John Agliata – Johnny Boy Marketing

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Everlong🎶
Carvana🚗
Basketball🏀

THE DAILY UPDATE

Three Things I Am Grateful For Today:

1. The things people keep on their desk to inspire them.
2. The word “poignant.”
3. Juan Soto.

Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Five. Again. Meh.

Wordle 1,214 5/6

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Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: PERFECTO! Homey don’t play dat!

Connections
Puzzle #492
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The song in my head when I woke up today: Everlong, by Foo Fighters (acoustic version)

• Oct. 14: Dear Agony, by Breaking Benjamin
• Oct. 13: Crawl, by Breaking Benjamin
• Oct. 12: Failure, by Breaking Benjamin
• Oct. 11: It Not Over, by Daughtry
• Oct. 10: Outside, by Staind
• Oct. 9: These Dreams, by Heart
• Oct. 8: Complicated, by Avril Lavigne
• Oct. 7: Complicated, by Avril Lavigne
• Oct. 5: Slide, by Goo Goo Dolls
• Oct 4: Evil Angel, by Breaking Benjamin
• Oct. 3: Right Here, by Staind
• Oct. 2: So Far Away, by Staind
• Oct. 1: I Will Follow You Into The Dark, by Death Cab For Cutie

Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: And I wonder/When I sing along with you/If everything could ever feel this real forever/If anything could ever be this good again

Commute Tunes: My drive to the office today was done with the DJ mode on Spotify rollin’. My music tastes are eclectic.

• Something to Remind You, Staind
• Without You, Breaking Benjamin
• Complicated, Avril Lavigne
• The Scientist, Coldplay
• Grow Old, Florida Georgia Line
• Gravity, Papa Roach
• One More Light, Lincoln Park
• Someone Like You, Adele

Something I’m looking forward to today: An office day with my colleagues.

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: An appointment next Tuesday with the guy who’s going to operate on my neck.

Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: The first fall day wearing flannel and a grunge rock T-shirt.

What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved the draft of a story for a Johnny Boy Marketing client about an Indiana University professor whose research is all about battling misinformation on social media.

What I’ve written: Driving Growth With Confidence: Nihar Shah (MMM ’16) relies on lessons learned in MMM as he works on Carvana’s mission to become the largest and most profitable car retailer in the country.

In the one and only season I played organized basketball, our season ended at 3-4 after a 135-3 loss in which I was knocked unconscious by an errant knee, convinced my coach to let me go back into the game, and scored one-third of our points. All of which is to say, I was never a very good basketball player.

Which is very important to note now that, as of last night, I’m the new head coach of the 15U Blue Knights developmental team. How this happened is another lesson on the things we do for our children.

Boy The Younger has more basketball talent than I ever had. He’s a flashy ball handler and great playmaker who, if he could develop a consistent outside shot, would be a pretty good force on the court. As it stands now, he stands just outside the competitive team. He’s been invited to practice with them, but he’s been told he likely won’t play much, if at all.

So that means he’s also on the developmental team, which, through the years, has struggled to find a coach and, when it did find one, struggled to find a coach who understood that the word “developmental” doesn’t mean, “Just put everyone out there and don’t teach them a thing and see what happens,” which, most often, was double-digit losses.

So when BTY said he was thinking about giving up the game if there wasn’t a coach he could learn from, I told him I’d coach the developmental team if he didn’t make the competitive team. And so here we are.

Now that I’m coach, I have no clue, really, on exactly how to develop the team. Of course, I have no clue who’s actually on the team yet. That’s a pretty important piece of the puzzle, I would say. What I do now is that what I lack in basketball talent I make up for with enthusiasm and inspiration to get the most of the kids who play for me. I do it in baseball. I did it for BTY when he was younger and I coached his YMCA basketball team.

That said, expect more double-digit losses — just hopefully not as bad double-digit losses.

Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?