The Great Resignation. ( A Tough One for a Friday.)

The Great Resignation--as journalists, social scientists and economists are calling it--is here. People are leaving their jobs en masse. 

It occurs to me however, that one person's Great Resignation might be another person's Great Awakening.

People aren't leaving the workforce because they don't need to work. They're leaving because they've begun to wake up to the lack of equity--the unfairness--built into the system.

They're Awakening to:

--workers are expected to be loyal but they can expect no loyalty in return.

--workers are expected to work perhaps thousands of hours a year without pay.

--workers are expected to work more than the occasional weekend without additional pay.

--workers are expected to be ok with ending the year with fewer real dollars in their paychecks (after taxes and inflation) than they began the year.

--workers are expected to accept that they have less year after year, rather than more.

--workers are told they must accept factory-like working conditions, chaos and noise because open-plan offices maximize creativity when all they really do is strip away dignity and save the company rent.

--workers no longer regularly receive either raises or cost-of-living increases. They're often lied to about this.

--people with no knowledge of a particular industry--no skin in the game other than money--are running the industry.

--workers are meant to accept compensation inequities where the top of the food-chain makes 200 to 300 times the pay of a median worker.

--workers are tired of working for an industry that disparages the very work the industry is supposed to do. It commoditizes the "unfair advantage," (creativity) and promotes instead that which is a truly a commodity (data.)

--workers never actually see a paycheck or even a pay stub. Everything happens electronically and there is never a handshake or a thank you.

--workers essentially have no interaction with the people and the macro-forces that control their career path and livelihood.

Basically, there are two ways to run any sort of social organization. From a marriage, to a corporation, to a nation-state.

1. WITT. We're in this Together. When people--even those who are nominally unequal--share the risks and the fortunes in equitable proportions.

 

2. YOYO. You're on Your Own. Where powerful forces make the rules, take the money and blame you for your torpor and vassalhood.

I've been working fairly steadily since I was a child-star back in the early 1960s. I started paying into Social Security way back in 1961 when I was already earning a middle-class income because I had platinum blond hair and disarmingly winsome blue eyes and starred in some minor TV commercials.

I've had in that time maybe 50 jobs. From installing aluminum siding, to working as a night-clerk in a downtown Chicago liquor store, to assistant dean of students at Barnard College to about a dozen and a half agencies.

I've observed that most people enjoy work. They enjoy the fruits of their labor. And the sense that they are taking care of their own and building something, somehow.

What's changed isn't the work ethic of workers. I think societally, we might be having a Popeye moment. "That's all I can stands. I can'ts stands no more."

Maybe people are realizing what you realize when you wake up to the realization that you're in a diseased relationship.

You're putting a lot more into it than your getting out of it.

People are resigning because they're not resigned to accept that inequity.

--

BTW, if you want a macro-economic look at what's happening today, you might want to check out The Great Leveler by Princeton professor, Walter Scheidel. There's a lot of pretty heavy economics in it, complete with GINI coefficients that put a mere copywriter's brain into a spin cycle.

Nevertheless, if you can stick with it, you might understand something of my generation. I grew up at a time of economic compression--when the distance between the richest and the poorest was narrowing. When there was more fairness in the world.

It would be safe to say, entire generations (myself included) believed society was generally moving in the direction of more equality. Scheidel believes--and I go along with him--that what my generation regarded as normal was really an anomaly. Wealth begets wealth and poverty begets poverty. That's what's happening in the West today and the Great Resignation is just one result.

FWIW, here's the review of the book, since I can't imagine anyone but my brother and nephew, Ben, slogging through it. Mind you, it's a review from the cheery neo-fascists at the Wall Street Journal. So take it with a spoonful of gruel. Mean-spirited gruel.

The Surest Cure for Inequality

The peak of inequality in world history was 1914. What solved it? Total war —and decades of strife. Gregory Clark reviews “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century” by Walter Scheidel.

