In December, 2025, I flew from Nairobi to Abuja. Three months before, I had no idea I would even come to Africa. Then my first time in Kenya slingshotted me to my first time in Nigeria.

I passed through one of the worst airports I’ve ever set foot in. It’s in Lomé, Togo. Few electronic signs or televisions worked so it was difficult to know where to go. The lines made no sense. The loud speakers spoke over each other so it was impossible to hear anything. But I don’t blame the workers for this. These sorts of issues are usually due to a systematic failure of leadership. And, having watched how airports and airlines in the USA have monetized themselves by monetizing the pain they can cause travelers, it’s obvious that, when things work badly, it’s because someone has a vested interest in things working badly.

Abuja is the political capital of Nigeria. It’s an hour flight north-east of Lagos, Nigeria’s heaving heart. I was there to train the team at Rage Media in one of the best events I’ve ever been a part of. And I was the event.

After reaching the front of the immigration line, I was told I needed to fill in an arrival form. So I hurried into a room off to the side and smiled nicely for the local bureaucracy. With my form completed, I was now the only person in the immigration line. A tall, uniformed officer took my documents to see that I had them then asked me to give him money.

I haven’t had cash for months because my bank cards are all expiring while I’m on the road so I said I had no money and he waved me through to the people who needed to stamp my passport. Two guys took interest. They smiled, looked at my wrists, looked me up and down, asked me where I was from, then they let me through.

The team at Rage took care of me in Abuja and, later, in Lagos. They said the checkpoints can be difficult but I didn’t know what they meant when they said this.

I was only in Nigeria for three nights but people in uniform seemed to think that they deserved money for doing nothing. My hotel security asked for some food I was carrying. At the security checkpoints, we didn’t get asked thankfully but I think that’s because of whom I was with.

Then, as I left Lagos, I had to deal with more than thirteen people at the airport. Seven of them asked for money.

There’s no reason for Lagos airport to be like this except that someone has a vested interest in it being like this. Someone will intercept you as you walk to check in then ask you for money because they told you where to go. Later, you have to deal with all these separate people who do not need to be in the airport at all - one looks at your passport, another checks your exit visa, another asks if you’re carrying currency, then you walk past airport workers who ask for money, but the weirdest one was just before I boarded the airplane, a uniformed officer patted me down and repeated the pattern: “Where are you from? You have USD? Now you give me USD?”

I ignored him and he said, “Are you okay?”

But it led me to this thought: Nigeria seems set up for shakedowns.

My strategist brain never turns off. I’m constantly collecting patterns–hopefully with less paranoia than what I now feel after the past year of travel–then trying to name them. If you speak to me, my brain will listen for sentences like the one above.

This is an example of the strategist’s mind outside of the brief.

And you can see it on display on national Nigerian news here.

Here are other strategist behaviors that you can use outside of your dayjob:

1. Strategists turn patterns into ideas

Ideas combine at least two topics in novel and useful ways:

Topic A x Topic B.

My Nigeria experience lead to the idea that Nigeria is designed for shakedowns.

Topic A = Nigeria Topic B = Designed for shakedowns.

Ideas create new meaning. They get us to see the world around us differently. This sentence attempts this.

Another sentence I was told about Nigeria is this:

Nigeria is Africa on cocaine.

Topic A = Nigeria Topic B = Africa on cocaine.

A lot of strategists are good at finding patterns but strategists are strongest when they can turn the patterns into ideas.

Every slide of a research debrief, a trends report, or competitive review is stronger when an idea leads it. Dumping observations on people isn’t useful. Turn the pattern into a thing.

2. Strategists turn research into stories

I see a lot of decks. Most struggle to find a voice and point of view. Most dump information in decks as if the more information a deck contains the more important the deck is.

If you can focus on turning patterns into ideas then you can remove observations that do not support the idea because they become noise.

What’s more, you can turn your research into stories.

Since Colombia in June, 2025, I’ve written 40+ lyrics. I then play with them in Suno. I listen to people’s stories and I have my own adventures and then I turn them into songs.

For example:

• What If Never is me replying to a student who had a brief romance in Mexico and asked, “What if I never feel that way again?”,

• Man For What deals with stories and research I come across to do with a lot of heterosexual women being fed up with men, and

• Hold Me (3k listens) is me processing my own feelings.

Strategists often ask, “What do strategists do after their strategy careers?”

Well, what if you continue to do what you do but you find a different shape for it - like music, painting, or fiction?

3. Strategists explore

A few years ago, a famous London agency got publicity for launching an initiative for its strategists to get away from their desks and explore their country. I was stunned because isn’t that what strategists do?

Now, not many people travel as much as I do but I travel to learn and to be changed. And my life is full of music. If I didn’t travel, I might have never fallen in love with these music genres and through these music genres I learn about people and culture:

• Brazil funk – Santa Rita do Sapucai (3 hours north of São Paulo), Brazil (2 a.m., standing next to MC Binn)
• Reggaeton – on a rooftop in Quito, Ecuador (through Bad Bunny’s “Callaita”)
• Dembow – Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
• Merengue – Dominican Republic
• Bachata – Medellín, Colombia
• Salsa – Medellín, Colombia
• Amapiano – Johannesburg, South Africa
• Gengetone – Nairobi, Kenya
• Rancheros & corridos – Mexico City, Mexico
• Bongo – Mombasa, Kenya
• Afrobeats – Nigeria

Trying new hobbies, watching documentaries, reading books (fiction and non-fiction), and learning languages can help you explore if you can’t travel. You’ll emerge from all of these with a deeper understanding of the world and a new sense of self.

4. Strategists direct action

Strategy usually involves some combination of situation analysis, goal-setting, pattern-finding, plus declaring a strategy and connected tactics.

But how many strategists do this for themselves? We are our most difficult clients.

