Warning

 

The White House wants a sign at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History warning visitors that its exhibits were created by people who "don't want you to love your country." The claim is that the museum has been captured by a "radical, activist ideology" and can't be trusted to tell America's story honestly. In other words, politicians with agendas should decide which parts of history you're allowed to see.

But a museum with exhibits about slavery doesn't want you to hate America. It wants you to see America. The real one: complicated, messy, remarkable, inspiring, and impossible to understand by looking away.

Loving a country isn't the same as refusing to look at it. If anything, pretending the hard parts never happened is a far greater insult than putting them behind museum glass. You don't honor a nation by editing its memory. You honor it by trusting people to see the whole picture and decide, for themselves, what kind of future deserves to be built.

Mind the Gap

 

Every successful person is basically an iceberg in a designer suit. You get exposed to a sliver … just the surface: the title, the portfolio, the rehearsed introduction. You see the sum total of what they feel safe presenting.

What we see is the part they’ve learned to display. What we don’t see is the slog.

We don’t see the job they took because rent doesn’t barter with dreams. 

We don’t see the night everything fell apart and they kept going anyway, because the alternative felt like drowning in slow motion. 

We don’t see their losses … the ones that shrank them first, then, eventually, made room for something else to grow. 

We don’t see the  constellation of tiny, paper-thin, fleeting, easily missed wins that kept them from quitting.

Most people’s “overnight successes” are built from years of bleary predawn mornings, oddball mentors who showed up at the right hour, moments of luck that could’ve gone another way if the universe had sneezed, and the kind of stubbornness that borders on fictional.

When we encounter them out in the wild … shiny, confident, wearing accomplishment like a well-fitted sport coat … we forget all of that. We assume ease. We assume clarity. We assume they were born on third base and woke up already stretching for home.

This habit of seeing only the surface is potentially dangerous. It tricks us into comparing our internal draft pages with someone else’s final-print edition. You don’t see the similarities in your struggle, when you're only exposed to (or focus on) their highlight reel. And there’s no faster way to feel like you’re failing at a race you didn’t know you entered.

No one gets where they are by coasting. They get there by pushing through the molasses-thick patches of everyday life, by dragging yesterday’s version of themselves uphill until something finally gives. They get there through heartbreak, through dead ends, and by stubbornly pushing forward every time the universe said, “Nope, not now.”

So the next time you meet someone who seems impossibly put-together, remember this: There’s a whole basement beneath that living room. Being human is a long, winding apprenticeship. No one gets certified without bruises. No one grows wings without first lugging around some astonishingly heavy bones.

Don’t compare the tip of their iceberg to your total existence. It’s psychological self-torture … a recipe for misery that keeps you focused on what you don’t like about yourself and your life.

Default Setting

AI is stealing something important from us. It’s ruining wonder.

In the past, if I watched a video of someone doing something extraordinary, I’d think, How did they do that? Or I'd see a video of a brave dog rescue another animal and be happy that life occasionally produces stories better than fiction.

Now my brain interrupts with a different reaction: "Is this AI?"

Instead of enjoying the moment, my brain starts fact-checking it. Every incredible photo, every unbelievable performance, every heartwarming moment now arrives with an invisible disclaimer: Proceed with skepticism.

That's a loss.

Of course, AI didn't invent fake things. Photoshop has been lying to us for decades. But AI has made doubt so cheap that we spend it on everything.

Sometimes a breathtaking photo is the product of a photographer who waited six freezing hours for the right light.

Sometimes a dancer is actually that good.

Sometimes a dog really does something that reminds you why people don't deserve dogs.

We used to assume something remarkable probably had a remarkable explanation … years of practice, ridiculous talent, dumb luck, or the weirdness of being human. Now, thanks to AI, suspicion is our default setting … and our lives are diminished because of it.

Not Gonna Change

 

I like short sentences. I like lists of three. And, yes, I love me an em-dash.

Apparently, those are all “AI tells” that’ll make an Artificial Intelligence detector flaps its little wings and sound an alarm: Beep beep - suspicious human AI use detected.

Cute. But I didn’t build my voice in a prompt window. I built it in drafts. In meetings. On deadlines.

I earned my word scars. And now I’m supposed to stop writing how I write because some detector wags its algorithmic finger?

Nah.

I’ve been writing professionally for a long time. Long enough to know what works. Long enough to know what’s mine. Long enough to know I’m here to connect with readers, not impress a robot.

If a machine thinks I'm a machine, that’s not my problem, that’s a design flaw. File a bug report. Tell tech support the human has too much rhythm. 'Cause I'm not changing. Not gonna write like a middle-school book report to make a silicon hall monitor feel safe.

I was here before the detectors. Before the red flags. Before the breathless warnings that creativity might be “generated.” I write like this because it’s how I think. I’m not gonna scrub the fingerprints off my voice.

I write with teeth. And breath. And the occasional verbal middle finger.

