How I Do Me — Oct. 27, 2022 - Johnny Boy Marketing

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Empath Life 🤗
Earthquake 🌎
Revolutionary Failure 😶

About six months after I started my career as a professional journalist, I started walking past this job opening in our company every time I walked in and out of the building. It was for editor of a weekly paper routinely ridiculed by those who were a part of the daily for which I served as a copy editor and page designer.

I admit, I’d joined in the fun. The paper was a joke. It looked ugly. It was poorly edited, poorly designed and poor written. Its primary color was this ugly shade of pink. A pink newspaper? Ugh.

So one day, I applied for the job. I figured the bar was so low, I couldn’t possibly screw it up any worse. (Incidentally, this is also how I became a basketball coach … after watching my son’s team lose 43-0.)

That’s how I found myself about a month later as a 22-year-old newspaper editor with a camera at a high school football game. I had no formal training as a photographer, and back in the late 1990s, cameras weren’t what they are today. First off, they were filled with film, which meant you had no idea what you’d shot until you got back to the newspaper office and found a photographer to actually develop the shots in the dark room.

The olden days, kiddos. Look it up.

My strategy to ensure I had a good shot to run in the paper with every story I had that lent itself to photos was simple — and extremely costly: Shoot the hell out of it. I routinely went through multiple rolls of film on every sports shoot, and I greatly annoyed the photographers who had to develop my shots. I’d like to think I’m partly responsible for the fiscal decline of the industry, though I doubt that’s true.

Here’s the thing: It worked. The paper became more visually appealing, which was part of its renaissance and enabled it to become a lot less of a joke and a lot more of a community resource.

I say that because it illustrates that I don’t always do things conventionally, and I never have.

I was thinking about that today when I was working on my side gig as the CEO/President/Grand Poobah of Johnny Boy Marketing. A fellow freelance marketer handed off an assignment to me to ghostwrite a letter for a person who recently has become head of an academic program at a prestigious university. I’ve written speeches and letters for people throughout my marketing career, and I enjoy taking on that person’s personality to showcase them, not me, in what they say or write.

That’s not easy when you’ve never met the person, which was the case with this assignment. I had an audio interview my colleague had done with her, her resume, her LinkedIn bio and some information about the program she’s now leading.

So I started writing.

Here’s the thing: I had absolutely no clue where I was going when I started writing. I don’t plan. I don’t outline. I don’t even sketch it out in my mind. I just … write.

No one would teach an up-and-comer to do this. I, myself, wasn’t taught to do this. I just sorta do it because I know it works and I don’t fight against myself anymore.

A colleague at my last job asked me how I go about designing the really pretty flyers and such that I can churn out digitally. (I can’t draw a straight line in real life). She asked me if I could teach people to do it. I told her I could try but that it wouldn’t be of any value. I literally have no idea what I want something to look like when I start designing. My way of designing is similar to my way of writing. I don’t plan. I don’t outline. I just … design. And it always seems to work out.

With today’s assignment, about two sentences in, the idea popped in my head of a relay race, that this person was being handed the baton to do something great with the program, but that she couldn’t be doing it if the person who’d run the previous leg hadn’t done his work. And who ran that previous leg? Why, the outgoing program leader, the faculty and the former students. Boom. Analogy.

By the time I finished, this theme carried through the entire letter. Did I mean for that to happen? No. It just sorta … did.

I say all that because it speaks to a larger thing about what I’ve learned about life, and maybe it’s something you — faithful reader — could learn, too. I worry about a lot of stuff. Less than I used to, because I’m learning, but still … a lot of stuff. What I’ve learned is that I don’t really need to worry about much if I’m feelin’ my shit and in my intuition.

I’m blessed to be an empath. I say that because so few empaths feel that way. I listened in on a weeklong empath conference online last week in the midst of all my daily work, and what I heard was seminar after seminar after seminar of how to cope with being an empath and how to get by and the struggles we all face.

And I get that. I was there. For more than 40 years, I didn’t even know about being an empath, didn’t know what an empath was, and I suffered mightily because of it. But finding out about it didn’t help. I was then in the middle of a community that largely saw itself as victimized by the world. And we are! The world sucks and we feel it all.

But I’m not a victim. I don’t let this world happen to me anymore. Those seminars are good if they teach you how to manage the shit. And at my best, I do exactly that. I manage my shit and happen to the world instead of allowing the world to happen to me.

