Some days I finish work and cannot utter a word. Not because nothing happened, but because too much did. My brain spent eight hours switching between strategy, branding, code, writing, management, and decisions, then circling back before any one context had fully cooled.

I recently told a friend, “Yeah, I have twelve subagents cleaning up all the slop code the previous models made. But look at the results. This search result is thirty percent faster now.” He had no use for this information, though he knows I’m building an archive of public-domain artworks.

Then I heard myself and laughed. What world are we living in? Maybe the bigger question is: Who am I becoming?

I see people hold their laptops up to their mouths like water fountains and whisper their desires to robots. “Please build me this feature. Don’t make mistakes.” I’m having fewer meetings while working on more things. I went from typing all day to mostly yapping at my computer. Typing is now reserved for morning pages and this newsletter. It feels slower. More deliberate. Like thinking.

Almost everything about how I work, and how I define myself professionally, has transformed overnight. My career sits at the center of my identity, survival, and vocation, and it is undergoing a shift I can only describe as chaotic excitement and insane exhaustion.

I’m also having the most fun I’ve ever had in my career. That may be the better metric right now.

Chaos is an audit

Chaos exposes the beliefs, systems, and rituals that can no longer support the weight placed on them. It shows us what served the work and what survived because everyone agreed to keep doing it.

AI is producing a similar moment inside knowledge work. It is auditing expertise, titles, meetings, handoffs, approval chains, status updates, departments, and org charts. It reveals which activities create value and which merely perform the appearance of value.

Not every ritual was foolish. Some processes compensated for real technological constraints. Others gave people time to build trust, disagree, and arrive at a shared understanding. The work now is to separate coordination that helps people create from coordination that simulates progress.

Years ago, a manager repeated a phrase whenever things became chaotic: Execution over everything. Another mentor taught me to focus on outcomes. Together, they form a useful operating system: make the work real, then judge it by the change it creates.

From idea to outcome

For much of the software era, work was organized around distance. A designer lived in a canvas made of pixels, flows, and prototypes, then handed the work across a gap to an engineer who rebuilt it in a medium the designer could not speak.

Intent became a mockup. The mockup became a specification. The specification became a conversation. The conversation became code, and the code became something almost, but not exactly, like the original idea. Translation leaks, and the industry learned to live with the loss.

We built careers and management systems around that distance. Product managers translated between functions. Designers made representations of the thing. Engineers made the thing. Leaders reviewed abstractions because interacting with the real thing was expensive.

AI has blurred the gap. A designer can ship a pull request. I shipped three in my second week on the job. A writer can build a working prototype. A product manager can enter a meeting with something people can use rather than a document describing what might exist. The handoff loses authority when one curious person can move from idea to interface to code to feedback before the traditional team has finished scheduling the kickoff.

The titles are breaking down because behavior is outpacing our ability to name it. Titles are useful because human coordination is hard and labels save brain energy. They are also made up. An org chart is a story about how work happens. It remains useful until reality stops following the plot.

For most of my career, nonconformity was a liability. I did not go to a famous school, and my résumé wandered through freelance writing, content marketing, an education startup, community building, brand strategy, design, and management. The old system looked at that path and asked, “What do I do with you?” Now the same wandering path feels less like a defect and more like preparation.

The advantage belongs to people who can learn across disciplines, develop mastery in a few, and carry a good idea across the borders between them.

Execution is judgment made visible

When production becomes cheap, output becomes weak evidence.

Anyone can generate a strategy, an interface, an article, a research report, a prototype, or a pile of code. We are entering a world of infinite drafts produced at nearly zero cost, which moves the valuable questions up a level: Should this exist? Is it any good? What deserves more attention? What should we refuse to make?

I have watched non-designers use AI to make design-y things for the first time. They light up like a toddler hearing a recording of their own voice: an animated HTML deck, a button that wiggles, a little app that works. That delight is real, and so is the learning. But when something serious has to get made, the gap becomes obvious. The tool can produce options. It cannot give someone the vocabulary, pattern recognition, or judgment they have not yet earned.

This is why so many conversations about the future of work return to taste. Taste is the ability to choose. It knows which detail deserves three hours, which deserves three seconds, when the first answer is average, and when something is technically correct but spiritually dead.

Taste without execution remains an opinion. Execution is judgment made visible.

Execution means accepting responsibility for the path from intention to consequence: choose a worthwhile problem, define what good looks like, make something real, expose it to feedback, improve it, and stay with it until the desired change occurs. The outcome is the evidence. A strategy no one believes, a prototype no customer uses, and twenty projects in motion are possibilities, not outcomes.

What speed cannot replace

Some parts of work deserve to disappear. I have a Slack bot that reads my team’s channels and gives me a morning brief: who is working on what, which projects arrived, where people are blocked, and which decisions need attention.

I don’t have to ask everyone for updates, and they don’t have to stop working to perform an update for me. Good. No one joined a company hoping to spend Wednesday morning explaining what they did on Tuesday afternoon. Yet we call this work.

The brand strategy process is more complicated. At an agency, strategy could take four to six weeks because every decision downstream depended on it. I interviewed executives, team leaders, and customers, studied the company and its ambitions, then turned all of it into a direction the team could believe and build from. It also took me time to digest this information and write something cohesive.

Today I have a Claude Skill trained on years of projects, patterns, language, mistakes, and decisions. I can enter a company, examine its documents, talk with its leaders, and produce several legitimate strategic directions in a day. That would have sounded absurd five years ago. It is also incomplete.

But because I have years of experience and pattern recognition, I can tell whether the tool is producing good outputs. When I notice it's bad, I can trace the root cause in the code, learn what’s not working, and keep testing. Without the pattern recognition, you’re essentially just driving in circles and calling it an adventure.

The old process was inefficient, but inefficiency was not its only feature. Interviews made people feel heard. Workshops gave teams permission to disagree. A foolish comment could unlock the room. People developed language together and became advocates because part of them lived inside the outcome.

AI can compress production, but it cannot eliminate the human need for participation. There is a loneliness in arriving at the answer before everyone else has had the chance to ask the question. You can produce a brilliant strategy in one day and still fail because no one believes it. You moved faster than the group could develop trust.

Enrollment takes time. Sometimes the meeting is theatre. Sometimes it is where people decide to care. Experience means knowing the difference.

Execution of what?

It is easy to mock people who resist AI. It is more useful to understand what they are protecting. A degree told them they had expertise. A title gave them status. A specialized tool separated them from amateurs. A career gave them dignity, a sense of belonging, and a story about the future.

Then a machine performed part of that work in thirty seconds.

Of course there is fear. A livelihood becomes a private mythology made of education, sacrifice, promotions, surviving bad managers, and a language only people inside the profession understand. Someone can recognize that a new system is faster and still resist it because the old system helped them understand who they were.

A beginner may adapt more quickly because they have less of their identity invested in the old process. They lack experience and taste, but they also have less to mourn and fewer habits to defend. The opportunity inside this chaos is to build an identity around learning rather than a tool with the shelf life of a banana. The durable skill is the ability to become useful again.

AI also removes friction, and friction once forced us to choose. An idea that required six months, a meaningful budget, and ten people had to survive serious scrutiny. Now a passing thought can become an active project before lunch.

Desire becomes operational. You can speak an idea into existence, generate the research, create the interface, assign the agents, write the code, revise the copy, and open three more directions before the first idea has earned your commitment. My twelve subagents are not merely a funny anecdote. They are a mirror of my ambition.

Execution over everything does not mean execution of everything.

When nearly anything becomes possible, restraint becomes part of execution. The scarce ability is knowing what to ignore, which good idea must be abandoned so the great one has room, and what should remain slow because the slowness produces something valuable.

I know where permanent acceleration leads. My ambition has put me on the treadmill before, and I know the humiliating realization of discovering that my own finger was pressing the button. AI gives ambition a faster engine, but it does not give ambition a steering wheel. That remains our job.

Make the work real

Work in B2B tech long enough, and you will meet someone who believes their job is to “wrangle stakeholders” for three months so the group can achieve clarity: thirteen meetings, seven documents, endless threads, no decision.

Big tech companies produced and normalized this behavior. Now, with this new technology, it’s challenging that way of working.

Then someone makes the prototype in an afternoon.

The prototype does not settle every question. It changes the quality of the questions because people can respond to something real rather than defend their interpretation of an abstraction. Instead of arguing about whether an idea might work, create evidence. Give people something they can touch, test, reject, and improve.

The point is not to kill process. Process must earn its keep. Some processes make good work possible. Others defend the old ways of doing things.

Execution also does not mean becoming a lone hero. The best work of my life happened with small groups of motivated people who trusted one another, respected each other’s craft, and cared more about the outcome than the credit. One person saw the system. Another understood the customer. Someone could build, someone could write, and someone noticed the detail everyone else missed. You find those people and lock arms.

Titles will change. Tools will churn. Job descriptions will become outdated before the recruiter finishes posting them. What travels is character and portfolio: who you are when the work becomes difficult, and proof of what you made possible.

Become known as the person who makes good work happen without the drama. You do not need every answer. You need to move the group closer to one. Create clarity. Make the first version. Tell the truth. Ask the inconvenient question. Notice the customer everyone forgot. Remove the idea that no longer serves the outcome. Turn words into works.

My labels are still struggling to keep up with my behavior: writer, strategist, designer, manager, photographer, builder, whatever comes next. I’m tired in a way that is difficult to explain because the exhaustion sits beside genuine delight. Every week, something I once considered impossible becomes a Tuesday afternoon.

The opportunity is larger than replacing jobs. It is the chance to redesign them, remove the theatre, preserve the human collision, and give people more agency over their attention, energy, and time. That possibility deserves more than panic and predictions. It deserves proof.

At the end of some days, I close the laptop and have no words left. The next morning, I open my journal and write by hand. It is slower, which is why it works. The machines can help me make nearly anything. The blank page and pen ask the harder question: What is worth making?

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On May 15, 1947, Bill Bernbach wrote a letter to the executives at Grey that now reads like prophecy. He warned about “the trap of bigness,” about agencies that “worship techniques instead of substance,” “follow history instead of making it,” and let “hardening of the creative arteries begin to set in.”

That last phrase is the one I can’t shake. Hardening of the creative arteries. You can feel the blood stop moving.

Bernbach was writing about an ad agency, but he was really describing what happens to any institution once it gets large enough to confuse scale with vitality. The danger is not growth itself. The danger is what growth quietly puts at the center.

Everyone says taste matters. Yeah cool. But taste is often just the visible residue of something deeper: a philosophy, a point of view, a set of convictions about what is worth making and what is beneath you.

When that philosophy weakens, taste eventually goes with it. The work might still look polished for a while. The logo may survive. The press releases may still sound confident. But the animating force is already gone.

That is why the story of DDB matters.

For anyone outside advertising, it is hard to overstate what DDB represented. This was not just another agency with a famous founder. It was one of the places that changed the grammar of persuasion, and if you want the longer version of that story, I wrote about it here.

DDB helped lead the creative revolution by doing something radical for its time. It respected the audience’s intelligence. At a moment when most advertising was addicted to chrome, bravado, and hype, DDB made work with wit, restraint, honesty, and self-awareness.

Its Volkswagen campaign, especially “Think Small”, remains so influential because it broke the logic of the category. Instead of pretending the car was bigger, faster, sexier, or more glamorous than it was, the ad told the truth with style. It did not shout. It did not flex. It trusted the reader to get the joke.

That same sensibility showed up again and again. Avis turned second place into a strength with “We Try Harder”, one of the earliest great challenger-brand campaigns. Levy’s rye bread gave America one of its most durable lines, and the “Daisy” spot for Lyndon Johnson proved that one minute of fear and precision could alter political history.

This was not a shop that merely made ads. It built a philosophy of persuasion.

That is what made DDB a legend. Not a logo. Not mythology. Not award-show fumes. A standard.

Which is why its death matters.

When Reuters reported that DDB would be folded into TBWA after Omnicom’s takeover of IPG, the language was predictably corporate. Consolidation. Integration. Efficiency. Cost-cutting. Clean words for a dirty process.

But what disappears in those moments is not just headcount. It is institutional memory, judgment, and the accumulated wisdom of what actually works. Not what tracks well in a dashboard. What works.

One former DDB leader put it bluntly in a LinkedIn post: what dies when great agencies die “isn’t just jobs.” It is “the accumulated wisdom of what actually works.” Then came the real obituary: “We traded institutional memory for efficiency.”

That is the line. Not that an old name vanished, but that a place built to teach standards, judgment, and courage got flattened into a structure built to optimize margins.

The warning signs showed up long before the merger. In 2021, Business Insider reported deep confusion inside DDB as leadership pushed harder into a more data-driven, precision-marketing direction. Former employees described a “huge swell” of departures, said the work had become “all about numbers, measuring KPIs,” and described feeling less like makers than labor.

That language matters because cultural decline leaks into vocabulary before it shows up on the balance sheet. First the words change. Then the work follows.

This is the part people miss when they talk about decline. The problem is not data. The problem is not technology. The problem is what moves to the center of the table.

When craft exists to serve the system, the work gets thinner. When the system exists to serve the craft, the work has a chance to stay alive.

Even current DDB leaders have said some version of this out loud. In 2025, regional executive creative director Alejandro Canciobello said the attention economy had pushed advertising toward “performance and efficiency” at the expense of “compelling storytelling”. That is the whole fight in one sentence.

A company built on wit, taste, and long-range persuasion got trapped inside an economic model that rewards throughput, attribution, and short-term proof. In tech companies, this happens all the time. Creative judgment gets subordinated to people who can speak the language of creativity but cannot make anything memorable themselves.

That sounds harsh. It is also ordinary.

I do not come from the advertising world. I study it. I admire it. I have friends in it. Design agencies face many of the same pressures, and after a while, you start to recognize the pattern, no matter which industry is wearing it.

I have felt that pattern as a customer, too. When Blue Bottle was acquired by Nestlé, I remember that sip of the New Orleans and wondered why, by the time I reached the end of the block, I wasn’t trembling because of how strong it was. It was watered down, just like all of Nestlé’s products. When a glamping brand I loved got acquired by Marriott, the customer support became maddening. The website experience is just utter garbage, and earned credits are lost.

That is how the decline usually feels. The thing that made the thing feel like itself starts to thin out. The edges get sanded down. The weird little standards that once made the experience memorable get replaced by process, scripts, systems, and scale.

Big fucks small. But even that line is incomplete.

Big does not only kill small from the outside. Small often starts dying earlier, when it begins copying big. It starts admiring the wrong things, hiring managers before it has protected makers, and mistaking polish for conviction.

That is the pattern I want people to see, whether they work in advertising or not. First, the philosophy weakens. Then the language changes. Then the metrics move to the middle of the room. Then the people who protected the standard leave. Then the institution starts managing its reputation rather than renewing its perspective.

By the time the acquisition, reorg, merger, or quiet surrender comes, the rot has often been underway for years. The paperwork arrives last. The soul usually leaves much earlier.

The same thing happens to careers, teams, publications, friendships, and companies that reach the top and mistake dominance for permanence. They stop standing for something precise. They get lazy with standards. They start outsourcing judgment to consensus, dashboards, or market research.

Bernbach saw all of this coming in 1947. “There are a lot of great technicians in advertising,” he wrote. “And unfortunately they talk the best game.”

That line still lands because the danger was never incompetence. It was competence without soul. Process without courage. Technique without philosophy.

He was not against rigor. He was against mistaking rigor for aliveness.

That distinction matters even more now because today’s winners are more vulnerable than they look. A company at the top starts believing its system is the source of its success, when often the system is just the scaffolding built around an earlier act of conviction.

Somebody once had a sharp point of view. Somebody once made a weird bet. Somebody once protected a standard that did not make immediate financial sense. Then the company grows, more layers appear, and institutional self-preservation slowly takes over.

Then the consultants slither through the back door. Then people without real expertise start managing the people who do. Then entropy begins its slow work, or a bigger player finishes the job.

You can see this in advertising. You can see it in media, fashion, hospitality, tech, food, apps, movies, publishing, and culture at large. What made the thing matter becomes less legible to the people now entrusted to scale it, so they inherit the results without understanding the philosophy that produced them.

That is why standing for something is not brand theater. It is a survival strategy.

A real point of view does more than make a company interesting. It tells people what to protect when pressure shows up. It gives a company a philosophy for hiring, making, rejecting, and deciding. It helps you know when the market is asking you to evolve and when it is asking you to betray yourself.

Most companies do not want that kind of clarity because clarity is expensive. A real standard creates friction. It embarrasses the people who do not meet it, forces choices, closes doors, and makes certain shortcuts intolerable.

That is why so many companies reach for substitutes. They borrow language, borrow frameworks, borrow trends, borrow certainty. They do not build a philosophy. They build a deck. They share what they’re seeing on Twitter because they themselves have no ideas, no point of view.

And a deck will not save you when things start to rot.

Bernbach understood that too. “If we are to advance,” he wrote, “we must emerge as a distinctive personality. We must develop our own philosophy.” That line still cuts because most companies do the opposite.

They build an identity system, a campaign, a content engine, a management layer, a dashboard. Then they wonder why nothing holds when pressure arrives.

That is the real warning inside DDB’s story. Not that a famous name disappeared. Not that one more institution got folded into a holding company. That part is just paperwork.

Big fucks small is as real a law as gravity.

The real warning is that decline begins long before the press release. It begins the moment philosophy gives up the center seat.

That is the danger for any company at the top right now. Do not confuse momentum with meaning. Do not let performance language quietly replace your philosophy.

Do not hand your standards over to people who only know how to measure what can already be counted. Do not assume the thing that made you win will survive on inertia.

Because entropy is patient.

And if entropy does not get you, a bigger player will.

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Most tech companies hire brand designers and then bury them under marketing. They bring in people who are, in effect, artists, then treat them like production staff.

That mismatch explains a lot. It explains the sea of sameness in tech. It explains why talented brand designers often stay freelance or work at an agency. It explains why so many in-house teams are exhausted, underused, and blamed for problems they didn’t create.

The modern tech company inherited a structure it never really questioned. Brand got tucked under marketing. Product design got tucked closer to engineering. That one org-chart decision shaped everything that followed.

Product design escaped with status because it sat near the function that made the thing. Engineers straight out of college can make over $120,000 a year, whereas a designer might make 40-60k. Product design was elevated to new levels. Proximity bought product designers leverage, higher salaries, and protection. Brand designers got the opposite. First laid off. Last consulted. Dragged off meaningful work, the second something “urgent” appeared. Because they were always seen as an additional appendage to marketing.

Conceptually, product design and brand design are the same discipline. Both are about shaping behavior, perception, and experience. I jokingly say product design is “form follows function,” and brand design is “form follows fantasy.” But because one grew up beside engineering and the other beside marketing, they became like twins separated at birth.

The bigger problem is that most companies never understood what they hired in the first place. Because the marketing leader, often creatively illiterate, has no idea how to talk to or grow these brand designers.

They did not hire strategic partners. They hired a captive agency. A service desk for decks, landing pages, campaign assets, social posts, sales collateral, and whatever else the quarter demanded. The designer is trapped, but fed.

And during the years of cheap money, bloated teams, and endless hiring, many bad habits were normalized. The age of AI will unravel this.

You cannot bullshit your way into engineering. You either write code or you don’t. You can’t fake your way into design either. The portfolio tells the truth quickly.

Marketing is where things got muddy.