If that trips your digital tripwire? Good. Means I’m still weird enough to be human.

And I’m not gonna change.

Not for detectors. Not for flags. Not for whatever robot snoop evolves next.

And if that’s a problem for the robots, fuck ‘em. I’ll be over here … typing with intent, smirk fully engaged.

PS Here's proof that Shakespeare used AI to write his plays:

_________________________

Check out my song: Spot the Bot (The I Miss My Em-Dash Blues)

Schedule your hardest work when your brain is strongest.

 

My most productive writing times are 7am to 11am and 4pm to 6pm.

Those times have changed over the years, but I’ve consistently enjoyed about 6 highly productive hours a day. Sure, I’ve had to grind out work outside those hours. I’m a pro and can get the job done well any time, anywhere … just maybe not in peak efficiency.

So I try to schedule my most important, highest priority work into that time frame I know I’m at my best. And recharge during “off” hours.

How ‘bout you? Have you figured out where your productivity “sweet spot” is?

________________________

The story behind "Crank It Up To 11"

The Future That Expired Before It Arrived

 

In 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta. A bold move.

The name Meta came from “the metaverse", an idea from dystopian novels of a place where people escaped from a hellish real world. And the move was based on a simple idea: the future would happen inside headsets. We’d all wander into a glossy digital elsewhere while the real world quietly smoldered in the background.

Mark Zuckerberg seemed convinced this was where life was headed: goggles on, reality optional.

Now that whole push toward virtual reality has mostly… evaporated. Not dramatically. Not with a cinematic collapse. Just a slow corporate shrug, the way trends usually die …fading like a New Year’s resolution.

What fascinates me isn’t that the bet failed. Big bets fail all the time. It’s the speed of it.

The company renamed itself after something that was supposed to be the future… and that future never managed to become the present. It skipped straight to the past. It promised disruption, but ended up speed-running obsolescence.

There’s something oddly perfect about a tech company doing that. The tech industry worships the future so intensely that sometimes it trips over it, face-plants, and accidentally invents nostalgia for last week.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are still just using our phones to text people and watch cat videos. Reality, stubborn as ever, refuses to go out of style.

Battery Panic

Modern batteries come with dashboards, warnings, and color codes ... your phone practically files a missing persons report when it hits 20%.

So kids today don't experience battery panic. Real battery panic. The 1980s kind. The scavenger hunt kind. The panic that drove you to check other devices to see if they had a fresher pair to steal.

Back then, batteries were household currency. Your quality of life was dictated by AAs and they were always in short supply. The Walkman ate them. The Game Boy ate them faster. Music dragged. Flashlights dimmed. Toys became haunted plastic bricks. And every smoke detector in America seemed to wait until 3 a.m. to announce its dissatisfaction with your battery management system.

Every house had a supply of new batteries rolling around in a kitchen drawer alongside pens with petrified ink, keys to long forgotten locks, and rubber bands fossilized into strange geometric shapes. But along with the fresh batteries were a handful of batteries too dead to trust but too alive to throw away. You never actually knew how much power was left. There was no way to tell them apart, so you’d grab a handful and test them in three different devices before you got the power back or admitted defeat.

That uncertainty is unacceptable today. Now we just plug our phone in before bed and wake up to it fully recharged. The whole thing happens quietly while we sleep, like technology tucking itself in for the night.

Kids today will never understand why my entire childhood felt like a combination of a low-grade energy crisis combined with a desperate treasure hunt.

Technology Isn't the Threat

AI didn't make us lazy. It just handed our laziness a power tool.

But is it removing busywork or removing the work that actually teaches us something?

It's easy to have AI generate 50 ideas instead of wrestling with one on your own. Easier still to ask AI what customers want instead of having a conversation with actual customers. The shortcut feels productive because the output arrives instantly. But output isn't the same thing as understanding.

What can be lost in the process is judgment, which grows slowly, through repetition, dead ends, and the occasional spectacular mistake. Sure, AI can help me move faster, but it can't hand me the instinct that comes from doing the work. Experience has a habit of charging tuition before it hands over wisdom. AI can skip the line, but it can't waive the fee.

The people getting the most from AI don't seem interested in replacing their thinking. They use it the way a good mechanic uses better tools … not to avoid knowing the engine, but to fix it faster.
Technology isn't the threat. Outsourcing curiosity is.

The moment I stop asking why and let the machine answer questions I never bothered to think through, I'm not saving time. I'm giving away the one thing that was mine to begin with: my judgment.

Who won the 2026 World Cup?

 Most people will name the team.

Some might mention David Beckham.

10+ sponsorships. 

$25+ million payday. 

Not bad for someone who didn't kick a ball in this year's tournament.

Nicely played, Sir David.

Nicely played.

_________________________

When the dust clears:

For Beckham: He's found a way to sell the same face over and over. Brilliant asset management.