The two questions I focus on are:

A. What am I doing when I feel alive? (What are my verbs? e.g. write, teach, talk, travel)

B. Is there a community to which I can make a meaningful contribution?

My answers to these questions guide my life. And lead me into these sorts of situations:

• A massive Indian wedding in Bangkok (Congrats, Chirag and Sarah)
• Meeting some of Nairobi’s main radio shows, DJs, and MCs

5. Dealing with a fast and, sometimes, scrambled mind

As the marketing and agency worlds twist and turn through this era we’re in, many strategists will untether from what they thought were stable lives and livelihoods. For the past three years, I’ve heard a lot of stories about layoffs and the difficulties of freelance life. Sure, we all know people who are crushing it but many people are struggling.

I’ve hung out with a lot of you who do similar work. Yes, many of you are well balanced, but a lot of you deal with anxiety, ADHD, trauma, stress, and minds that don’t slow down.

I’ve felt scrambled many times in Kenya, especially on the one night that turned into two nights after drinking liquor, jaba juice (a naturally occurring stimulant), and konyagi (the only drink I’ve ever drunk and immediately vomited back out into the cup I was drinking from).

It’s difficult being a strategist without a brief. Without a company to work for, it’s like being a ronin. And, if you’re feeling like this now, your job is to write your own brief for the next phase of your life.

Follow me on Instagram @markpollard.

Years ago, I worked with an agency on a pitch for an alcohol brand. We were in Manhattan but the brand was based in a conservative state. The beer was drunk by people who might never travel to Manhattan and, if they did visit Manhattan, they’d probably marvel at it while also scoffing at things that fit the conservative propaganda about how broken Manhattan is because it’s a blue state, not a red state.

This era was before the algorithms had parted us and our families. This era was before the explosion of alpha male content on the Internet. It was the era of early experimentation by conservative think tanks that would publish weird videos on YouTube about how “contemporary art isn’t real art”.

However, it was the era of early political polarization. And the strategists working on this alcohol pitch didn’t identify with the people they needed to sell to. What’s more, they seemed to look down on them because of their political beliefs and their lifestyles.

When we poured through the research about the audience, much of which I had conducted, little comments flew around the room. It was a form of pitch pollution and it suggested that some of the pitch team couldn’t get out of their own way.

Dave McCaughan spent nearly three decades working in strategy in Asia and Australia with McCann. He once said that every strategist who went to China reported the same insight about “Little Emperors” as if nobody had ever thought of it before. Because of the one-child policy, a lot of children in China were treated like Little Emperors, receiving the full attention and doting of their entire families - parents, two sets of grandparents, and more.

When I use the term “outsider insights”, I’m referring to observations that smell more like judgments or condemnations rather than empathy, or they’re simply too obvious and useless. And they can ruin projects and careers. The “Little Emperor” insight is an “outsider insight”. It’s an observation that an outsider had that might not be useful.

One truth many of you might not enjoy is that most of you aren’t in the audiences you’re selling to. If you’re well educated, earning decent money for your country, you have a passport and you travel, you are in a small percentage of people in your country.

Obviously, this doesn’t make your research useless but it can make it shallow because the temptation will be to stop at the first things that seem surprising without having the tools or life experience to go deeper.

For instance, you’re a 22 year old working on a brand that sells to mothers. You’re a 28 year old working on a brand that sells fancy cars to people in their fifties and sixties. You’re a 32 year old selling erectile dysfunction products.

The majority of people in these situations will struggle to truly understand their audiences, which is why people who are exceptional at doing this are so sought after.

The most common comment I hear from CMOs is this: “We have a lot of research, a lot of data, but not much insight.”

And it’s why a pitch for an alcohol brand in a conservative part of the USA might just look too Brooklyn than it should.

Observing worlds you’re not a part of

Here are a few things to keep in mind if you’re trying to understand an audience that is quite different from you:

1. You are not your audience but your own life experiences can matter

It’s useful to think about your own life experiences when it comes to your research. They might lead you to useful hypotheses or give you sharper questions for interviews. Just remember to not make the research about you.

2. Search for things you haven’t heard or seen before but don’t get clingy

If you’re writing a research debrief, you’re right to start by collecting observations that you haven’t heard or seen before. In fact, you’re more powerful sharing one slide with “Five unexpected things we found in our research” than a sixty slide deck with everything you’ve found. The challenge is to share these things in a way that invites discussion because perhaps what you found is obvious to other people.

3. Dig deeper

When you have a list of observations that seem unexpected and useful, give them time to breathe. Ask yourself, “What’s really going on here? What’s causing this behavior?” Try to avoid the obtuse or the obviously academic - for example, try to avoid rolling out Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to look smart (by the way, it’s said that Maslow borrowed a lot of his thinking from the Blackfoot - Siksika - Nation in Canada).

4. Try not to collapse useful observations into useless buckets

You know when you’re a bit junior and you have a bunch of research on the wall and you think you’re getting somewhere interesting then someone more senior comes in, looks at the wall, and tries to collapse your observations into a meaningless bucket and then you copy them for a few years? Don’t do that.

• “Oh, you mean, people want to feel empowered when they buy a house?”
• No, I mean that many people are scared shitless in case they end up buying a house and the cost of it destroys them or they have to sign up for a life they don’t want to live.

Implicit in all of this is that novelty is useful in business and in brand-building. Novelty can help you find new business opportunities and it can help you find new ways of getting people’s attention. Novelty is worth money. But taking observations that aren’t novel and bringing them to life in novel ways is also worth money.

Observations I’ve had in Africa

I’ve been sharing observations about Africa on Instagram and TikTok. For example:

I’ve found myself asking, “Why does everybody’s skin here glow?” Answers include cocoa oil and shea butter. But there’s nothing insightful about this. And, sure, we can connect this behavior to how skin and hair can make people look healthier and more virile and therefore more likely to attract mating opportunities but I’d still want to dig deeper or just dig somewhere else to find something to play with.