There are great marketers. I know them. I’ve worked with them. They understand story, distribution, audience, timing, and taste. They know how to enroll people in an idea. But tech also allowed another type of marketer to thrive: the kind who can narrate work they cannot actually do. These are the consultant types that slithered through the back door as PMs or PMMs.

If you are accountable for decks, why would you not learn how to make decks? If you are accountable for white papers or any asset that goes into a channel, why would you not learn how they get made?

At a minimum, you should know how to build a rough first draft. Better yet, you should know how to work closely enough with a designer that the handoff is not a pile of vague thoughts and panic. That is not “being less strategic.” That is called respecting the craft you depend on.

For some reason, tech has allowed this lack of accountability to hide inside the language of collaboration.

An engineer who can’t code gets exposed quickly. A designer who can’t design won’t last. But a marketer who cannot take an idea even halfway to execution can survive by pushing the labor downstream and calling it teamwork. Then, when things slow down or quality suffers, the designer gets blamed for being a bottleneck.

That is ridiculous. And it has been tolerated for far too long.

Brand designers are not there to be human middleware for half-formed thoughts. Their role is larger than that. They set the standard for what great work looks like and how it shows up in the world. They establish the tone, the visual language, the level of care, the emotional texture, and the coherence. Everyone else is accountable for the brand too, whether they sit in sales, marketing, support, community, or product. The designer should not be the only adult in the room who knows what “good” looks like—but most of the time, they are, and the pushback against people who’ve never made anything is just a sad part of the game.

That’s why so many brand teams are fried.

From the conversations I’ve had over the past year, most brand designers spend the overwhelming majority of their time on production work. Asset assembly. Deck cleanup. Template wrangling. Taking scattered crumbs and turning them into something presentable so someone else can shove it into a channel.

Then companies wonder why the product feels disconnected from the homepage. Why the sales deck feels like it came from another planet. The campaign looks polished, but the onboarding experience feels generic. When brand designers and product designers do not work together, and when marketing treats design as a cleanup crew, the company pays for it in fragmentation.

The most potent designers I know can move between product and brand. They understand systems and expression. Utility and feeling. They know how a thing works and how it lands. Those people are rare, and they are wasted when all they do is resize assets and fix ugly slides for people who should have known better.

The real value of a brand team lives in the work that usually gets squeezed out: experiments, systems, product collaboration, better defaults, new bets, clearer standards, and tools that raise the floor across the company. This is the major shift with AI right now: brand designers as tool-builders that help others meet them where they are.

That is where the flip has to happen.

A brand designer should not spend the day executing everyone else’s requests one by one. They should be building the brand operating system. The systems, tools, libraries, guardrails, prompts, templates, and principles that let other teams move faster without dragging design into every single task.

Marketing needs a landing page. There are tools and systems for that. In the near future, there will be agents who get it to 70% done. Sales decks. Social assets. Event booths. Brand designers will build tools that make the brand impossible to misrepresent.

That is the future. Not a design team acting like a vending machine. A design team is building the machine.

This is also why I’m bullish on AI.

Not because it replaces designers. Because it exposes who actually has craft and who was hiding behind process or incompetence with no accountability.

The people who used to rely on designers to make every deck, resize every asset, and translate every half-thought into something coherent now have fewer excuses. They can use tools. They can learn prompting. They can generate rough drafts. They can learn to, I don’t know, be a collaborator. They can meet the designer with something real.

And that changes the relationship.

The designer becomes less of a production arm and more of a director, editor, systems builder, and standard-setter. Judgment rises in value. Taste rises in value. Point of view rises in value. The people who only knew how to route work around an org chart are going to have a much harder time justifying their existence.

I don’t think every marketer needs to become a designer. But if you are accountable for an output, you should be able to move it forward. You should understand the materials. You should know what good looks like. You should be able to either make a rough version yourself or build a real partnership with someone who can take it further.

I don’t know what kind of previous jobs these people had, but when I worked in marketing, I had to learn Photoshop, learn how to put together an email image, or a blog hero image, and social posts—while scheduling 20+ posts a day, writing copy for landing pages, and oh yeah, servicing a campaign. Zoom out and ask the simple yet obviously ridiculous question: how can you possibly be making six figures, remotely, in tech, and can’t make something as simple as an image or a deck? Really really think about that.

I’m already living at the beginning of this shift. At my last job and my current one, I’ve pushed teams onto tools like Cursor and Claude Code. We’ve built internal systems that automate parts of white papers, resize logos, and generate blog and email images using brand guidelines and best-in-class examples.

What does that free designers up to do?

Push the brand forward. Work closely with the product. Create better tools. Improve the defaults. Build coherence from the first ad someone sees to the homepage, the demo, the sales conversation, the onboarding, and the first meaningful win inside the product.

That work matters more than production ever did.

Some brand designers don’t have the metabolism to do this. They just want to sit around and make nice things. There are mediocre companies that will allow that, for sure, and your boss can be a marketer who can’t make their own decks. And to each their own. But where I’m coming from, as a leader who wants to build a new model for brand designers to thrive in this age of AI, people need to adapt.

I think the maddening thing for me is that, of course, it falls on the designers to solve this problem. It always fucking does. The “XFN partners” are never held accountable for moving as fast with AI. It’s just how it is. I’m just telling you what the game is as someone who’s sitting at the front of the rollercoaster and has dealt with multiple inept teams that were never held accountable.

I also think brand designers should work much more closely with sales, which is usually the most neglected team in the room. If the brand can help sales build trust faster, reduce friction, and close with more confidence, the business feels that impact immediately. Especially as startups move upmarket, coherence across the sales experience stops being cosmetic and starts becoming a trust signal.

The better model is smaller, sharper, and more accountable.

An engineer. A designer. A writer, researcher, or storyteller.

Three people who can take an idea from first principle to final touchpoint without ten layers of translation, status games, and diluted ownership.

In time, more people will become builders. Role boundaries will blur. More marketers will design a little. Designers are already building like engineers, sometimes faster. More writers will prototype. Fine. Good, even. But that future still needs quality control. It still needs people with portfolios, judgment, and lived experience deciding what deserves to go out into the world.

That is why brand work becomes more valuable, not less.

Brand is not a logo file. It is not frosting on a finished product. It is not a slide in a keynote. It is the felt experience of a company. The world it builds. The standard it sets. The story people tell about it when nobody from the company is in the room.

That kind of work is closer to conducting than decorating.

So if taste is really the differentiator every company claims it is, then invest accordingly. Give brand designers authority. Give them a budget. Give them access to decision-making. Stop burying them under people who cannot make the work they are accountable for and do not understand the craft they depend on.

And my tough love for brand designers: stop waiting for permission. Stop saying yes to everything. If you uphold past patterns, you undoubtedly deserve the past. Introduce new patterns. Make the old model obsolete by building a new, better model that the future demands.

Put designers in the room early enough to shape the future.

Brand design is how you differentiate yourself from others. It’s the foundation for taste, story, and quality. Invest in it accordingly.

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Thank you to my buds Mark Johnson and Mike Casebolt for always reading my shitty first drafts and providing thoughtful feedback.

I’m launching a project today that I can’t believe I built. If I had the power to freeze time, study computer science at a top university, I don’t think I could have built what I did in the past six months.

The Tenth Muse (10M) started as a personal challenge after playing with Cursor in 2023 and building a few small personal apps: build a data-intensive, full-stack product. Do the research, brand strategy, design, copywriting, and launch. Of course, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I wanted to learn.

When I started, the most powerful AI coding models were OpenAI’s o3 and Anthropic’s Sonnet 3. Today, the models are leaps ahead. It’s like going from dial-up internet to virtual reality goggles. I felt in my gut that everything was about to change: my industry, my career, job expectations, and ultimately, my future.

The name comes from Greek mythology. The Nine Muses inspired poets, painters, and philosophers for centuries. In this age of AI, having a point of view and growing mastery are what’s left—and have been timeless to have. Having access to the richest canon of creativity, I hope, helps designers and creatives push back against the sea of sameness.

In this new world, you must be the tenth muse.

I know many “vibe-coded” apps get a lot of hate. But I hope what I’ve built singlehandedly shows what may be possible—and what’s coming.

I started with something I love: museums.

I found that the experience of searching for artworks—for a moodboard, a starting point, a creative spark—was painfully difficult. Most search filters were basic. All of this masterful, timeless work is being buried by clunky interfaces and scattered data. Many institutions, frustratingly, make access to artworks inaccessible. For modern art, I understand why, but for historical archives and images, I believe those should be widely and freely available.

The problem isn’t abundance. It’s architecture and access. The spaces where we discover art shape what we’re capable of discovering. A feed designed for addiction will never facilitate contemplation. A platform that treats a Vermeer the same as a meme will never teach your eye to see the difference.

The internet has billions of images, multiplying by the second. Somewhere in that flood are the works that could change how you see—the painting that stops you mid-scroll, the photograph that names a feeling you couldn’t articulate, the sculpture that makes you reconsider everything you thought about form. But algorithms serve what’s popular, not what’s profound. Platforms optimize for engagement, not for seeing. More art is accessible than at any point in human history, and yet meaningful encounters with it have become rare.

The limitations became obvious: there is no platform that allows people to search by feeling or mood.

I learned that AI has vision capabilities, able to scan thousands of vector points and “read” an image. I tested it on museum artworks and found that most of the keywords used—moody, sad, joyful, regal, complex, sophisticated, opulent—were accurate. This sent me down the rabbit hole. Other than Google Arts and Culture, there is no platform that curates all of this timeless work through mood and emotion filters.

I constantly complain about designers using the same shallow references. I complain that in the age of AI, we are losing connection to the bodies of work that informed, pushed, and changed cultures and genres.

When I worked at an agency, all of our work started in a library that had over 4,000 books—from science fiction to poetry to photography and beyond. It showed up in the work, making it fresh. I always push my designers to go to the library and get off platforms like Pinterest and Behance. Nothing wrong with them, they can be useful, but only living in those places yields recycled inspiration.

10M currently houses over 120,000 artworks form 17 museums and institutions around the world. 95% are in the public domain. A small percentage of famous artworks from The Whitney and MoMA are on display, but only for viewing. You can download any public-domain artworks from other museums at the highest resolution available. I created a feed view, a 3D globe view, and a timeline view that takes you through notable artworks from each era. And I plan to expand further.

I believe in returning to fundamentals, going directly to the source, studying the greats so you can develop your own point of view.

This isn’t a generation tool. You can’t make anything on 10M. You can regenerate your ability to see and feel. If taste is the differentiator in the age of AI, then it grows here by studying the works that shaped genres, movements, and forms. By learning the themes in the works and bringing that into your work. Your next idea might come from an Agnes Martin grid layout. A Japanese woodblock might reshape how you think about form.

There is still metadata to fix, labels to refine, and features to build. But I’m confident it’s in a state worth shipping.

I’m building for the people who stand in front of a painting until the museum guard gets nervous. For the ones who fall down research rabbit holes at 2am. For designers who want to fill their moodboards with artworks that are both timeless and timely. For anyone who’s ever felt that a single image could hold more truth than a thousand words. For the people who may never be able to step foot into a museum, but want to scroll through the greatest canon of creativity.

Taste starts here.

10m.co

The best experience is on desktop, but I’ll make the mobile version fun soon.

If you’re an institution reading this, please work with me. Let’s make the canon of creativity accessible and open to everyone. There are people who will never set foot in these museums. The least we can do is give them the tools to explore on their own.

Email me at: hello@pauljun.me

Massive thanks to my bud Bobby Jeffries for the logo. Thank you, everyone, who supported me with encouragement and feedback along the way: Mark Johnson, Pedro Marques, Matej Hrescak, Michael Casebolt, David Choe, Jun Cha, Emerline Ji, Nick Ace, Sean Blanda, Julia Reger, Skylar Woodward, Zuzanna Rogatty, Katie Siu, Ryan Davis, Victor Woo, and many more.

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For context, the “New Aesthetic” was created by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, two people I greatly admire for their thinking.

Tl;dr:

• Bauhaus intentionally shaped the 20th century’s look, and we’re still living in its design legacy.

• We’re deep into the 21st century without a clear new aesthetic; “the future” often looks like retrofuturism, so they’re asking what should come next.

• They’re funding artists/architects/designers to pursue genuinely new, beautiful work ($5k–$250k; apply by March 31, 2026; rolling review; no rejection emails).

I read a fantastic essay/response by Stephanie Wakefield here.

Tl;dr:

• The “new aesthetics” problem isn’t a shortage of imagination. It’s that our era is full of futurist talk but keeps snapping back to sameness, because institutions and culture keep reasserting conservatism.

• She uses Italian Futurism as the extreme case: when inherited forms can’t hold and technology accelerates, you either retreat into nostalgia or you demand new, harder, more intense spatial forms that match modern life.

• Bauhaus is her model for how new form becomes possible: not by declaring a style, but by rebuilding the conditions for form through a shared experimental milieu that retrains perception and remakes the categories of thought and making. I love this.

• Her punchline is urban: if anything like a renewed futurist practice emerges now, it likely starts in cities and will require Bauhaus-like institutions plus real experimental zones where new ways of living and building can be tested quickly, in public, under different rules.

Here’s my take.

The future does not arrive as an aesthetic. It arrives as a story strong enough that people start rebuilding their lives to match it.

This “New Aesthetic” call reminded me of a story from my former boss, Brian Collins. To me, it was a story about design and how it installed new futures.

He grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, a colonial town full of Cape houses and early-American tradition. Small dormers, shutters, the kind of architecture that says we know who we are. Then, around 1964 or 1965, Brian started noticing houses that looked like they’d arrived early from the future. Flat roofs. Big glass. Interiors with Eames and George Nelson silhouettes. A different way of living, dropped into a neighborhood still shaped by the Revolution.

He would tell me how he rode his bike past those houses and felt the jolt, as if the neighborhood had split into two timelines. The past on one street. Tomorrow on the next.

That story is useful because it shows how new ideas spread. The houses Brian noticed weren’t the work of a single visionary with better taste or a call for a new aesthetic. They were the output of a pipeline that had been running for almost two decades.

First, education. Walter Gropius arrived in Cambridge in 1937, fleeing Nazi Germany. Harvard hired him to rebuild its Graduate School of Design, and he imported the Bauhaus philosophy: design as a repeatable discipline, not a decorative art. Within a year, he became chairman of the architecture department. A worldview became a curriculum. A curriculum became a workforce. By 1945, Gropius and seven young architects formed The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a firm built on the same egalitarian principles. They didn’t just want to design buildings. They wanted to design a way of living.

Second, economics. Cambridge was expensive. Land further out was cheaper. In 1947, those TAC architects found twenty acres in Lexington, bought it from an auto dealer, and named the project Six Moon Hill. They drew lots for sites, priced them all the same, and built homes for themselves using shared design principles: flat roofs, redwood siding, floor-to-ceiling glass, open plans. By 1951, they had launched Five Fields, a larger development aimed at young families working in the defense and technology firms sprouting along Route 128—the future needed square footage. Suburbs became laboratories.

Third, distribution. In 1953, Benjamin Thompson, one of TAC’s founding partners, opened Design Research in Harvard Square. It was the first store in America where ordinary people could buy modern furniture, Marimekko textiles, and George Nelson clocks. Design stopped being a magazine fantasy and became something you could touch, finance, and carry home. When Jackie Kennedy wore a Marimekko dress on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1960, the future began to appear in mail-order catalogs.

The same pipeline reshaped the objects inside those houses.

You can see the pattern if you look back at Art Nouveau.

Most people treat Art Nouveau as decoration. Curves. Flowers. Tiffany glass. Paris Metro signs that look like plants. But it makes more sense as a refusal.

The Industrial Revolution was rewriting the world: mass production, soot, speed, repeatability. The machine wanted everything to become straight lines, right angles, and cheap sameness. Art Nouveau answered with vines, hair, insects, vibrant colors, and smoke. It insisted that a human life should still feel alive, even as the economy became mechanical.

That’s the part we keep skipping today. We keep asking for a new look. What we actually need is a new refusal. A new story strong enough to pull the form behind it.

Appliances didn’t start looking like the Jetsons because America collectively “got better taste.” They started changing because new materials enabled new forms to become cheap enough to ship. Plastics. Laminates. Aluminum. Fiberglass. New coatings. New manufacturing techniques. Curves stopped being a luxury and became a default. Surfaces got smoother. Seams disappeared. Colors got brighter.

The kitchen started looking like a cockpit because industries could finally build that fiction at scale. In 1959, Nixon and Khrushchev argued inside a model kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. Cameras rolling. The kitchen wasn’t decor. It was ideology. Look at what our system builds. Look how our people live.

Materials turned fantasy into inventory.

This is also where the cast of characters matters, because movements aren’t only made by artists. Designers and distributors make them, too.

H. Creston Doner helped turn the future kitchen into an exhibit. Henry Dreyfuss made domestic systems feel organized and humane, even when they’re deeply engineered. Raymond Loewy taught America to want streamlined machines in the home. Charles and Ray Eames translated the future into exhibitions you can walk into, like their work for IBM at the 1964 World’s Fair. Benjamin Thompson opened Design Research in Cambridge in 1953, making modern design purchasable. Marimekko arrived in America through channels like that, and textiles do what textiles always do—they smuggle aesthetics into daily life.

By the mid-century, corporations learned to sell tomorrow as a product demo. They staged a new domestic life as theater. They let ordinary people walk through prototypes and imagine their own living room catching up. This created a social desire. A new status symbol. Then it started appearing on televisions and in advertisements.

You could argue that the twentieth century’s most influential design galleries weren’t museums. They were world fairs, department stores, and corporate exhibits. Places where the future was packaged as something you could touch, desire, and eventually finance.

Even Disneyland got in on it. The future wasn’t just a poster. It was an attraction. A walk-through promise. Tomorrow, as entertainment, with a gift shop at the exit, to remember that moment.

(I was rewatching my favorite animated film, Batman: Mask of Phantasm, and there’s a scene where Bruce and Andrea visit an exhibition called “World of the Future.” Look at the images: rockets, robots, the “house of the future”, and Bruce looking at what is a model for what would become his Batmobile.)

So when people ask, “Where is the twenty-first-century aesthetic?” it helps to be honest about what we are really asking. We are asking for the output without rebuilding the factory or questioning the foundations in which new futures are inevitable.

An aside: Americans are arguably weak at building things, e.g., bridges, tunnels, roads, and most obviously, homes. This challenge is a deeply structural problem for the country writ large, especially as we constantly compare ourselves to China.

Steph’s essay points right at this. Bauhaus wasn’t a style guide. It was a milieu—a shared experimental environment that retrained perception and remade the categories of thought and making. That’s why it mattered. That’s why it traveled. That’s why the downstream world started to look like it.

Which brings me back to America, and why that Lexington story keeps sticking. Because the most significant driver wasn’t chairs or glass or appliances. It was a call.

“A good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it.”
— Barbara Kingsolver

America has always needed a frontier story. For a long time, it was the Wild West. Rugged individualism. Dirt roads. “Go anyway.” In the early 1960s, Western TV shows were basically a national lullaby. Then Sputnik embarrassed us, and Kennedy reached for the same myth and aimed it upward. Space became the “New Frontier.”

That reframing mattered. It gave people a clear, optimistic picture of the future, not just a Cold War knife fight with the Soviets. NASA wasn’t a bureaucracy anymore. It was destiny.

And the call didn’t just produce rockets. It produced the silicon infrastructure underneath the phone in your pocket.