For the Brands: They think they're buying Beckham's credibility, when they're mostly paying to reinforce Beckham's fame. There's a name for it: the Vampire Effect. The celebrity walks away with all the attention, while the brand quietly fades into the background. You remember Beckham. The logo? Not so much.

The Result: An asset stops being distinctive the moment it's rented out to everyone else. If Beckham is selling everything, he isn't a signal anymore. And while he's building Brand Beckham every time his face appears on a screen, the brands (unless they've locked down exclusivity) may just be paying to increase the value of someone else's brand while slowly diluting their own.

Will Working for Yourself Deliver the Freedom You Crave?

 

People romanticize the idea of working for themselves. As if you hand in your notice on Friday and wake up on Monday as your own boss, sipping coffee in a sunlit home office, answering to nobody.

It's a lovely story, but that's not how it works. It leaves out the part where your business quietly moves into your head and refuses to pay rent … even when you're technically off the clock, it's still following you around, scratching at the back of your mind.

In reality, it takes years of chaos, bad decisions, lucky breaks, and figuring things out before you earn anything resembling freedom.

Working for yourself is hard. So is working a 9-to-5, raising kids, staying healthy, and keeping relationships alive. So is pretty much everything worth doing. Life isn't divided into "hard" and "easy." It's divided into things that are hard for reasons you choose, and things that are hard because someone else chose them for you.

So if you decide to work for yourself, and if you’re successful, the hard work you pour into your business will eventually give you something back: Freedom … but perhaps a different kind of freedom than you originally imagined.

Not freedom from responsibility. Freedom to decide which responsibilities are worth carrying.

If you're lucky, and stubborn enough to keep going through the messy years, the scales eventually tip. The business stops feeling like a fire you constantly have to put out and starts behaving more like a well-tended garden. It still needs attention, but it doesn't demand your soul before breakfast.

Owning a business isn't the shortcut people sell online.

It's just another difficult path.

But, if you're like me, it'll turn out to be the one worth taking.

_________________________

If you are a marketing writer who wants to be self-employed, check out Why Going Freelance Might Not Be the Best Fit for Every Marketing Write useful information to use in your decision-making.

Was this written by AI?

 

“No AI was in used this.”

Every time I see this, I think: okay… but is it any good?

It’s presented like a virtue. A signal: “This came from a real human, the old-fashioned way.”  I get it. It’s meant to signal something: purity, effort, humanity. Like buying bread from someone who insists it was made “the old way.” Which sounds nice, until you realize the old way also produced a lot of very bad bread.

“Human-made” has never been a quality guarantee. I’ve read plenty of human writing that felt like wading through wet cement. Being human is a good starting point, but it doesn't stand alone as a credential. 

Saying “no AI was used” is a bit like a chef bragging they didn’t use a recipe. That could mean mastery or it could explain why the soup is disappointing. The method isn’t the meal.

Lately, though, we’ve gotten fixated on the method. People scan paragraphs like they’re counterfeit bills, looking for tells. “Too many em-dashes.” “Too structured.” We’ve reached a point where writing clearly might get you accused of outsourcing your brain.

This argument isn’t really about tools … it’s about ownership. If something can help you think, shape an idea, sharpen a sentence… where do you end? That question makes people nervous. So we draw a line. “This side is me, that side is the machine,” and we stand there like we’ve secured something important.

But the "this is me" line was always a bit of a fiction.

Because none of us create in isolation. We’re not as original as we feel when we’re typing. We’re stitched together from things we’ve read, arguments we’ve had, phrases that stuck, ideas that rattled around long enough to feel like our own. We’ve been remixing other people’s thinking forever. The only difference is that it used to happen slowly enough to feel like invention instead of assembly.

That said, I don’t think the “No AI” crowd is entirely wrong. There is something real they’re trying to protect, even if the slogan is clumsy.

You can feel when a piece of writing has friction in it. Not bad friction, human friction. The kind that comes from someone actually wrestling with an idea instead of just arranging it neatly. A sentence that almost trips over itself because the thought behind it isn’t fully settled yet. A paragraph that reveals the writer changed their mind halfway through.

That stuff matters. It’s the difference between writing that’s merely correct and writing that feels lived-in.

None of that, however, is guaranteed by the absence of AI.

You can write something painfully hollow all by yourself. You can also use tools and still produce something sharp, strange, and unmistakably yours. The presence or absence of assistance doesn’t map neatly to depth, originality, or meaning. It’s just not that clean.

So when I see “no AI was used,” it feels less like a meaningful signal and more like a kind of virtue shorthand. A way of saying, “trust this,” without actually earning that trust on the page.

And readers, in my experience, are less interested in your process than you think. They’re not sitting there awarding points for purity. They’re asking much simpler, much harsher questions:

Is this worth my time?  

Does it say something I haven’t quite been able to articulate? 

Does it sharpen a blurry thought? 

