Binderama60for60

The best one yet!

Can you believe it? I’ve been mouthing off for almost a year on this 60|60 platform, spouting nigh on 90,000 words into the ether. And I still haven’t touched on a few topics I promised to cover.

Looks like I’ve got more spew in me.

When this thing started over 18 months ago, I began by making lists of topics, just to see if I could even find 60 things I’d want to write about. Check. As the execution unfurled, other topics emerged that felt more urgent or pertinent.

Anyway, there are six topics (actually more like 40) I had planned to cover that got shelved or consumed or tossed all together. Blogging is a bitter, sinister mistress; she doesn’t care about your feelings.

So in 58|60, I’m doing a little catch-up. Here are six topics I thought were important in 2024/5 but ultimately didn’t make the cut. Disclaimer: I already had drafts with a few hundred words on each of them, so…

• Leaders & Builders
• Vienna, Virginia
• Women
• Technology
• Creative for Hire
• Regrets

Here we go.

Leaders & Builders

I’ve been fortunate to work with, near and for some great leaders my entire career. If you’ve read along on this 60|60 thing, you know Walt Disney is my everything. Never met him. But I’ve met people who worked closely with him, as well as people who’ve faithfully built on his legacy and still do.

For me, leadership lands different today than it did 18 months ago. Back then I had bosses, now I don’t, except for Mary and the dog. I had clients who were all over the F100s: CxOs, high-profile leaders and thinkers, some very inspiring and accomplished folks.

More than that, my dilemma in revisiting this topic is that the term leadership feels nebulous to me these days. Leadership shouldn’t be about mere hierarchy, org charts and titles, or about blind loyalty. It also shouldn’t be transactional or based on intimidation. That’s where we are though, in government and business. Even our HOA.

The leaders I’ve worked for and admired have been empathic, supportive and fair. While they were superior, they didn’t act like it. They confronted me for my arrogance and praised me for my professionalism; they clapped back when I screwed up and cheered me when I had the chance to stand up. As important, they were open to being challenged and they encouraged me to speak up, truth to power.

Sure, I encountered a few screamers along the way, some jerks, posers and BINOs–bosses in name only–and I learned from them as well.

I never aspired to leadership. I’m content as an IC, an independent contributor. When I am placed in a position of authority, I do my best to be fair and forthright, but I do hold people accountable when necessary, especially when balls are dropped, assignments aren’t followed and quality is sub-par. As my Dad liked to say, “Sorry doesn’t feed the admiral’s cat!” Makes sense to me. And like my Dad, I don’t suffer fools gladly.

This post was supposed to be a shoutout to some faves in the business of leadership. I covered a lot of that in the eighth installment of 60|60. Teachers and coaches; bosses and colleagues at Disney and Universal; partners and clients along the way at Adrenaline Films, Intel, Microsoft, Campos, the Encore boys, a few Invisionites. I thank all of them for what they’ve taught me and how they’ve inspired me over the years.

Vienna, Virginia

This is my hometown, where I spent my life from years two to 18. I feel fortunate to have grown up there, surrounded by the history and culture of the Washington, DC area, smart people, important places and a lot of natural beauty. There was community, as I came to know it.

That said, I couldn’t wait to leave and I’ve never contemplated moving back. More on that later.

A few years ago, I attended my high school reunion. The town felt familiar at every turn, and jarring at the same time. There were pangs of nostalgia as I toured around–in Ubers mostly, rather than on my bike or in the Family kelly green station wagon.

The house on Lewis Street, school hallways and auditoriums, soccer fields and playgrounds, the sites of Pinewood Derbies, Easter egg hunts, fireworks, orthodontia, bully showdowns, walking with Mom to the Big Boy (now a bank), paper routes, bus stops, first stitches, first kiss, first jobs, the pizza place, the Rexall lunch counter, the movie theater, the mall, the other mall, and all the threads that hold the place together.