A British tank in World War I.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

By Gregory Clark

Updated Jan. 20, 2017 4:37 pm ET

In academic economics as in electoral politics, inequality has become a topic of pre-eminent importance. Yet economics has no accepted theory of inequality—no scientific understanding of the mechanisms and processes that create it. Until recently, wealth distribution was regarded by many economists as a minor issue compared with growth. Too much focus on distribution was even considered a threat to growth. The economists who have offered theories of inequality tend to be those on the heterodox fringes: David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Henry George and, more recently, Thomas Piketty. Broadly convincing explanations remain elusive.

Into this vacuum steps an outsider, Walter Scheidel, a historian of ancient Rome and an ingénue in the brash world of economic analysis. “The Great Leveler” is an astonishing tour de force, a dense 500-page survey of the known history of inequality in all societies, from hunter-gatherers to hedge-fund profiteers. The author believes that settled, stable societies have an inevitable tendency toward greater inequality. The only substantive countervailing forces are all bad news: mass-mobilization wars, social revolution, plague and state collapse. The cure is worse than the disease. Thus in Mr. Scheidel’s telling Lenin, Hitler and Gavrilo Princip did more than the embrace of social democracy to make the 20th century an era of equality.

THE GREAT LEVELER: VIOLENCE & THE HISTORY OF INEQUALITY

By Walter Scheidel

Princeton, 504 pages, $35

The re-establishment of stronger states in Europe in the later Middle Ages was associated, Mr. Scheidel argues, with rising inequality—though here the evidence is thin. Before the onset of the Black Death in 1348, political stability created conditions that helped markets and towns flourish, generating a highly unequal society. As the population expanded, many independent peasant cultivators in England and France lost their land and were reduced to day labor. In France, for example, the typical plot size of peasants fell from 25 acres to less than 7 acres between the ninth century and the early 14th century. At the top, great lords magnified their possessions.Across the globe and across centuries, the author documents inequality increasing during conditions of peace and security in society after society, starting with Ancient Rome. As the empire expanded, Mr. Scheidel explains, the citizen-soldier state was replaced by the imperium, and the senatorial class magnified its wealth across the far-flung territories of the Pax Romana. Even at the level of provincial society, we can see evidence of increasing wealth concentration: Archaeological evidence from Pompeii shows how, in the period of about 160 years before the town’s destruction after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, house sizes became steadily more unequal, as upper-class houses expanded their footprint and middle-class housing disappeared. The scholar Robert Stephan has looked at the variation of square footage in dwelling footprints elsewhere in the empire as a systematic measure of inequality. The dispersion in dwelling sizes in England was larger under Roman rule in England than in the preceding Iron Age or the later early Middle Ages. Centralized states become increasingly unequal states.

Then came the bad news (or good news from the point of view of equality): the catastrophic population losses of the Bubonic Plague era. All across Europe, these losses acted as a great equalizer. England’s population, for example, went from around six million people in 1315 to 2.2 million by 1450. The resulting shortage of workers in the deserted countryside meant that the real wages of unskilled laborers in England soared to levels not seen again until the 20th century. As land rents declined and cities contracted, the incomes and wealth of property owners shrank relative to those of workers. This equalizing trend, Mr. Scheidel notes, was particularly evident in the wealth-distribution records of northern Italian cities.

As the plague lost its grip and population again grew across Europe after 1500, however, the march of inequality resumed. England, the Netherlands and Italy all saw rising inequality in a process that industrialization did nothing to counter. In Dutch cities, one technical measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient on wealth, where higher is more unequal, rose from 0.5 in 1500 to 0.65 by 1750. (For comparison, the current number for the U.S. is 0.40.) In northern Italian cities, the rise was even more dramatic, from 0.65 in 1500 to 0.85 in 1750.

Even in the New World, the land of opportunity, the trend was toward inequality. In the territories of what became the United States, inequality grew steadily during the entire period from 1650 to 1914. In Central and Southern America there were similar disparities. The only counters were the social revolutions, which saw colonies break away from their motherlands.

The tale Mr. Scheidel tells is of a 2,000-year process of disequalization that was halted, in his account, only by the violence, misery and disruption unleashed upon the world in the 20th century—by two world wars and the great Communist revolutions in Russia and China. For him, 1914 appears to have been the peak of all inequality in world history, with the top 1% wealth share in the U.S. and Europe averaging 50% of all wealth, compared with only 35% in 1800.

