Psychology
Hold The Vision
There are two parallel universes emerging right now. One living in and with a pandemic and one merely annoyed by it. Day after day I get messages from friends and readers whose lives have been turned upside-down, while their newsfeeds boast of an unaffected population, still going to clubs and birthday parties and vacations to (…)
Write Copy You’re Proud Of
There’s a category of businesses I call “cookie-cutter” because they all look the same. You can tell who runs a cookie-cutter business because they’re obsessed with business “formulas” for scaling. And they do it quite well. If you want to run a cookie-cutter business it will probably work, at least for a little while. Books (…)
Copy Lessons From Ski School
When I was 5 my parents put me in ski school to learn how to ski. Five hours later they returned and I was a pile of tears. Not only could I not ski, I now HATED skiing. I had (and still have) terrible spatial awareness and my body doesn’t listen to my instructions. When (…)
My Christmas Wish Is A New Emergent Culture
Just skip a week. This is what people suggest when I tell them I’m tired. “Just skip a week, no one will notice.” They tell me to quit writing emails, not cook dinner, don’t go to the gym, leave the laundry on the floor, get a sitter. They say none of you will notice if (…)
Pretension is Optional: What Wine and Writing Have In Common
We were in a cave. They call it a wine cellar, but it was a cave. Parts of it were charming and other parts were super creepy and you could tell that if the walls could talk they’d have had stories because they looked like they’d seen some shit since 1422. The thing I remember (…)
How to Improve When You’re Not “Naturally” Talented
PSA: The Copy Workshop is open for enrollment for our January 2022 session. The workshop is $1,200 but for the next week, Akimbo is offering it for $800 in celebration of something I’ll tell you about later. For now, what you need to know is the price for the workshop will increase in one week. If you’d (…)
How It’s Always Been Done
Each year on the week of Thanksgiving, lawyers and financial planners all over America send me clip art. The clip art comes with a note that says some version of, “We are grateful for the opportunity to serve our clients. Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Reese Holdings, LLC.” We’ve created a culture that finds these (…)
Fine, I’ll Get Back On LinkedIn
At the urging of my friend Louis, I have returned to LinkedIn. I’d avoided it for years because I’m not in the market for a “job,” and find the dialogue on there to be vapid, performative, and – I cannot emphasize this point enough – emphatically boring. Forced hot takes, feigned “excitement” over things (…)