Mind Soup

Marketing has never been a profession where knowing everything was possible. There are too many industries, audiences, cultures, platforms, technologies, and behaviors changing at the same time. Yet there has always been a temptation in marketing to act as though we have already figured things out. We build frameworks, create best practices, develop playbooks, study case studies, and look for formulas that can be repeated. We want to know what works. But the longer I work in marketing, the more I think the most valuable quality a marketer can have is not certainty. It is curiosity. Curiosity is what makes you ask why a campaign worked instead of simply celebrating the results. It makes you question why customers behave differently in one market than another. It makes you wonder whether the strategy that worked last year still makes sense today. It makes you interested in what your audience is doing when they are not interacting with your brand. And perhaps most importantly, it keeps yo...

We are living through a strange moment in the history of communication. We have reached a point where almost anyone can produce a polished article, social media post, email, presentation, or marketing campaign in seconds. The technology is impressive, and it is changing the way we work. But as AI becomes better at producing content, I think we are going to discover that producing content was never really the difficult part. The difficult part was always having something worth saying. I have spent much of my career working in marketing and communications, where there is constant pressure to produce. There is always another campaign, another post, another newsletter, another blog, another presentation, and another idea that needs to be turned into something people can see. For years, the challenge was often finding enough time to create all of it. AI is changing that equation. It can help you move from an idea to a draft remarkably quickly. It can organize your thoughts, suggest angles, ...

Nobody really prepares you for becoming a manager. You can take leadership courses, read books about management, learn how to conduct performance reviews, delegate tasks, set goals, and run meetings. You can study every framework ever created about leadership. Then you become responsible for other people and realize that most of management has very little to do with frameworks. It is about people. It is about making decisions when you do not have all the information, giving feedback when you know it might hurt, protecting your team while still holding them accountable, and knowing when to step in and when to get out of the way. Perhaps most importantly, it is learning that being good at your job and being good at managing people are two very different things. Your job changes completely One of the biggest surprises is how quickly your definition of "work" changes. When you are an individual contributor, you are largely responsible for your own output. You can measure your pro...

Over the course of my career, I have worked with more than 175 clients across different industries, countries, cultures, and stages of growth. Some were large organizations with established teams and sophisticated processes. Others were small businesses where a handful of people were doing everything themselves. I have worked with founders, CEOs, marketing directors, entrepreneurs, government organizations, nonprofits, artists, educators, and people launching their very first business. On paper, those clients had very little in common. Their industries were different, their budgets were different, and what they needed from me was rarely the same. But after working with that many people, you start to notice patterns. The biggest thing I learned is that working in marketing is rarely just about marketing. People hire you because they want more customers, better branding, stronger campaigns, more visibility, or better results. But underneath almost every business problem is a human proble...

I've always found changing my mind slightly uncomfortable. There is a strange pressure, especially as you get older, to appear consistent. We are encouraged to have strong opinions, defend them confidently, and stand by what we said before. Changing your mind can sometimes look like weakness, indecision, or a lack of conviction. I've come to see it differently. Changing your mind is often evidence that you learned something. Some of the opinions I had in my twenties feel almost foreign to me now. Others have simply become more nuanced. There are things I once considered extremely important that barely register anymore, and things I didn't understand at all that have become central to how I think about work and life. I'm sure I'll change my mind about many of these things again. That's probably the point. I changed my mind about having a five-year plan For a long time, I thought ambitious people were supposed to know where they were going. You picked a direction,...

For most of my life, I thought education was something you could document. You went to school, earned a degree, took a course, received a certification, and added it to your CV. The more qualifications you collected, the more evidence you had that you were learning and progressing. There was something reassuring about being able to point to a piece of paper and say, "I know this because I studied it." I still believe formal education has enormous value. My own education has shaped the way I think and has opened doors that might otherwise have remained closed. But after many years of working, changing roles, working across countries and cultures, managing people, dealing with difficult situations, and simply getting older, I've started to think that some of the most important things I've learned are precisely the things I could never put on my CV. There is no certification for learning how to deal with disappointment. There is no university degree for knowing when to s...