Does it make me pause, or laugh, or argue back in my head?

If the answer is yes, nobody cares how you got there. If the answer is no, the fact that you suffered through every word unaided is admirable, I guess. But it doesn’t make the reading experience any better.

Slop is slop. Handcrafted slop is still slop.

Maybe the more interesting shift would be this: instead of obsessing over whether something used AI, we get better at noticing whether something actually thinks.

Because that’s the part that’s getting rarer. Not humanity (there’s plenty of that) but genuine, engaged thinking. The kind that doesn’t just glide from point A to point B but leaves a few scuff marks along the way.

Tools will come and go. People will keep drawing lines and defending them. That’s what we do when something new shows up and rearranges the furniture.

But I keep coming back to the same filter:

Not: “Who wrote this?”

Not: “How was this made?”

Just: Is it any good?

Everything else feels like reading the label instead of tasting the food.

Ready?

Writers, if you’re gonna hit SEND with deliverables, you’d better be ready to get hit back.

That’s the deal. You don’t get to bask in your own cleverness and then fall apart when someone red-pens your baby. Every headline, every tagline, every CTA is fair game for getting picked at. Questioned. Rewritten. Maybe even ripped to shreds.

And that’s not cruelty. That’s the job.

Be prepared to defend every decision you made, but don’t dodge critique ... sharpen your next draft with it. 

Every red mark is proof you’re in the arena, not watching from the stands

Piggly Wiggly

 

Every time I walk into a modern supermarket, I have the vague sensation that I’m participating in a very polite psychological experiment.

Soft lighting. Strategic fruit displays. Twelve brands of the same oat milk arranged like they’re auditioning for a minimalist design magazine. And somewhere, silently judging me, a row of protein bars that taste like sweetened drywall but promise health, energy, and, in some ways, moral superiority.

Hard to imagine, but before 1916, you couldn’t wander a grocery store making questionable life choices next to the frozen waffles. You walked in, handed a clerk your list, and waited while they retrieved your food like a polite, edible library system. Sometimes they suggested things. Sometimes they judged you. Mostly they controlled the flow of the entire experience.

That was shopping.

Then along came Clarence Saunders, a grocery wholesaler in Memphis who apparently woke up one morning and thought, ‘What if we just… let people touch things?’ A radical notion. Borderline chaos. The retail equivalent of letting toddlers run a city council meeting.

Everyone thought he was ridiculous. Competitors even ran ads mocking the idea, which is comforting in a bleak sort of way. History shows that whenever something genuinely new appears, the first public response is usually laughter followed by panic, like someone spotting a chimp on an airplane.

Saunders opened his store anyway and gave it the deeply unserious name Piggly Wiggly, which sounds less like a business and more like a children’s book character. When people asked why he chose the name, he basically said, “So you’d ask”. Which, honestly, is better branding logic than most million-dollar startups manage today.

But the name wasn’t the real disruption. The layout was.

Customers entered through a turnstile, grabbed a basket, walked down aisles, saw clearly marked prices, picked whatever they wanted, and paid at the front. No middleman, just you, your list, and your impulses.

It was the first self-service grocery store in America, and within a year, Saunders was franchising. By 1923, there were more than a thousand of them.

Which means one slightly stubborn man rearranged how an entire country bought food. Not with new technology. Not with an app. Just by removing a step everyone assumed was necessary.

That part fascinates me. Because we live in an age obsessed with adding things. More features. More layers. More dashboards explaining other dashboards.

Saunders did the opposite. He took something away. And in doing so, he quietly invented impulse buying … the economic engine of late capitalism and my personal weakness around dark chocolate covered almonds. When customers had to walk past every product, they didn’t just buy what they needed. They bought what looked good, what felt comforting, what whispered, “You deserve this,” in the gentle tone usually reserved for bad decisions.

He even put candy at checkout, which is either genius merchandising or the earliest documented form of emotional manipulation, depending on how recently you’ve tried to parent a six-year-old.

The wild part is that today we’d call this “behavioral design.” We’d build a conference around it. Someone would write a book with a bright orange cover and a subtitle containing the word habit.

But a century ago, it was just a guy rearranging shelves and trusting human nature to do the rest.

That’s the lesson hiding under the nostalgia and the oddly named store: real disruption isn’t always about inventing something new. Sometimes it’s about noticing the invisible friction everyone else politely ignores.

And friction is everywhere right now.

We’ve built digital lives filled with tiny clerks: algorithms suggesting what to watch, what to read, what to think, what to want. Helpful, efficient, and faintly suffocating. Like being wrapped in a very soft, very intelligent blanket you didn’t ask for.

Convenience, we’re told, is the highest good. Faster. Easier. Smoother.

But Saunders’ story makes me wonder if we’ve misunderstood the assignment. Because convenience isn’t just about removing effort. It’s about deciding which effort matters.

He removed the clerk, but he added wandering. He removed waiting, but he added choice. He removed control, and accidentally created temptation.