Afterward, as the author shows, there were notable shifts in the economies of many of the participants in World War I and World War II toward greater income and wealth equality. In the U.S., France, Canada and Japan, for example, the income share of the top 1% fell from an average of 17% in 1939 to 9% by 1945. There was also a compression of wage differentials at the bottom. From top to bottom inequality was seemingly vanquished.

As the great wars become distant memories, however, and as revolutionary ardor matures into materialism and self-seeking, the march of inequality has resumed. And the future of mankind, in Mr. Scheidel’s account, is one of ever increasing inequality—or of violence and turmoil none would wish for.

What about more benign attempts to rein in inequality through policy? Can’t we attribute at least some leveling in the 20th century to the extension of the franchise from elite oligarchs to the common citizen? After presenting his historical account, Mr. Scheidel attempts to investigate these and other questions. With the extension of the franchise, there was a huge rise in the appetite of governments for taxation and spending. Yet various studies, he reports, find no association between the extent of the franchise and inequality. Across 184 countries from 1960 to 2010, for example, there was no significant observed effect of democracy itself compressing income distributions. More specific meliorist institutional measures, such as land reform, Mr. Scheidel argues, tended also to have little effect unless carried out in the context of violent, wholescale revolution. Absent war between China and the U.S., or the European Union breaking into warring kingdoms, there seems to be no prospect of ending the march toward disequalization.

Is this a convincing theory of inequality? No. The factors Mr. Scheidel points to are descriptive regularities, not mechanisms—processes that are observed but not understood. Any projection into the future is uncertain. He presents no Piketty-like rule of wealth acceleration, no law that wealth will accumulate faster than output whenever the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output. There is no social mechanism underlying the apparent centripetal forces of inequality. It all just kinda happens.

In truth, the historical record is a lot thinner and more speculative than Mr. Scheidel acknowledges. And in terms of the 2,000-year record of increasing inequality before the 20th century, there are factors at play that he does not consider. One is the role of interest rates in determining wealth inequality. Income from assets gets capitalized into wealth through the interest rate. The lower interest rates are, the greater the wealth associated with a given stream of property income will be. An important long-run trend in the world over all of recorded history has been toward ever lower interest rates. Risk-free real returns in medieval Europe, such as on farmland, were 10% (farmland was a very safe investment, its value changing little decade from decade). In ancient Babylonia interest rates were at least double that level, according to most scholarly estimates. Returns on much riskier assets, such as U.S. equities, are now only 4%, and real returns on safe assets like government debt are 1%. A long trend toward increasing values for assets such as land, houses and equity makes it harder for people without wealth to accumulate significant wealth through savings from wage earnings or even from property income. This reinforces existing wealth inequalities. And we have no idea what future returns on capital will be.

Total war is certainly linked with declining inequality, but again Mr. Scheidel offers little insight as to why. There were so many individual elements to declining inequality in each country in the war periods: destruction of physical capital, hyperinflation, progressive war taxes, rent controls, unionization. But the total effects were fairly uniform. Is that because the wars accelerated processes already under way? The period of mass conflict, from 1910 to 1955, also coincided with dramatic social movements driven by ideology. Thus Sweden, which was neutral in World War II, saw as great a decline in the income share of the top 1% as the U.S., a major combatant. And even now the countries of greatest equality are those with the highest tax rates, the greatest social spending and the largest degree of unionization: Denmark, Norway, Sweden.

“The Great Leveler” is an important book, but it is not one for the general reader. Despite his background in history, Mr. Scheidel is as much a quant as the most ardent economist. This is history narrated through the medium of Gini indexes, top 1% income shares and regression coefficients. When the elaborate social structure of Florence in 1450 is reduced to a Gini measure of 0.5, general readers may struggle to feel engaged. To be fair, income and wealth inequality are a much more difficult topic to write about for a general audience than warfare, politics, crime, gender or demography. It does not come with simple narratives: personalities, plots and poison. Inequality is a highly abstract subject and one difficult to translate into narrative history.