It was eerie. Seriously, on some astral plane, I felt vibrations emanating from the bustling new Chipotle, Whole Foods, Peet’s, MODs, McMansions and Metro stations. Maple Avenue, the main drag and still the scene of the annual Halloween parade, is traffic-jammed non-stop. I used to sit on the curb to watch the spooky spectacle and anticipate a handshake from Vienna’s most famous resident, Willard Scott. The Drug Fair is now a jazz club; I once met Joe Theismann in the checkout line. And I can still smell the burgers Mom and I shared while waiting on the pharmacy. The Vienna Inn is still there, so is the Virginian, pretty much the same but sans smoking. Vienna Donuts is now a Dunkin, predictably.

Adjacent regions like Tysons Corner and the Dulles Corridor have sprawled outward and skyward with glistening cathedrals fueled by technology and commerce and government contracts, connected by 10-lane highways and trains that fly through the air. I kid you not.

The place felt like a dear old friend who I barely recognized.

A little history

When Dad took a magazine job in Washington, Northern Virginia was in transition. It was sleepy and the suburbs had barely taken root. Though destined for the cosmopolitan, it had the dusty flavor of the old south.

Back then, the temperature of the country was running hot. Mom reminisced about when we left Michigan for DC, Detroit was on fire from the riots fueled by civil rights and more. When we arrived in Virginia, DC was on fire too and for even more reasons.

The Folks chose Vienna, they said, because Vienna was more integrated and diverse than the rural areas, and they wanted us to understand that. In the late 60s, integration in Vienna had a ways to go: schools and stores were integrated but the social divide and geography was still palpable. There was some moderate unease, even among us kids. There were fights. There were streets and blocks we were told not to traverse. And we didn’t. By the late 70s, refugees started arriving from Vietnam and Iran; and things got even more complicated.

Lessons I’ve taken with me my whole life.

Onward

Vienna gave me a lot. And like a lot of people who gave me a lot, I turned my back on it.

The fond memories of the place are rivaled by pangs of angst. It will always be my hometown. But when I came of age, I just wanted more and felt I deserved more. In retrospect, Vienna was the first place I wanted to escape; just leave the baggage and go. And keep going.

At the reunion, I ran into the mayor of Vienna, Linda Colbert. I kinda knew her from our days at James Madison High School, and I used to deliver the paper to her house. I congratulated her for growing the town; I fan-boyed is more like it. Seems curious to me now: I’m fascinated by the mayor of a town I don’t want to live in. But there it is.

I also lunched with a few folks from the JMHS Class of ’83, none of whom I had known especially well. It was a nice, boozy, raucous afternoon. One of the women, who I’d been acquainted with since elementary school, asked me, “were you always this funny?”

Yeah, I was. Gotta go.

Women

In the earliest stages of 60|60, I was actually enthused about exploring this topic. It seemed like an obvious thing that’s confounded me my whole life. Actually, it scared the hell out of me, in a good way.

A lot to unpack and I’m going to try to unpack as much as I can bear in this 60|60 exercise. Jeez, it already sounds sordid. Talk about baggage!

Originally, I imagined framing this as cause and effect: revisiting my earliest experiences and how they informed me as I grew into adulthood. For one, I was born into a household that consisted of four males and my Mom. Mom was strong but so were the men, times four. It was the early 70s into the 80s, a fragile era for gender rights, equality and threatened masculinity.

When it came to women, my Dad and older Brothers didn’t offer a lot of hand-me-down advice. Most of my outreaches to girls during adolescence ended badly. The first girl I ever asked out laughed at me. Then she told her friends about it, so humiliating. That was 8th grade. It stung. For weeks and longer. I formed a protective shell. For years.

Until college, most everything I knew about women was gleaned from pop culture, music and movies of the times–#MeToo it was not. Then I lived in a fraternity house. You can read about it here but suffice to say the lifestyle didn’t reinforce or reward the best behaviors when it came to forging other-gender relationships.

After a lot of soul-searching

As an adult, I navigated relationships recklessly. I still didn’t have the maturity and patience to commit to the long term. Like with my transience from place to place, I felt the same urges to keep escaping, looking for something more. I knew then that it might hurt people–and it did–but I was that selfish.