That trade-off feels more honest than most modern design, which tries to erase effort entirely, as if a meaningful life should feel like scrolling through a menu that never ends and never quite satisfies.

Maybe the real rebellion now isn’t building smarter systems. Maybe it’s noticing where the friction is doing something useful: The pause before buying. The silence before speaking. The boredom before an idea. All the uncomfortable little spaces where thinking actually happens.

AI "Tells"

With everybody lathered up over detecting indications that AI was used in everything posted or published, I'm considering adding a quick parenthetical aside every time I naturally use a phrase or punctuation that signals AI use. How does this sound?

The things that used to signal craft — clarity, rhythm, structure — things you’ve been doing for years get rebranded as artificial. (Damn,  I've used an em-dash, another AI "tell")

 

You're so dumb ...

 

Back in the day, ex-partner and mentor Tom Dombrosky and I had a major client who liked to “hold court”, bringing in his management team and us (his “advertising team”) together for a weekly discussion on sales and marketing in his massive, richly appointed office.

He was one of our biggest clients, so we would dutifully show up, sit quietly, nod, and take notes as he pontificated, rarely letting anyone else speak unless they where being called out for what he liked identify as “a dumbass move that made me wonder what the fuck he was using for a brain.”

He liked Tom and me and we were seldom targeted except to back up his calling someone out by turning our direction and saying something along the lines of “Dumb as a Pollack, huh, Dombrosky?” There was no reason to respond. He was too busy laughing at his “joke”.

He was a self-centered, know-it-all bully. But we needed the billing and the prestigious name of his business on our client list.

During one of these “meetings”, Tom caught my eye and then looked down at his notebook where he had written: “If his brain was dynamite, there wouldn't be enough to blow his nose.”

I almost laughed out loud … which would have been a major faux pas by drawing attention to myself, thus setting myself up as a target.

Next week, I did the same to Tom with: “Does his asshole ever get jealous of the shit that comes out of his mouth?”

So it became a weekly thing where we would each prepare an insult that we’d use to try to make the other laugh at an inopportune time.

That was a long time ago and I can’t remember all the insults we traded … but I do know how to search the internet … so … here are a bunch insults reminiscent of those Tom and I used to share via pen and paper back in the pre-digital days:

• I see you’ve set boundaries between yourself and common sense.
  
  
• You have a unique way of speaking that makes people truly appreciate your silence.
  
  
• I truly admire your courage to speak in the vast absence of knowledge.
  
  
• You possess a mind that is completely unburdened by the complications of thought.
  
  
• As an outsider what’s your view on intelligence?
  
  
• You bring everyone so much joy when you leave the room.
  
  
• I'd call you an idiot, but that would be an insult to idiots everywhere.
  
  
• Your brain must feel so lonely, with all that empty space to itself.
  
  
• You should get two paychecks. One for what you’re worth and then another one to bring you back up to minimum wage.
  
  
• Wisdom is chasing you but God blessed you with speed.
  
  
• You look so much smarter than you are.
  
  
• You’re the type of person who would climb a glass wall just to see what was on the other side.
  
  
• I love that you don’t let facts get in the way of your opinions.
  
  
• I know you tried your best, that’s what makes it so disappointing.
  
  
• It is very hard to underestimate you.
  
  
• I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.
  
  
• Intelligence is chasing you, but you are faster.
  
  
• I love how committed you are to your limitations.
  
  
• You look like the answer to a question nobody asked.
  
  
• Anytime I think I am failing in life, I remember that you exist.
  
  
• I’m trying to understand your point of view, but my frontal lobe is developed.
  
  
• Besides the obvious, what would you change about yourself?
  
  
• You look like you get paid by the mistake.
  
  
• I envy the people who don’t know you.
  
  
• I wish I could bottle common sense and prescribe it to you in pill form.
  
  
• You’re a walking reminder that thinking is optional.
  
  
• Your learning curve must be a circle.
  
  
• A douche of your magnitude could cleanse a whale’s vagina.
  
  
• I’m trying so hard to see this from your perspective, but I can’t seem to get my head that far up my rear end.
  
  
• I brains were measured in cotton, you’d have enough to make a tampon for a flea.
  
  
• You're proof that evolution can go in reverse.
  
  
• You have so many talents that no one would think of wanting.
  
  
• If ignorance is bliss, you must be the happiest person alive.
  
  
• You're not the dumbest person on Earth, but you'd better hope that person doesn’t die.
  
  
• Whatever you're thinking, stop. It's not helping anyone.
  
  
• You're living proof that even natural selection takes a day off sometimes.
  
  
• Some drink from the fountain of knowledge. You just gargled.
  
  
• Your train of thought doesn't seem to have a station.
  
  
• You have such a unique way of misunderstanding things.
  
  
• I'd explain it slower, but I'm afraid we'd both die of old age first.
  