Further, Mr. Scheidel tends to focus on inequality at the top. The conventional abstract metrics he uses—Gini coefficients, the top wealth shares—give a lot of weight to the superrich. But most people’s perception of inequality is much more driven by what is happening to the income and wealth distribution among the bottom 90%. We much more care about how the middle class is doing relative to the working class, and here history shows a very different trend. The wage premium of skilled workers like carpenters has tended to steadily fall across the centuries, being much greater in medieval Europe than it is now.

So, still wanted: a theory of inequality. And please make it one that can be relayed in 200 pages, with plenty of stories and images.

—Mr. Clark, a professor of economics at UC Davis, it the author of “The Son Also Rises.”

Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the January 21, 2017, print edition as '.'

Three ways of writing.

On a bright, sunny autumn day, I took a long walk along the water. My thoughts naturally turned to rain.

That's not a result of my saturnine mien. It's because I was asked by a client to rewrite something an agency had sent them and I was having a hard time explaining to them why it sucked.

(It was easy to say that something sucks. I wanted to tell them why. I wanted to be sure I wasn't just being a dickhead. Or a victim of Not Invented Here.)

I thought about something I had taught in an advertising class about three decades ago. I had heard a line in a blues song and I was trying to use it as an example of good writing.

To describe sadness and pain, the song said, "It's raining soup and all I have is a fork."

That's good, I said to my class. It's funny. And it makes you feel the forlorn-ness--and the sense the singer's straits all at the same time. I thought of that as I was thinking of trying to tell a client what was wrong with some writing they sent my way.

Imagine it's raining very hard.

Most ads would say, "It's raining cats and dogs." 

That's a tired, meaningless cliche. A lazy description. That's bad, ineffective writing. Reading it, you'd think less of the writer and the company paying the writer. And because the information is so blandly communicated, it might not even get through to you. It's like an in-flight announcement. Or the crackle on the 4 train when they tell you not to lean on the doors.

Better writing might say, "The rain was heavy. In fact, in just two-hours over seven-inches fell. That's seven times the rainfall Cairo, Egypt gets during an average year." That's ok. I get the sense of a lot of rain. But I don't feel anything. It doesn't get me in my kishkas.

You could write like this, and make an impact. Though you might get called into HR or people might hate it because it's so different: "It rained hard. So hard that it was said twelve sorority sisters from Kappa Kappa Gamma--each with a pert up-turned nose--came close to drowning in the downpour."

Our job is to write. 

We trade in and words and pictures that come together to form motivating thoughts to get people to think, feel or act as we want them to.

Rain. Soak with me for a moment.

Raymond Chandler once wrote about ran like this. “It got dark and the rain-clouded lights of the stores were soaked up by the black street.”

Or this: "Rain beat very hard against the windows. They were shut tight and it was hot in the room and I had a little fan going on the table. The breeze from it hit Dravec’s face high up, lifted his heavy black hair, moved the longer bristles in the fat path of eyebrow that went across his face in a solid line. He looked like a bouncer who had come into money."

I feel that writing. I smell the nicotine and feel the sweat.

Writing today too often makes me think of something another writer of detective tales, Dashiell Hammett, once wrote. I admire Hammett. If you want to read something, read "G in the Air." Chapter Seven of "The Maltese Falcon." That will tell you what you need to know.

In "The Continental Op," Hammett wrote:

"ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND
BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE

"I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more, when one of my confederates, the Greek, cleared his thoat with the noise a gasoline engine's backfire."

How many lies could be found in those nine words...

The reason I harp on such things, the reason I look for evocative, truthful writing, is because I believe three things. 1) It works. People remember it. 2) People shut down when they hear things they've heard before. 3) People are on the look-out for lies, weasel words and testosteroned-legalisms. 

Even in the most benighted of focus-groups, people can usually point out bullshit.

Today, it seems everywhere we turn we get something manifesto-like and asinine. 99% of it is meaningless--inscrutable. And 99% of it also has the added disadvantage of sounding like a (bad) ad.

Shit like this.

It's tired.

It's pretentious.

It's perfectly expected.

Everything we do should be to stand out, not blend in. That's why the crayon box you had when you were a kid had 64 colors. It's why Macs have millions of colors. Use them to do something different.

Our job is to be different.