Drafts of this post have been around from the beginning of 60|60. I’ve avoided it, afraid it would surface or breed some unpleasant feelings or rationales. It has. As I’ve ruminated on all this for these past many months, I’ve come to accept–or at least understand–that my treatment of women has not been so different from my treatment of men. I haven’t always treated people with the respect and loyalty they deserved.

Many regrets and cringe-worthy memories on the topic. But that’s part of an upcoming chapter in this expansive 58|60 installment.

If not for Mary’s patience and tenacity, I would probably still be running. She came into my life at the right time, and I’m damn lucky that I figured that out when I did. Finally.

Information Technology

Nobody knows nothing.

A.I. is about to strike like ferocious, head-spinning lightning across every walk of life. Some of it might be good, a lot will certainly be bad, and the rest no one has a clue about. You wouldn’t see the world’s largest companies investing trillions researching something they already understand.

I’ve been connected to the high-tech business for most of my career, from weak PCs attached to the rickety internet of the 80s and 90s, to mobility, smart homes and phones, the cloud, IoT, gaming, holography and a bunch of other flavors-of-the-year. In my opinion, there has never been anything that comes even close to the potential for disruption that A.I. will deliver.

Goosies!

What makes this different is accessibility. Whereas inventions of the last 50-1,000,000 years took years and centuries to gain large-scale implementation–and often only by certain educated or moneyed classes–A.I. is already in your face and in your hand.

Here’s an example from a simpler time: my Gran used to share marvelous stories of inventions she’d witnessed in her lifetime, starting with the Wright Brothers. She spoke as though she’d been there with them at Kitty Hawk chasing the glider down a hill. She would have been two.

It wasn’t until her 60s that Gran flew on an airplane. That’s how long adoption used to take. Btw, they served real food back then, on real plates with real metal flatware. Gran would filch the whole set and give it to me when I met her at the gate.

Where was I? Oh right.

Three years ago A.I. felt distant and utilitarian—a quiet back-room tool monitoring supply chains and assembly lines in the hands of responsible managers. Now it’s churning out Hollywood-level films in minutes, along with a tidal wave of social and political effluvia for gullible morons to feed on.

Plus, unlike most tech platforms that require years for coders and engineers to master, if you don’t know how to use A.I., A.I. will explain itself to you. “What do you think you’re doing, Dave?”

Soon, it will be eating your lunch for you too.

For those of you who crave monumental change and epic disruption, the next few years should be a blast. For some of us staring at the next chapter of life, it’ll be fascinating to watch. For everyone else, vaya con Dios.

Which makes me wonder: If A.I. is now capable of making movies, running companies and curing cancer, why are customer service chatbots still so unbelievably stupid?

A little history

Here’s a phrase I’ve used ironically for a long time: “In my day…” These days, the irony is gone.

Anyway…

…In my day, if you wanted to create something, you used your hands and your head. If you wanted to share it, you tacked it up on the cork board or put it in an envelope and trusted the USPS to deliver it in a week or two.

In my day, classroom handouts were printed on paper and delivered wet, smelling of chemicals. Keyboards were called typewriters in my day, and it sometimes took two fingers to get a single key to work; if you made a mistake: Whiteout, more chemicals. My Dad taught me to work a real B&W photo lab, even more chemicals, the kind that made you woozy.

Where was I? Oh right. I think those chemicals might have retarded some synapses.

Dad was the first person I knew to own a computer, a Commodore in the late 70s. He used it for word processing mostly. I took a computer class senior year of high school, spending most periods texting with kids at other schools. I paid an uber-geek $10 to write BASIC code for my final project, a word-processing application. You might call it an “app.”

More computer labs in college, connected to a screaming-loud dot-matrix printer. I designed graphics for the college TV station, filling exactly 64 pixels with one of 16 colors. I typed my first telex at Disney, sitting in some outpost near Orlando at 11:00 at night, surrounded by superiors feeding me material to share with the good people of Russia. In my day, it was called “the USSR.”

Email eventually replaced inter-office envelopes when I was at Universal. When the internet started making noise, I was told by a promotions guy that, basically, you’d have a printer on top of your television that would spit out coupons. One night there was a party on the backlot for an internet company. I crashed it. I thought, “these people are the people of the future!”

