Leave This Trail Behind

I've worked in sales. Not the car sales type gig, but the media sales type gig. At times, this position was as lowly, petty, predatory, and even humiliating as one who's never done sales, can imagine. Then there were other sales roles (I got to be a sales 'director' at one point :)), which I found satisfying, engaging and confidence-building. These were better.

Fast forward to now, and in the last two weeks, I've had not only been approached by my previous employer for a role in sales but by another media agency, today. 

And it felt terrible. The offer was introduced vaguely in an email. The writer is someone I've known in the field for a few years and I think we've grown to respect one another. In writing, she didn't initially state the type of job, just suggested I might be interested in some work.

What Stealing Looks Like

This 4th of July holiday I made a new friend who works for Hearst communications. She's hustled hard to get her place as editor for a bike and running publication, and when we began following each other on Instagram, passing one of the many phases of the 21st-century friendship, I commented in faux (but secretly real) jealousy of her 2k+ followers.

Popularizing Christianity

I don't know much about David Brooks. His name is familiar and if I take 30 seconds, the internet reminds me that he writes a column in the NYTimes. I've also heard him on NPR, and maybe PBS. If I still regularly tuned into PBS.

But I'm not writing so much about the career of David Brooks as I am about his life's work (there is, in fact, a difference). And his life's work is relevant to my career work because his life work is about marketing complex ideas to the mainstream world.