  
• It must be so peaceful inside your mind.
  
  
• I can explain it to you, but I cannot understand it for you.

• The acoustics in your head must be amazing.
• 
  
• You're the human equivalent of a participation trophy.
  
  
• If stupidity were a currency, you'd be a billionaire.

• It must be so freeing not to be saddled with the burden of comprehension.
  
  
• I don’t want to argue with you and have to explain all the big words I have to say.
  
  
• Somewhere there’s a tree out there providing you oxygen. Find it and apologize.
  
  

Are we teaching our kids to memorize or to understand?

 

How to survive the classroom: grind through a textbook and try to memorize just enough to survive the next test.

The classroom doesn’t prepare students for the real world. Because the real world doesn’t hand out standardized exams.

Outside of school, success isn’t just about recall … it’s about understanding. If you have to memorize something, chances are you don’t really understand it yet. And when you truly understand an idea, memorization is a by-product, because you can use it, explain it, and apply it in new situations.

_________________________

NOTE: Don’t blame teachers. If they’re evaluated and paid based on standardized test scores, the system dictates the outcome: teaching to memorize, not to think.

When Things Were Allowed to Just Be Things

 

The other day I tried to read an article online and got interrupted by a pop-up asking me to accept cookies, subscribe to a newsletter, disable my ad blocker, create an account, and verify that I’m not a robot.

I wasn't surprised. It feels about right for the era. Everything now requires a password, an app, a subscription, or a small surrender of dignity. We were promised technology would simplify life. Instead it turned ordinary activities into airport security … and makes me long for simpler times.

I don’t think I’m nostalgic in the way people usually mean it. I’m not sitting around polishing a jukebox or wishing we still used telegrams. Half the old stuff was inconvenient, ugly, or smelled faintly of lead paint. But I do miss a time when the world had less insulation between you and ordinary life.

You bought a thing and you owned the thing. End of relationship.

Somewhere along the line we stopped letting things simply exist. Your television wants software updates. Your smart watch is disappointed in you. And everything comes with an app or login screen, like we’re all trying to enter a mediocre nightclub managed by a password prompt. Simplicity has left the building and now every purchase is an experience, a platform, a brand, a pipeline, or a personal journey.

Maybe that’s why the world feels exhausting. Nothing is allowed to be quiet anymore.

I miss when things were allowed to just be things.

6 Tips for Marketing Writing That Doesn’t Suck

We’ve all seen it. That Frankenstein monster of corporate “content” stitched together from jargon, buzzwords, and the tears of unpaid interns. It lumbers across the internet, moaning things like “synergize your ROI streams” and “facilitating growth opportunities.”

And … we close the tab.

Don’t be that writer. Nobody wants to read a white paper that feels like homework. If your marketing copy doesn’t make people yawn, scroll, or punch their monitor, you’re already ahead of the pack. Here’s how to keep your words alive, awake, effective, and maybe even fun.

1. Write Like You’re Talking to a Human (Preferably One You Like)

Pretend you’re explaining your thing to a buddy over beers. Not a boardroom. Not a hostage negotiation. A buddy. If it feels like you’re writing a eulogy for software, stop. Start over.

Shortcut: Literally write, “Hey [friend’s name], did you know…” and then just let it rip. You can delete the “Hey Steve” later, but that tone? That’s the good stuff.  

2. If You Wouldn’t Say It In a Conversation, Torch It

Do you actually say words like “utilize” in real life? No, you say “use.” The second you start sprinkling in “facilitate,” “robust,” or “synergy,” you sound like a malfunctioning TED Talk robot.

Bad: “We facilitate growth through innovative strategies.”

Good: “We help you grow with smart strategies.”

One sounds human. The other sounds like a ransom note.

3. Read It Out Loud (And Cringe Accordingly)

Your brain lies to you. It tells you that your 34-word sentence is smooth jazz when really it’s a Yoko Ono interpretive interlude. Read it out loud. If you trip over it, your reader will too. Rewrite until it feels like something you’d actually say.

Before: “Our team leverages cross-platform synergy to maximize ROI.”

After: “We make sure your brand shows up wherever your customers are, so you get the most bang for your buck.”

See? Less “leverage.” More life.

4. Stop Marathoning Your Sentences

A sentence should not feel like a triathlon. If you’re gasping for air halfway through, your reader’s already gone. Break it up. Short. Punchy. Done.

Before: “Our new app offers a range of features designed to streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and ensure optimal user satisfaction by delivering seamless integration across multiple platforms.”

After: “Our new app helps you work smarter. It streamlines workflows. It boosts productivity. It plays nice with your other tools.”

See how much easier that is to swallow?

5. Bring Yourself to the Party

People don’t want to talk to a brand. They want to talk to you. Opinions, stories, jokes … whatever makes you sound less like a voicemail from Comcast, use it.

Boring: “Our customer service team is always available to help you.”