The integrated circuit was invented in 1958. Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor figured out how to put multiple transistors on a single silicon chip. It was a breakthrough. It was also, in 1960, a technology without a market. Chips were expensive, unproven, and fragile. Computers still filled rooms. Nobody knew if the technology would scale.

Then Kennedy made his commitment: a man on the moon by the end of the decade. NASA needed a guidance computer that weighed 70 pounds, not 7,000. The engineers at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab made a daring choice: they would build the Apollo Guidance Computer using integrated circuits—a technology most engineers considered too risky to bet a mission on.

That bet changed everything.

By 1963, the Apollo program was consuming 60% of America’s integrated circuit supply. NASA became the largest customer for an industry that barely existed. They forced Fairchild and its competitors to prove reliability, scale production, and drive down costs. In 1965, a Fairchild engineer named Gordon Moore noticed a pattern: chip density was doubling roughly every 2 years. He wrote an essay about it. We call it Moore’s Law now, and it held for decades—because government demand made the investment possible.

By the end of the decade, the area around Fairchild—Santa Clara County, California—had a new name: Silicon Valley.

Fairchild alone spun off over a dozen companies. One of them, Intel, was founded in 1968. By 1971, Intel introduced the first microprocessor. The line from Apollo to iPhone is direct.

Astronaut Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, put it this way: Kennedy “reached out into the 21st century where we are today, grabbed hold of a decade of time, slipped it neatly into the ‘60s and ‘70s and called it Apollo.”

The Space Age didn’t happen because appliances got futuristic. Appliances became futuristic because the country had a future to aim for.

The call organized attention. It organized money. It organized pride and labor. And once the call took hold, the aesthetic poured into everything. Rockets and helmets, yes. But also living rooms, kitchens, chairs, typography, and toys. The story came first. The forms followed. A decade later, we were on the moon.

This is the part I want us to sit with, especially if we care about “new aesthetics.”

Story first. Form second.

Today, I don’t think we lack taste. I think we lack a shared story that doesn’t collapse into cynicism.

Leadership used to mean telling stories that enrolled people into a shared vision. Right now, that muscle feels atrophied. Everyone has a microphone. Almost nobody is building a future that people want to live in. The result is predictable—retreat into nostalgia, into comfort, into the sea of sameness. A world of competent design and timid imagination. We have mistaken legibility for culture, minimalism for maturity, and speed for direction.

So if we’re serious about responding to the New Aesthetic call, I don’t think the first move is to ask artists to “come up with a new look.” That’s a trap. That’s moodboarding the apocalypse.

This is why the New Aesthetic call matters. The grant money is not the point; it’s actually tame and almost laughably small given the scope and impact of this endeavor. The point is the attempt to rebuild conditions. To give artists, designers, and builders the time and oxygen for good ideas to emerge and take root. To let new forms gestate before the market asks them to behave.

Still, money alone won’t do it. The deeper question is: what call are we building toward?

If you asked me what call I want, it isn’t “more futuristic.” What the fuck does that even mean? Futuristic is a costume. I want a call that feels like life.

Maximum care. Maximum accountability. Maximum meaning. Maximum progress. Maximum support for children, parents, education, and clean water. Objects that don’t just perform, but belong. Buildings that don’t just impress, but hold us. Interfaces that don’t just convert, but teach people to see again. A future that doesn’t look like a spaceship, but feels like a place worth embodying.

That’s how new aesthetics are born. Not from an announcement. From a refusal, plus a pipeline, plus a call strong enough to pull the world into a different shape.

I think about Brian’s Lexington story as both a warning and a dare. The future showed up on a residential street because a whole system made it possible. It wasn’t vibes. It was education, economics, materials, and distribution, all aligned behind a story about where we were going.

Most of all, it came from people who deeply cared about their craft and how it reshaped or reinvented the fabric of the world. What an incredible privilege, it must not be squandered or used lightly.

If we want a new aesthetic now, we have to do the same work.

Name the frontier.

Tell extraordinary stories.

Build the pipeline.

Fund the builders and designers. Provide sandwiches and get out of the way.

Then make the future close enough that someone can bike past it and feel their world change.

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From shipping one of the most significant projects of my career in April, to visiting Barcelona and Amsterdam for the first time, to getting laid off in October—this year was fucking wild. I also built three apps. I said goodbye to my grandfather, and, for the first time, broke a pattern in my life, the root of my depression, anger, and habitual chaos.

Good news: I’m joining Ramp to lead their brand.

This post is a roundup of what I loved this year: a book, a magazine, a few podcasts, a couple of tools, things I’ve built, and a ritual that provides so much fulfillment.

ICYMI—Everything I published this year

On frequency: What I look for in a collaboration. A feeling. A vibe. An understanding. This can extend to relationships.

Clear thinking: If you want to make better work, start by thinking better. Read and write more.

Learners will inherit the earth: warning: this is one of my spiciest takes about AI and its impact. I don’t expect you to agree.

The defense against slop and brainrot: my most popular piece this year, with over 30,000 reads. Thank you, Jason Kotke, for featuring it.

Start the next one tomorrow: the one piece of creative wisdom that will sustain a long career.

Product, brand, and marketing teams are collapsing onto themselves: my industry is changing, and almost no one seems to have an answer for what the future looks like.

Why brands can’t be built like monoliths anymore: the era of creating brands like Apple or Nike is long gone. How will brands earn trust in the age of AI?

You are what you believe yourself to be: why self-delusion is vital for leading a creative life or doing anything worthwhile.

Develop a point of view: in my circle, the word 'taste' keeps coming up.

Favorite book of 2025

This year, I read more slowly and intentionally, really chewing on books and sitting with them.

One book that truly blew my mind was The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. The writing is flawless. I remembered the movie Troy with Brad Pitt. It follows that story similarly, but told through Petroclus. The storytelling is astounding. Masterful.

Other good reads:

• Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod

• Somehow: Thoughts on Love by Anne Lamott

• The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhou

Inque: Created by designer and Pentagram partner Matt Wiley, this project publishes one large literary magazine each year. Once a year, for ten years, and the project ends. It is currently on issue three.

Ephemeral. Beautiful. Craft. More of this, please.

Favorite podcasts and shows of 2025

Dive Club

Ridd does a phenomenal job of highlighting young stars, up-and-coming designers, and OGs from the industry. Whereas other Design podcasts are more like audio biographies of the guest, Ridd’s episodes get insanely practical, digging into the process, the thinking, the tools, and output. What Lenny’s Podcast did for product managers and entrepreneurs, Ridd is doing for designers and builders alike.

Prof G Markets

Ed Elson and Scott do a great job highlighting trends in financial markets, bringing in smart experts, and sharing their insights. I appreciate that they reflect on their takes, whether right or wrong.

YouTube Channels

I am very late to the rabbit hole of YouTube; I’ve been actively ignoring it forever because I knew I’d get sucked in.

I’ve been obsessed with people like Luke Nichols of Outdoor Boys. Vanwives and their off-grid home project.

Food shows like Dooby and Matty Matheson.

Paulie B walks with street photographers in NYC.

I’m so out of it, I didn’t know DJing was so big on YouTube. ZouZoua has an incredible range.

The perception around AI is not great, skewing towards typical ragebait that journalists need to keep their paper empire alive. This documentary with Demis Hassabis, the genius behind Google DeepMind, was fascinating.

My favorite video of the year is the drummer Chad Smith hearing a song for the first time and then just slaying the set. Mohini Dey is another example of god-tier talent. But also, this drummer playing Cowboy Bebop’s intro song makes me very happy.

ARIatHOME produces live beats while walking around NYC and getting strangers to rap or sing. Just the amount of talent he comes across is astounding. I love NYC.

Favorite new tools of 2025

1. Cursor: AI coding.

2. MyMind: save notes, images, and websites with one click.

3. ScreenStudio: a tool to record demos with video (all videos in this post used this software).

4. Granola: a notetaker for your meetings.

MyMind became my replacement for Pocket (RIP). It helps me easily save articles, images, websites, etc. I also trust the founder and believe he will build this long-term, thoughtfully, and morally.

Cursor is an AI coding tool. I’ve tried to learn to code in the past, but I've failed repeatedly. This has become my primary tool. I’m creating things I genuinely couldn’t build if I could freeze time and get a 10-year head start in learning to code.

My ChatGPT had a nice summary about me.

Here are some things I built with Cursor.

Teul — a Figma Plugin for color combinations inspired by the book, A Dictionary of Color Combinations by Sanzo Wada and Werner’s Nomenclature of Colors.

• Find beautiful color combinations rooted in Japanese color theory or Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours.

• Easily add gradients to frames using the combinations.

• Develop an accessible (AA or AAA) color system for your brand and product, aligned with Radix's color accessibility guidelines.

Telos: a central company brain that can validate ideas, create briefs, and write on-brand copy.

• Analyze Sales/Gong calls and find patterns in customer feedback, frustrations, ideas, requests, etc.

• Drop a recording of your team's conversation to validate the ideas.

• Easily create briefs based on customer validation.

• Use the brief to generate copywriting, trained on the company’s tone of voice, strongest writing examples, and brand strategy.

HAX, an image editor with fun effects. This would typically take me hours on Photoshop.

The goal was to build a personal tool that I would use daily for image editing. A tool that would save me endless hours on Photoshop while still delivering quality output. It still blows my mind that I built this and it works.

I do have one more thing to share, but that will require a longer post. These were all warm-ups for a larger, data-intensive project that I spent months building. Stay tuned!

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Favorite ritual of 2025

I have two dinner groups with close friends. Four people each. Once a month, someone picks a restaurant and a time. We typically order the entire menu. We tip well. Servers love us. Three hours feels like ten minutes. We rarely, if ever, post about it.

Four people is the right number. Reservations in New York City are impossible with larger groups, and the conversation stays intimate. No one hides. Everyone talks.

If there are two bites I can share that I still think about from time to time.

I love my friends. Thank you, Katie, Mark, Ryan, Bobby, and Dave, for all the heart-to-heart conversations and unforgettable moments. Thank you to my partner Marta, my brother Peter, and my friends—Matej, Gui, Chris, Pedro, Grace, Zuzanna, Sam, Samer, Brandon, David, Amy, Maria, Dom, Iva, and so many others for supporting me this year on everything from job transitions, negotiations, just holding space for me to rant, and helping me on learning new skills like coding.

Thank you for reading! Happy New Year.

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You know when someone has taste. You feel it before you can name it—a through-line in their work, a coherent strangeness that signals: this person sees something I don’t. But here’s what most conversations about taste get wrong: they treat it as a starting point. Taste isn’t where you begin. It’s where you arrive.

The most important thing a creative can have isn’t taste. It’s a point of view.

A point of view is your compass. It comes from your beliefs, your lived experiences, your obsessions, the way you connect dots. It gives your work a spine. When that spine moves through real craft, other people experience it as taste.

Taste is a byproduct. And you don’t get to award it to yourself.

It’s something other people say about you. “She has taste.” “His work has taste.” That’s reputation, not self-diagnosis. Anyone who walks around claiming they have taste is a fucking asshole. Taste is like a Pulitzer. Very few people reach those heights, and when they do, they humbly accept the award. Then they get back to work.

When I was starting out, I had a good eye. Maybe I had the self-delusion that I did, and over time this became a self-fulfilling prophecy through relentless effort. I was the friend who could see what would stick, what felt fresh, what carried cultural weight. Useful, but that’s instinct, not taste. I had opinions and could express them thoughtfully, unlike people who think they have taste and say useless things like, “I don’t like it.”

What I did have early on was a point of view.

I had strong opinions about what made good writing, compelling design, and meaningful storytelling. I read like a maniac. I studied the masters in every domain I cared about. I copied, failed, tried again. Out of that, I stitched together a small, stubborn system of beliefs.

Those beliefs became my internal standard: what I’d ship, what I’d kill, what I’d stand behind. As I learned to express them with greater clarity and skill, people started calling it taste. That’s the missing step in almost every conversation about this.

When people say, “In the age of AI, taste matters more than ever,” I nod, then pause. Taste has always mattered. Craft has always mattered. What changed was the attitude—a decade of cheap money and dopamine-fueled growth that rewarded speed over discernment, scale over depth.

Now everyone wants the shortcut. The vibe without the values. They want to moodboard their way into originality. You can’t. Because you don’t know how to see yet. Seeing is the posture of an artist.

Taste without a point of view is just styling. It’s mimicry dressed up as discernment. It’s a crypto bro wearing a Gucci tracksuit, believing he has fashion sense. What you actually need is a core set of convictions about what you’re trying to say, what you want to see in the world, and what you’re pushing against.

You don’t build that in a weekend. A point of view grows as you do. It evolves as your craft improves, as you encounter more ideas, as you sharpen your tools. It’s your creative DNA. It might change shape, but it doesn’t disappear.

Taste, by contrast, is contextual. It bends toward what’s happening in culture. Taste is timely. Point of view is timeless.

When people say, “That person has great taste,” what they’re really saying is: this person has a clear perspective and makes consistent, intentional choices. Their work feels thoughtful and alive. That feeling doesn’t come from a palette or a font. It comes from the person behind the work. They see something we can’t, and they have the skills to bring it to life.

So if you want to be someone others describe as having taste, don’t chase references. Start with the spine.

What do you believe? What do you stand for? What do you refuse to do? What makes your skin crawl? What lights you up?

Have conviction. Then express it, relentlessly, across everything you make.

Taste is not perfection. It’s not a style. It’s a signal—the visible trace of knowing what you stand for and choosing to be seen. To translate intention and thought into an experience that makes people feel something.

When I feel deeply envious of a great piece of work, I know there was thoughtfulness, craft, and a point of view. An idea expressed so clearly that I get upset I didn’t think of it myself. That’s taste. Not something the maker claimed. Something I felt.

Let other people call it that. You’ll be too busy making the next thing.

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What is it that motivates someone to write a book while working full-time, raising kids, and juggling everything else that adulthood requires?

Picture them at the kitchen table after everyone is asleep. Laptop open. Calendar packed. Bank account not quite where it should be. They still believe they can do it, even if part of them knows they might be lying.

That belief is not polite optimism. It is a quiet, stubborn self-delusion that says, I can pull this off. It gives them enough fuel to push against the weight of reality.

Now imagine if they decided to be completely “real” with themselves. They study the saturated market, the failure rate of new authors, the chaos of publishing, and the grind of writing a book on top of everything else. They look again at their calendar. They talk to their worried partner. Any rational person would back away. Not now. Maybe never.

Our ancestors felt something similar in higher stakes. They charged into hunts where they could be mauled or killed, and many of them survived because they carried an inflated belief in themselves. There was no room for doubt or overthinking. Over time, they layered on rituals, paint, drums, and feasts. All of it in service of the story they told themselves before they ran toward danger.

A creative life is no different.

The belief that you can build a new edge in the market or make a body of work that dents culture requires a ruthless tunnel vision, the kind that many people just don’t have or haven’t developed. You have to blur out specific facts long enough to move. Leaders who guided companies through an unpredictable pandemic had no playbook. They still had to stand in front of their teams, day after day, and speak with conviction. They had to act as if things would get better, or else they had no chance of getting anyone through it.

How do you wake up and lead with that much uncertainty if you do not allow a little self-delusion?

Of course, in many areas of life, “keeping it real” matters. I would rather my dentist tell me I need a root canal than puff up my belief that I can manifest the infection away.

Still, self-delusion is not just a flaw in the system. It is part of our evolutionary wiring. Psychologists call one cluster of these inner distortions the self-enhancement bias. We tilt our view of ourselves to keep going. People who are brutally accurate about their abilities tend to be less happy day to day than people with slightly inflated views. There is a cost to seeing everything with harsh clarity.

Your body will not let you hold your breath until you faint because self-preservation is built into your system.

Your psyche does something similar. It will not let you stare at your failures and disappointments forever. It pushes you to convert them into lessons, justifications, or stories that help you live with yourself.

Or you write a book.

You are the story you tell yourself

If you believe you have no chance of being a writer, designer, or entrepreneur because nothing in your past points that way, then you are probably right. You have given yourself no shot. The story you tell yourself can open doors or seal them shut.

Great teachers, mentors, and friends treat every door as an invitation. Try this. Learn that. See what you have in you.

Take me, for example.

I spent most of my early life as an athlete and gamer. I got in trouble on the first day of school for not doing the summer reading. I’ve been suspended more times than praised by parents or teachers. I graduated from high school with a 2.0 GPA and from college with a 2.2. Out of 420 students in my senior class, I was ranked number 400.

Writing was not in the script. This life I lead right now was unfathomable.

Then, during one of the lowest stretches of my life, a friend told me to start a blog. Out of all things, I thought. His advice was simple and urgent. Just do something. He understood what writing and journaling could do, but he wanted me to discover it for myself. He paid for a yearly subscription and built me a simple site.

I wrote about video games, food, movies, hobbies, and culture.

Did I publish every day? No. Most days I wrote a thousand words of flaming garbage and hid them as drafts. In more than ten years of writing, I have collected more hidden drafts than published pieces. My parents were concerned. My friends assumed it was a hobby. No one took me seriously, and on paper they were right. Nothing in my past suggested I should become a writer.

But in that small room I grew up in for over twenty years, inside the universe of my own head, I was learning every day. I was mesmerized by language like a newborn hearing their own voice. I woke up with stories I needed to get out. Writing nudged me toward another habit that changed my life: reading.

I devoured books on science, philosophy, design, business, neuroscience, psychology, history, and poetry. Half the time I barely understood what I was reading. It still felt like I was putting my brain and my soul through bootcamp and therapy at the same time.

During my junior year of college, I decided that writing mattered more to me than a degree in psychology. I aimed for straight Cs. I worked out exactly how many tests and assignments I needed to pass with the least effort. I skipped class to sit in the library and write about what I was reading. That year I read over a hundred books, self-published two, and wrote for dozens of publications.

I learned that I was not alone. Many writers crawled into their careers from low points. That realization felt like being inducted into a secret club of people whose lives had been cracked open, then rebuilt through sentences. They, too, relied on self-delusions to keep going. That is how they made it through the long, quiet years when nobody cared.

In Meredith Maran’s book Why We Write, Michael Lewis puts it plainly: “A lot of my best decisions were made in a state of self-delusion. When you’re trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.”

The only thing larger than my self-doubt was my self-delusion. On paper, I should have chosen a safer path. Every writer, and really anyone trying to build a creative life, needs that inner exaggeration to survive the long game. You have to keep your spirits up when there is no external evidence you are on the right track.

Every blank draft felt like charging into a pack of buffalo. At the end of the day, all I had was the story I told myself and the discipline to keep practicing.

That non-profit you think about starting. That project to support teachers and parents through a crisis. A podcast. A newsletter. A book.

The world is not asking you to be realistic about how you will do the work. The world is asking for your imagination. Your ability to build a bridge from here to there. If you are too realistic about your prospects, you will talk yourself out of starting. You have to psyche yourself up.

There is power in acting as if you are already building that non-profit, already helping those teachers and parents, already hosting that show, already writing that book. Because one day it can be real. It is a practice.

It becomes real not because you were brutally honest about every challenge ahead, but because you believed in yourself despite the odds, the roadblocks, and the people who doubted you. It becomes real because you kept telling yourself private stories of giving it everything you had and of why the world needs what you have to offer.

You are what you believe yourself to be.

One day, if you practice long enough, your self-delusions will catch up to you. The book exists. The work is in the world. The life you quietly rehearsed becomes the life you are living.

Someone will look at you, juggling a job and kids and deadlines, and wonder what could possibly motivate you to take on something so big.

You will know the answer.

You chose to believe the story that kept you going.