Feeling my way through life? That’s what I do. That’s who I am. I am blessed with a really good brain that can think logically and plot and strategize and do just about anything except math with letters in it. But that brain isn’t at my core. It helps, but it’s also incredibly unreliable. I can overthink anything. But if I’m in touch with The Feels? Just like writing, just like designing, if I’m feelin’ it, it’s best for me to just start doing it.

Does it always work? No. Sometimes my writing or designs are spectacularly bad … at first. That’s usually because I’m tired or not hooked up with my feelings and intuition. If I do what needs to be done to get that shit together, I’m good 99.99% of the time.

I like that about me.

Technology is useful, right? I mean, this morning I saw this BBC news report from 1994 on this whole internet thing. Contrary to the newspaper execs my 22-year-old self shared meeting space with back in the day, it certainly wasn’t a fad, huh?

Tuesday, about 18 seconds before a 5.1 magnitude earthquake shook those near San Jose, Calif., 95,000 people who’d downloaded and signed up with an app called MyShake knew it was coming. I hope they were, as most folks are these days, tethered to their phones.

The app was developed by scientists at UC Berkeley’s Seismology Lab, which sounds like a cool place to work. The hope in the future is that it will give you a tad more than 18 seconds to do whatever you’re supposed to do when an earthquake hits. I probably should review that elementary school lesson at some point.

The app uses the same technology that is pissing off cops and medics who are repeatedly having to make runs to amusement parks. The new iPhone has an emergency system in which rapid deceleration or twists or turns triggers a call to the authorities if not disabled within a certain timeframe. Turns out rollercoasters decelerate pretty rapidly and make unnatural twists and turns.

With MyShake, the sensors are used to detect movement, and the data is then filtered through an artificial intelligence neural network, which sounds nightmarishly frightening, to see if it matches what signals the beginning of an earthquake.

That’s freaking amazing, isn’t it?

I have a love-hate relationship with technology, but it’s not because of the technology. Any technological advancement is neutral. It’s how us stupid humans use it that makes it good or bad. We started off with that internet thing being largely good for humans. Now, it’s horribly divisive and allows for the rapid spread of misinformation and the proliferation of outright stupidity.

But detecting earthquakes early? That’s pretty cool. Just keep it away from the stupid people and maybe we can thin the herd a bit.

It warms my heart to see Facebook, err… Meta struggling. Ditto for Google, err… Alphabet. These two tech behemoths have been selling you and me as their product for too long now, and if there’s anything good about the pending recession and the current inflationary pressures, it’s that people are spending less money buying us from them.

Both companies’ Q3 profits disappointed, though they still are shockingly high. Meta is in worse shape, considering the fact that the place it relies on to learn enough about you to sell is being abandoned by huge swaths of people. There’s still not a popular Google alternative. That Chinese-owned TikTok is eating Alphabet/Google spawn YouTube’s lunch is great, but it really shouldn’t make you feel much better.

I was thinking about all of this and our current political climate in relation to the aims of the Revolutionary War. In that, we threw off the shackles of a repressive government that was taxing the hell out of us and not listening to what we were saying. The government was working at the behest of big business (The East India Trading Company) to the detriment of We The People.

All these years later, I’m wondering what exactly the Revolutionary War accomplished. Sure, it’s nice to not have to give a crap when the queen dies — though a disturbing number of you Muricahns appeared to have given a lot of craps about that — but it seems like we’ve just exchanged masters. Our government taxes the hell out of us and is horribly inefficient with that money, and while we say we are a representative democracy, no candidate for state or national election has appeared on the ballot in almost a decade who would accurately represent me. Worse, every one of them on both sides of the aisle is bought and paid for by some sort of industry, and most often, multiple industries.

It just seems like a pretty screwed-up system when the government has to take action to cool down an economy by implementing measures that are going to hurt the average citizen. I understand why it has to be done. It’s probably the right thing to do right now. But that doesn’t make it good.

That it hurts Meta and Alphabet is great, though there are real people who are going to lose their jobs because of it. What happens when those paychecks stop coming? Are they going to lose the homes they overpaid for when things were too hot? What happens to those who make the products they aren’t able to afford? And then what happens when those people lose their jobs and stop getting paychecks?

We like to think of our democracy and form of capitalism as some great success story. I’d like to suggest that there is a mountain of evidence to say it isn’t and never has been.

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Welcome to Issue No. 11 of Listicles, the feature that presents the Top 10, Top 5, Top 3, Top 100 or Top 1,000,000 of whatever it is you want to know about. Email your Listicle suggestions to johnagliata@gmail.com. Most married couples enter marriage having heard at least once that marriage is work. Very, very few…

How I Do Me — Oct. 27, 2022

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