Your citizens, users, or customers are looking for shortcuts.  Quicker ways to do things: lose weight, gain wealth.  Close a business deal, open another opportunity.

As our physical and digital worlds continue to blend, more of these shortcuts are found online.  And they are visible, measurable, and monetiseable.

So the biggest challenge to growth isn’t really about audience, it’s about organisations.  Getting an organisation to keep up with the new shortcuts your audience take is hard.  The real art of brand planning is using it to get people to do the things you want: individuals, departments, partners—and then finally customers.

Isolated intelligence is not interesting or competitive.  In a room full of smart people the creative person wins.  Not paint-splat-on-wall creative expression but applied creativity.

Creativity is more powerful than intelligence because the enduring outcome of innovation is a better result and/or less effort required overall.  Power = Effect / Effort

Applied creativity unpacks intelligence.  The deeper you understand a topic, context, or tools available—the bigger the canvas in front of you.

You will define the concept of work (as in: career) for yourself.  It will sit at different places on the work-to-live or live-to-work priority spectrum throughout life.

It is important to define it because society will do the same.  But as with most things what society comes up with will apply to the lowest common denominator—the mainstream masses.  And who this benefits is for you to determine.

At time of writing this post the quote I grew up with "the world is full of educated failures" is less a dig at any institution and more a reflection on the fact that traditional career pathways and rewards established in the mid-to-late 20th century no longer exist.  I am using this period as a reference only because I can relate to it through my own life experience.  In reality a series of industrial revolutions has done the same several times over and is likely to do so again in ways and for reasons I can't yet imagine.

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Time is constant but different stages of life carry different meaning.  Chronos versus kairos.  These special stages might have gaps between them but can also overlap as the thread of significance may be more personal, family, professionally, etc oriented.

Thinking about the recent future I can define two trigger moments when new stages commenced and led me to writing this post today: meeting my now wife five years ago in Singapore and embarking on an IVF journey together, and being approached for my current role as Managing Director Publicis Groupe Hong Kong.

I don't plan to get into the reason for writing but my primary reflection as I do is my tendency to discard information—specifically in this case, material I have written—after I have mastered it, changed my mind about it, or moved on for whatever reason.  I regret this as it's 1) a missed opportunity to learn from myself, 2) deletes trace of incremental gains, and 3) prevents me quickly sharing with others when I think it might be useful.