Better: “Got a question at 2 a.m.? We’ve got your back. Our support team basically runs on caffeine and panic.”

Your personality is the difference between “eh” and “hell yes.”

6. Kill Corporate Buzzwords

Buzzwords are marketing’s cigarette butts. They’re everywhere. They stink. And they make you look lazy.

Trash: “Let’s circle back on that low-hanging fruit and leverage cutting-edge solutions.”

Treasure: “Let’s talk later. We use the latest tools to get the job done.”

Simple. Clear. And you won’t make your readers throw up in their mouths.

 

Good marketing writing isn’t about sounding smart. It’s about being clear, being human, and, dare I say, not sucking. Write like a person, cut the crap, and remember: nobody’s ever said, “Wow, I loved that brand’s synergy.”

Now get out there and make words people actually want to read.

Curbing Creativity

 

Most people don’t have a creativity problem. They have an approval problem.

You can watch it happen in real time. Someone starts to say an idea out loud, then suddenly edits themselves mid-sentence like they’ve got a tiny corporate lawyer living behind their eyeballs. “Well, maybe that’s stupid.” “This probably wouldn’t work.” “Forget it.”

The idea barely made it out of the driveway before getting pulled over for inspection.

Which makes sense. Modern culture trains people to become aggressively reasonable. Schools reward the right answer. Offices reward the safe answer. Social media rewards the fast answer delivered with the confidence.

Meanwhile, actual creativity is messy as hell.

Good ideas often arrive looking slightly stupid. They wander in incomplete ... making weird connections, asking inconvenient questions. And people kill them early because nobody wants to sound foolish in a culture obsessed with optimization.

So we edit too soon -- filtering while generating and judging while exploring. Because everything now has to sound optimized, validated, scalable, monetizable, and preferably summarized into a carousel suitable for posting on LinkedIn.

The irony is that originality rarely comes from people who are always certain. It comes from people willing to sit in ambiguity a little longer. People who can follow a strange thought without demanding a business case after thirty seconds. 

This looks suspiciously unproductive to people addicted to metrics, but the smartest people I know are rarely the quickest to declare certainty. They poke at ideas instead of immediately trying to win with them. And I believe that this is more of an advantage now than ever before. Because the world is filling up with polished sameness. Perfectly optimized content that is clean, efficient, frictionless, and dead on arrival.

The people who still matter creatively will be the ones willing to look a little foolish before they look correct. The ones who can resist editing every thought into compliance before it has a chance to breathe. The ones who may initially appear inefficient, but, when the dust has cleared, will be celebrated for their effectiveness.

Fortunately, Dav was not a very good listener.

Dav Pilkey’s “Captain Underpants” books have been translated into more than 37 languages with more than 90 million books sold worldwide.

Independence Day

 

July 4th: the day Americans collectively decide that freedom is best celebrated through grilled meat, minor explosions, and aggressively themed paper plates.

This time of year, every commercial starts the same way: soaring eagle, acoustic guitar, waving flag. Then a pickup truck drives through a wheat field in slow motion while a gravelly voice whispers: “This Independence Day, celebrate the American spirit.” Apparently, patriotism now comes with zero-percent financing and a free cooler.

Then there're the furniture and mattress sales. “LIBERTY SAVINGS EVENT!” You've gotta admit that nothing honors the founding fathers quite like financing a recliner until 2032.

And the food ads. Every burger on a backyard grill gets filmed like a cinematic masterpiece. Dramatic close-ups of ketchup dripping in slow motion like it’s a historical reenactment turn burger commercials into a patriotic documentary. And hot dogs. Why are hot dogs the official food of freedom? Why? Can we please find something that says “land of opportunity” better than mystery meat tubes consumed outdoors while balancing a paper plate on your knee.

And why are fireworks always sold in roadside tents that look one gust of wind away from becoming national news? Nothing inspires confidence quite like buying explosives from a folding table next to a handwritten sign that says: “MEGA COBRA DEATH ROCKETS.”

Also, can we discuss patriotic clothing? Every store expects me to buy star-spangled pants and shirts that say things like “RED WHITE & BREWS” or “PARTY LIKE IT’S 1776,” which is historically concerning because if we actually partied like it was 1776 we’d all die of dysentery before dessert.

Still, there’s something wonderfully fun about it all. Maybe it’s the collective agreement that for one evening we’ll all stand outside together, swatting bugs and looking upward while the sky explodes in patriotic glitter. Or maybe it’s just the cold beer. Hard to say.

Happy 4th of July, my fellow overheated freedom celebrants.

Now excuse me while I go spend 150 dollars on sparklers and bottle rockets … and assure my wife that no parts of the house will catch on fire this year.

Is AI learning from my writing or am I learning from AI writing?