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Three months into a rebrand, I watched a team realize the new illustration system did not work.

It looked beautiful in a deck. It fell apart everywhere else.

Ads felt flat. The site crawled. The style was too fragile to scale across product, sales, social, and hiring. But by then, the company was locked in. Templates, guidelines, design tokens, all tuned to a visual language nobody had tested in the wild.

That is how most brands still work. You disappear for six to twelve months, build a giant identity system, reveal it with fanfare, then spend the next few years defending it from reality.

Meanwhile, culture is sprinting past you.

The Monolith Becomes Debt

A monolithic brand system feels efficient at first. One big decision. One rollout. One set of rules that will “last for years.”

In practice, it behaves like technical debt.

You choose colors and lock them in without letting them marinate. You lock in illustration styles without stress testing them in product and paid. You decide on voice in a workshop and never put it in front of real customers.

Let me be clear, I’m not saying that customer sentiment/research and data alone should dictate decisions. Sometimes you have to take a risk and do things with taste. No great brand was ever made in a user research group.

Once the monolith ships, everyone is afraid to touch it. The system is final. Any change means another long project. So, teams hack around it. Growth quietly breaks the rules to chase numbers. Product designers invent their own components. Marketing agencies spin up a parallel visual language for the next campaign without involving the brand team.

You end up with a brand that is technically consistent in the guidelines and emotionally incoherent in the world.

Here's the part nobody admits out loud. A lot of brand work is just cosplay. If it doesn’t impact the product, change the internal company culture, or provide every team with better tools, then, at best, it’s a cosmetic change. You’ve got everyone going through the motions of “doing a rebrand” instead of asking how this company will actually show up in the lives of customers.

That is how you get a pristine brand book and dead channels.

Software already solved this kind of problem.

Brand as Software

Engineers learned long ago that you do not ship one giant release and then freeze it. Code lives in versions. It branches. It is tested, observed, and improved.

Brand should work the same way. This was a new idea I learned through my former manager, John Evans. Living this ethos in my recent project is what inspired this essay and made me think about how brands will be crafted—and how they’ll endure—in the age of AI.

Treat brand as software and you move in three modes.

Alpha: Explore without commitment.
You generate options, not answers. You explore illustration, typography, motion, and photography across real touchpoints. Product screens. Emails. Ads. Sales decks. You ask basic questions. Can this style work for small and large? Does it load fast? Does it still feel interesting after you see it fifty times?

Beta: Stress test in the wild.
You pick the strongest alpha directions and bring them to seventy or eighty percent. You run small experiments and get back data. You show them to customers and watch what people do, not just what they say. Does this help them understand the product faster? Does it feel like you or like everyone else? Does it attract the people you actually want?

If a direction dies here, good. You killed it before it became debt.

General Availability: Codify what works.
Only after real use do you promote elements into your official system. Design tokens, templates, motion rules, tone examples, guidelines, and libraries. That becomes the current version of the brand, not the sacred version.

On a recent rebrand, we shipped a rich product palette so that customers could customize their experience. It looked great in a deck and customers loved it during the research phase. In practice, it was too much for internal teams that weren’t familiar with 1) a rebrand of this scale and 2) using more than two colors. The sales decks appeared to be from a different company. The all-hands slides looked like four teams made them. Designers started limiting themselves.

Because the system behaved like software, the fix was simple. We tightened the palette without changing the customer experience. Updated the tokens. Designers flipped a few switches and updated variables in Figma. The product and marketing surfaces shifted in days, not quarters. The guidelines were easy to adapt and edit.

That is the point. Pull one string and the whole system moves.

A brand system built like JENGA will collapse. Build it like LEGOs and you naturally bake in the freedom to adapt.

From Consistency to Coherence

Most companies stop at consistency.

They pick a typeface, a color, and an illustration style, then repeat it everywhere. That repetition builds some recognition. Useful, but limited.

The real goal is coherence. Building a brand is the continuous act of making music.

Consistency says, “We always look like this.”
Coherence says, “We evolve and you still know it is us.”

Think about Beyoncé or Miles Davis. The early albums and the recent work are not consistent. The sound, visuals, and references change. Yet the thread is obvious. You experience one evolving body of work, not random reinventions.

Star Wars is the same. Films, shows, games, books, theme parks. Styles shift. Tones adapt. Formats change. Yet a single frame can tell you where you are.

Spotify shows this in brand design. Their center is simple: Joy in music. Around that center, the visual language has moved through eras. Duotones. Gradients. Bold shapes. Vibrant colors. Softer refinements. The surface evolves. The world stays intact.

Coherence comes from a clear center, not from freezing your expression.

The Apple and Nike Fantasy

This is where many leaders get stuck, why so many tech companies are never going to make it, because they hire executives who defend old playbooks and the status quo.

They reference Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola. Brands that were built in slower markets, over decades, with the luxury of time and repetition. They want that level of recognition, but they also want to move at startup speed and pivot every quarter. They also need to realize these companies spend billions in advertisements, which is more than what most companies make in revenue.

You cannot copy a twentieth-century playbook into a twenty-first-century attention span.

Today, the environment moves faster. AI accelerates copying. Trends burn out in weeks. The answer is not to chase more surface novelty or cling to a static system. The answer is to design brands that can adapt without losing their center.

Ironically, that means more constraints, not fewer.

Adaptable brands are not loose. They are brutally clear at the core and freer at the edges. Strong point of view, tight narrative, clear world. Inside that frame, you can change color, image, layout, even logo execution, and still feel like yourself.

Weak brands do the opposite. Vague core, rigid surface. They defend a logo or the H1 hero copy on their homepage, but say nothing with it.

As my mentor Seth Godin brilliantly said, “If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you’d have a pretty good guess about what it would be like. But if Hyatt announced that they were going to start making shoes, you would have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what those shoes would be like. That’s because Nike owns a brand and Hyatt simply owns real estate.”

You Do Not Own Aesthetics

Corporate Memphis made this very clear.

When Facebook launched its Alegria illustration system in 2017, that elastic limb style spread everywhere. Within a few years it became the default look for tech. The style was so persistent that Canada’s 2023 passport redesign was blasted for using it. This is the equivalent of your uncle doing a TikTok dance.

On the Robinhood rebrand in 2019, we leaned into a Moebius-inspired visual world. Surreal. Optimistic. Slightly sci-fi in a way that made sense for retail investing. For a short window, it felt distinct. Then other brands hired the same illustrators. The style drifted. It no longer belonged to anyone.

That is how aesthetics behave. They are cultural currency. They rise, get copied, and then crash into noise.

You do not own a shade of green or a line style of illustration, even if you arrive first. The market will remix you.

What you can own, if you are disciplined, is behavior.

To quote the great Maya Angelou: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya understood branding better than most marketers today.

Embedding, Not Announcing

This is why embedding matters.

Weak brands announce what they are about. They claim values rather than speak in a way that makes customers feel it for themselves. They overexplain logos and colors and campaigns. They rely on decks to tell you what the work means.

Strong brands embed their values in how they behave. You should be able to watch what they do and derive the principles yourself. Patagonia is a prime example of this.

Art criticism has a helpful parallel. There is a difference between being taught the themes of a painting before you see it and discovering those themes by spending time with the work. The second experience is more substantial. It respects the viewer. It trusts the art.

Brand works the same way.

There is a difference between “we want to appear this way” and “we act in a way that makes this obvious.” If people need a PDF to understand your values, you do not have values. You have marketing copy.

When brand is behavior, the experience itself carries the meaning. A support interaction. A hiring process. A refund. A late shipment and how you handle it. The design and language exist to amplify that behavior, not to distract from its absence.

What Actually Builds Brands Now

So what builds a brand in this landscape? Not a clever logo. Not an “ownable” illustration style. Not a color you hire lawyers to defend.

It is a pattern of behavior that repeats over time within a coherent world.

Cash App is a clear example.

They did not win because they had the most distinctive mark in fintech or a remarkable color green. They earned trust within specific communities by building products that previously lacked support in these communities. They made leveraged hip-hop culture with credibility—from give-aways to promotions to campaigns. They backed artists and educators. By the time you saw Kendrick Lamar talk to Ray Dalio about investing on their platform, it felt like a natural surprise. The brand had already done the work.

(Dan Runcie wrote up a brilliant analysis.)

PayPal or Revolut cannot copy that with a campaign. It would not ring true. They did not embed themselves in that world.

In a time when AI can generate a hundred campaign routes in a morning, the surface is cheap. Behavior is not.

The Unchanging Center

Technology changes. Culture shifts. New tools appear weekly. Underneath all of it, people still want the same things: Status. Safety. Belonging. To feel useful. To be seen and taken seriously.

Brand is one of the ways we negotiate these needs in public. It creates belonging. It signals identity. It gives people a story about the kind of world they are joining.

Do you remember your first pair of Nikes? Your first designer handbag? A car that made you feel like you made it? A watch?

The old model assumed you could predict the future, design a monolith for that imagined future, and then enforce it with budget. The new model assumes the surface will keep changing. So you protect something deeper:

• A clear promise: what people can reliably expect from you.

• A clear point of view: what you stand for and what you refuse.

• A clear world: the symbols and stories people step into when they choose you.

Everything else is software. Versioned, tested, improved.

A Simple Check Before Your Next Rebrand

If you are in the middle of a rebrand right now, ask:

• Are we building something we can update in weeks, or a monument we will be scared to touch?

• Do we have a real center, or are we hiding behind aesthetics? In other words, do you deeply understand the purpose of your brand (the why) and are you communicating it through the right symbols and stories or are you using a trendy illustration because you think that’ll get you product-market fit?

• Have we explored across real touchpoints, not just moodboards?

• Do we have a plan to run betas in the wild before we bless anything as final?

• Are our guidelines a floor for experimentation, or a ceiling that shuts it down?

• Have we made it technically easy to flip switches and propagate change?

• Are we feeding the work with real art and culture, or only with other SaaS brands?

If the answer is no, you are likely hard-coding tomorrow’s regret.

The Real Choice

Your brand will change. Culture will force you to change. That part is not optional.

The choice is whether to treat it like a monolith and let culture drag it into irrelevance, or to treat it like software and shape its evolution yourself.

Build a system that expects change. Build a world that can stretch without breaking. Let your behavior carry the meaning.

A brand always has to answer two questions:

1. What do we believe?

2. How will we behave?

In a world moving this fast, survival does not belong to the brands that look the same the longest. It belongs to those who learn the fastest without losing who they are.

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I’ve had the same conversation over a dozen times in six months. Different companies, different teams. Same exhaustion.

“Design is treated like a service desk.”
“Nobody can take an idea from start to finish.”
“I’m blocked by people who don’t understand the work.”
“[That team] holds the budget but has no vision.”

I found myself conducting accidental therapy sessions. Smart people described feeling trapped in a system that no longer works. And then I realized this isn’t team dysfunction. It certainly is a lack of good leadership. This is an organizational model collapsing in real time.

What’s Actually Dying

For 15 years, tech companies have been running an experiment: bring creative muscle in-house.

In 2017 alone, over 70 design firms were acquired by global companies. Twitter bought Ueno. Accenture absorbed Droga5. Today, more than two-thirds of tech companies have internal creative teams.

The thesis seemed sound: why pay agency markups when you can hire the talent directly?

But we moved the people without moving the process. More importantly, we never questioned who they’d report to.

Who managed those agencies? Marketers. CMOs. So naturally, design folded under marketing. Marketing controlled the budget and owned growth metrics. The structure seemed logical. It wasn’t.

Marketing departments were built for a different era—the era of buying ads, when marketing was primarily advertising, and when growth-at-all-costs was the juiciest, lowest-hanging fruit.

The snippet below from Seth Godin’s This is Marketing, published in 2018, nails it clearly [emphasis mine]:

“Marketing has changed, but not our understanding of what we’re supposed to do next hasn’t kept up. When in doubt, we selfishly shout. When in a corner, we play small ball, stealing from our competition instead of broadening the market. When pressed, we assume that everyone is just like us, but uninformed. Mostly, we remember growing up in a mass market world, where TV and the Top 40 hits defined us. As marketers, we seek to repeat the old-fashioned tricks that don’t work anymore.”

[…]

For a long time, the most efficient way for a commercial enterprise to make large-scale change was simple: buy ads. Ads worked. Ads were a bargain. Ads paid for themselves. Besides, they were fun to make. You could buy a lot all at once. They made you (or your brand) a little famous. And they were reliable: money spent equaled sales made.

Is it any wonder that, pretty quickly, marketers decided that advertising was what they did? For most of my lifetime, marketing was advertising.

And then it wasn’t true anymore.

Which means you’ll need to become a marketer instead.

That means seeing what others see. Building tension. Aligning with tribes. Creating ideas that spread.

But the org charts didn’t change.

Design became a service function, a pixel production factory. Brilliant designers who once had creative autonomy found themselves buried three layers deep, reporting to people who’d never hired, managed, or grown designers.

This is the equivalent of putting someone who’s never held a violin in charge of the Philharmonic.

The result? Campaigns start bold and get diluted to tech word salad by the time they ship. Designers stuck creating whitepapers instead of building brand systems integrated into the product. Marketers providing jobs-to-be-done frameworks instead of clear points of view. The power in the wrong hands.

As someone who started my career in marketing, I believed it was a creative job. Content marketing was beautiful writing and storytelling that helped startups position themselves as leaders. I did campaigns with WordPress, Mailchimp, Wix, and all of them were genuinely fun to create and useful for the audience. However, over time, the growth game consumed creativity and transformed marketing into a playbook of shallow tactics and cheap levers and acronym-filled Google slides that conveyed absolutely nothing.

Here’s the part nobody says out loud: many marketers are pretending to be Don Draper. They can’t write or build anything. They don’t understand design. They can’t tell a story that inspires a designer. Yet they receive budgets and get to boss designers around.

But designers are also at fault. Not pushing back. Not asking good questions. Accepting these bullshit requests and creating a cycle of more bullshit. Introverted by nature, many designers accept their role as is, versus find opportunities or teams within the org to make a larger impact.

Nearly every rebrand process is doomed to failure because the final decision-makers are not designers. It’s the board of directors, who are just boring people with big egos. It’s the executive team, who enjoy feeling important and busy but have no taste. Or it’s the CEO, who then asks their friend network for input, and one of their partners has opinions about the colors. This is why when a brand feels different and authentic, it gets talked about.

Now that the value of design is increasingly apparent, the illusion is beginning to break. Marketing teams are rarely the ones executing good ideas or good work. They need designers to do it. Or an agency.

The handful of good marketers I’ve encountered are what Seth described: people who have a finger on the pulse of culture. They’re writers. They’re tired of their own industry because it has fallen into shallow tactics and shallow thinking. They want to be creative. They want to be inspired by the work. But even their own teams lack a spine for risk-taking, boldness, and imagination. They’re held to insane metrics and standards that not even the executives who assigned them can achieve. Their CMO is likely an absolute fucking moron who thinks buying ads in Times Square is the most elevated expression of a brand. Their teams examine other companies and try to one-up them, rather than sprint in the other direction.

What We Lost

In 1941, Bill Bernbach met Paul Rand at a small Manhattan ad agency. Before them, writers and designers worked on different floors. They rarely spoke. Writers “passed down” copy to the art department.

Rand changed that. Their collaboration gave birth to the creative team—copywriter and designer as equals, solving problems neither could tackle alone. The model worked because it eliminated handoffs. Two people owned the idea from start to finish. Experts trusted each other. Those with taste and craft had the final say.

No translation layer. No competing priorities. Shared accountability for creating something incredible.

The legendary George Lois recalls: “Here was an art director who not only wrote and designed his own ads—he also didn’t take any shit from anybody.”

This model built the advertising golden age. First, it was the copywriter’s name on the mastheads. Then it was the art director and copywriter duo. Eighty years later, we’re still studying works from this era because it was imaginative, bold, fresh, quirky, and unique.

Today’s equivalent of writers and designers on different floors? Brand teams are not working with product and engineering teams. Marketing teams that lack knowledge of how to collaborate with product teams or engineers. Handoffs everywhere. Ideas are diluted at every layer of approval.

We forgot what made great work possible: collaboration without coordination. Trust without bureaucracy. Craft with authority.

What’s Already Working

Midjourney generates $500 million annually, employing roughly 200 people. No venture capital. Its product became so good that it marketed itself.

This isn’t an anomaly. It’s a preview of the future for those with talent and ambition.

I shipped an AI product in 2022 with a team of six in four weeks, from research to 1,000 beta customers. This was before Cursor and Claude. Not because we cut corners, but because we eliminated handoffs. The researcher talked to customers. I creative directed with one designer. Engineers built the product. I wrote everything for the landing page and launch. Worked with the designer to make marketing materials. Every expert in the room with autonomy and decision-making power.

At my previous company, we created an animated video in-house, work that typically costs $100,000 to $500,000 from an agency. A team of five completed the task in three months. From script to final delivery, the team owned it. No outside feedback. No bureaucracy. No opinions from people who’d never done this work. No stakeholder reviews. No Google doc comments, which are often a huge waste of time. Ideas stayed intact. Execution was flawless. Everyone was happy throughout the process.

This is how work should happen. But most organizations can’t operate like this. They need 12 meetings about one thing. More managers than makers. They’re busy performing work instead of doing it.

A portfolio should be the source of power, not a position in an org chart.

In other words, if you want to climb Mount Everest, you should listen to the person who completed the climb. Not the gear experts or YouTubers who never did the work.

When you eliminate that friction, you realize something: most of what we call “work” isn’t work. It’s theater. It’s cos-playing.

What’s Coming Next

Strip away the titles and silos. What’s essential?

Story. Articulate what you’re building and why it matters.
Pixels. Make it beautiful and usable.
Code. Make it work.
Relationships. Understand customers and market dynamics.

That’s it. Four capabilities small teams can own end-to-end.

AI is collapsing the expectations of every job.

A recent project of mine: an internal tool that gives teams clarity on problems that matter, validated through customer voice, research insights, and essential company documents. I trained it on our brand strategy and tone of voice, so it writes copy based on the validation.

The process is simple: drop a brainstorm transcript into the tool. It cross-pollinates data from sales calls and documents, then validates whether ideas were valid. Did customers request this feature? Does it address churn or resolve company misperception? Is this thing really worth working on?

I built this with five people. I sketched how it could behave. Another designer built the identity. A researcher coded a database to facilitate the quick and accurate analysis of data. Two colleagues coded it with me. When we involved a backend engineer, the idea opened up. We created an internal platform allowing anyone to develop and ship internal tools.

Small teams of experts. This is the future. Now imagine this structure across a company. The manager’s job: ensure these teams are resourced and accountable, that ideas stay intact. Then get the fuck out of their way.

Brand Design ↔ Product Design

Software development costs have collapsed. Designers and engineers can ship features in days that used to take months. Every product is at risk of being commoditized by competitors who move faster. The feature wars are over before they begin.

The only moats left are brand, craft, taste, technical advantages, and imagination.

Most companies are stuck in a destructive pattern: they see a competitor ship a feature, and immediately add it to their own roadmap. Playing catch-up in a race with no finish line. This is the path to mediocrity.

The stages every company goes through:

Stage 1: PMF.
Stage 2: Investing in features.
Stage 3: Building an experience.

Companies reside in stage 2 forever, competing on features that their competitors can copy in weeks. Breakout companies invest in Stage 3—where brand design becomes essential.

At its core, brand design is about differentiation and communicating value. It translates abstract concepts, such as “efficiency” or “security,” and makes them tangible. It’s about symbols, stories, and systems.

