planning notes

A reasonable companion to a beef, though my feeling is that if you’re going to eat more than just a sandwich, why not eat two sandwiches? At least that way you’ll die a hero.

Creative Research in Utero

I'm very grateful to be alive, even though I know a lot of dead people.

You and I live in a culture that thinks its pitiable to work in a job that lacks intellectual or artistic fulfillment, but which relentlessly mocks people who try to make it into the jobs that do. Someone who files TPS reports all day is a sad drone; someone who goes to grad school, writes a screenplay, or tries to break into acting is pathetic, pretentious, and bound for failure. We have steadily erased the unhealthy American ideal of Career-As-Self and white picket fences, but we haven’t replaced them with anything that most people can do. We just come up with more ways that you can be a loser. We’re best at that.

"The good organizations are great at having an informed opinion by constantly going out and meeting their customers, reading what they read and doing what they do.

The essential difficulty in creating strategy is not logical; it is choice itself

The only thing brands seem to want to tell me is that impossibly attractive people smile when they use their brand.

Consensus decision-making, in which everyone’s opinion is carefully sought out and somehow miraculously weighs the same, is all too often the norm.

“It is the pure arrogance of the newly rich and the newly powerful to think content is easy.”

Of course, the dark side of any trend is that once it’s identified, it’s too late to prevent the good aspects of it from being sucked into a black hole with the rest.

Visual images are not so much representations of (a single) meaning as they are generators of (multiple) meanings.