While I was still in Florida I bought my first computer: a Macintosh Quadra 660AV with 8MB of RAM and a 250MB hard disk. With the monitor, the printer, scanner, modem and software (Office and Photoshop 2.0), I laid out a keen $6K when I was making about $30K. My engineer and design friends scoffed, “Oh, I thought you said you got a computer.” In my day, Apple was an albatross.

Fast-forward a few years, past AOL, past Netscape, okay you can go faster, yes LISA, Compaq, CompUSA, Friendster, MySpace, RadioShack…

Okay, stop here.

One day I find myself in the demo lab at Intel HQ in Santa Clara. I’d been hired by an agency to support Intel on their executives’ international keynote tours. I’m staring into the back of a server rack as someone explains to our group how it operates. I nodded occasionally and affected some grunts of understanding, overcompensating for the fact I did not have a clue what any of it meant. And I mean any of it.

That’s when I realized the man standing to my left was Andy Grove, the Chairman of Intel and recent Time magazine Person of the Year. Even this Silicon Valley noob knew that Andy was a legend.

Yadda yadda yadda, a few years later, I’m standing backstage at an Intel event in an arena in Anaheim. Andy Grove is wearing leather pants, about to take the stage to address 5,000 of his team. I tell him he looks sexy. Eyes dart, his wife Eva howls, Andy blushes. We’d come a long way.

Do people still fast-forward?

If so, keep going. For the next few years, I traveled all over the world with Intel executives, staging keynotes and touring labs, fabs and universities in Europe, South America, China and India. In those years and beyond, I was fortunate to interact with all sorts of tech pioneers, as an event and content producer. I spent time in prep and on stage with Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Eric Schmidt, Larry Ellison, Steve Balmer, Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang and others.

I understood my role, but like with my previously chronicled celebrity affliction, spending a few moments or hours in conversation with these giants left an impression. These guys are engineering history. Double entendre intended.

Some of them will be writing and perhaps rewriting history. What’s going on with our government and companies like Anthropic is chilling. Unleashed autonomous weaponry, mass surveillance of civilians, complete opacity. And we’re supposed to be the good guys; imagine what our enemies will do with it. Are doing with it.

Now if they could just make that Walgreens.com chatbot understand what “REPRESENTATIVE!” means.

Okay, this is my stop. It’s been a good ride, thanks for reading about my journey from pencils and mimeograph ink to A.I. in my life, so far. I’m gonna hop off here, but I’ll definitely stay engaged; I want to see it unfold from the cheap seats and how it all ends. I hope I end before it ends us. Not kidding.

A.I. Postscript

As with a lot of these posts, I consult ChatGPT before posting. In its analysis, it added this:

One Very Important Meta Move (If You’re Brave)
You are literally using AI right now to refine this memoir. You could say: I’m writing this with the help of the very thing I’m describing. That would:

• Humanize the fear.
• Show adaptation.
• Remove hypocrisy.
• Add humility.

That would elevate the entire chapter.

Post-postscript

When I fed GPT an updated rev, it suggested edits to its edits. Feels very human already.

With that, Godspeed, people of the future! Godspeed.

Creative for Hire

Now that I scared you (and me) with my take on A.I. and the likelihood that it might put everyone out of business—even the A.I. engineers—let’s see if we can still make a living in the business of being creative.

I’ve been hacking around the creative business for about forty years. Mostly on my own, sometimes on staff, occasionally inside agencies. Mostly corporate work: events, campaigns, media, the occasional spectacle and debacle.  

You are fortunate.

If you can cut it being creative, at any level or in any discipline, congratulations. If you get to spend your days imagining things and then trying to bring them into existence, that’s a privilege. That doesn’t make it easy or fun. A lot of people aspire to creative careers, and I know a few who’ve zigged into real estate or zagged into teaching or HR or management. No offense.

My advice: Aspire to make great things. Create moments and scenes that wow audiences. Bathe in their adoration and applause. It won’t always happen. It might happen only rarely. And you might have to bang your head against the wall, stay awake all night and have your work scoffed at by people you should rightly consider plebeians and miscreants. Don’t despair.  