I’ve found the money culture in Africa different. What people refer to as “black tax”, girlfriend allowance, provider or sponsor culture, and “send me money” culture are new to me. Some people might point at colonialism as the cause. Others might point to African community dynamics that seem to be falling apart in other countries as the cause. And, yes, someone in the comments will say, “Africa isn’t one country”. All true but not yet an insight and not yet usable.

I’ve repeatedly been surprised by how Kenyans often start a night out by sitting down and appearing composed only for the night to later get crazy. I’ve been told, “Kenyans start slow while Nigerians start fast”. There’s an observation here that borders on an insight but we’d want to dig deeper.

How do we dig deeper? By speaking with people, which is what my Reels linked above try to do.

Being observed in Africa

I’ve spent time in 40+ countries in the past couple of years.

In some countries, I’m told I’m tall or I have a nose bridge or I have double eyelids or I’m told I look like a particular actor that I definitely don’t look like.

In Kenya, I hear about my white skin which is pink when I’m sunburnt (not “red” which is how I’d describe it), how I don’t dance like popcorn, how my eyes are green (versus hazel), how my hair is soft, and so on.

It’s been interesting because people’s descriptions or labels of me might not fit how I see myself. This doesn’t make them true or false. But, if you’ve ever experienced this, keep it in mind the next time you research a group of people who are different from you. It might help you avoid trying to sell Brooklyn vibes to conservative beer drinkers.

Follow me on Instagram @markpollard.

I love business.

When I was a kid, I’d buy rugby league cards before school and resell the popular ones at a markup. Sometimes I’d put a bunch of packs in a plastic bag and charge people to pick one or two at random, like a lottery.

As a teenager, I watched my single mom run a singles club. She’d place ads in the newspaper, people would leave messages on our answering machine, she’d filter them, then host parties in our apartment or in restaurants so they could meet.

At 15, I worked for a guy who ran major under-18 dance parties in Sydney. At 19, some friends and I put on a couple of Asian dance parties. The first drew hundreds of people to a club on Oxford Street. The second ended with an extortion attempt by a gang that later became notorious in Australia, a fight with the Lebanese security crew running the venue, and about 50 police officers shutting it down.

At 20, I started what became the first full-colour hip hop magazine in the Southern Hemisphere. I worked in agencies by day and on the magazine at night. I expanded into distributing CDs, vinyl, and merch. I put on conferences and events. I designed the posters, printed them at Kinko’s, then walked around Sydney putting them up while hauling boxes of magazines around the city.

That work felt real. Every sale mattered. Every mistake stung.

I’d approach some of those businesses differently now, but back then there were very few people to talk to about work like that.

That feeling of having no real peer to think with is something I now hear from people running all kinds of businesses, big and small.

Common Challenges That Face Business Owners

On my travels, I love hearing about different business cultures.

In Medellín, Colombia, the local Paisa population is known for their business acumen. A lot of the earlier wealth came through farming - often coffee - and, yes, possibly illegal means, and there’s so much wealth in the hands of a few pockets of Medellín that one of the biggest financial conglomerates in Latin America - Sura - was born there.

In Saudi Arabia, people I meet often have multiple businesses - yes, something to do with oil, real estate, perhaps a jewlry or fashion brand. There’s a love of business and growth and sense that they want more access to the kind of thinking that a lot of us have done in agencies for years. My friends there pester me: “When will you start a business here? I’ll call the government right now.”

In Kenya, there are a lot of micro SMEs - think hair braiding, selling hair, selling imported sneakers, but also there are organizations like E4I who work with small coffee farmers, and people trying to create the next M-PESA (the main payment gateway in Kenya, owned by the main telco Safaricom).

And I’ve also worked with independent businesses in the USA (like Poo-Pourri).

The settings are different. The cultures are different. But the underlying challenges are often surprisingly similar.

And here’s what I hear:

1. “I don’t know what I don’t know.”

This is a truism but how I interpret it is as follows: “I want to take the next steps with my business but I’m stuck.”

2. “I’ve brought in outside help but it doesn’t go anywhere.”

This is usually a combination of outside help over-engineering the work they do (eg massive research projects) as well as the need for many SME owners to be the author of their own world while not knowing how to put hired help to the best use.

3. “I don’t have peers around me - it can feel lonely.”

Sometimes, the business owner is such a dominant personality that they struggle to get honest thinking of their growing teams. Or they spend so much time in the business that they struggle to find and form community for themselves.

4. “Do I need to put myself onto the Internet as a personal brand?”

This stresses out most business owners because their days are predominantly operational.

5. “I’m not sure how to expand.”

For a business that is mostly clicking - i.e. decent systems in place and profitable - that next step can seem difficult. Do you keep things simple and repeat the business in another location or country? Do you add new products or services and risk complicating your business?

6. “”I’m too close to the business to see it clearly.”

This might be the deepest challenge of all.

A lot of business owners do not need more information. They need perspective.

Why Strategists Fantasize About Working With Small Businesses

When I left corporate America, I tried to solve a dilemma for myself:

I loved doing strategy but I hated the bureaucracy and politics of doing it in large companies for large clients. It felt like nothing happened.

I’ve watched many strategists leave the big agency world and try to solve this problem for themselves. Perhaps they move client-side or they fantasize about working with start-ups and small businesses, hoping they can make a bigger impact. And they become addicted to a new drug called “consequence”.

For any of you thinking through these things now, I guarantee you’ll feel consequence by starting your own business. It might take a few years for you to shift the rhythm of your weeks, to ween yourself out of needing to intellectualize everything, and for you to become a good operator, but, with the way the world is going right now, it is worth considering.

After leaving corporate America, I took on a few consulting projects with small businesses, and I found that doing strategy with small businesses presents its own set of challenges:

Many business owners want to be the author of their entire business. This makes sense but it can also make a business owner un-coachable.

