Content about everything

A creative writing professor of mine wouldn't allow you to begin reading your stuff to the class unless he was fully satisfied how much you thought about your title, that it accurately announced the purpose of your work, and that it made sense to him. He was the worst professor I ever had.

In a closer attempt to capture my imagined purpose here and to continue to appease that old professor still, I considered the title "Verify you are human". I settled for one equally inaccurate and untrue.

Sorry professor. I thought about it and I'm reading to the class anyway.

There it is--every time I look at my banking app. The checkbox asking me to do so is so inert and smiles without irony, as if it doesn't have the time to truly understand, as if it will somehow know in the way that I check it whether I'm being truthful or not.

Thank you for being one of my loyal 12 readers on this platform and so consistently staying with me to paragraph 5 while indulging me our little 7 minute conversations. Being part of this elite group, you've already signed up for a meandering journey and to a point in my articles being hard to find, if available at all.

Among my 2025 resolutions I will now be doodling on something like Substack, if for nothing else than to not have to force fit a title back to something work related. Though going forward I can't promise a selfie from a plane on my way to a really important conference, or a one sentence headline that becomes painfully accurate, I do promise that future things from me here will be more focused and educational around the company I represent, the markets we are in, the opportunities and challenges we face. I will move these flighty, indulgent self-purgings over to somewhere more expecting of such things.

But before I do that and before I check my balance, as always I wanted to thank you for the conversations along the way. While writing I'm quite sure I've pictured you personally, hoping to spark that singular smile on a cold day with coffee as you get ready to actually work, hopefully achieving my low-bar goal of distracting you from getting started. "To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it." (Bogost originally (I think) and, more recently and definitely, Zevin)

I so embrace and value the 12 of you (if you're #13 please exit quietly now) as I love how intimate the conversation can be. I can be sure you're here because you want to be, that you would have left if my tone is off, and I can now strive to take on the challenge of keeping you to the end.

I'm fully confident that a content generation engine could spit out much better stuff, generate titles that really hit the nail, make a professor contently smile, better follow style conventions, avoid run-ons, create an onslaught of phrases even better than freedom within "our tiny skull sized kingdoms" (Foster Wallace), but I only increasingly care when I see the speech delivered to an audience glowing in the moment of shared experience and when the phrase in fact does come from an imperfect skull sized kingdom.

So as I carefully prepare to check the box, I think of the proof I might need to gather to defend my assertion. I think about...

...how we uniquely scream so loudly over digital distances while looking silently at elevator floors.

...how, only for us, if feels impossible right now to be content with one sentence bullets flying so relentlessly.

...how we alone can create content so hateful and so lovely and so emphatically disagree on which is which.

...how we can be so very nostalgic for authenticity that we choose leaders who so openly steal their ideals.

...how we struggle with the balance of truth and order and seem so quickly willing to relent on one as soon as the other seems at risk. (Yuval Noah Harari, with Casey changing the sentence and adding a few words)

...how we can worry about attribution clearly being at risk, how nothing will seem original anymore and how it's only important now from whom we steal.

...how we can use content both as a weapon and a shield in a battle between the two that was never supposed to reverberate this loudly.

...how we can uniquely create titles that are both true and false and that have nothing to do with what's next.

...how we alone can interpret whether words in titles are nouns or adjectives and appreciate how wildly the meaning changes based on that outcome.

...how we can have a conversation with an author in our head, at our own pace, in our own words.

...how as we write we get to engage an unseen audience, fully hoping and expecting that they think back.

...how only we can acknowledge that it is our responsibility to consume, not only create, the best content possible.

...how the care we take in 1-1 conversation should translate to communication at any volume.

...how only we can make shared experience an antidote for outrage.

...how we alone can cry when we're immeasurably happy.

...how it's probably impossible to put words together in a new way but how we should always still try.

I'm very thankful to this platform for connecting me to you. I'm so thankful to be at this point in my career (hey kids, things actually do get clearer the more crowded the rear view mirror becomes) where I can reflect on so many great conversations and appreciate that it's not the volume of content but the continual refinement of themes, allowing me to grow my own point of view to share back with you for further refinement. And so it goes...

Whatever I do next in relation to you (start or grow a friendship, continue to collaborate, compete honorably), I thank you in advance for that next talk, I thank you for what you already have taught me and I assure you I'm always ready to learn more. Our mutual success is assured by things we'll surface in that conversation, in words very much our own.

And, my dear friends, check the box with care. It's the evidence you bring every day that will forever remain our true competitive advantage.