To coin a phrase, "We" are meant to "try harder." 

Nearly everything today looks and feels like an ad. We're forced into cliches because of the know-nothings and strictures that guide us. We end up with crap.

This is how we vomit.

Danger. Solipsism ahead.

I forget who said it, if it were an ad person or a contemporary artist, but it was something to the effect that if you've seen it before, if you like it right away, the ad or painting or movie or joke isn't very good.

The other day I was walking in my new neighborhood by the sea and an old bearded man was banging boards together in a garage. Parked alongside his banging was a cranberry red 1967 Volvo sedan.

I started talking to him about his car. "Drive it like you hate it," I said. He looked at me like I had four heads. "I don't get it," he answered. "Why should I drive it like I hate it."

60 years or more after that great ad ran, its expression and defiance are still new. They still make people uncomfortable. They still startle people.

Often in my new role as perennial outsider brought in by companies after their usual suspects flounder, I'm asked to look at work other agencies have already presented. It's a tough assignment because you don't usually know who likes it, who's not sure, and who's sleeping with whom. You really don't want to trash something only to find out you're trashing someone's brother-in-law.

In my eyes, however, I'll say this.

So much advertising looks like so much advertising.

If you're doing food, you have to have the spoon and grin. If you're shooting a beer commercial, a high-five and a pretty woman is fairly requisite. If you're doing insurance, some unfunny guy in khaki. And if you're doing technology, you must have business people talking about agility, robustness and transformation as if those words had actual meaning.

Just about every category has their must-haves. Some times the agencies brings them. Some times they're demanded by the client or by research or the CEO's husband, boyfriend, ex-husband or ex-boyfriend.

The truth to my eyes is simple. Most work doesn't get noticed or talked about because it looks like everything else.

I remember working for a client who wanted to do hundreds of customer videos about how their company is helping their customers. Hundreds of videos for very little money.

I asked them, why would anyone watch. What would make them interesting. 

Around that time, Steven Spielberg had released thousands of videos of people who had survived Nazi death camps. These are arguably among the most shocking films of all time. Full of emotion, peril, evil and ultimately the triumph of the human spirit. However, and I feel guilty saying this, after five or ten, they all began blending together. We look for something different.

On Monday, the great art director and archivist Dave Dye reposted a portrait on Stuff from the Loft on art director John Knight. I hadn't known of Knight. However, through the years, I had clipped a dozen or so of his ads out of awards annuals.  See Dave Dye's column here.

First, these ads for Volvo. They're like nothing else I've ever seen. 

They make me feel like Volvo is a different kind of car company. They make me like Volvo.

John Knight also did these ads--20-foot-long posters of the interior of bars from a bygone--or never-was era. It's set-design as perfect as something out of Citizen Kane. Again, these posters don't feel like ads. But they convey a sensibility and a sense of place I want to be in. I like buxom women in bikinis as much as the next guy but I don't need them to sell me beer.

I guess the main point here is simple. An ad doesn't have to look like an ad--maybe it shouldn't look like an ad, if you want it to stand out.

But agencies and clients, under the shibboleth of authenticity, find real people, real directors, real voices in an effort to make things that are just as fake as everybody else's work.

My guess is your favorite ads and my favorite ads don't look like everyone else's ads. 

But one it comes to making ads we say things like, "What if it had an Apple feel," or a Starburst feel, or was like Errol's Miller work.

I think that's called solipsism, my friends.

And it's pretty dangerous.

Curses and new business.

When people ask me, and they do, how I manage to write something in Ad Aged five-days-a-week for roughly fifteen years, I usually invoke the availability heuristic, though I seldom use that term because people a) wouldn't understand it and b) wouldn't bother to look it up. 

Basically, the heuristic is simple. If you go to the Lower East Side looking for bed linens, you'll see bed linens in every storefront. If someone says, "did you see any tablecloths," you might reply, "not a one." Next time you're down on Orchard Street, however, shopping for tablecloths, that's all you'll see. And you won't see a single shop selling bed linens.

Writing a blog is good for your brain--and your writing acumen. You have to always be on the lookout for ideas. You have to walk through your life attuned to your surroundings. You never know when something interesting will strike--so you have to be ready all the time.