Business owners might share the work you do with a coach or a friend and it all falls apart.

Business owners might not be set up to implement your recommendations and default back to business as usual. Change is difficult and many business owners might require frequent coaching to push change through but a coaching business is very bitty to run unless you charge a lot of money.

Business owners aren’t sure how to value the work you might do as a strategist or creative mind unless they have spent time in or working with the agency world.

Over time, if you focus on working with business owners, you can tighten up your offer and how you work with them, while attracting people who are better set up for what you want to do.

The promise of being close to the business and the daily decisions is powerful. Consequence is addictive.

What Small Businesses Actually Need From Strategy

When I speak with small business owners, often what they need help with is this:

• Help working out what the business actually is
• Understanding basic business and marketing concepts
• A push to simplify how they communicate
• Understanding how to make their message about their customer
• Someone to untangle whether the real issue is brand, product, team, pricing, or focus

This is one reason strategy can feel so different in a small business. The work is usually less about “big ideas” and more about clarity.

Not many business owners are set up for what they themselves would call “out of the box” thinking. For example, I love the work my friends do at Vacation Inc - sunscreen that comes in a whipped cream format is incredible. Most business owners are trying to operate their business - making sure their farm survives bad weather, that deliveries happen on time and without theft, dealing with employees and contractors. Lobbing in wild ideas can give us strategy types a dopamine hit but they are difficult to pull off and many business owners don’t exist in such a three-dimensional world.

What This Means

This, to me, is the fantasy and the reality of working with small businesses.

The fantasy is closeness to consequence. Less theater. More reality. A chance to do work that actually changes something.

The reality is that most small businesses do not need a strategist to arrive like a magician. They need someone who can help them see their business clearly, describe it simply, and decide what to do next.

That kind of work can be incredibly satisfying. It can also be hard.

Follow me on Instagram @markpollard.

“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.

1. Metaphors are useful when it comes to strategic and creative thinking, and

2. Metaphors can confuse strategic and creative thinking.

I’ll explain after you read these metaphors about strategy careers:

Metaphors For Strategy Careers

Chris Charles, Freelance Commercial Director

NOW: A surfer at the top of a massive dam, in control of the flow of the water.

THE FUTURE: A captain in a great ocean, catching the wind in my sails.

Jaymie Rubiano, Director - Marketing, Strategy, & Planning, American Eagle Outfitters Inc.

NOW: An old beloved car that’s stalled out in the driveway.

THE FUTURE: I own the road. I’m in the driver’s seat. I call the shots.

Kat Richards - Associate Director - Experience + Strategy, Digitas North America

NOW: A baby sea turtle wandering into the big ocean.

THE FUTURE: A phoenix that is constantly reborn and re-evaluating where our passions and values lay.

Kavinda Welagedara - Chief Strategy Officer, Fudge

NOW: A one-man-band playing music .

THE FUTURE: Conductor of an award-winning orchestra.

What Is A Metaphor?

A metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.” It’s a symbol.

For example, “freelancing is limbo.” To say this isn’t to say that freelancing is literally a place between Heaven and Hell. It’s to make the point that some people freelance without committing to a more long-term direction. They freelance to bide time. While this can work for some people, it can also prevent more ambitious action such as setting up a company.

Why Metaphors Are Useful

1. Metaphors create new meaning and new meaning creates new energy

An idea brings at least two topics together in a novel way (Topic A x Topic B). Ideas create new meaning. They help us see to ourselves and the world around us differently. Metaphors are ideas. “Strategy is an act of confusion.”

2. Metaphors drag people out of corporate speak

Most business documents I’ve seen in the past decade - yes, including documents from the biggest, coolest companies around - are very hard to understand. They’re riddled with poor writing and business speak. A simple metaphor about an urgent problem that needs solving or about how to reposition a brand can grab people’s attention and make action easier.

3. Metaphors are memorable

As emotional, mental shortcuts, metaphors get stuck in our minds. Getting people’s attention and getting your ideas stuck in people’s minds are the two main jobs of communicators.

The Issue With Metaphors

1. Metaphors are inaccurate because they’re not literal

I remember seeing a LinkedIn debate years ago between strategists in which one said to another, “You’re cherry-picking how you mean the metaphor.” Umm. Yes. A metaphor isn’t literal. So, yes, we need to cherry-pick its meaning.

For the metaphor “freelancing is limbo”, this is what I mean:

i. It’s a place that people go when they’re inbetween directions, ii. They can get stuck there if they’re not careful, and iii. If they get stuck there, it can suck there.

This sort of exercise in which you write your metaphor and then write the 3-7 ways in which it is true or in which you are using it is helpful.

2. Mixing metaphors is confusing

If I say “freelancing is limbo for a lot of people” and someone respond, “Sure, freelancing can be limbo, but I just keep swimming toward the next opportunity,” this is a mixed metaphor. Unless limbo is a pool.

3. Using metaphors on creative briefs is risky

A CCO I worked with once loved this single-minded proposition: “Brand X is Aladdin’s Cave.” He knew what to do with it. He knew he needed to capture how incredible it was to enter this store and marvel at what was inside. Sometimes, a metaphor can work on a creative brief. But, usually, people will ask, “What do you mean?” and this is a sign that the proposition isn’t clear.

So, metaphors are worth toying with as ways to reframe problems and brands and as ways to grab attention in a presentation, but make sure you can also explain what you mean.

Follow me on Instagram @markpollard.

In the last job I’ll ever have, I was Head of Strategy of an 800-person PR agency in New York. I was told that new senior hires never fitted in. I was told that most people in the agency didn’t want strategists. I was told that the company wanted to do “earned media ideas,” which meant very different things to each of us because, to me, getting words from a press release into the news was low aura stuff. And, despite red flags that I desperately ignored, I took the job so that, later, I could be told, “You’re not a culture fit.”