 

Our writing is heavily influenced by what we're reading. We’ve always absorbed language from whatever we consume: 

• Read enough good writers and your sentences sharpen up. 
• Hang around surfers and suddenly everything is “gnarly.” 
• Spend six months on LinkedIn and your brain starts formatting thoughts into bullet points.

So, of course, reading enough AI-generated text has its impact, too.

Many people now spend their workday marinating in AI-assisted writing without really noticing it. Emails. Reports. Slack messages. Blog posts. Meeting summaries. Half the internet suddenly sounds like it graduated from the same customer service academy.

Consider the word delve which use to live primarily in fantasy novels and TED Talks. Now it’s everywhere, along with meticulous, comprehend, robust, and all the other strangely polished vocabulary that AI models love to spray around like scented disinfectant.

And it's not just impacting our writing. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute studied hundreds of thousands of hours of podcasts and YouTube videos and found that words generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude tend to favor are showing up more in human speech too. 

This feels both fascinating and dystopian.

Obviously, nobody wants to sound like AI ... but I’m not sure people realize how hard that’s becoming when AI writing is increasingly the majority of what we read.

It's a predictable loop: AI learned from us. Now we’re learning from AI. It’s like photocopying a photocopy until the edges blur.

The words don't really bother me. I understand that language changes. It always does. But the flattening is concerning.

Everything starts sounding optimized. Smoothed out. Sanded down until there’s no splinters left. Human writing has personality. Odd rhythms. Unnecessary detours. Now everybody communicates like they’re trying to pass a brand safety review.

Maybe this is just what happens when language gets filtered through machines built to avoid risk and maximize clarity. But clarity alone is overrated. So is polish. A lot of memorable writing is memorable because it limps a little.

Anyway. I’m trying to resist becoming a statistically probable sentence generator myself.

Though apparently I should stop saying “apparently.” AI loves that one too.

The Creative Brief

When an assignment is ready, the copywriter needs a proper creative brief. The creative brief is a template document that provides the critical information the writer must have to complete the job. It should include:

• The working title
• A 2-3 sentence overview of the purpose of the content
• A description of the target audience
• An explanation of what action the reader should take after reading it (specific call/s to action)
• The high-level talking points
• Additional secondary talking points (if applicable)
• Links to supporting research (if applicable)
• Keywords (if applicable)
• Approximate word count

A solid creative brief gives the writer context as well as specific instructions for creating the piece. The test of a good creative brief: if the editor, client, or company leader looks at the finished piece and says, “This is exactly what we wanted!” the creative brief is a smashing success.

Creative brief tip: Listen to the writers

Companies seldom if ever roll out perfect creative brief templates the first time around. However, by listening carefully to questions from the writers after they receive the brief, you will spot weaknesses; that is, things that are not clear.

 

I Miss The Mess

 

I miss when disagreeing didn’t feel like a freaking divorce.

You know, back when people could argue about anything -- God, ghosts, or whether Green Day sold out after Dookie -- and nobody needed a therapist afterward. When “you’re wrong” didn’t sound like “you’re dead to me.” You just disagreed, rolled your eyes, and moved on to splitting a pizza afterward. 

Back then, disagreement had texture. It was messy, human, and slightly exhilarating … sort of like a mosh pit for ideas. You’d go in swinging, come out sweaty, maybe missing a metaphorical shoe, but alive ... and maybe, just maybe, it would change something small in the way you saw the world.

Now every conversation feels like a hostage negotiation with emojis. Everyone’s treading on eggshells, smiling through their teeth, terrified that a single misplaced opinion might get them blocked, canceled, or excommunicated from the Church of Mutual Validation. The whole thing’s gotten sterile. Safe. Beige. Like everyone’s scared to leave fingerprints on anything.

I miss the mess.

We used to play with ideas. Now we handle them with tongs and rubber gloves.

I miss when words had weight but not explosives strapped to them.

I want the texture back. The push, the pull, the beautiful awkwardness of not seeing eye-to-eye. Conversations where everyone’s a little uncomfortable but walk away going, “Hmmm…”

I want the “hmmm.” Because that “hmmm” is the good stuff. That’s the sound of a brain stretching. That’s the soul of conversation.

I don’t want to live in a world where we all nod politely through life like bobbleheads at a stoplight. I want to argue with my friends about aliens, AI, and whether pineapple belongs on pizza (it does, fight me), and still share the pizza, pineapple or not..

Not everything needs to be resolved. Sometimes it’s enough to just wrestle with a thought together, scuff it up a little, and walk away still liking each other.

So yeah, I miss when disagreeing didn’t feel like a divorce. When conversation was a playground, not a courtroom. When being challenged didn’t feel like being erased.

We don’t need to win all the time. We just need to stay curious, stay kind, and feel safe to stay at the table when it gets uncomfortable.

So, let’s bring back the mess. Let’s argue, question, laugh, push, listen, and still split the pizza. Because maybe the best conversations aren’t the ones that make us right. They’re the ones that make us think.

Let's bring back the mess.