I think the reason that templates work so well is because they give you confidence and clarity even when you feel unconfident and confused.

That’s when I came up with my best idea yet. I emailed everyone who said they were interested at 10pm, asking them to call me the next morning at 7am. Only one of them did.

If you don’t know what you want to accomplish, spend some time today thinking about it. If you do know where you want to be, but don’t know how to get there, spend some time working backwards from your goal.

Daniel Pink keeps a plastic toilet on his desk, to remind himself to flush away silly mistakes. This is inspired by one of the best to ever play softball, Jennie Finch, who also kept a tiny plastic toilet in the dugout for her and her teammates.

You can eavesdrop on me and my cousin’s conversation on Instagram DM, if you like.

If you meet someone who works at a brand that you want to work with, what’s the next step? Ask for their email? Send a cold pitch? Ask what their marketing goals are? No.

So when I’m on YouTube, and Paramount shows me a two-minute trailer for their new movie, I’m willing to watch it. I’m on YouTube to watch content like that anyway, so now I get to see something interesting, and then I get to watch the video I wanted to watch. But when Toyota shows me a 15-second, highly produced ad about their summer car sale, I skip it. I’m not there to see content like that.

After the first day of shooting, I got to my hotel room, opened my laptop, and sent emails for two hours. I immediately got flashbacks to 2019. Pre-producing one project, while producing another, while post-producing a third. It’s a lot.

One of the downsides of pursuing intense focus is that your whole world can begin to seem like it’s just one thing, all revolving around the project.

He learned quick, worked hard, and treated everyone he met with respect and kindness. That’s what garnered this compliment from my photographer friend. I was struck by how simple and powerful that description was.

Maybe you’re in a similar spot. Maybe you’re working hard at two things. Maybe you wish you could fast forward a few years, or quit your day job, leave your boss on read, and put it all on red.

The next step is to show up to the places where success happens. And to show up as often as the successful people do. That’s what designing a trajectory looks like. And, just for the record, getting magically discovered as a prodigy by a record label (or a movie studio or a publishing house) isn’t part of the trajectory. That’s just daydreaming.

Do you have the Sunday scaries? You know, the rising tide of stress and anxiety that creeps up as the sun goes down on Sunday evening? The feeling of dread for Monday morning, for all the things that you’ll have to do, for all the mistakes you might make?

We’ve seen villains spruce up ad campaigns for years, most notably with Allstate’s Mayhem character. Recently, the villain-based ad campaign has been pretty popular, with Jimmy John’s, Little Caesars, and Mint Mobile introducing their own villains.

Life gets boring. There are two options when this happens. Switching your focus to something new, or deepening your interest even further.

I gave myself a pep talk in the shower today. I told myself that success this week depends on short bursts of immense focus.

If you stop to think about it, why wouldn’t you read reviews? The goal of advertising is to get inside the mind of the customer. To listen to them. To understand what inspired their purchase, and to use that in your marketing.

I’ve written about this framework dozens of times, and I’ve used the framework for clients hundreds of times. Its nothing new to me, but I wanted to give another shout-out to this framework because it recently helped me navigate a medium I was inexperienced with.

After a serendipitous meeting at a baseball game, Keith explained his creative blocks to me. I knew exactly what he was going through. I explained the Creative Sprint to him, a process that helped me publish a blog for over 300 days in a row. Keith and Em put it into practice, and finished lyrics for their band’s next Ep that same week.

Marriage was always drawn up as this monumental thing. And if our personal investment in it is any indication, it is indeed important. But it doesn’t negate any other corner of life.