PR is an individualistic, full-contact sport. PR people live and die by their network, their ability to influence their network, and their personal reputations that lead to more network to influence.

In New York City, where every second person says they’re a Type A personality and they’re either desperately trying to keep a grip on living in one of the most expensive cities in the world or they’re a nepo baby and they’re given an assistant during their summer internship (true story), the Corporate America vibes are frothy and feral.

I was a sucker in this environment. I tried to play soccer when I needed to play tennis. Singles tennis. With a sword.

And then it happened:

• “Hi there, my boss told me to come and ask you for an insight for our deck. We need to send it in two hours.”
• “Oh, would you like fries with that?”

Constantly, strategists were treated like internal service providers:

• “Give me stuff that makes me look smart in front of my clients but please don’t come out of the shadows as I have a reputation to handle.”

But here’s the thing: strategy is not a back-office function.

Lena Roland, Content Director at WARC, shared the above piece of research from WARC’s annual “The Future of Strategy Report 2025” .

On the left, you’ll see Tomas Gonsorcik, Global CSO, say this:

“We have to rebrand strategy - not as a back-office function, not as a luxury, but as a service. Strategy as a service: clear, accountable, and indispensable.”

It took me moving to New York to understand how muscular advertising agencies and strategy are (or, were) in countries like Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

In high-performing agencies, there is an aggressive focus on the work. Fighting for it. Everyone. Otherwise - get out of the way.

Agencies that focus on organizational charts, process, and job titles tend to be low-performing agencies because they have no creative heart.

But, like many of you, I thought my problem was a Me Problem and not an Us Problem.

I thought I just didn’t have the political skills or will to help strategy move from the back-office to the front-office in this particular agency. And the gaslighting made me realize how much I love strategy - doing it and teaching it - but how I’m allergic to Corporate America. So I built what I do now.

Front-Office Strategy Is Not That Hard

There are a few things that need to be in place for strategy to be front-office:

1. A sense of team over individual

Strategists can struggle in PR firms because PR firms are individualistic, plus they’re riddled with nepotism and dotted lines and matrix org charts. What’s more, creative departments often hold people who’ve never worked with strategists before. Yes, this has changed a little but I do speak with hundreds of people around the world every year so I’m not going to congratulate incremental change.

Strategists are rarely the first point of contact in an agency so they need the first point of contact to pull them in early and keep them there often. This will only happen if the first point of contact wants to play a team sport and has the leadership skills to do so.

2. Time to build real relationships with clients

In most agencies, the account management team will be in the pocket of their clients. But they will allow the strategist time to build relationships without feeling insecure about it. The strategist will also seek a direct line with key clients so they can have informal conversations about the work. If each interaction is formal and performative, the strategist might struggle to encourage the kind of work their team is capable of.

3. A charismatic strategy team and leader

Vibes matter. We’ve all worked with people who could make clients and colleagues swoon. A stiff, boring, and corporate strategy team will struggle to be front-office. If they constantly bore people, their own colleagues will shift them to the back-office anyway.

4. A reputation that precedes the strategy team

Around 2008, I started writing about strategy. At first, I didn’t want to be that guy but then I saw the offices of my clients empty out during the financial crisis and I got tired of competing in meetings. So I decided to write so that, in many rooms I’d enter, people might have a sense of how I thought before I entered the room.

I was working at Leo Burnett at the time. My boss was Todd Sampson, a strategist with a big reputation and, since then, someone who’s appeared on many TV shows. And the people I worked with all had amazing pedigrees and brands. We were competitive and we cared about doing good work. Clients wanted us in the room.

We didn’t have to constantly explain ourselves as happens so often in the USA in companies new to all of this and who don’t really want to change.

We just did the work and tried to help some of the best creative teams in the country do their work.

Just like with brands, strategy teams need reputations because reputations pull people into situations for which they don’t have to go sniffing around the building.

5. An unapologetic business model

Procurement has made a mess of our industry. The way agencies have had to open their books to reveal salaries and margins to clients is an embarrassment. Sure, there are a few people in procurement and a few forceful marketers who’ll fight to bring in their agency, but, mostly, Corporate America forces a blandness onto everything it touches - including the agency business model.

When strategy is strong and front-office, it appears on scopes by default. The Head of Strategy doesn’t have to chase projects through the corridors to beg for a strategist to be put on projects.

The Ultimate Front-Office Green Flag

Years ago, I interviewed Ilana Bryant. I believe Ilana was the first American planner to work in London. This is quite a feat considering how Brits perceive Americans.

In the interview, she said that if a strategist’s or account planner’s name was on the building then it meant strategy or account planning was a legitimate activity in the agency.

These days, agencies don’t have such cute names as the partners’ initials but, as I’ve wondered why I made so many poor career decisions in New York and why I was eventually serving fries with ten slides of strategy having never met the clients, it’s so apt.

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Often I catch myself wondering, “Is this really how I want to spend my time right now?”

It happened when that older Kenyan banker followed me around a club asking me if I knew who he was. It happened when I chose to spend my first New Years Eve, Thanksgiving, and Christmas alone. It’s happened many times in Nairobi when I’ve been out and seen everyone sitting at high tables with their bottles of liquor and not dancing for hours. It’s happened when I’ve landed in countries I’d never thought of visiting and knew very little about - I’d arrive in my hotel room, close the door, and say out loud, “What the fuck am I doing?” And lately, it’s happened many times mid-interview or halfway through conference panels.

The full-time strategist inhabits a rare role. How many other jobs let you learn every day, express yourself, work with creative minds, and develop your own critical thinking skills while earning a decent salary? But for me, even though strategy gives me an intellectual kick, the most interesting thing about it has always been people.