But here’s what matters: brand is behavior. Not your logo or illustration style. The Coca-Cola era is over. It’s how your product behaves and feels when using it. The decisions you make about what to build and what to ignore. How your company shows up in crisis. How embedded your brand is in the cultures you seek to change. The personality that emerges from a thousand small choices.

A brand must answer two questions: What do you believe? How will you behave? Patagonia has clear beliefs and behaviors. So do Coinbase, Stripe, Shopify, Cash App, Linear, and Anduril. You see it in their products, marketing, investments, and how leaders present themselves publicly.

Brand isn’t decoration applied after the product is built. Brand is the product’s operating system. When a brand truly influences product decisions, you invest in advancing your mission rather than chasing competitors. Brand strategy is ultimately the guiding philosophy of a company, compelling you to make decisions based on first principles and your core beliefs. You develop your distinctive edge instead of diluting it. You differentiate yourself through authenticity—anyone who copies you digs their own grave.

This is words to works. From story to visuals to product experience. A clear point of view—expressed in language first—inspires designers to create coherent, cohesive experiences. Marketing can make promises, but only the product can deliver them. You can’t position your way into being loved. You earn it through what you ship and how you contribute to cultures that matter to you.

I’ve said this before:

Marketing might get you known.
Product earns trust.
Brand is how people fall in love.

Product is merit. Brand is distribution. Every role or job should fit under those two teams, and they’re forced to work together. Two sides of the same coin, not 12 silos each with their own executives and roadmaps.

In most tech companies, brand teams live under marketing and rarely work with product teams. This is wasted talent. This is how you end up with talented designers stuck creating whitepapers and event booths for marketers who can’t make anything other than meeting invites, versus making the product—the thing customers pay money for—insanely great.

Every designer I’ve spoken to can do a marketer’s job, but a marketer cannot do their job without a designer. The worse examples I’ve heard are marketers who hire agencies that essentially do their job for them. There are entire teams like this flying under the radar.

I’ve led brand teams under product leadership at two companies. We still collaborated with marketing and sales, but our core focus was ensuring the brand lived in the product experience, not just around it.

Brand teams are the chefs. They determine what the brand looks and sounds like, as well as what the product feels like. This team works horizontally across the entire organization, creating systems, guidelines, assets, templates, and—with the aid of AI—internal tooling that allows others to create on-brand materials. When design is a prosthetic limb attached to marketing, you have a discombobulated organization. When brand teams align with product, you have a chance to create something magical.

Brand design isn’t about making things pretty. It’s about translating value and making it visible to people who need it. It’s about creating consistency across every touchpoint—from the first ad someone sees to the moment they get value from your product and beyond.

Here’s the reality: people don’t trust marketing claims anymore. They trust the experience and how people talk about you on social. AI search now ranks brands based on user-generated sentiment—Reddit threads, community chatter, reviews—not the marketing copy on your site. Your product reputation surfaces before any campaign you run. People talk about products that feel different. They don’t talk about products that work the same as everything else.

The gap between what something is and what people think it’s worth—that’s where brand lives. When organizational charts separate brand from product, you get a product that feels like a utility, not an experience. Or beautiful campaigns that promise experiences the product can’t deliver.

Rosetta Stone is a utility. Duolingo is an experience.

Everyone wants—and remembers—the latter.

The New Structure

Think LEGO blocks. You have people with unique strengths. They don’t fit into a box. Top talent is not one-sided. They embody multitudes.

What are the top business outcomes? What is one opportunity that solves a dozen problems at once? Assemble a small team of experts to own it.

Julie Zhou said something on Lenny’s podcast that resonated strongly with me:

“We need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles. We can drop all of these different role distinctions and call ourselves builders… We can all be builders.”

For exceptionally talented people, AI will blur the lines further. A brand designer who can prototype, code, and do motion design. An engineer who can write beautiful copy or build brand systems. A researcher who understands customers deeply and translates that into compelling copy. A marketer who can storyboard and know how to use Figma or design tools.

With small teams and powerful tools, these pods work like water. Point them at any business outcome—a broken funnel, a new product, a major campaign—and get out of their way.

Here’s the absurdity of the current model: companies conduct end-of-year planning exercises, only for those plans to flip within months. Most companies don’t know what’s six months out, yet they design rigid structures to service this dead-end.

They also fail to understand that the world and culture are changing faster than before, so your roadmaps have the shelf life of a banana. This is where dysfunction breeds, where leaders are not held accountable, and why good talent quits.

The companies that win won’t have hundred-person marketing departments with mostly managers making meetings about work. They’ll work with an entirely new structure and metabolism for making an impact.

There will be a stark distinction between mediocre companies and those that stand out in their own category. Most organizations—especially leaders and founders—don’t have this mindset ingrained in their culture. What I am proposing is too radical. They will remain mediocre, believing that all they have to do is throw money at marketing channels, and they’ll achieve ten times the growth and revenue.

It’s the equivalent of spending all your time and energy on a beautiful wedding invitation, only to arrive at a rave in a morgue. Too many companies have beautiful bullshit marketing, and their product looks like something from 20 years ago. This immediately erodes trust. There was a time when you could get away with this. Those companies are successful not because of innovation, but rather necessity, inertia, and luck.

Now the marketplace is different. And people know better.

The remarkable companies will invest in design, have smaller teams that are accountable, and retain the right experts, allowing them to outpace the competition faster than before. Because of AI. Because people are tired of the bullshit. Because people with talent will not tolerate broken structures where their talent is wasted.

Final thoughts

In those dozens of conversations, I noticed something: people weren’t complaining about their work. They were mourning the work they couldn’t do. They want to do more and be more, but the structure restricts them.

Personally, in the last year, I’ve never seen my industry change overnight so quickly. And most people are too blind or their egos too big to see it.

Every role is collapsing onto itself. Every industry is facing an existential crisis. The world is moving and changing faster than before.

I remember a year ago, everyone said designers were fucked. That our jobs would be replaced. Completely bullshit. If anything, the power of a designer just increased 10x. Their ability to code and create; their natural inclinations to learning new tools and expressing their ideas. For a long time, I heard leaders complain about how design never had a seat at the table. Now, we’re inventing our own table, our own rooms, and deciding who belongs.

I’m personally excited about the future, where the current model becomes obsolete. There are too many outdated systems that hinder progress. I want those systems utterly destroyed. I want companies that thought they were too big to fail to melt down. I want to see even better companies and stronger leaders arise from this chaos.

Bill Bernbach saw this bloat growing at his company in 1947 and wrote to the executives: “I’m worried that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance, that we’re going to follow history instead of making it... Advertising is fundamentally persuasion, and persuasion is not a science, but an art.”

He was right then. He’s right now. And he ended up leaving and starting his own venture, which ultimately became bigger than the employer he had worked for.

I’m worried that too much talent is being wasted, that the status quo will be defended rather than utterly decimated. The higher I ascend on my career ladder, the more charlatans I deal with. The average leader at a company doesn’t have the DNA to think boldly and clearly about the future, let alone build it. They’re too comfortable, too incompetent, too naive to see what’s happening in front of them.

The power belongs to those who can make things work end-to-end, collaborate seamlessly, and bring bold ideas to life. Teams that get this won’t just work faster—they’ll work with an entirely different metabolism, creating products and experiences so compelling they spread themselves.

That’s not just better business. That’s better work. That’s work worth doing.

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Nothing. No downloads. No reviews. No revenue. Just digital silence stretching like an empty inbox at 3 AM.

In July 2012, I published my second book online—eight months of heart-poured vulnerability uploaded into the void. I'd watched other bloggers ship their PDF manifestos and grow their newsletters by thousands. Mine landed with the sound of a penny dropping in the Grand Canyon.

Mortified doesn't capture it. I was failing college, broke, watching friends land real salaries in big cities while I refreshed my download stats like a slot machine that might finally pay out. This book was supposed to prove I was on the right path. Instead, it made me question everything.

So I did what I always did when confused: I emailed someone I respected. Seth Godin responded quickly and said, “Journey, not destination.”

Steven Pressfield, whose books are my bible for the creative life, actually responded even though I had never emailed him before like I did with Seth.

I originally published this as part of another essay in 2014 for 99u. His response is a piece of wisdom I return to often.

Dear Paul,

What you're feeling is what everybody feels. Start something new right away and don't look back. Don't check the grosses, don't look up the reviews on Amazon. Seth is right (I previously emailed Seth Godin and replied “Journey, not destination.”) Get used to it.

In "The War of Art," I tell the story of when I finished my first novel (after about ten years of trying and failing), walked down the street to visit my mentor, Paul Rink, and told him the good news. He never looked up from his coffee. "Good for you," he said. "Start the next one tomorrow."

My own theory is to have the next one already in progress. I like to have thirty or forty pages of the Next Book already done (and have momentum going on it) when I finish the Current Book.

It's postpartum depression, just like with a new mother. Did you read about the despair Brooke Shields went into?

Congrats to you, Paul. You did good. You shipped. I salute you. Seth salutes you. Every other member of this select club salutes you. Get drunk. Have a party. Get laid.

Then start the next one tomorrow.

All me best, mate!
Steve

With time and miles under my belt, I see what he was really teaching me. Creative work isn't a lottery ticket; it's weight training. Every project you ship is a rep. Every time you resist checking reviews is another plate on the bar. The strength you're building isn't for this project—it's for the next one, and the one after that, and the career that emerges from a thousand shipped experiments.

Here's what nobody tells you about the creative life: believing any single project will cure your restlessness, erase your doubts, earn you so much money you don’t have to be in survival mode or be wracked with anxiety in our post-capitalism world, or rewrite your story is a kind of soft egomania. It sneaks in and kills creativity before it can breathe. You see others succeeding with what looks like inferior work, and your brain short-circuits—why them and not me?

Because they're doing reps while you're checking the mirror.

After that first disaster, author Ryan Holiday gave me feedback: my writing was too high-altitude, remixing other people's ideas instead of mining my own experience. Scary advice, of course. It's much easier to copy what other bloggers are doing. He saw right through my templated approach.

I reference my friend Sean Blanda’s timeless essay and framework, The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex.

The bullshit industrial complex is a pyramid of groups that goes something like this:

Group 1: People actually shipping ideas, launching businesses, doing creative work, taking risks and sharing first-hand learnings.

Group 2: People writing about group 1 in clear, concise, accessible language.

[And here rests the line of bullshit demarcation…]

Group 3: People aggregating the learnings of group 2, passing it off as first-hand wisdom.

Group 4: People aggregating the learnings of group 3, believing they are as worthy of praise as the people in group 1.

Groups 5+: And downward….

I was in group three. This book was my first step at being in Group 1.

My third book, Connect the Dots, reached a quality I could stand behind. Jeff Goins and Holiday wrote blurbs. My friend designed a real cover. It didn't make me rich either. But here's what I learned: that book in my portfolio signaled initiative to future employers. It opened doors to industries I never imagined entering. That one small project differentiated my resume from other writers or marketers. Writing became how I navigate the world—not the career I envied in others, but the practice that taught me I could be an artist.

Pressfield mentioned having "thirty or forty pages of the Next Book already done" when you finish the Current Book. This is wise advice, like laying out your gym clothes so you can change quickly and head out the door (because that’s the hard part).

When your identity stays attached to the thing you just shipped, you become a monument to your past. When your identity lives in what you're creating next, you become momentum itself.

The mind can only focus on a few things at once. You either focus on the practice or the scoreboard, on the process or the analytics, on the weight you're lifting or the mirror on the gym wall.

Each project becomes a timestamp—a receipt of where your skill, taste, and clarity were at that moment. Your first one? Probably a mess. But that's not failure; that's the first rep. Ship the mess. Learn what that weight feels like. Add more plates. Ship again.

You ever read Seth’s post on forty years of projects? It takes decades of failures to become an overnight success…

I check my Amazon reviews maybe once a year now, just for laughs. The royalties? I genuinely don't care. The book exists. If it helps one student embrace self-guided learning, it was worth every hour. I have a folder of notes from readers who took time to send me a lovely, thoughtful note—that's my real return on investment.

The real question was never "Will this succeed?"

It was always "Will I keep going regardless?"

Thirteen years later, I understand what Pressfield meant by "postpartum depression." Every creative act is a birth followed by a necessary emptiness. That silence I experienced wasn't failure—it was the space between reps, the pause between breaths, the rest that makes the next movement possible.

Because momentum, more than talent, more than luck, more than any success, sustains a creative life. And momentum only asks one thing of you:

Start the next one tomorrow.

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I used to type The Great Gatsby word for word, page after page, at my desk when I couldn't write a single original sentence. The idea came from Hunter S. Thompson, who re-typed Fitzgerald and Hemingway just to feel world-class prose move under his fingers. It felt ridiculous. I questioned if I was wasting my time. But by the final page, something had shifted—I could sense how clean sentences snap into place, the way a pianist's fingers know where middle C lives without looking.

That grinding, repetitive friction built something no language model can download into you: muscle memory for excellence.

This is the resistance training nobody talks about anymore. The more the world automates, the more value accrues to people who continue to condition their fundamental capabilities. It's like watching a gym empty out because everyone discovered protein powder—meanwhile, the few who keep showing up, deadlifting and squatting, get exponentially stronger.

Our brains are designed to prefer shortcuts, and AI has become the ultimate shortcut dealer. GPT drafts emails while you sip coffee. Midjourney generates logos in thirty seconds. TikTok explains Stoicism in eleven slides of pastel text. The temptation is obvious: outsource the friction, save time.

But time saved is not always strength gained.

When friction disappears, so does a hidden form of conditioning. Consider what happens when you remove resistance from any training: your muscles atrophy. The same principle applies to mental capabilities. Every hard task you delegate is a rep you didn't do, a pattern your neurons didn't carve deeper.

No, really. This is on a scientific level. Consider this passage from the book, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle:

“The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Here’s why. Every human skill, whether it’s playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit. Myelin’s vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing electrical impulses from leaking out. When we fire our circuits in the right way—when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note—our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.”

It makes me think of the quote by Vladimir Horowitz: "If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip practice for three days, the world notices."

More than half of American adults now read below a sixth-grade level. Let that sink in. Half the population struggles with the cognitive equivalent of a basic push-up. How do you think they'll fare when AI-generated content floods their feeds looking authoritative but hollow? A population that skims headlines will drown in what we now call "AI slop"—the endless stream of plausible-sounding nonsense that passes casual filters.

The game has shifted. Your parents can't tell the difference between AI video and reality. My local bagel shop uses AI-generated images when an iPhone photo would work better. Anyone can look capable; fewer people can be capable.

That makes the old, slow disciplines worth your life.

Real athletes understand something most people miss: boring fundamentals create explosive performance when it counts. While amateurs chase fancy techniques, professionals drill basic movements until they become involuntary. Kobe Bryant was obsessed with the basics. The best writers still study sentence structure and write in the margins.

This is my training regimen for an automated world, a recipe for anti-slop and anti-brainrot:

Every morning, I write 2,000-3,000 words. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, so whenever someone asks me why I’m a good storyteller/presenter or how I can write 10 taglines in under 10 seconds, it’s because I put in the work. I write to think out loud, to process my life, to flip over every stone in my head. It's mental calisthenics. Some days it's garbage. But after years of this discipline, I can think clearly under pressure, find the through-line in complex problems, and translate abstract concepts into clear language.

I read fifty pages of actual books daily. Not summaries, not highlights, not audio at 2x speed. I read slowly enough to see the worlds authors paint behind my eyelids. Books lengthen your attention span the way running lengthens your calves: gradually, painfully, permanently. When everyone else's focus fragments, mine compounds.

I lift weights five days a week, focusing on the fundamentals: deadlifts, squats, push-ups, pull-ups, and kettlebells. After my Achilles surgery forced me back to basics, I rediscovered something profound—timeless movements that have conditioned human bodies for centuries work better than any trend or tool.

On weekends, I walk ten miles through the city with a camera, paying attention to beauty that algorithms can't generate. I also meet friends for long dinners, where we actually listen to each other instead of performing for screens. These practices resist optimization because they're already optimized for what matters: human connection, aesthetic appreciation, and present-moment awareness.

After years of this seemingly inefficient approach, I've noticed that if you can think well, AI becomes a multiplier. If you can't, AI just amplifies your mistakes.

The people who built strong foundational capabilities—who can read deeply, think critically, create originally—use these tools as extensions of their existing strength. They prompt with precision because they understand the underlying principles. They edit AI outputs because they recognize quality from their own hard-earned pattern library.

The people who skipped the fundamentals become dependent on tools they don't understand, producing work they can't evaluate, making decisions based on outputs they can't verify.

This is why I constantly tell designers to go to the library. Go to the museum. Look at timeless works. So much of life is pattern recognition and simulation. The richer the archive of materials you can reference, the more that shows up in your work.

Social media was level one of this challenge, and it absolutely fucking cooked society. AI is level two in this maze—the three-headed sphinx whispering promises and threats simultaneously. Many who surrendered their focus in round one will surrender their critical thinking in round two.

Scarcity drives value. Focused thought is becoming scarce.

Will most people choose the slow lane of human conditioning over the fast lane of automated existence? Probably not. But that's exactly what makes it valuable.

The hard habits follow compound interest rules. Writing every morning doesn't make you a better writer immediately—it builds a thinking apparatus that serves you for decades. Reading deeply doesn't give you instant expertise—it creates neural pathways for processing complex information. Physical training doesn't just build muscle—it builds discipline that transfers to everything else.

These inputs don't scale as fast as GPUs, but their outputs compound quietly in the background of your life.

When I close my eyes now, I can feel how sentences want to flow together, the same way my fingers found their way around Gatsby after months of conditioning. That muscle memory, built through deliberate friction, has become my competitive advantage in a world racing toward the effortless.

The resistance training nobody talks about isn't happening in gyms—it's happening in the space between stimulus and response, in the choice between easy and excellent, in the daily decision to build strength instead of just borrowing it.

The few who commit to this conditioning will find themselves uniquely equipped to navigate whatever comes next. Not because they avoided the future, but because they trained for it.

There is a scene in the television show Peaky Blinders where Alfie Solomons, played by Tom Hardy, delivers this line during a conversation with the main character:

"Big fucks small."

Hardy uses the phrase to describe the ongoing struggle between powerful and less powerful factions—the larger, influential groups always dominating the smaller ones. It's a blunt distillation of power. It’s how the world works. This truth exists in careers, politics, negotiations, the animal kingdom, and business.

Big fucks small. Always.

The Luddite’s Warning

In 1811, English textile workers organized under a mythical figure named Ned Ludd. They weren't technophobes—they were skilled craftspeople whose livelihoods were being automated. When letters and petitions failed, they smashed the machines, not out of hatred for technology, but out of fear of being erased without voice or dignity.

The British government sent more troops to crush the Luddites than were fighting Napoleon. Seventeen were hanged. The machines kept running.

Big fucked small.

The Luddites teach us something important: resistance without adaptation is self-defeat. They fought the wrong battle. Instead of learning to work with the new machines, they tried to destroy them. Instead of becoming bigger by mastering new skills, they played the short game, not the long game.

AI is the new loom—a new tool—transforming the how of everything. People protest and plead, but the bulldozer moves on. Change has arrived. Can you overcome ego or anything blocking you from being an open vessel, absorbing the world, and learning what makes it move?

Because big fucks small.

Nearly every transformative technology has sparked the same uproar: power looms, electric lights, radio, television, the internet, and AI. Workers protested, unions resisted, and industries fought back. And yet the world moved on. Roles disappeared, new ones emerged, and culture shifted.