Do it because you love it, because you need to, and even because you need the money. Which brings me to: unless you’re surviving on a trust fund…

RULE NUMBER 1: Get paid.

Maybe you followed your bliss, good for you!

But this is a career. Careers, by definition, are transactional: I do work for you, you pay me. It sounds obvious, but creatives are surprisingly bad at remembering this. Be clear up front on terms, which will likely not be in your favor. Once you agree, it’s simple: you deliver what you promised, the client pays what they promised and when they promised it.  

No matter your talents, direction, interests and the clients you choose or land, what you create is all about making money for someone. You especially. Don’t forget that. So…  

Get paid what you are worth.

What are you worth? That’s a tough question to answer, especially early on. Don’t be modest and don’t be timid. Ask around, test the waters, be wary of taking gigs on spec with the promise of a return down the road. That almost never works in your favor.

This is not a hobby. It’s a business, a profession. No matter how desperate you might be at the time, it’s better to walk away than to sell yourself away.

It amazes me how big companies and even small ones will nickel and dime creatives, but when it’s time to bonuses and perks for themselves, cha-ching! Do you think they bicker with their plumbing contractor when the toilets back up? No offense.  

APT: Attitude, Price, Talent.

This is my formula for evaluating and hiring creatives. Rare is someone who nails all three. If you can sell yourself on two of these, chances are we’ll get along just fine; expectations are set.

If you’re talented and cheap, yay. If you’re green with a great attitude, yay. If you’re really talented, with a stellar attitude and you’re cheap, you should definitely be asking for more money. I’ll find it.  

APT came to me from experience, and it inspired me to work on my attitude. I think most people who’ve worked with me would agree.

Of course, I wish my version of APT was laid down by Bruno and Rose. I would finally be enough.  

The customer is not always right.

You are getting paid to be creative, solve problems, deliver results. You are not being paid merely to follow orders. It took me a while and a few mentors to make that sink in. Truth is, worthy clients and leaders invite collaboration and even challenge. At Intel they call it constructive confrontation.

That said, choose your battles wisely. And give the client their share of W’s, even if it hurts sometimes. I suggest now dying on the hill between PMS 722C and 723C.

What’s more, if you’re conducting yourself professionally but you’re still in fear of being fired, you might want to zig or zag into another career.  

Speaking of firing, I admire agencies and account leads who are willing to fire clients for bad behavior. That’s especially true when the client is abusive, including a placing unreasonable demands on agency employees, budgets and timelines.

Keep learning and growing.

A few years ago my advice would have been obvious: master the tools of the trade. Learn Adobe for yourself. Learn production software, budgeting tools, technical direction, and use collaboration tools.

Today, I strongly recommend you master A.I., if that’s even possible. More likely A.I. will master you first.

I had a bunch more preachy paragraphs on the topic, but I’ll leave it with this: A.I. will always be smarter than you, but at least school yourself in the culture, the arts, literature, storytelling, whatever. The more passionate you are about something, the more effective you’re A.I. journey will be.

And the more passionate and effective you are, the better your creative journey will be. Sail on!

Regrets

Nope, not going there. This 60|60 is already a minefield of regret and revelation. So let me dispatch with this entire issue in a single run-on non-sentence:

I regret: Smoking; alcohol; parachute pants; gambling; crabs; flaming shots; shoplifting; a few things I said; a few things I said which were misconstrued; hickeys; a few things I didn’t say; that break-up; my behavior at a wedding in New Hampshire; typos; junior high school; partaking of certain controlled substances (but only a few of them); being ill-prepared when it mattered; not investing in Nvidia, Google or Microsoft; unloading Apple, Amazon and Meta way too soon, and holding onto AOL until it crashed; the mullet (but I’d kill for it now).

Of course, I wouldn’t be here today without denial, evasion and my comrades in codependency.

This is a tough topic to balance. I still harbor some fantasy about “what if…?” That’s not a healthy notion, but healthy notions have not been a cornerstone of my life. I’ve learned though that my choices have made me stronger in many ways, like scar tissue. And like scars, they make for some great stories.

That’s all for now.

Only two more installments to go in the 60|60 series and then, well, on to whatever comes next!