The Stance
I did not choose this work. A failed merger chose it for me. I was the tech guy, the automations and the funnels, and I had merged with a creative agency precisely so I would never have to write. When it came apart, it left me holding the one part of the work I had spent years avoiding. So I learned it. Badly at first. Then I could not stop.
The part I had dodged turned out to be the lever. A sharper message moved the needle as hard as any automation I ever built, and it kept working long after the automations went stale. A literature professor later gave me words for what the field had already taught me: that writing is the oldest technology we have for moving another human being, four thousand years of engineered feeling, and that almost everyone selling something treats it as decoration.
AI has made competent copy free, which makes competent the noise floor. What stays scarce is the layer underneath: the mechanism that makes a stranger keep reading, and the judgment to know what not to say yet.
So the practice here is simple. Study before speaking. Build before asking. Let the pursuit prove the craft. And when the work is done, wait, because quality creates its own gravity.
Don't chase attention · Be worth attending to
The Lineage
Angus Fletcher proved to me that literature is a technology: twenty five inventions, each engineered to move a human brain. I built him a museum.
Chip and Dan Heath taught me why a handful of messages survive while the rest evaporate, and that the difference is engineering, not luck.
Shannon Morgan thinks in decades. He showed me the five levels of authority, from the vendor asking permission to pitch, up to the cathedral, where there is no selling left at all, only draw. I have spent the time since refining what he gave me, adding color, teaching it to others. The playbooks I trust most stop at level four. The fifth is still above me.
I am not there yet. I am climbing in public.