Too Much Theory Goes Nowhere

Most conference panels jog on the spot: awkward self-introductions, people speaking over each other then quickly performing politeness (“Oh sorry, you speak”), vague and wordy questions that try to sound zeitgeisty but confuse the room, panelists answering every question even when they have nothing to add, company talking points lifted from press releases, and a litany of jargon and buzzwords.

Where’s the personality? Where are the rare truths? Where are the hot takes?

When I’m on these panels, I try to short-circuit them by asking the other panelists to talk about people, not just their theories. For example: What’s the most unusual behavior you’ve ever come across in your research?

Many interviews I’ve done recently lose me halfway through. Maybe that’s partly my fault because I’ve written a book about strategy. But sometimes I get the sense interviewers are trying to meet a fantasy intellectual version of me, when I’d probably rather talk about some weird shit I saw on the street five minutes earlier or a new Afrobeats song I can’t stop playing.

I earn a living by sharing a point of view on strategy - how to think, how to define things, how to express ideas - but the point of all of it is to get inside human behavior and the mind. From a martial arts point of view, it’s the difference between debating the finer points of a kata versus sparring.

Lately, I think that’s why some of these conversations have left me feeling in between. I can do them. I know how to sound like myself in them. I know how to offer a clean idea, a framework, a useful phrase. But part of me is often somewhere else, tugged towards life as it’s actually being lived - the street, the club, the awkward interaction, the song, the strange little behavior that reveals how people really are. Maybe that’s the tension I keep feeling. Not that strategy bores me, but that strategy becomes limp when it loses contact with life.

And maybe that’s why cities like Nairobi and Lagos and Medellín have felt clarifying. So much of what’s interested me in these cities has had nothing to do with theory and everything to do with watching people who are alive with energy I’m new to: how they sit, when they dance, how they dress, how they flirt, how they wait, how they perform status, how they let go, how they talk about money. That, to me, is strategy’s raw material.

Over the past month, my videos about Africa on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have had millions of views. Talking about a liquor called Kenya Cane (for example, this unboxing video) has led to me being recognized on the streets of Nairobi most days. Discussing Nigerian “give me money” culture led to me being on the national news in Nigeria. While I’ve had help writing many of these videos, they are embarrassingly simple. And I’ve felt guilty as I’ve pushed beyond the strategy topic into cultural observations. But the reactions from people light me up.

How Close Can You Get?

Most panels and interviews I’ve been part of lately include a section on artificial intelligence. A common question is, What will happen to the strategist as these AI tools develop? Part of any reasonable answer should involve strategists getting away from their computers and getting closer to human behavior.

For example, if I talk with ChatGPT about the nights out I’ve had in Nairobi - especially nights where hundreds of people have sat for hours while a DJ has played - it might tell me that nights in Nairobi start slowly. But watching those behaviors up close completes the picture.

Nairobi loves liquor and takes shots early, often in a squadron of shots. Many venues are packed with furniture because tables full of liquor make money. Waiters move chairs and tables on their heads and shoulders as the room’s shape changes with the arrival and departure of guests. Waiters ask if you want your drink cold or room temperature. Some put two drinks on your table instead of one so they can close the next sale early. Sheesha appears and creates a whole other set of dynamics. A few people dance close to their tables, but tables are prizes, so people don’t stray far. In fancy areas, politicians, actors, and celebrities occupy the furniture, which leads to a lot of people scanning the room to see who else is there.

Eventually, a few people head to the dance floor while others take power naps at their tables. Some people call this swatching or reloading. (“Swatch” means “sleep” in the Sheng language). Then the night kicks on and it could take you to three other venues. Some people might have stocked up on a local stimulant called jaba juice, which keeps them awake for a long time. Many will party through the night, joking that there should be a day between Sunday and Monday, that Kenyans do not really do Mondays, and that they are definitely quitting alcohol like they said they would the last few weekends.

A lot of these behaviors are new to me. Maybe I could prompt-engineer my way towards some of these observations. But until I’ve seen them in the flesh, been confused by them, and had them explained to me, they remain theoretical. And when they remain theoretical they’re limp. They’re hard to bring to life in a way that might electrify people.

The Theory Is Not the Point

Yes, there can be an intellectualism to strategy work. But for it not to go limp, it needs to stay closer to real talk, hot takes, and the street than to theory alone. Theory is there to help you focus on what matters. Spoiler alert, what matters is the people, which is where I’m loving spending my time right now.

And, as I prepare to return to the USA before teaching in Asia and Europe, I can tell you that Africa - and Kenya in particular - is very much on mind as somewhere that I need to spend more time. Africa isn’t easy but the youth population, the energy, and the sense of what could be are unlike most other places I’ve visited.

In my teens and 20s, I didn’t feel I belonged in this world. I didn’t like the systems, the conformity, the establishment.

Maybe because I shifted between my parent’s two homes and I was often not at home from a young age, I felt more comfortable roaming Sydney than in rooms I take for granted today.

This caused a lot of internal turbulence. I literally didn’t feel I was built to be here. And I had days when I struggled to want to be here.

I found a home in the underground hip hop scene and I then published a hip hop magazine (Stealth Magazine) and I hosted a radio show (The Mothership Connection).

I also worked in and around advertising from the age of 20.

But, because I didn’t feel I belonged anywhere, I also didn’t think about having a career. I didn’t think I belonged in a career.

At first, I did UX and content strategy. I loved it. I could lose myself in research and thinking. I loved the immediacy of the Internet and the lack of gatekeepers.

At 28, I took a job in which I did 50% of this work and 50% account planning at Leo Burnett.

Leo Burnett Sydney was my peak advertising experience. Nearly everyone I worked with has gone onto big things or more meaningful things. You might recognize some of the faces above.

But, in my head, I was still doing hip hop stuff and I happened to have a job.

In 2011, I moved to New York to briefly work at Saatchi and Saatchi. This is when I almost saw advertising as a career.

