Culture

Good Marketing helps others become who they seek to become by giving them a place to belong in. Marketing, since its inception, has been making great use of status, which is humans’ constant effort to move up and down the ladder. And there are essentially two fundamentally different ways to do this. The first is by tapping on people’s need to dominate: to be smarter, prettier, more powerful. The second is by giving people a place to belong. Which one will you choose?

“Being authentic” is one of the most used phrases when it comes to branding. But what is “authenticity”? If authenticity is “the revealing of one’s true self” then, then, perhaps a better question would be 1. Is there ever a true self?; and 2. Do people even want to see it?

Originality sounds like a noble pursuit because all great thinkers appear to have been original. But is that true at all? If more of us acknowledged that originality is a flawed and over-glorified concept, the more we would feel safe to create. Our job, our mission, is to improve the familiar.

Ever noticed how the linguistic conventions of photography are tacitly embedded in an ideology of photography as a form of hunting? We load, check the viewfinder and shoot, and photographs seem to be our “trophies”. If we stop seeing photography as a form of “taking”, then we can begin to leverage photography’s healing power as […]

We “take” a photograph. We “snap” it. We “shoot” it. Whatever the case, we seem to hunt for it, because, all of the above are nothing but hunting terms.

I strongly believe in generosity as the cornerstone of being of service. Generosity is one of those transactions that can be easily misunderstood. Generosity is not offering things cheaper. This is not the kind of generosity I am talking about. Generosity is a the act of giving a finite resource you possess to someone else without expecting anything in return. With no agenda, except to delight and offer a better alternative.

Nothing makes me happier than reading a great book – unless it’s the chance to talk to other people who’ve loved that book as well. Here is my list of my 2021’s favorite reads.