Now, it seems, we're living through another reset. AI is changing knowledge work and how work is done by multiple people, just as the Internet did to information and connection. The barriers are collapsing again.

The new rules are being written right now

I’m watching my industry change before my eyes every day. Every new update to an LLM model is the equivalent of a tectonic plate beneath the ground shifting suddenly.

Where designers used to take months from concept to prototype, begging for engineering resources and enduring endless presentations, I'm now watching them build working prototypes in hours using tools like Cursor. This changes the entire conversation about how ideas are made, and job expectations at companies are already changing.

This terrifies people who succeeded under the current system. It should excite everyone else.

Think about photography. Once a high-barrier industry requiring expensive gear, insider knowledge, and specialized education, Instagram and iPhones democratized it faster than it took the industry to form. Many photographers shooting major campaigns today probably didn’t attend traditional schools. They built portfolios through work, not credentials. They played new rules in a new game. The old guard complained about "Instagram photographers" ruining the profession. They're mostly irrelevant now, choosing resentment over adaptation.

The big got comfortable. The small got hungry. Small got big.

The same pattern is accelerating across every industry. Yes, white-collar jobs are getting nuked. College graduates struggle to find entry-level positions (hello, my fellow 2007 graduates). Domains built on templated knowledge and documents—law, real estate, or life insurance—face seismic disruption.

Someone with a laptop, curiosity, and ruthless determination now has more power at their fingertips. They can research any topic, learn skills, build things they couldn’t before, and play a new game that involves new experiences.

The tools are here. But do you have the discipline, the curiosity to learn?

In the last year, I’ve built things with Cursor (AI Coding for my friends who don’t know of this yet) that I genuinely would never have been able to in the past. I wouldn’t have the time to learn it all. I've built a Figma plugin based on a Japanese color theory book and an app where you can edit images using cool effects. Now, I’m building something far more complex, which is pushing me to learn the language of code.

I am challenging myself to build a full-stack product requiring complex data in the backend. I will also do the brand strategy for it, the branding, the marketing materials, and develop the website. End-to-end. I’m giving myself until the end of the year to ship version 1.

At work, we’ve enabled over 60 designers to start prototyping using AI coding. Designers are having fun every day. They can now see their ideas come to life on the screen rather than just moving around frames and rectangles in Figma. Nothing is stopping them from learning new skills and weaving those supplementary skills into their core mastery.

What stops many people, I’ve noticed, is their beliefs. The story they are telling themselves about this technology. There is so much fear, so much hesitation. I’m trying to push my friends to learn this shit versus pretending like this isn’t going to change everything.

Adaptation has always been the price of survival. Technology doesn't stop for anyone who finds it inconvenient.

The Selective Outrage Problem

I know brilliant people who've already self-identified as "anti-AI" before giving it a chance. Environmental concerns, regulation fears, ethical boundaries—I get it. For what it’s worth, I do agree with these concerns.

What will it cost me if I don’t try learning these tools? Some industries might be safe in the slow adoption, but my industry is at the forefront of AI. I’m seeing and doing things that will take months or years for the general public to understand.

Let's be honest about what this selective outrage is.

The person lecturing me about AI's environmental impact also doomscrolls on TikTok for six hours, lives in one of the top 10 most expensive cities, orders GrubHub, wears Nikes, and upgrades their iPhone every year? They're not thinking about the kid in a poor country with a failing education system whose chances of becoming "big" are slim to zero.

If you pull the ethics card, especially with me, apply that scrutiny to everything in your life. Selective outrage is privilege at its worst, born from boredom and the desire to use outrage as a building block for identity or a sense of purpose. Weirdly, I am starting to see this as a unique Left-leaning identity tension.

The fact that you can even be angry about this—and that people who feel this way didn’t do research, they just read a few headlines—proves that you’ve won the genetic lottery. Congratulations: you’re among the select few million people with all the advantages in the world to become whatever you want to be and live a life that the average person will never experience.

I tell my friends with tough love: You don’t realize how lucky we are and how good we have it. Our only job is not to fuck it up. For 99.9% of the world, their focus is not to be fucked.

For what it’s worth, the early days of AI claimed to replace writers and designers. From the first DALLE-E image generation to now watching AI build entire prototypes, I will confidently say: you have nothing to be worried about, right now. It’s just a tool. It’s a black box.

Most people can spot AI writing. I don’t know of a good designer using an output from Midjourney or AI tooling straight off the press. There is editing, compositing, stitching, and much remixing going on. Even motion/animation effects cannot come close to an expert in craft and taste.

Sure, the average person will use these tools rather than hire humans. That has always happened. Website builders launched templates, and suddenly, every website was decent by default. My local bagel shop used AI images for their food, and it made me LOL.

Blaming capitalism won't save you or stop this bulldozer. Capitalism is the reason why you have the privilege of complaining, because our parents benefited from it, and because their parents suffered for it. Complaining is entitlement on display.

The worst part? It stops you from learning. It stops you from inheriting this earth. People are so online and can’t think for themselves; it’s hard to parse what you believe versus what the tribe wants you to think.

Learning is the only balm to chaos, uncertainty, fear, and change. Learning how to see, learning how the world works, learning about human nature, learning about the domain you occupy, what shaped it, and where it might go. And right now, there is a potent tool worth learning. It’s in the dial-up phase. Think about that.

I don't want to be caught off guard by this technological change because I was either too proud or too cautious to try it. Maybe in a few years, none of these tools will matter. At least I'll have given them a shot, and I will know for myself whether they were useful or not. Even if these tools are limited, I still have decades of mastery in writing, design, branding, and organizing communities to fall back on. I still know how to collaborate with others and make ideas come to life.

The Real Battle

Look, maybe I’m far more jaded than you. Growing up as a second-generation Korean American from New Jersey with repressed anger issues separates me from you. Maybe I’m tired of being blindsided or fucked over or feeling like I missed the train. I finally feel ahead of something for the first time in my career. Maybe I see writing on the wall that puts a fire under my ass to figure out how not to be poor because I’m afraid I won’t be able to take care of my family. Maybe I realize my privilege and deeply understand how the average person lives, and I don’t want to waste it. The way I grew up colored my worldview to be Default Apocalypse. Maybe I subconsciously believe that the world is too far gone and I’ve reached the point of not giving a fuck.

I see grotesque power imbalances, incompetent leadership from government to workplaces, corruption on sale, a miasma of brain rot, civility out the window, and learned helplessness at scale. Maybe the world has always been this way, and we’re just so extremely online.

Of course, there is also tremendous beauty and progress, if you know where to look.

This is precisely why you need to get big. The world will continue to get weirder, and the pace of change will only accelerate.

I know our brains weren't designed for this pace of change. We prefer eating berries by the fire to being constantly skullfucked with a tsunami of information about the endless turmoil happening around the world.

I can easily focus on apathy and let the noise consume me. I know the world is shit, that things are just wild right now. But that madness stops you from learning new skills, seeing clearly, and finding opportunities to make a difference. The system wants you to be angry and inactive. It wants you to retweet rage bait. It wants you to have an opinion about the latest media headlines that do not matter. It keeps you small, distracted, and stupid. You are nothing more than a battery to these algorithms.

The same opportunity exists today. With more great tools and abundance. The same potential. The question isn't whether you can go from small to big—history proves you can.

No one is coming to save you. Not the President, not the government, not your manager. Not some retraining program.

Learning—self-education —will save you. What will save you are the hard things: lifting weights, writing daily, reading books, having self-discipline and rituals that fuel and bolster your humanity and curiosity, and organizing gatherings for your friends to belong and see each other.

Because here's how change works: People build new things that make old systems obsolete. They don't ask for permission. They don't wait for regulations. They don't tweet about fairness. They build. Because big fucks small.

Get big so you can help the small.

Or get big so you can fuck the other bigs.

Learn as if your life depends on it.

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The quality of your thoughts shapes the quality of your work. Clear thinking gives you a fighting chance at making something worthwhile.

Shallow thinking produces weak work. It’s weak because it’s boring. Boring because no one spent time sitting with the problem, teasing apart the idea, or refining the execution. Nothing new was unearthed.

Great work demands attention. It’s interesting because there’s something familiar about it, but also surprising to some degree. It makes you want to study the details. Whenever I encounter great work, I have more questions than opinions. I’m deeply curious about how they pulled it off, whether it’s an essay, a company rebrand, a photograph, a film, or a beautiful piece of furniture.

If I feel envy, then I know it’s exceptional.

In my experience, great work feels like a heist. You can’t believe you pulled it off. You’re always looking over your shoulder, waiting for a tasteless executive or “decision-maker” to kill the project. The idea, the pitch, the team—it all came together. In 14 years, I’ve felt that three, maybe four times.

Rigorous, imaginative, clear thinking is rare.

And I believe it starts with writing.

David McCullough said it best: “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” If you can’t write your idea down, present it, or tell a story about it—you need someone nearby who can.

Can’t everyone think?

There’s a scene from Peaky Blinders I always come back to. Two brothers lead the family: Arthur Shelby is loud, drunk, and violent. Tommy Shelby is quiet, calculated, and equally dangerous. At first, it’s unclear who’s in charge. But in moments of chaos, Tommy rises. He sees the moves others miss.

At one point, Arthur panics and yells. Tommy stays calm and simply says:

I also empathize with the opposite side. Imagine you are in Arthur’s position, at your job. The ego would be hurt. “What do you mean I can’t think?" I have thoughts and ideas!”

"Two percent of the people think; three percent think they think; and ninety-five percent would rather die than think," said George Bernard Shaw.

The objective measure of whether someone is good at thinking is through writing or presenting. You probably don’t know what you’re talking about if you can't write something that moves people. And if you can’t present your vision, you didn’t think it through, or lack the confidence to own it.

Many companies fail because they don’t have a Tommy. The thinking is left to people with titles, not talent or proof that they know how to think imaginatively and strategically.

Everyone can write a sentence, but few can take a stand. Few can paint a picture vivid enough for others to see. The real struggle is having a point of view and the courage to back it up and to stand for something.

Clear thinking moves people by giving them the words they felt but couldn’t develop independently. That’s power. Clear thinking doesn’t just lend words and vision but sparks a motivation to pursue one idea instead of another.

Tools can’t think for you

These days, I see people outsourcing critical thinking. They binge podcasts. They mimic the thinking of a VP or CMO. They adopt frameworks and assume it’s a strategy. But frameworks don’t think for you. The person who created the framework thought deeply. The person copying it often hasn’t.

Most frameworks, especially those in my industry of B2B SaaS, are just microwavable, empty food. They’re the Hungry Man for the Talentless. They were born from the ZIRP era, prioritizing speed and metrics over quality and love. While some companies succeeded in using these playbooks, they failed to become a long-term strategy.

Here’s a box. Type in some words. Voila—your magical positioning statement, even though half your exec team can’t write a clear sentence. Here’s your roadmap framework. Toss it on a slide and make it look like progress. And somehow, these tactics are celebrated.

It’s nonsense.

The number of times I dealt with people who made three times more than I did but couldn’t string two words together to form a coherent thought makes you want to pull out your hair. In rotting bureaucratic organizations, the shallow thinking of the higher-ups is often permitted, which becomes the roadmap and goals, leading entire teams to weak outcomes. You reach a point in your career where you realize that every company, to some degree, is a massive shitshow. Once you get into certain rooms, believing that the adults are in there and thinking clearly, you quickly realize how naive you’ve been. The world operates on Default Chaos.

Clear thinking is threatening. It exposes bad ideas and incompetence. Your boss or the exec team often won’t see your clarity as an asset. They’ll see it as a threat. That’s happened to me more than once in my career.

Now, with the rise of AI, this will get worse. Tools can generate prose that sounds coherent. It will spit out something that smells okay. But most people don’t have the taste to know if it’s good, or if it says anything at all.

That’s the difference between thinking and having thoughts. Everyone has thoughts; the mind conjures them without us wanting it to. However, thinking is different because it forces an outcome, an artifact others can read or experience. They are changed by it.

Clear thinking is earned. Once you have clarity, confidence ensues. Clarity and confidence can enroll people in your vision. That’s what leaders do. They think clearly and tell compelling stories.

Clear thinking

Whenever a designer asks me for career advice, I always say the same thing: learn to fucking write. It’s not pushing pixels that will set you apart, but the ability to think critically, imaginatively, expansively, and strategically.

Writing to think is a sharpening stone for your creativity. It will help you see the world clearly, and seeing is not something everyone does.

Clear thinking is hard because it’s humbling. It forces you to admit what you don’t know. That’s why reading outside your domain is essential. It widens your field of vision. It sharpens your pattern recognition. You stop recycling the same stale ideas.

I think of Michelangelo:

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it... I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

Clear thinking is carving. It’s the slow removal of noise, excess, and cruft. Every creative person's job is to carve their idea to its essence. To be able to communicate it so succinctly that nothing is lost and everything is felt.

Strong ideas have an immutable core. You can’t cut any deeper. You’re left with the thing itself.

Writing sharpens your thinking. Thinking reveals your taste. Taste shapes your decisions. And decisions shape the world.

If you want to make better work, start by thinking better.

And if you want to think better, start by writing.

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Beautiful, seamless collaboration is rare enough that when you experience it, it fundamentally changes you. If you're lucky, these moments spoil you forever — recalibrating your standards and showing you what's possible when minds truly connect. The new bar for excellence becomes both blessing and curse. These experiences aren't just happy accidents. They can be designed.

I often reflect on projects throughout my career that lit me up — collaborations that pulled something extraordinary from me and pushed me into flow state. That's where any creative person needs to be to do their best work.

The outcomes were strong, but more importantly, everyone involved felt safe to be themselves — to speak up, propose half-formed ideas, and play at the edges of possibility without fear of judgment.

The Wavelength of Connection

I've been thrown into high-stakes projects with complete strangers and somehow found immediate alignment. We showed up for the same reasons, believed in the work and our roles within it, and supported each other without the typical professional power games.

What made this possible wasn't just shared goals but something more elemental — a shared frequency.

Frequency might sound like another word for trust, but it's different in crucial ways. Trust is binary and takes time to build. Frequency is dynamic — you can visualize it as sound waves or patterns in motion. In new relationships where trust hasn't yet been established, frequency can emerge almost immediately when the conditions are right.

This alignment doesn't eliminate tension or disagreement. In fact, the most productive conflicts happen precisely when there's frequency — when people operate on the same wavelength while bringing different perspectives. The foundation holds steady while ideas collide and combine. Without this underlying harmony, disagreements don't elevate ideas; they devolve into posturing. Concepts get microwaved rather than properly baked.

When I'm tuned to the same frequency as colleagues, my creativity flows without constraint. The fear of failure evaporates. There's no mental accounting of who gets credit or who's positioning for the next promotion. There's only shared curiosity and the ruthless desire to push ideas to their fullest expression — to create conditions where everyone can contribute authentically.

When the Signal Breaks

Frequency fractures when values and expectations misalign — when egos override collective purpose. The focus shifts from creating excellence together to advancing personal agendas. What was once about the work becomes about individual feelings, status jockeying, and hidden motives.

The opposite of frequency isn't discord — it's fear. Fear breeds fakery, corporate doublespeak, and the inability to have honest conversations. When frequency disappears, real communication dies with it, leaving only performance — pretending until we eventually die at our keyboards.

Language is the clearest signal of frequency's presence or absence. Genuine conversation, spontaneous banter, honest feedback, and the capacity to discuss difficult topics openly — these are all vital signs of healthy alignment.

When these elements disappear, replaced by carefully worded emails and passive-aggressive comments, you know the frequency has been lost.

Building Frequency From Scratch

How do you establish frequency with people you've never met? How do you tune into the same wavelength when starting at a new company or joining a new team?

A strong portfolio creates the foundation — evidence that you can execute at a high level. It creates a positive bias where people assume competence until proven otherwise. But technical skill alone isn't enough. If someone with impressive work turns out to be toxic or self-absorbed, the frequency quickly deteriorates. True resonance requires both competence and character.

This is where leadership, storytelling, and culture converge. A leader articulates a vision compelling enough that others want to help build it. Culture emerges from how the team moves toward that vision together. I've come to see frequency as the invisible bonds that enable unified movement, while culture manifests as the visible behaviors that signal whether those bonds exist.

I can detect frequency — or its absence — almost immediately. When joining companies, I've skimmed Slack histories that instantly revealed whether teams were aligned or fractured. Without frequency, communication becomes talking past each other, passive-aggressive positioning, and corporate jargon masking what people really mean. There's no humility, no changing of minds, no meeting in the middle. It's repellent.

The Body Knows

Job interviews are perfect frequency tests. Pay attention to your physical response during these conversations. Notice the language used, the conversational rhythm, whether ideas flow naturally or feel forced.

Are you genuinely present or performing from a script? Do you feel drawn to these people or merely tolerant of them? The body registers frequency before the conscious mind can articulate it.

Before any new professional relationship, the fundamental question is: what wavelength are we on? What do we truly value? How will we show up for each other when things get difficult?

Time invested in aligning frequency pays exponential returns, because without it, there's no foundation for meaningful conversation, let alone collaboration.

Frequency in Action

At a past job, I joined to evolve their brand identity — an organization with complex history and wounds from previous failed partnerships. Their skepticism wasn't personal; it was earned through disappointment. Most people in tech organizations have limited understanding of brand building, making change especially challenging. I knew that success wouldn't come from brilliant ideas alone. We needed to establish frequency first.

Instead of immediately presenting solutions, I spent months having conversations and creating space for people to voice their concerns. I listened for the fears beneath the resistance: that I would impose my vision without understanding their reality, make changes that disrupted their work, and then disappear, leaving them worse than before.

I responded with concrete examples and clear processes, showing where opportunities were hidden rather than claiming to have all the answers. In meetings, I explicitly invited better approaches: "This isn't about my vision and my ideas. It's about the best idea. If someone has a better approach, write it. Present it. Let's talk about it."

The presentation I gave to one hundred stakeholders wasn't just about what we would build, but about enrolling them in why it mattered — connecting our work to business outcomes and personal growth. I followed with countless one-on-ones, discussing everything from creative process to implementation challenges.

I knew frequency was developing when the most skeptical executives stopped attending oversight meetings. Their fears had been voiced and addressed. Their resistance had been respected rather than dismissed. They recognized they were working with someone who knew his shit front and back.

The project now had a fighting chance.

Within two years, this carefully cultivated frequency enabled work of exceptional quality and difficulty — work that pushed the company's vision forward and influenced every aspect of the business. What made me proudest wasn't the polished final product but the team that created it and what we collectively felt throughout the process.

The Heart of Frequency

At its most elemental level, frequency emerges from the ability to have genuine conversations. Can we talk without filters or masks? Can we discuss what troubles us, share ideas we're afraid of or obsessed with? Can we be vulnerable without performing vulnerability? Can we be real with each other?

This authentic exchange is both the foundation and the reinforcement of frequency. Real conversations can bring even skeptics into alignment, widening the circle of shared purpose.

The challenge is that this requires self-awareness and humility from all involved — qualities that seem increasingly rare in professional environments.

The deeper I go in my career, the less I see these values practiced consistently. People resort to masks and performance because that's what their experience has taught them. Perhaps they've only been rewarded for playing politics rather than doing good work. Perhaps previous vulnerability was met with judgment rather than acceptance. Now authenticity feels too risky.

