A Natural Born Attention Whore Turned Advertising Creative — I’m a man who was born a whore for attracting, keeping, and basking in other people’s attention. See how unnecessarily long I made that? I wanted your eyeballs for a few extra precious seconds. I didn’t always know this about myself. Or openly admit it. Perhaps writing my “About Me…

A Guide To Visual Solutions a.k.a. Stuff Made Out Of Stuff On the twenty-first floor of the Leo Burnett building in Chicago, I sat at my Creative Directors’ desk and waited for their critique. My Art Director and I had just finished presenting conceptual sketches for an ad campaign. The…

Grammarly is for grammar, right? Well, that’s how they got me. After a short time, I found Grammarly to be oh-so-much more — even more valuable than “Clippy,” that old Microsoft assistant. After two years of tracking, Grammarly has become my tool for measuring my weekly output, evaluating my habits…

Between 2017–2020, I worked on one of the most rewarding experiences of my life as a writer/content creator/wordpress developer. That experience was volunteering to update the Surfrider NYC website in New York City. To update the Surfrider website, I personally kept updated on all events surrounding the Williams NESE pipeline…

Agree for Sapiens as a book-reco, and there's so much more to say too! Sapiens is the "history lesson we deserved but never got" as one commenter said. The beginning of the book was especially fascinating. When we often refer to "Hunter Gatherers", I'd previously thought of the Hunters living…

Remember in the movie Office Space when a restaurant server, Jennifer Aniston, gets berated by her manager for not wearing more “flair,” a.k.a. pins on her uniform. I too waited tables at T.G.I.Friday’s during their golden era of flair. …

Many people, including strategists, account executives, brand managers, and CMOs, work together to make a decision on what a brand should say. But how that message is spoken is when writers get the chance to shine. Like a jeweler, writers have many different tools for a project. Each tool has…

#1: Sentence subjects are like jabs — quick ones set up knockouts. Readers like a quick start. They like it when your words land easily and can be followed without confusion. Keep the subject of your sentences reasonably short. Less than six words can be a good limit. This helps readers get to your verb faster, which tells them what action is…

Have you listened to This American Life episode, “Fermi’s Paradox”? The show followed David Kestenbaum, a producer with a PhD in particle physics, as he unpacked his sadness about the interstellar mystery. However, where the conversation ended up isn’t quite so far, far away. Here’s a bit of background. Ira Glass This…