2019 was a bitch. Not your run-of-the-mill bad year; we’re talking a full-blown, question-your-existence kind of ordeal. Divorce, depression, anxiety—my personal cocktail of disaster. I dove into the katabasis, that dark night of the soul shit Robert Bly talks about. If you’re curious, I spilled those beans in my book Nowhere To Go. But that year also peeled back the curtain on a truth harder than the bourbon burning down my throat: We're all just marionettes in some cosmic puppet show, tangled in strings we mistook for connections.
It’s Friday again. The room's a mess, coffee is within arm’s reach, and the world outside doesn’t exist. This is where I come to bleed - my weekly ritual. Journal open, pen ready, mind racing faster than my ability to capture the chaos.
So, let’s talk about marketing, or as I like to call it, the art of selling your soul without losing it.
Marketing? It’s like juggling grenades—you keep them in the air because if you don’t, well, things go boom. It’s a battlefield, a science lab, a midnight gamble in a back-alley casino.
You throw your best ideas into the void and hope they land somewhere near the target. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. And sometimes, they blow up in your face in ways you can’t even begin to fathom.
You learn a lot out here in the wild.
Every shiny new strategy is just another ‘big thing’ until it isn’t. Algorithms change. Trends die. What worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow, and what flops today might be the gold rush of next week. It's all about embracing uncertainty.
Emerson once said, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Out here, in the manic world of likes, shares, and fleeting attention spans, those words hit like a freight train. It's easy to lose yourself in the noise, to become just another echo in the echo chamber. But screw that. If you're going to play the game, play it on your terms.
Change the narrative. Own your story.
This marketing gig? It’s not for the squeamish. It’s for the brave, the bold, the utterly insane. It’s for those of us who look at a storm and don’t run for cover but charge right into it, screaming at the top of our lungs. We’re not just pushing our work, products or peddling services. We’re weaving tales, building dreams, stirring souls. We’re the modern-day alchemists, turning the mundane into magic, one day at a time.
Do not be afraid of uncertainty.
It humbles us, teaches us, and if you’re lucky, it changes us.
Because, more often than not, it’s the scars that tell the best stories.