Last week, I was in the bathrooms of a fancy club in Nairobi. While I was taking a piss, a guy confronted me:

“Do you know who I am?” Umm, no, sir, I do not know who you are. “I’m a banker from Hamburg.” I am very happy for you. I bet you’re an excellent banker from Hamburg.

Then I tried to leave the bathroom and he cut me off.

Eventually, I moved past him and he followed me. He tried to cut me off multiple times for at least ten minutes until I asked some friends to get me out of whatever was happening.

They surrounded me and he backed off only to sit and stare at me for another 30 minutes. It was as if he wanted to deal with whatever internalized racism he felt and whatever racism he had dealt with in one night by following me around drunk, telling me how good he was, and two days before Christmas. Or perhaps he likes men. I couldn’t tell.

A few days later, I was in a different club, and another guy sat down and watched me for an hour. He moved around the club - upstairs and downstairs - to watch me. Luckily I was with friends who knew people but I still don’t even understand what was happening.

In fact, last week, I had bad interactions and verbal altercations with several people. Obviously, I am the common denominator but, as I speak to more people about Kenyan culture, I realize that there are things in Kenyan culture that cross my boundaries.

Like, if you stare at me, if you bring up money and I don’t know you, if you don’t react to situations in a way that I’m used to, if your face is too stoic that I can’t read it, or if your friends watch me from a distance, then my alert system fires and I confront or I leave.

I travel to bad places in which one broken boundary could lead to a very bad situation.

These sorts of drama-filled moments remind me of what a lot of agency people speak to me about.

“I have this client. And they do this and this and this. And I really don’t like it. How can I change them?”

Chances are you won’t.

The bigger question is this:

“How can I attract more of what I want?” As in, “How can I attract clients who want what I do and how I do it?”

Strong questions show you how to answer them. So how do you answer this question?

1. You work out what you want to do, and
2. You work out how you like to do it, and
3. You work out what kinds of clients you want, and then

You put this into public and force people to make a strong decision.

What do you want to do?

When I first left Corporate America, I thought I wanted to do workshops and workouts. I was the workshop guy. I was used to being wheeled out around the USA to conduct meaningless workshops. Sure, I liked the idea of working quickly and not getting stuck in bureaucracy, however, I ran a few workshops I was unhappy with and so I offered them less and focused on doing the strategy work by myself as well as a little training.

How do you like to work?

I like the concept of M.R.E. - Minimum Required Effort. As in, what’s the least I need to do to make the biggest impact? Not, “What’s the least I need to do?”

Most clients I’ve worked with - The Economist, Euronews, Twitter, Decoded, and more - have had a lot of data. Some have even had a lot of agencies. But many would say, “We have all these agencies and all these strategy decks but there’s no clear strategy.”

So I sat down and thought, “How do I like to work?”

• I like interviewing people.
• I like coming up with provocative strategies.
• I like sharing my thinking in informal ways.
• I like working with senior decision-makers.
• I like writing.
• I don’t like making long decks.

So my “process” was simple:

• I’d write a discussion guide or two,
• I’d interview 10-40 people,
• I’d digest the client’s existing research which was rarely very useful,
• I’d write a research debrief,
• I’d develop different strategies,
• I’d share the strategies on single pieces of paper,
• I’d write strategy stories (one-page strategies),
• I’d print the strategy stories out and put them on boards if the client was in New York or I’d simply share them.

What kinds of clients do you want?

The challenge with any kind of strategy and creative work is that most clients don’t know how to buy it.

This is why when someone says to me, “I really want to work with start-ups,” I ask, “Are you sure? Because start-ups often don’t know how to use what you do for them and the CEO might want to author it and it could all come undone because they share your hard work with their romantic partner who has opinions.”

When I was consulting more, I was fortunate to attract clients who knew me and who would ask: “How do you get to your best work?”

I was fortunate to attract clients who had some idea about advertising agency work. And, if they didn’t, they didn’t try to get in the way.

I was fortunate to attract clients who saw the weird things I did on the Internet and still thought, “Oh, we should work together.”

There were CMOs who wanted their internal and agency teams to write less boring strategies. There were CEOs who were building businesses as acts of self-expression. And there were other leaders who had worked with agencies and just wanted that - “big agency thinking”.

I’ve found small business owners difficult to work with. I’ve found early stage start-ups difficult to work with. I’ve found people who are not a little strategy-literate difficult to work with. I’ve found narcissistic leaders difficult to work with. I’ve found interagency teams difficult to work with and life is too short.

But note my use of the word “found”. Building a business and a life is an act of discovery. You make decisions. You place bets. You go through the adventure. Then you work out what you want more of and less of.

What Do I Want To Attract More Of?

I don’t want to attract strange men in clubs. I don’t want to argue with people because I don’t understand “Send Me Money” culture. I don’t want to ask someone what on earth is happening when their face doesn’t react through hours of conversations.

So how do I do this?

• I tell the universe what I want.
• I learn about the cultural nuances that I’m taking personally.
• I make better decisions.

And this is what I have just done in this article.

Follow me on Instagram @markpollard.