Musings

I’ve been reading Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear . If you haven’t read it, the premise is simple…and a little unsettling: intuition is a survival system. Pattern recognition running ahead of conscious thought, processing signals that your brain hasn’t yet assembled into language yet. De Becker’s argument is that we’re all born with it, but modern life (with its demand for explainability, its suspicion of anything that can’t be proven) trains us to override it. To tamp it

I’ve been reading Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. If you haven’t read it, the premise is simple…and a little unsettling: intuition is a survival system. Pattern recognition running ahead of conscious thought, processing signals that your brain hasn’t yet assembled into language yet. De Becker’s argument is that we’re all born with it, but modern life (with its demand for explainability, its suspicion of anything that can’t be proven) trains us to override it. To tamp it d

Years ago, I was talking with a creative director at The Richards Group, the first ad agency I worked for. He’d just come back from judging a creative awards show and shared an observation that I’ve never forgotten. One of the agencies in the running was Crispin Porter + Bogusky, who had been doing headline grabbing work for Burger King. Until that point, the ambition of advertisers was essentially artistic. You wrote the best scripts. You hired the best directors. You invest