The path toward better collaboration doesn't start with new methodologies or frameworks. It begins with creating conditions where people can find their shared frequency — where they can drop the performance and remember what it feels like when work transcends transaction and becomes transformation.

If you want to build something that matters, start by tuning in. Everything else follows.

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I've been thinking about fundamentals lately. An Achilles injury I carried for almost two years, living in denial, led to surgery in November 2023 — all because I didn't have health insurance at the time it happened in 2021. When I finally got a new job and coverage, I waited too long to feel secure, completely ignoring the opportunity cost of living with a missing Achilles tendon. No long weekend flaneuring. No gym. The weeks turned to months as 30 lbs crept onto my body and bad habits accumulated.

Nearly a year after surgery, walking feels new again. I must consciously consider each step — heel to toe, right foot push off versus left. There is something profound about returning to the basics of anything: our craft, routines, beliefs, or behaviors. Every athlete or artist with a consistent practice inevitably must revisit the fundamentals, usually when life or our work has strayed off course.

It echoes the wisdom of legendary pianist Vladimir Horowitz: "If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip for two days, my wife notices. Three days, the world notices."

So what are the fundamentals for a writer like myself? Tasting beautiful prose. Fiddling with words until they sing. Cultivating an ear for the music within sentences. Stretching and engaging the muscles that produce language. Observing the world with care and attention. Simple, yet arduous.

When we can't commit to the basics daily, it's a sign we're likely prioritizing something else that feels important but ultimately isn't. Distraction pulls us from what improves our craft, tempting us to seek hacks and shortcuts instead.

Publishing is a muscle, and this Substack was my attempt to re-engage it after years of atrophy. When I started blogging 15 years ago, naivety and innocence were on my side. I published like no one was reading, imbuing my writing with raw vulnerability and unfiltered truth-telling. Now, I find myself battling an internal dialogue:

"Write whatever you want!"

Vs.

"But what will people think? My boss, colleagues, or friends? Does anybody even read anymore? Does any of this matter?"

This chatter leads to blockage because those once strong publishing muscles have withered away, just like my post-injury hamstring.

Bloat is the enemy of basics. It's everywhere: the economy, politics, industries, media. Bloat is the natural progression when we lose sight of what truly matters. Print free money during COVID? Interest rates skyrocket. Over-hire at tech startups? Cue the layoffs. Succumb to clickbait for profits? Watch public trust in media sink to historic lows. Neglecting the fundamentals always has consequences.

My tattoo artist decided to learn sculpting to break free from the comfort of his tattooing routine. A few times a year, he apprentices under master sculptors in Italy, the epicenter of the world's marble. When I asked how this impacted his tattooing craft of 20+ years, he replied, "I had to throw everything away and be a student again. I relearned my fundamentals." The way he sculpts marble has completely influenced how he tattoos skin.

Artists who "throw everything away" aren't literally erasing their skills, but rather shedding the cruft that's accumulated over the years. Clearing out the fun but ultimately short-lived tips, tricks and shortcuts to uncover the timeless, evergreen habits and fundamentals. The hard stuff that takes real commitment.

For photographers who've only shot digitally, the resurgence of film has reignited those core artistic muscles: observing, anticipating the moment, slowing down, and framing with intention. Holding a film camera shifts how you see the world compared to a digital one. And with each shutter click costing a buck twenty-five, the stakes are real.

Picasso, despite his success, felt compelled to return to basics in the early 20th century. He began studying and incorporating African and Iberian art into his work, kickstarting his groundbreaking Cubist period. Stripping down to primitive forms and fundamental shapes revolutionized his art.

Miles Davis, after playing blazing bebop with Charlie Parker's quintet, stepped back in 1948 to explore a new jazz frontier. Teaming up with arranger Gil Evans, Davis assembled an unconventional nine-piece band that swapped bop's intense heat for a cooler, more composed sound with unique instrumental blends. Those sessions, later released as "Birth of the Cool", marked a crucial pivot point in jazz history and helped bridge bebop and cool jazz with a more emotionally restrained and harmonically intricate approach.

Even Georgia O'Keeffe, as her eyesight deteriorated in old age, returned to simpler forms and began sculpting, demonstrating a return to elemental shapes and textures.

If your life, work, or art feels bloated — if your mind buzzes incessantly, if you cram your quiet moments with endless podcasts with out-of-touch rich idiots who tell you how to live life, Twitter rants and Instagram Threads brain rot projectile word vomit — the solution is simple yet arduous:

Return to your fundamentals.

This is where sanity resides. This is the springboard for real progress and mastery. This is where the greats have toiled away entire lifetimes. And in devotion to their craft, they found the path to beautiful, fulfilling lives. Not because they’re more talented or lucky than us, but because they were able to stay sane. To stay focused on what matters.

You are not going backward by revisiting the fundamentals of your craft or areas of your life. You are returning again to the place that got you started. That began a journey. And by returning home, you can embark on a new one.

I am also in a medical boot because of an Achilles surgery. The injury happened two years ago, but I finally got it done. Two years of hobbling around, dealing with random back and shoulder pains, being unable to exercise intensely, or walking around the city to photograph things. Oh, I also got a random nose infection the day after surgery. The pain was worse than the Achilles recovery. Then, about a week later, an infection in my earlobe returned. Two bouts of psoriasis in a single year is a new record.

Like the screaming rice cooker, this bundle of atoms made entirely of kimchi & gabagool had a helluva year.

Despite stinky things and my body nudging me—sometimes snapping—to wake me up, I am enormously grateful. I am also sad about the world, trying to stay sane.

“Dead week” is my favorite. I read old journal entries, comb through my Apple notes, re-read entries into my commonplace book, browse photography folders, and clean up the apartment. This week is about perspective, clearing the cache (in your mind), and rest, whatever that means.

Here is a curation of some favorite photos, personal wins and lessons learned, book and essay recommendations, and what’s next.

Favorite photographs of the year

I spent two weeks with my childhood best friend and girlfriend in Kona, Hawaii. Magical is an understatement. There is genuinely no word that captures the beauty, aura, and energy on that island.

We ate with locals, swam with fish, trekked a volcano, drove up 13,000 feet to an observatory, and drank more coconut water than one’s body should absorb.

Here are some other favorite snaps

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Some wins

• Celebrating three years of love with my partner, Marta.

• Started a new role as Director of Brand at Personio.

• Achilles is healing well. I’m eating lots of kimchi and gabagool.

• Shipped this Substack and didn’t lose all of my subscribers after sending an email for the first time in three years.

• Launched the Mixpanel rebrand and didn’t get ripped apart on Brand New.

• Re-kindled old friendships. I also read many essays on friendships, which made me appreciate how I have friends of over 20+ years.

• I photographed my friend Caroline’s wedding at City Hall! Loved every minute of this experience.

Biggest lesson learned (again)

I left a job that I liked and gave my all to, and it was one of the hardest decisions I made this year, especially given the circumstances of the work my team and I did and how we accomplished it.

I have a ritual: whenever I feel like shit at my job because my body is telling me that things are wrong, I talk to like 5 to 10 of my closest friends. People at my career level and beyond. I tell them my situation fully, hoping they keep it real, and say, “Paul, you’re being a little entitled brat.”

But no, it’s usually, “Damn, that’s fucked up. You gotta get outta there.”

I try to remind myself that, sadly, this is how things are. The bar is so low in so many workplaces. It is difficult because I’ve spent my entire career reading about career successes, and just when I feel like I’m at a place where I can live that story, I get Will Smith bitch-slapped. I keep having to relearn this lesson, and I feel I’ve reached a point where I’m just numb to all of it or finally coming to terms with reality.

A top industry recruiter asked me, “Why do you keep finding yourself in places where you’re exploited and used up?” LOL. Wow. That question will extend another ten years of therapy.

This essay by Mandy Brown helped put things in perspective. She opens up about a similar situation and how she decided [emphasis mine].

“I did quit that job. And I did uncover some new devils. I’m uncertain if they were lesser or greater devils—my taxonomy of devils isn’t all that rigorous at the end of the day—but what I learned was that once you start moving, you can just keep moving. When I found a new spot that wasn’t the right place to settle, I didn’t tarry. I took another step.”

Friends have broken down in front of me because of the shattering of their naivety, their innocence. The stories and expectations they told themselves about being a hard worker and being rewarded for it, all that psyops our generation swallowed dutifully. The door is blown off its hinges, forcing you to look at reality for what the fuck it is: messy, chaotic, and, many times, extremely unfair.

No amount of essay writing will change the industry or the people making these decisions. Accountability is about as useless a word as leadership in today’s state of things. The only thing I can focus on is what is in my control. Nine out of ten companies are flaming shitshows; this I know. Trying to change how companies behave is a futile endeavor. Believing that a company will reward you for doing top industry-level work is LOL at best. Such is life.

Marcus Aurelius always has something good for these moments:

“Surrounded as we are by all of this, we need to practice acceptance. Without disdain. But remembering that our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.”

So, the biggest lesson for me is how to keep a job as a job while still doing it with the level of craft and quality that I am known for because that personal feeling and connection to the work is rightfully mine. No one can take that away, and I couldn’t stop myself if I tried. But the expectations, the grand narratives I invent about how I’ll be rewarded for being a good little worker bee increasing shareholder value… it needs to end. This is the hardest thing for me to do because 1) I’m Korean, and 2) well, clearly, there is a lot of childhood shit to unpack here.

Good books and ideas

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Freddie deBoer

This book examines history, connects the dots on various cultural events, and helps people like me understand how everything from #OccupyWallStreet to #MeToo to #BLM fizzle out. Why do passionate movements fail? Why is change so hard?

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

I only bought this because it was a Pulitzer Prize-winning book. I didn’t even care to preview what it was about. I devoured it. I loved every sentence and every chapter. A book is great when you can close your eyes and see the characters and when you absorb the story faster than you can read the words. The best part of this book? No fancy grammar. Just periods and commas. Punchy sentences. The words jumped off the page. I, of course, later learned who Kingsolver was and her legendary status. I love catching up to greatness.

Bill Bernbach’s Book: A History of Advertising That Changed the History of Advertising by Evelyn Bernbach

In an era of uninspired advertising, this book is an essential resource for creatives. Bernbach's legacy of innovation and disdain for mediocrity shines through, offering timeless insights into what elevates advertising from good to great.

The Vanishing Designer by Chuánqí Sun

This is a good essay on how the ZIRP era informed designers and companies on how they build products. Today, designers seem to make things for other designers, not customers. Everything looks the same in every app—whether you’re ordering food and groceries, hiring a babysitter, or managing your projects. It’s so sad. No wonder why techlords want to make writers and designers irrelevant with AI.

The People Who Don’t Read Books by Thomas Chatterton Williams

I love this title. Just reading it filled me up with a dozen spicy thoughts. I believe this unequivocally: reading books is one of the most fundamental ways to improve your life, quality of thinking, and actions.

I describe it to non-readers like this: your brain is software, like an operating system, that uses a set of beliefs, words, thoughts, ideas, and patterns. Reading a book upgrades the software, adding new layers of language and ideas. This allows you to think better, more clearly, and expansively.

Software is Beating the World by Ed Zitron

Ed has become one of my favorite writers who rips apart the illusions of bullshit in the tech industry. His essays are a canary in the coal mine. His latest essay helps people like me connect the dots on where the last decade went wrong due to specific ideas and players in the game. It’s a level of analysis and research I cannot do because I get too angry and lose focus.

How To by Michael Bierut

This book is inspiring because it shows the depth and breadth of one’s career. Decades upon decades of work, both in craft and range. More importantly, it shows how design is good for business, creating change, and communicating.

The Age of Average by Alex Murrell

Murrell's frustration with cultural homogenization is palpable as he decries the current state of music, film, and design. He challenges the reader to consider when and how this cycle of repetition might be broken.

What’s next

• Excited to start my new role at a new gig, stepping into a more official “leadership” position. In short, less IC work, more the other messy shit.

• Expect infrequent posts, probably once or twice a month. I’ve been writing longer pieces that require more analysis, research, and time to ensure I have a viewpoint worth sharing.

• Maybe a photobook? I envy Craig Mod and everything he does. I know this is a terrible reason to invest a lot of money and time into making a photobook that probably five people would buy, but still. I’m curious. I want to make physical, beautiful things in 2024.

If you made it to the end, then wow. I am grateful for you.

Happy New Year, stay healthy and stay sane!

An unemployed copywriter searching for a job walked into his interview at the William Weintraub agency in Manhattan in 1941. His method for creating advertising was the same as all writers before him: he came up with some copy and then passed it down to the layout department, where a bullpen of artists would whip up some “roughs” or “pastels.” The writer? Bill Bernbach.

Keywords: passed down. Writers and designers worked in separate rooms, on separate floors. This was the model of the advertising world before television when posters represented much of our visual communications.

But not at Weintraub.

Weintraub appointed a young, promising designer as Head of Art: Paul Rand. Rand, who had already received international recognition for his designs with Esquire and Direction, worked with Bernbach for a few years. Rand was expanding the edges of traditional American advertising by making quirky, witty, and visually memorable ads. Rand didn’t treat ads as a thing to be designed. He saw them as whole ideas themselves. 

Through Rand's tutelage and friendship, Bernbach’s love for language became fused with a deeper appreciation for design and the overall creative process. They visited museums and art galleries together, and Rand would point out how images paired with words would work. 

“This was my first encounter with a copywriter who understood visual ideas,” Rand recalled, “and who didn't come in with a yellow copy pad and a preconceived notion of what the layout should look like.”

The famous art director George Lois, who knew Rand and Bernbach very well, recalls:

“The seed for advertising’s Creative Revolution was planted when Bernbach met Rand at the Weintraub agency. Here was an art director who not only wrote and designed his own ads—he also didn’t take any shit from anybody. Meeting Rand, Bernbach had an epiphany about the whole creative process. He realized that advertising could be ten times better if a talented writer works with a talented art director.”

From this seed sprouted a new model for advertising agencies. Rand and Bernbach’s collaborative spirit inspired the “creative team” concept, changing the industry forever.

How ideas were generated in earlier days would be perplexing today.

The creative department had little control. It was the accounts people who told copywriters what to do. Suits … telling artists … what to do? Can you imagine? Then, copywriters “passed down” their work to the art department. It was rare for designers and writers to know each other.

Before the creative team approach, many ad agencies’ mastheads showcased the copywriters’ names only: David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Raymond Rubicam. And then in the 1950s and ‘60s, it became about the art director and copywriter combo, like Ammirati & Puris, McCann Erickson, and the agency that Bill Bernach would start in 1949 with Ned Doyle and Maxwell Dane, DDB. 

Under Bernbach’s high standards and creative leadership that united design and language to tell stories, DDB became a giant in the industry, producing ads that are still discussed today, from Polaroid to Alka-Seltzer to Volkswagen.

He proved that commercial creativity didn’t need to sacrifice beauty, wit, and grace to be effective. Advertising and design worked much better when they embraced these qualities—when they strived to be relentlessly unboring. Quirky. Imaginative. Powerful.

And of Rand? He broke the isolation between art and copy. “His sense of responsibility to the reader and his emphasis on quality and good taste” changed advertising—and the attitude of growing a business and building a brand—forever.

Has anything changed?

In 1981, design critic Ralph Caplan penned an essay calling designers "the exotic menials.”

I fear that many companies still have this attitude toward designers.

"I want finally to address in some detail, a role that I call 'the designer as exotic menial.' He is exotic because of the presumed mystery inherent in what he does, and menial because whatever he does is required only for relatively low-level objectives, to be considered only after the real business decisions are made. And although this is a horrendous misuse of the designer and of the design process, it is in my experience always done with the designer's collusion."

Sound familiar at all?

Is this how design is treated at your organization? An afterthought? A “go make me some stickers by EOD” department?

Michael Bierut wrote in 2006 about the persistence of the exotic menial, challenging whether a designer's role is any different 25 years later.

Bierut nailed it when he said…

“Yearning for the spotlight — respect from the business community and attention from the general public — has been a ceaseless, all-consuming theme of ambitious designers for the last quarter-century, and maybe long before that.”

He said this just a few years before the rise of digital applications and the boom of venture-backed tech startups. Software expanded the design world with product and UX/UI design, pushing graphic design, illustration, motion, and branding.

The path to making six figures in design is now well-worn because of tech startups. A Principal Product Designer should make as much as the top engineers and probably more than a U.S. senator. I know illustrators—yes, people who draw for a living—who make a salary that would make anyone pursuing a doctor or lawyer's path question their choices.

Read a good take here on the vanishing “visionary” designer.

“Visionary designers have lost their conceptual integrity to an industrial complex optimized for consensus, predictability, and short-term business gain. The rise of data-driven culture cultivated a generation of designers who only take risk-free and success-guaranteed steps towards the inevitable local maxima of design monotony.
[…]
Companies say they are “design-driven,” but designers are driven by dashboards filled with metrics like CSAT, NPS, CES, DAU, MAU.”)

I would argue that at most companies, yes, designers got a seat at the table… on someone else’s lap.

And the reason is because of marketing’s influence and power—its roots in advertising—and an economy that allowed for exponential business growth.

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What happened to creative teams?

Bill Bernbach said, “An idea can turn to dust or magic depending on the talent that rubs against it.” 

Looking at the history of creative teams that started with Bernbach and Rand makes me wonder: When is the next creative revolution coming? Where will it begin?

Here are a few dots to connect to understand why we lost creative teams and went into a world of marketing, spreadsheets, frameworks, and what feels like a total abandonment of good writing, tasteful ideas, creativity, and storytelling:

• Tech startups and their margins are delicious. So, a lot of money flooded into these kinds of companies, creating new demands, roles, and systems.

• For the past ten years, we lived in a “growth at all costs” mentality. This allowed insanely bloated teams inside startups and marketing to gain more power.

• Growth Hacking was the first sign of rot in the industry, born from that short-term mentality. There was a widespread delusion that you could track specific metrics monthly, pour your free interest ZIRP money into the advertising machine, and poof, you have magical 10x growth for your company. It worked for a few companies for a short time. Good ideas don’t work that way, nor does building a long-standing company or brand.

• This allowed mediocre marketers to get unmerited promotions because they could play the growth hacking game without producing anything good, useful, or interesting. This might explain why I meet many marketing executives without technical skill, taste, writing chops, design muscle, or vision. They’re good at spreadsheets, buying ads, and claiming success on their LinkedIn, saying things like “Helped grow the company 300% YOY.” I don’t hate the players, I’m just talking about the game.

• I started my career in content marketing. It was a rare time for writers to get paid a tech salary while doing what we love: researching, writing, storytelling, and talking to customers. But that road hit a dead end when growth hacking and other tactics/levers became more seductive like influencers.

• The post-ZIRP era that we’re entering will be very telling. Companies will need to think hard about how to do better org design to survive and hire people who can make things rather than having meetings about making things.

• Now, companies treat ideas like putting widgets into a box. Rather than a designer and marketer working together to make something, one team often passes a Google or Notion doc to another team to execute.

• So, what happened to creative teams? Something juicier: the internet, search engines, Google and Facebook ads, the ZIRP era and venture-backed startups, growth at all costs, IPO at all costs, get rich at all costs, exit quickly and move onto the next one.

This is how bad things are getting. Marketers are leading design teams. Big yikes. Probably because there’s a shortage of real design leadership. I believe most designers don’t want to work in-house at a B2B tech startup because of the persistence of the exotic menial. This is also why the top companies still hire brand agencies—some attempt to build an in-house agency.