Back in the days of library research and card catalogs, when I was an aspiring young scholar at Columbia University, most of the sparks that lit the tinder of my brain came to me when I was looking for something else. Rabbit holes are good to run down and not just for rabbits. Especially if you are ideaphrenogenic--that is open to putting thoughts together that maybe haven't been put together before.

I'm convinced that the most-successful creative people are the people who walk around with their heads up. Or they're like a commercial fishing boat dragging a mile-wide net along the bottom of the sea. They are always in the hunt for something. They're always looking to catch something, even if that something has no immediate use.

My ex-partner, Sid, for instance has a Pinterest archive with more ideas per square pixel than almost anyplace in cyber-Earth. People in the idea business should be hoarders of ideas. They should stuff their coffers up to the rafters with them. Never knowing when they'll come in handy. But they will.

Early Sunday morning, I read an obituary in The Washington Post of an author I liked, Martin J. Sherwin. Sherwin, along with author Kai Bird, won a Pulitzer-prize for their biography of the Father of the Atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer. It was called "American Prometheus," and if you don't "get" the Titan in the title, do yourself a favor and look up who Prometheus was. If nothing else, it'll keep you awake a couple of nights and have you appreciating your in-tact liver.

There was a bit in Sherwin's obituary about Oppenheimer's favorite toast. It makes me think of the advertising industry, and perhaps explains why, today, at the age of 63, I am about 63 times as busy, profitable and productive as the next 63 agencies combined.

Oppenheimer's toast, I suppose in the great German-Jewish-Yiddish tradition of intelligent curses was elegant in its spite. 

"To the confusion of our enemies."

I know more than a few CEOs who might, at this moment be reading this, who I'm sure will not only relate to the mean-ness of the toast, but will also adopt it when it comes to new business, product launches and more.

As I enter my 41st year of making my living at a keyboard, more and more my job is to throw confusion into abeyance. It's to find clarity in a sea of entropy. 

Clients come to me now less for an ad or a :30--those seem like parity products in today's advertising world. The communications equivalent of parsley alongside a $44 steak. You have to put it there but no one really needs it or wants it.

But clearing up confusion, well, that's the ticket.

Going back to Prometheus, we can traipse over to another ancient Greek, Pandora. Of all the woes that escaped from her box, confusion was the woe-i-est.

In fact, if you think of either Shakespeare's Macbeth or the mis-rule of donald frump, a world full of foul is fair and fair is foul and hurly-burly and topsy-turvy and whatever that skinny blond's name was, "alternative facts," they're all just methods of propagating confusion, discord and chaos.

Hey.

If you run a business or an agency and you want your next pitch or next launch to be un-confused, you might be able to get me for three days or five. In that time I'll probably figure out your company's spinal column and make things clear. So clear even a CEO could understand it.

Yes, I charge a fortune.

There's no confusion as to why.

Seeing.

I stumble upon a lot of fragments as I wander and read my way through the world. I think a lot of us are really like birds. We build our nest, our homes with little shards and twigs and pieces of this and that. We're not so different from the fierce ospreys that live on top of the telephone poles planted for them in the swamps high above the sea. We take what we find around us, and do the best we can with what we find.

I don't know where I found this sentence below. But I found it and I quickly wrote it down and saved it in my birds' nest folder. It will come in handy someday, either in a conversation I'm having with myself, or with some young person somewhere.

"I was filling my role rather than filling my potential."

After forty years working in giant agencies, it's not hard to identify with that. You're asked to take one for the team. Because you can handle tough-stuff (that's generally not that much fun) you get the tough stuff that's not that much fun. When I was a kid, I was sentenced to write radio. I was good at it, and most of the other writers ran from it like you might run from a disease. Back when people ran from diseases.

There's a Murphy's Law in there somewhere. But I'm not one-hundred-percent sure of what it is exactly, except that somehow some people cherry-pick their way to success. I've never been that lucky.

Reading, I think The Wall Street Journal's book review section, which is among the best journalism you can lay your hands on, I came upon this book--a public debate of sorts about the best 100 baseball players of all time. You can buy the thing here.
And if you can get through the Journal's Draconian paywall, you can read Leigh Montville's review here.