The problem was that the industry was so volatile that it felt self-defeating to fully commit to it. And I was burnt out from working crazy hours in my 20s and with a young family, so I also didn’t spend enough time thinking about what else I could do. I just needed a change.

And a visa.

Five years in New York agencies taught me that I am not built to be inside Corporate America.

For years, I had been writing about and teaching strategy and I loved this. But the politics, the lack of creative ambition that I encountered everywhere*, and the exceptionalism that didn’t match the output drove me nuts.

*Except at Big Spaceship

Also, I struggled to build social circles.

I was often the young guy in a management team and parents with kids my kids’ ages were usually 10-20 years older than me, more corporate and conservative.

I didn’t like Corporate America. My social life was barely alive. I was just working.

I felt stuck. I felt trapped.

But there were clues - including, yes, from Anthony Bourdain. He showed a path - a more savage voice, adventures, and risk-taking.

Five years into my time in New York, I set up a company. At first, the goal was simple: break even on living in NYC.

Then I thought back to my hip hop days and rebuilt what I used to do in hip hop but in strategy: an online community, a podcast, events, books. Sweathead.

And I hit the road. I taught, I spoke at conferences. And, in 2019, Julian Cole and I did a bunch of events in different countries.

After each event, I found myself having conversations that I didn’t really access in NYC. They filled me with satisfaction, even happiness.

I realized that strategists are my type. But that I have also have a type of strategist.

Sure, there isn’t one strategist type.

But, having taught thousands of people in 40+ countries now, here’s the strategist type that lights me up:

1. Strategists are curious

“Curiosity” is an expression of one of the Big 5 Personality Traits.

The traits are:

• Openness - Novelty, variety seeking
• Conscientiousness - Hard-working
• Extraversion - Energy derived externally
• Agreeableness - More Yes or No
• Neuroticism - Prone to dark emotions

Behaviors:

• Has deep interests,
• Has a range of interests,
• Asks questions.

2. Strategists listen

We’ve all worked with dominant personalities but strategists are usually good at slowing down conversations, probing, and waiting for words they can use.

3. Strategists hold space

Interviewing people, hosting workshops, and discussing difficult topics with clients are all examples of this.

4. Strategists can bounce through many disconnected topics

Since strategists tend to be curious and they tend to collect a lot of information and life experiences, they are often able to shift between topics faster than most people.

Yes, this can lead other people to think that they are in the clouds and don’t always make sense.

But, if you’re like this, it’s fun.

5. Strategists don’t always rush to answers

Strategists can handle ambiguity because they’re often looking at problems from many points of view at once.

Sure, the more you do strategy, the faster you can see patterns and appear adamant about solutions, but good strategists are happy to explore different threads without committing to one until they’re ready.

6. Strategists are empaths

In some ways, strategy has become a cool job that people want because, well, it’s cool.

But if a strategist isn’t interested in people, if they aren’t on the side of people, they might struggle in creative circles.

In political and propaganda circles, they might thrive.

7. Strategists can self-doubt

Strategist self-doubt is cute.

Why? It keeps them open to improving, to better questions, and to not becoming dogmatic.

Obviously, I want strategists to be powerful and creative but a little self-doubt is healthy. It keeps people on their toes.

8. Strategists connect dots

Strategy is about finding and creating meaning.

We create meaning by combining at least two topics in a new way.

Strategists are constantly inhaling stimulus - interviews, content, academic research, etc.

Over time, they become good at creating meaning from all of this stimulus.

9. Strategists can have a sense of humor

Humor is cultural and, in some places I travel, everyone is very quiet and serious.

But my strategists can laugh - at the world, at themselves.

If they can’t laugh, I feel they might implode because they are taking everything too seriously.

10. Strategists work hard and smart

Perhaps due to social anxiety, many strategy teams I’ve worked with weren’t the first to the bar on a Friday afternoon to hang with the rest of the agency.

Strategists are often intellectually diligent but they can struggle outside of their work roles.

However, the smart ones are always looking for better ways to work.

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“I fell into strategy” is a common strategist refrain. “I was working in an agency in another department and someone said I might be better suited as a strategist” is a sentence that often comes next.

Truth is, a lot of people who end up in strategy didn’t know it was a career until they were in their twenties.

Yes, the USA has a lot of advertising courses in college (or, university) so it’s different here. In Australia, I don’t know if I worked with anyone who did a 3- or 4- year degree in advertising. It was rare.

Anyway, there are a few clusters of traits and behaviors that are common with many strategists. Here are the ones I see most:

1. Strategists are students

Strategists love to learn. They ask questions. They nerd out on things most people don’t. Their minds are insatiable. And personal development is very important.

Strategy bosses will often say they look for curiosity. Curiosity is an expression of one of the Big 5 Personality Traits–the O for Openness. Openness is being open to new experiences, variety, novelty.

Being curious is one thing. I think the thing is that strategists will often act like students, delving into their clients and the topics they need to understand as if they were preparing for an exam.

The challenges for some strategists, however, are getting lost in the information and treating their work as something to get “right”–so they can avoid failing the imaginary exam.

2. Strategists are people-watchers

This can make many strategists seem aloof but, if you put a strategist in a room, many of them will watch who’s doing what. If you put tens of them in a room at a strategy event, well, that just gets awkward. You know it :)

Some people are just wired like this–maybe a streak of introversion exists in the family but, sometimes, people-watching is a response to trauma. For example, growing up in a volatile household can make some people retreat to being an observer as the child tries to navigate adult emotions.

3. Strategists are performers

Most strategists who survive the industry for a few years learn they can’t just entertain themselves in their own heads – they need to take command of rooms and put on shows.

Strategy bosses will compile a team with different shades but, if a strategist can’t compel people with their thinking, it puts more load on everyone else in the team to do so.

Being quiet and smart and useful is superb. But…being able to perform useful smarts will help a strategy career more.