The shift from creative to marketing teams happened because of tech and venture-backed startup culture. Yet, despite ample resources and far greater tools, the quality of marketing today is laughable compared to the Bernbach era. The severe lack of taste and imagination reveals this industry's breaking point, not because marketers are terrible people (I know I drill down on the industry hard), but because the game they have to play is just so fucked.

I also think this is such an interesting moment for change.

What happened to taste? Craft? Imagination? Being different?

On May 15, 1947, an ambitious and fully formed Bill Bernbach wrote a letter to the executives at the agency he worked, Grey. The executives responded too slowly, making Bill leave the agency and start his own.

His sentiment feels too relevant for today’s time—emphasis mine.

“Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too, and I don’t mind telling you I’m damned worried. I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance, that we’re going to follow history instead of making it, that we’re going to be drowned by superficialities instead of buoyed up by solid fundamentals. I’m worried lest hardening of the creative arteries begin to set in.

There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this sort [sic] or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”

[…]

It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.

He then ends with a sentiment I wrote on a Post-it that sits before me.

“If we are to advance we must emerge as a distinctive personality. We must develop our own philosophy and not have the advertising philosophy of others imposed on us.

Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art and good writing can be good selling.”

Looking at the industry I am currently in, I am astounded by what passes as writing or expressing an idea.

“We are fast!” “We are affordable!” “We are human!” “We’ll save you time!” Yeah, no fucking shit, thanks. Every company is doing all those things. Whether your product is data analytics, HR, crypto, food delivery, dog grooming, booking an appointment, or note-taking, all these apps seem to promise the same things.

Fear is also baked into everything because companies are on borrowed money and time. This is why most startups copy each other, look the same, and fear standing for something, not realizing this is why they fail. 

This is an important pattern to watch out for, especially if you’re a creative person on the career treadmill, hoping to get a free house someday.

Now that we’re leaving the ZIRP era, how things were done in 2010 will not be useful in the next decade. So many tactics and levers that worked no longer do, like content marketing (it works, just not the way it did). There isn’t free money to overhire and throw at ads for growth. You can’t hire eight people for some company side project.

It sounds like companies will need to develop taste and ideas. Ut oh.

Maybe this is too cynical, but most startup founders and investors, I think, would rather have a team of engineers to build a product, a crew of product designers to boss around, and a sales function to sell the product. Fuck marketers and designers, the whiny creative brats.

Being a design-led organization is too perplexing to the creatively illiterate executives who work in tech. They don’t understand it. They think brand is bullshit. And their job is to increase shareholder value and ensure the investors are happy. Marketing and buying ads are the easiest levers. This is not about building a long-term company. It’s about building something that gets acquired and makes the early people rich.

Expand the Creative Team

My theory?

Teams will get smaller, and the media will love writing about them. I think the next hot startups will be teams of under ten to twenty people, seemingly doing the work of 100 to 200 people. They’ll get product-market fit faster, iterate their product quicker, and go to market with fresh and original ideas that overshadow their competitors. They’ll skip the bullshit bureaucracy that so many companies are drowning in. They’ll prioritize faster, and in turn, build insanely great products.

Bring back the designer + writer combo. God knows my brain needs it because reading incoherent copywriting is painful.

Pair that with, I don’t know, two full-stack engineers and a strong director/leader who has a point of view and taste. Who knows how ideas are made and shipped.

This group can make anything possible. They can make campaigns, ads, landing pages, and experiences and help sales build material for their conversations. They can build in-product moments. They can take new features/products and go to market. You have the creative power of designer and writer combination and engineering efficiency. They are not waiting for resourcing. They are the resource. They make the ideas. They are the bridge between the product and the customer versus 12 siloes and five middle managers.

Aside from engineers and product designers who build the product, everyone else in the organization—brand and design, marketing, partnerships, community building, sales, research, and customer support—should be in service of ideas, relationships, and growing trust.

Writing it out like this seems so straightforward and obvious. But, with dozens of conversations over the years with marketers and designers at all levels at many kinds of companies, no one seems to know what to do in this post-ZIRP era.

At the heart of it? A famine of leadership and vision for the future.

I’ll channel Bernbach one last time. This statement is as timeless as his work, and I hope it is the mindset of many founders and teams moving forward.

“When we started our agency, we had in mind precisely the kind of people we wanted with us. There were two requirements: You had to be talented and you had to be nice. If you were nice but without talent, we were very sorry, but you just wouldn’t do. We had to ‘make it.’ And only great talent would help us do that. If you were a great talent, but not a nice person, we had no hesitation in saying ‘No.’ Life is too short to sacrifice so much of it, to living with a bastard.”

I’m so grateful—and amazed—we get to live in a time where we can make a hearty living thinking about images, words, stories, and ideas. Many people in their mid-thirties and forties want to keep building things, don’t have enough to retire, and rather than rotting in a stagnate bureaucratic organization, I hope mini Marvel teams assemble and change the economics of the startup world.

I write about this because I care about my fellow creatives and the industry. I don’t know if this will change anything. But writing about it at least helps me develop a point of view, and sharing it will attract others who want to live—and work—in a more creative and competitive industry, free from the dogma of venture capital and growth-at-all-costs mentality.

This game was invented, sadly, by a few players and their ideas.

It can be reinvented.

(Many thanks to Justin Seymour, Diego Segura, and Benyamin Elias for helping me think through some of these ideas.)

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Practice is more than just repetition of behavior—it’s a movement of energy that creates a fissure in us to reveal what’s within. More movement, more revelation. Among the many things we discover about ourselves when engaged in writing, dancing, or making music is how to live with meaning and intention, perhaps the most important discovery.

Legendary choreographer and dancer Martha Graham masterfully expresses this in her essay This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women:

“Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit. . . . Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.”

The last thought—“inviting the perfection desired”—is earned wisdom. How many bruised toes and turned ankles did Martha Graham have to experience to arrive at this understanding of her art?

She tells us: “Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration; there are daily small deaths.”

Despite daily deaths, she loved her craft. She wrapped up her wounds, stretched, and kept going. She knew that daily deaths were part of the practice.

Go to any art museum and notice students sitting before a master’s painting. Look over their shoulder, and you’ll see them sketching and observing for hours. They’re practicing.

The student who builds the habit of learning from the masters will inevitably, over time, find her voice, her subject, and her technique. She is practicing the skill of learning how to see. She is practicing the subtle yet vital habit of showing up—even if (and especially when) she doesn’t want to.

Every time she buys that ticket and shows up at the museum, she is “inviting the perfection desired.” That is where her Muse is.

The idea seems simple: To be a creative person, to lead a fruitful creative career, keep practicing! Keep making and putting projects out into the world. On paper, the math doesn’t get any clearer.

But when a freshly enlightened artist-to-be dares to sit at a piano, wander their neighborhood with a camera, or buy a sketchbook and some micron pens, they’ve entered a new frontier. They are no longer spectators of creativity; they’re in the cockpit, feeling the g-force that a creative calling entails.

To embrace and love that feeling is also a practice.

What gets in the way of practice?

“If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip practice for three days, the world notices.” — Vladimir Horowitz

For most of my life, I believed I didn’t have a single creative bone.

Over time, I told myself a story about how writing and reading were the two pillars of becoming a writer. The same way that exercising and practicing are rudimentary to being an athlete.

What stands in the way if practice is vital to stretching and strengthening our creativity?

Below are some real and imagined roadblocks that are helpful to be aware of as you endeavor to practice.

Resistance

Naming things gives form to the unfamiliar and gives us back power.

Everyone has a voice in their head that feeds self-sabotage, self-doubt, and self-loathing. What is that voice, and why does it show up precisely when we want to launch a business, start a non-profit, or learn a new hobby?

Author Steven Pressfield gave that voice a name: Resistance. Like an invisible energy shield between your heart and a blank document, how often have you stared at it, hoping it would write itself? Yet, a week ago, you had all the opinions and ideas in the world.

Pressfield said in his essay Resistance = Fear:

“Artists and warriors live and die by one primal emotion.
Fear.
Fear stops us from beginning our work. Or carrying it forward in the face of adversity. Or completing it when we’re so, so close.
Fear of success.
Fear of failure.
Fear of exposure.”

Practice is challenging precisely because it elicits blood and resistance due to fear, like a shark that can smell it from 1,000 miles away.

Perfectionism

Nothing else has claimed more of the creative potential of millions of well-meaning people than perfectionism. We strive for perfection because we think it is a shield to keep us safe from criticism, trolls, and being seen as a fraud.

Bullshit.

Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird, her book about writing (and about life):

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.

[…]

“Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here — and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.”

If you’ve ever wanted to create, but you can’t stand the thought of the “mess,” you might make before reaching your end goal, or you can’t fathom writing a shitty first draft (and second draft, and third draft), then perfectionism got one on you.

Lack of a ritual

Every creative person still in the game, even after both success and failure, has a ritual. They earned their achievements because they never gave up practicing and “ritualizing” their creativity. Rather than relying on sheer willpower to commit to a daily practice, they leveraged something far more powerful: ritual. A habit.

My favorite example of the importance of rituals comes from the choreographer Twyla Tharp, recorded in Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals:

“I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 a.m., put on workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirt, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.”

Artists and athletes share the same principle of creating rituals: Mark Twain wrote, standing up, facing a bookshelf, with his typewriter on top. Matisse worked from nine to noon and then had lunch; he knew he had three hours to produce his best work before his afternoon nap. Isabel Allende started all of her books on January 18th. Michael Jordan wore his college basketball shorts under his game shorts.

These are all examples of professional habits that combat the resistance and get your mind and body into a rhythm that is conducive for creativity.

Me? If I don’t write from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., it isn’t happening. I’ve got four, maybe five, hours at best to crank out a shitty first draft. It took me five years to figure this out and another five to own it.

And you can’t watch me work; you must leave the room.

Love compels us

Lastly, I want to talk about love.

You do this every day, no matter how annoying, painful, or stressful it might be. Why do you do it?

The passing of basketball star Kobe Bryant was heartbreaking, to say the least. I grew up whispering “Kobe” whenever I shot anything into a bucket. When you heard his name, you thought about his performance on the court. And if you grew up playing sports like me, you immediately thought of how hard he worked at perfecting the game he loved. He embodied what relentless practice can do to one’s craft and, in turn, one’s legacy.

I look at all creative labor in the same way. Many of us have heard from an early age that practice makes perfect. What they didn’t tell us is that the bar for perfection inches further and further away from us the more we keep practicing—that’s the point.

It makes life meaningful. And it’s a behavior that consistently opens you up to new insights about who you are and why you’re here.

That makes practice worth every hour, every bit of pain, and all the joy it may bring.

This was originally published on COLLINS IDEAS.

Artwork by Zuzanna Rogatty.

A designer I worked with recently asked me for career advice. I believed this since year one of my career and still today: the only two things you should ever focus on, no matter where you are in your career, are your character and portfolio. Both are malleable. And in the long run, they are the only things that truly matter in working with interesting people and solving interesting problems.

Character is who you are. A portfolio tells a story about what you do.

One is about mastery. The other is about reputation.

A portfolio can get your foot in the door. Character is what allows you to stay.

You can also flip this: your character gets you a conversation because of the good things other people said about you, and a portfolio validates the person behind the work.

A portfolio highlights your mastery, craft, taste, and creativity. It tells a story about what you love working on and what you’re good at. It is a body of work. Why are you showing this particular project to me? What change did you make? Did it work? It must mean something to you, and it’s my job to understand why you care deeply. What kind of work makes you light up?

Character is how you behave. Are you a learner or not? Are you self-aware or not? Are you open or not? Are you a loudmouth on LinkedIn or not?

Character is revealed over time through behaviors, not words alone. You can get a sense of one’s character through reference checks, sure. Still, real character shows itself over time, especially in adversity, confusion, and panic.

What about a college degree?

What about learning AI?

What about becoming a prompt engineer?

What about coding, writing, or graphic design?

What about working at a famous company?

What about learning office politics?

What about moving to a major city?

I’m sure some of those things might matter to some people. It’s best to focus on something in your control, which is developing a beautiful body of work with a coherent point of view and becoming someone great to work with. The rest are tactics unique to your environment, goals, and personality.

Whenever I have to hire someone or consider a collaborator, the only two things I spend my time on are portfolio and character. I can dissect a portfolio and understand what the person cares about and what they’re great at. I learn about one’s character through conversations and interactions. The rest is taking a risk and trusting the process.

Some people will look at your LinkedIn and look for a famous company on the list. A famous company signals that 1) you might be good at what you do and 2) it’s a safe bet for the employer. But I personally don’t believe in those signals anymore, no more than seeing someone wear high-end fashion and believing they have any sense of fashion. Titles and famous company logos were useful illusions in the first ten years of the startup zero-interest rate world, but this halo effect has dimmed.

The opposite is often true: working at only famous companies (especially for one year at a time) shows me that the person had a good college education and the right network that got them in the door, but they achieved nothing impressive or meaningful.

I place a strong emphasis on building one’s portfolio—and letting that be the magnet for your next opportunities and collaborators—because I see too much bullshit and smoke-in-mirror tactics in the industries I’ve worked in.

I strongly believe those who build and create, those who can write and tell stories to enroll people in a vision, and those who create the environments for makers to do their best work should be leading. But sadly, the opposite is often true. Those who can’t write/think, those who never built anything, are somehow responsible for the people who do those things.

A strong portfolio and character will most likely get you your next job.

The recruiting industry is bloated, with low barriers to entry that have caused wreckage. LinkedIn is a fucking mess. In the past ten years, tech startups gave free promotions to people who’ve never built anything or done good work. Job titles are utterly meaningless these days. You’re pushing against the tide of mediocre people with fancy titles and no portfolios. No proof of work. Yet, sadly, I see so many of these people in leadership positions at promising companies. They have all the decision-making power simply because of the titles and time spent on the job.

A portfolio is a defense against all of this bullshit. A portfolio is earned over time. Projects get added and removed. Like a bonsai tree, you trim and nurture it throughout your entire life.

Think of it this way: If you wanted to climb Mount Everest, who would you speak to? The person who made the climb ten times? The YouTuber who talks about gear? Or the oil painter who lived in a nearby town? Probably the person who survived the adventure, right? Then you can worry about gear.

For any young creative person building this so-called “creative career,” I hope the way I look back on my history and connect the dots is helpful for you. When I lacked in portfolio, I made up for it in character. When I grew my portfolio to be in the top percentage of my industry with the character to back it, the opportunities started coming to me.

I failed my way through college. Majored in Psychology but wanted a career as a writer on the internet. Started a blog and read a ton of books to be responsible for my self-education and my growth. Wrote 2,000 words a day, every day. A blog got me some freelance gigs. Small gigs led me to bigger ones. Logos on a page to signal expertise and trust.

Having a blog and a decent portfolio of writing led me to my first Content Producer job at a small startup during my senior year in college. My editor and close friend, Sean, was my reference and knew the person hiring for this role because he, too, wrote for the same publication. This was the benefit of character: displaying a hard work ethic, curiosity, desire to learn, showing up, and doing the job diligently. I was working remotely and making $68k a year, which was insane for a 24-year-old. Two years of that taught me a lot about startups, the workplace, remote work, marketing, and online writing. Got laid off because of a shift in the company.

Got lucky. Seth Godin was building a new program called The altMBA, a four-week intensive workshop for people who want to level up. The first CBC (cohort-based course). He thought of me because I attended a three-day workshop years ago and kept in touch via email. Was I considered because of my character? Probably. What was supposed to be an experiment project turned into three years of the most meaningful work of my life. Three years of building a startup, coaching hundreds of students, hiring coaches, building culture, and working with a small team. Learning endlessly. But it was time to move on. Seth Godin was my reference for a new job… imagine that?

Moved to Brooklyn. Joined CreativeMornings to lead and manage their content. Learned community building. Built a newsletter from 100k readers to 250k. Launched global campaigns with cool companies like Mailchimp, WordPress, and more. Worked with thoughtful and generous humans. Did the work of three full-time people, so I learned a fuckton. Made friends in cities around the world. It was a fantastic three years of endless learning, living in NYC, and expanding my circles. Also, I became a photographer.

A portfolio is shaping. Zoom out—this guy can write, build things, and think. Also has taste. Has vision. Can do things from start to finish.

This portfolio raised the eyebrows of a brand agency leader, Brian Collins. A thirty-minute coffee meeting turns into a three-hour conversation about the future, industry stagnation, the future of branding, and creativity. A full-time offer is on hand. I wrote the job description. I join, I lead change, I build new things, I learn authentic branding, and I contribute to some awesome projects like Robinhood, Crane stationery, Match.com, San Francisco Symphony, Clubhouse, and more. I make lifelong friends. I have a cool company on my resumé.

Why did he hire me? Because of character and portfolio. I had the skills he needed (writing, thinking, building audience/community). And because I’m a dogged motherfucker that wants to do great work.

At this point in my career, it’s clear what I love doing. I’m not stuck in one industry. I can work in any industry because every enterprise needs clear thinking, good writing, and cohesive branding. And not once did any employer ask me where I went to college.

Between all of this, I start side projects that fail, try to switch careers and fail, write books that fail, and write articles that fail. I shut down the blog I started in college—10 years of writing, poof. Gone. Bon voyage.

The pandemic fucked me up. I leave COLLINS. Do some freelance brand strategy for a few months. Because of my character, portfolio, and network, my bud Mark Johnson hits me up for a gig. A gig turns into a full-time job. It doubles my salary. In two years, we evolved the brand and shipped dozens of projects. Friends I admire are hitting me, saying how excellent the work is. This is the first time doing something of this scale in-house in a relatively short timeframe. My name is out there.

I’m getting poached. Having calls left and right. For the first time in my career, I have leverage. Leverage gives me confidence. The conversations for jobs are different. I can ask bigger and bolder questions. I can detect all the red flags and patterns quickly. I can feel, in the first fifteen minutes of a conversation, whether there’s frequency or not. I can say no.

Realize this: I am now 14 years into my career. It’s non-linear. I can’t be put in a box. This is good because it’s how I want to lead my life. It is sometimes bad because most companies want you to fit into a box. All good. I love what I do. I love the people I work with. I have it good compared to 99.999999% of the world.

If you’re wondering why you aren’t at the levels you want to be yet, focus on your portfolio and your character. Doing great work attracts others who do great work. And we all talk to each other.

Some people play a different game and collect job titles. Good for them. They figured out a gap in the system and slithered through. The tech startup world is filled with clueless, incompetent so-called “leaders” who have the title but no proof of doing the work. This sharpens your intuition for who not to work for in the future. Working with the wrong people will obstruct your career and your future. There is no greater red flag than an incompetent charlatan with a fancy title and no portfolio, no ability to write, think deeply, and tell interesting stories to set a vision. How these people got their jobs I dunno. That would make for a great best-selling book or Netflix series. The moment you realize you’re working for someone like this, run. Where I’m from, we call them fugazis.

Play the long game. Grow mastery, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, humility, and storytelling. Work on things that light you up. And if your job isn’t giving you those opportunities, nothing stops you from doing it alone other than fear. Find other people who want to build cool shit. Make things and ship them.

Because when you start living like this, other people will find you. They will want to learn from you, work with you, and connect you to their friends. Rather than playing bullshit LinkedIn games or job title games, you can choose what your future looks like when you have a portfolio. When your name is clean and out there.

Every opportunity has a cost. Will it enrich your portfolio? Will it build your character? Will you learn a lot along the way?

Character: Who are you? What do you value?

Portfolio: What have you shipped? What are you great at?

This leads to an interesting question and conversation: Where are you going?