I quickly sent a copy to my best friend and my brother. We had all played ball together and we all still thought about the game--especially this time of year when the playoffs and the World Serious are about to take place.

Jorge Navidad was not included in the top hundred ballplayers, maybe by the time they get into listing players 49,000,000-49,000,100, my name will appear. But flipping through the e-book, I quickly came upon this short haiku and was arrested by it.

There's a lot in those seventeen syllables. There's a lot to be said for trusting your eyes, your experience, your instinct, your gut. 

Many people in our business don't. They look for rule books and if-then propositions. They trust strangers before they trust themselves. Or they listen to the dark recesses of doubt that we all wear as a frontlet--at least at times.

Good places to work--or even harder, making working for yourself a good place to work--make sure that your role and your potential are both fulfilled.

Right now at GeorgeCo., LLC., a Delaware Company, I am doing more work, for a greater variety of clients, that call on me to fill more roles than I have ever before in my long career. 

Maybe filling a lot of roles is filling my potential.

For one client, I'm helping with names. For another, I'm helping introduce a dessert to the US. For another, I'm wading through 32,000 pages of power-point and trying to discover who they are. For still another, I am learning the ins-and-outs of a chemical process that could lead to a breakthrough that could change an industry and help feed the world.

Along the way, I've been charged with writing a 5,000-word essay about this chemical process--so more people will understand it--and even more important, the right people will invest in it.

There's no telling what life will hand you on any particular day. And if you wonder while you wander--as we all should strive to do--there's no telling what you will discover, save, remember, recall and build your nest with.

The best living advice I ever got I got from a story by the great writer, and my writing hero, Joseph Mitchell. He didn't say this exactly. But I'm an arrogant writer and rewrite even the best if I think I can make things better.

Go through life like an old waiter. 

Don't look down at your feet or the ground. Walk with your head up all the time. Look for customers who need you. Keep your eye peeled for tips. And trust your eyes.

There's no telling what you'll see.

Book 'em.

What follows might get me rebuke. It might be regarded as retrograde or elitist or even nostalgic. 

Down the street from my apartment sits the all-girls private school my daughters went to. It's a storied place where good manners, for the most part, prevail. Where girls are taught to lead, to speak, to be themselves. I fell in love with the place the moment I set foot inside its doors 25 years ago. And I love it today.

I loved that the girls hung out in the library--a library with thousands of books, including old stuff, like the Iliad and the Odyssey. I love that each class put on plays by Shakespeare. And musicals by Gilbert and Sullivan. I love that their education was not based on what's au courant, but on values that will outlive today's modern undulations.

As I walked through the park this morning, the park that the school abuts, a lot of the girls were in the park, having class outside to enjoy a nice autumn day, or sitting among the pigeons and watching the giant barges make weigh on the river below.

I noticed something I wish I saw more of.

I believe the world would be better if we saw more of.

Every single girl was carrying a book. 

Many were reading and walking as they read. Some were saving seats with their books. It seems some of the young ladies carried books that weighed more than they did.

This past week, you'd have to have been under a rock to have not heard about the destruction of society brought on by so-called social media.

I'm not going to go into that here.

What I will go into is this.

We brought it onto ourselves when we allowed ourselves to be seduced by easy.

Easy news. 

Easy entertainment.

Easy information.

Easy opinions.

Easy acceptance of the way things are.

Easy theft of our privacy.

Social media is easy. Following a trend and saying you want to be part of popular culture is easy. Showing gyrating young people as a means to sell a $90,000 car is easy.

None of that requires thinking.

Going with the quo is easier than challenging the status quo.

I say, even if all others, not I.

I, for one, am sick of easy.

I'm sick of the ease of spurious awards outweighing the weight of real accomplishment. I'm sick of glib and pre-packaged solutions to long-term and often intractable problems.

I am very lucky. 

My business has grown to a point where I might be bringing in more revenue than the holding company that fired me. Because I don't offer glib solutions or tired platitudes.