4. Strategists are jesters

This doesn’t work in all work cultures but strategists often say the thing that needs to be said or ask the question that needs to be asked. This carries risk and many strategists pay for this over their careers.

Sure, some strategists are master politicians – they never say anything wrong, they deprecate to the client, and they let difficult questions fly by. I’ve worked with people like this. And, sometimes, this person is an excellent strategist and not just politically astute.

But many of us don’t have this in us. And so we risk our careers by saying the things we think need to be said.

5. Strategists are therapists

The older you get, the more you realize that listening to people, helping them find common ground, and working with them on a plan is very much like therapy.

In my classes, someone will often say, “This feels like therapy.”

It can feel a little negative but, when I ask in response, “Well, what’s therapy and why does strategy feel like therapy?” it’s easy to make the connections.

6. Strategists are adventurers

Many strategists can come across as nerds running around in their own heads but there’s a sense of adventure to strategy work. It starts with this sentence: “I don’t know but let’s go and find out.”

Indoor Strategists (haha sorry but I think I’m going to use this from now on) are wonderful but the strategist who gallivants around the outside world will likely have a more fulfilling career.

7. Strategists are writers

It’s hard to be good at strategy without being good at writing. Why? Well, writing is thinking. And, to captivate people with your ideas, you need to be able to write (and speak) in a way worth paying attention to.

Follow me on Instagram @markpollard.

Sometimes, I shut down and disappear.

As a child, I disappeared into writing poetry and raps and journaling. In my twenties, I disappeared into work. I published a magazine while often also working a job. For years, I worked until I fell asleep at my desk then I woke up and I kept working. Many nights, I could only fully fall asleep on the floor in front of the television with the sound of a late-night show or white noise soothing my mind.

I have always felt the world in an intense way. People have called me complex. They have called me sensitive. Both are true but I didn’t make myself that way. And, every now and then, I wonder, “Why do I spend so much time trying to understand people when few people try to understand me?”

Strategists are supposed to see patterns. We are trained to notice them in culture, in brands, and in behavior. Yet many people with strategist brains struggle to see the patterns shaping their own lives. Or they see them clearly and still cannot interrupt them.

A Simple Framework To See Your Own Patterns Through

When I teach insights, I ask people to think about a big life change they have made in recent years. We then discuss how this change happened, the routine it broke, and how their behavior changed. In other words:

1. Routine What was happening in your life before the epiphany? What habits, rhythms, relationships, or assumptions had become normal?

2. Inciting incident What happened to force the epiphany? This might have been one dramatic event, a slow build-up, or even something small - a conversation, a video, a sentence that landed at the right time.

3. Epiphany What did you realize? What truth became difficult to ignore?

4. Behavior change How did you change your behavior?

My Epiphanies On The Road

In 2023, I realized that I knew how to be happy. I realized this because I travelled to new countries and I saw photos and videos of myself happy. I had had my head down working in New York, trying to be a decent dad, and trying to build a business. But the financial stress, the pandemic, and certain relationship dynamics sat on my shoulders like a rhinoceros. They sunk me. My chest was often tight. All I could do was repeat the pattern I grew up with so I disappeared into my podcast, I wrote a book, and I published a lot of social media content.

Travel introduced me to another person inside of me. I fell in love with new music, languages, food, and cultures. I started dancing again after years of feeling frozen. But the old pattern still had a grip on me.

I visited Brazil for a friend’s 40th birthday party but I froze and I didn’t dance because I wasn’t sure of the social dynamics. I wanted to dance salsa every day in Colombia but I couldn’t bring my body to do it. In Kenya, I had a lot of boundaries crossed in my first few weeks here. People asked for money. They tried to find angles with me. It put me on high alert. I’d been robbed in Colombia a few months before and I’d just dealt with the aggressive begging culture of Nigeria. And I found myself literally getting up and leaving many situations.

In moments like these, I can feel my chest close, my heartbeat rise, and then I just walk. It’s hard to catch myself as it happens and it’s led me to spending less time with people I really like. Sometimes, I try to talk to myself as it happens: “Calm down and go back. Calm down and go back.” But my self-regulation isn’t as strong as it needs to be, especially if a drink has been involved. And, usually, this reaction happens in a group situation or in a crowd. I prepare for the worst.

Recently, I shut down in Ho Chi Minh City. I was with a university friend that I hadn’t hung out with for 20 years. I just wasn’t into the music or the crowd. The next day, I texted him and said, “Sorry about last night. My mood dropped.” And he said: “We’ll know we have a real friendship when we don’t have to apologize for ourselves.”

That stayed with me.

I’ve been lucky to build a social circle around the world with people who can hold me in the way I can hold them. If you’ve worked with me or had me teach you, I hope you’ve seen up close that I am decent at allowing people to be themselves, to be vulnerable, and to explore difficult topics. I do wonder why I don’t spend more time near these friends but I continue to move because moving helps me not get stuck in my feelings.

So, even though I believe I know how to feel happy now, I still fall back into old patterns that sabotage me. If I sense rejection or abandonment or a lack of safety or someone trying to find an angle, my triggers prepare themselves.

One response would be to keep moving. This is something I think of any time I run into conflict - “Let’s go”. Another response would be to work harder to catch myself in these situations or to think more intentionally about which situations I put myself in.

I do not think the answer is to judge myself for being sensitive, complex, or easily overstimulated. I did not make myself that way. But I do think I have a responsibility to understand the patterns that come with that wiring.

Strategists are trained to spot patterns in the world. The harder task is interrupting the ones running your own life.

Insight is not intervention. You can name a pattern, teach a pattern, even warn yourself about a pattern, and still obey it. The work, I think, is to catch yourself a little earlier - to notice when the body starts to close, when the old story starts talking, and when leaving begins to feel wiser than staying because you might not just be leaving a situation, you might end up leaving a friendship.

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