely worked at about 50 agencies. They all essentially have these three columns. And each column has a slider beneath it.

Good agencies are 80:10:10

Bad agencies are 10:50:40

This post. 10:90.