As my doppleganger, Donna Summer sang so many years ago:

She works hard for the money
So hard for it, honey
She works hard for the money
So you better treat her right

She works hard for the money
So hard for it, honey
She works hard for the money
So you better treat her right

That's it for me for this week.

Go pick up a book.

And find a hard solution. Something to work at. 

It'll feel good.

It's hard.

Over the past few weeks there's seems to be a major resurgence of those stupid videos on Twitter and other social media sites where something is either cooked or built in about 90 seconds.

Some of these things that are cooked or built are somewhat complex. Especially if you have no innate facility in either building or cooking, if you don't have the right equipment or power tools, or if you occasionally make a mistake or two.

No, in these videos, the onions are always diced beautifully. Your oak is always measured and sawed to perfection. The phone never rings to take you from your task. And everything is always completed--to perfection--in just about 90 seconds.

This morning--up at 4 because of the queasy-stomached Whiskey--I listened to a long BBC report on the radio about the emergent Metaverse. To hear various charlatans lay out their vision of the future, in five years or so, the virtual economy will be bigger than the real one, everyone will be having the most glorious "experiences" in the virtual world, and we won't want to or be able to tell the difference between a Metaverse interaction and a real-world one.

What I've learned from more than four-decades of reading history is how much predictions about the future allow the person doing the predicting to excuse his terrible behavior. 

For thousands of years now, whole civilizations have been raped and genocided because some zealot had a heavenly picture of the world cleansed of non-believers and imagined the ever-lasting glow of Jesus or Allah or Hitler or Jim Jones prancing through a grassy field in complete bliss.

My behavior, the horrid logic goes, will allow my people their space in the heavens and that makes it all worthwhile. 

Lest you think this kind of attitude is rooted in the past, it prevails today. As a "civilization," we are blithely living through what Elizabeth Kolbert calls the Sixth Extinction, but it's all ok because the Koch brothers are making trillions as are Exxon, Rex Tillerson, Dick Cheney and a handful of other trillionaires. It'll all be ok. Besides--it's ordained--and when the world ends, all true believers will wind up with 72 virgins or 72 raisins whichever they're selling at the cosmic candy store at the moment.

The thing people forget is that it makes no sense to view the world--any part of the world--like it's as orderly as a recipe for a garlic-crusted baked ziti pie, or a bentwood coffee table you can make in about 90 seconds.

In the real world, the path to Elysium is as interrupted as a movie showing on a cheap-ass cable station. No one cares about what the viewer wants. It's more important to butcher whatever's being shown every six-minutes to earn advertising dollars from companies selling spray-on hair and Mesothelioma
settlements.

Years ago, when I worked on IBM Watson, the client and the agency made a mistake.

We sold magic alone. We should also have been selling sweat. Because while magic can happen, there's usually a ton of work behind it.

Magic's sexier and could win you awards and acclaim.

But magic, like the aforementioned garlic-crusted baked ziti pie or a heavenly eternity, is an illusion. 

Working on Watson, I tried to remedy the misperceptions we created by trying to sell a campaign I called, "In praise of hard." 

Nothing in the world that's worth doing is as simple as a 90-second how-to video, or a 30-second spot, or a long BBC report on the splendors of the Metaverse.

Everything worth doing is worth working for. I can think of nothing, not even a breeze that is as easy as a breeze.

Even the most-perfect creature on earth, Whiskey, my nearly ten-year-old golden retriever, demands work. Yesterday she had me up at 3:15. Today, she let me sleep an hour later.

Too many businesses and way too many agencies refuse to accept this: work is hard. Results are hard to come by. And have to be sweat over.

At any given time I have six clients or twelve I'm working on. As adept and--almost magical as my magic fountain pen is--every word I write is built on my 63-years of thinking, reading, learning and writing.

I suppose I could hire a friend to stand on a ladder and shoot me undercranked as I write a headline or unravel a client's inscrutable mission. I wonder if our industry would be worse or better if someone had filmed Julian Koenig typing "Think Small," or Ed McCabe writing "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken."

And maybe some things do come in a remarkable electrical flash. 

But life, work and love are not if-then propositions. The best laid plans, as Robert Burns said, gang aft agley.

And even flashes of brilliance, no matter what we wish, are never easy.