Category: Blog Post

The world comes to us in pieces. What we all have to figure out is if it’s worth collecting more or less of those pieces, or is it worth walking away. Sometimes ignorance bliss.

Some nights I’m afraid of the dark.

Not the darkness, but the dark. FOMO or fear of missing out keeps me awake and listening to YouTube.

 I don’t need a night light. Do I need some form of acceptance?

How have you beaten back FOMO? I’d love to know. 

We pay attention to the story that resonates with us.

Whenever you sit with a great copywriter, you’ll notice how the story changes when they just focus on who the customer is, and what can you do for them. Everything and I mean everything else is fluff.

All we want to know is how do you tell the story. We can figure out the rest.

In some sense, we all have the same amount of hours in a day, however, that is only one part of the story. While we do have the same “time” per se, we each have different multipliers due to wealth, societal privilege, etc. Sure, I have the same amount of hours in a day as some poor child in Southeast Asia, but is it, really?

It isn’t.

So I really wish I stopped hearing that and believing anyone who says that.

In some sense, we all lie. The measure of a person is how they understand and go about entertaining which lies matter and which lies don’t. When do you tell the truth even though a lie is more convenient?

I like writing on the Subway. Sure, it’s cramped, and I don’t know what to expect, but there is a certain peace to knocking out my morning routine on the way to work, instead of before or after. 

It also gives me a place to edit that’s different from where I write (no connection on the train so I am just content with writing blind)

I’ll see where this goes.

Marketing is about profit, and if you aren’t profitable with marketing, start there. That’s it. As the kids say, that’s the tweet.

If your marketing is costing you money, your first job is to find ways for it to make you money. Once you get there, then it’s about all the other cool things that you can do (turning profit into yield, real differentiation, fun product marketing, etc.). 

However, none of that means squat until you are making money with marketing. 

Peanut Butter Falcon is a good movie about friendship and dignity. I can relate to it in some ways, in a lot of ways, I have a brother with developmental disabilities. See it and shed a tear as I did. 

Competing theories are hard to wrestle with. We have an instinct to push towards one that we agree with, the one that will keep us feeling “normal,” or something that lets us off the hook.

But no.

If we want to stay sharp, we have to resist the feeling of ease. We have to march forward and wrestle with different information, find fellow travelers who are willing to take the journey with us and deal with the restlessness. 

We have to be better than comfort.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

F Scott Fitzgerald

(Proud of you dad).

Product management changes on each level. Associates deal with singular, full PMs deal with multiples, Directors deal with strategy and reality.

Haven’t been a VP or CPO yet – I’ll report back.

See the thread here:

https://twitter.com/TheHonorableAT/status/1160550296915009538

The tl;dr: Optics are a part of your strategy work. To ignore the politics of your market segment is to ensure blind spots for competitors to enter the market. As the director of product at a current incumbent in the space, this has a ton of application and I’ve seen the effects as I’ve ramped up our operations.

I may do a deeper dive here at some point in a Medium post, but the main idea here is clear – you have to think about how you appear in the market.

This isn’t new of course – you’ll see it in chapter three of this big book. *

*I’m embarrassed to say I bought this four years ago and just started on it a few weeks ago. Granted – it makes way more sense now than it would have them.

That’s just pride fucking with you.

Yoga this morning was rather difficult. The teacher had to assist me with almost every pose, at least it felt like it. I put pressure on my ankle (incorrect) and due to a sports injury in my youth, I couldn’t bend my leg fully.

My pride made me feel like

Yoga this morning was rather tricky.

The teacher had to assist me with almost every pose, at least it felt like it. I put pressure on my ankle (incorrect), and due to a sports injury in my youth, I couldn’t bend my leg fully.

At the beginning of the class, my pride made me feel like a loser.

I thought about my childhood.

I always hated help.

Help made me weak. Help meant I wasn’t like everyone else. Help meant I wasn’t a star.

Childish, yes, but parts of it continued to my adulthood, and I had flashes of it pop up today.

But after the fourth or fifth pose I needed help with, I felt a shift, and as the class ended, I thanked the teacher for her help and care, and I went home.

What changed?

Yoga functions as therapy. I am both the therapist and the patient. I can acknowledge it. Because I am in the room, and present, I get the space to confront those feelings, and I see what is real and what isn’t.

I’ve come to love the practice.

I can continue to get better.

Help gets me there.

So fuck pride.

loser. Everyone else was nailing the poses. It sucked.

I thought about my childhood. I always hated help. Help made me weak. Help meant I wasn’t like everyone else. Help meant I wasn’t a star.

Childish, yes, but parts of it continued to my adult hood, and I had flashes of it pop up today.

I’m looking at “A Testament of Hope” on my bookshelf. It’s a collection of writing and speeches from Martin Luther King Jr. I landed on an interview he did with Playboy Magazine, where he is speaking on his mistakes. One of the biggest to him was trying to bring white churches into the fold.

Strange, because if you ask everyone now, they all supported it.

We hope that time bends towards justice, but we have to realize people will shift their position on that bend when convenient.

Work is work, even when you enjoy the work you are doing.

When you enjoy work, you find yourself in “the zone.” “The zone” is where your focus is razor-sharp, and time seems to slip away, and it often happens when you are working on something that is difficult and you have no distractions. For most creatives I know, it’s an awesome place.

With that said, it still can lead to burnout since you’re working your brain. Monitor it like you monitor any other work. 

Your network is a numbers game, especially at first. 

Sometimes, I’m asked how to build a network, especially since I came to New York with no connections. The first thing I recommend doing is picking up this big orange book and reading it. The second thing, start playing the numbers game. 

Now, this doesn’t mean go to a bar (unless it does 😉 ). What this means is to find a few events that are interesting to you, and start meeting people. Make it a game. Try to meet three people and get their email address. Email those people the same day and expand on the conversation.

Ask the ones that return a message to continue the conversation over coffee in the afternoon (if you can get away).

A couple of coffee dates here and there, offer to help in any way and suddenly you know some people you like. There is your foundation. 

He who prioritizes best wins. Decision science is all the rage now, and for good reason. We’re bombarded with choice and between our phones, our inboxes, and our relationships – it can get very confusing. Things get lost.

One way I try to keep ahead of it is a fifteen-minute session before I leave an environment (home/work) and ask myself a few questions – which I’ll write down.

1. What did you accomplish today?
2. What felt good, what felt bad?
3. What could you have gotten rid of (time-sinks)
4. Who do you need to have a conversation with?
5. Is there anything you’d like to defer?

That list of five questions can help with your priority in the next day, and if you are anything like me, get you started in the morning, quickly.