The 100 Days Push to be Human

Having had enough of work, I decide to start a few 100 days challenges and only work part of the day

We’ve hit peak frustration.

It used to be enough for me to wake up in the morning, go for a long run and come back for some ground coffee in the french press.

I would sit at the computer and start my work and after an hour or two, I would stop and read the paper or the online news, and take a shower. Yes, I often will get straight to work after a run, because the adrenalin is pumping and the thoughts are coming fast.

And then about six months ago, maybe eight months ago, I started feeling that I was losing any motivation to do the work I wanted to do. I felt this way for a number of reasons. The work I was doing, it was clear to me, was only going to be partially successful in helping my employer get the impact and the results it wanted.

The work I was doing did not approach anything nearing holistic. I want things to be holistic. What I mean by that is this:

I do digital marketing. Digital marketing for a long time was the practie of taking three very different things and weaving them to together into a kludge of something that resembled what people in the industry call a value proposition.

You take 1). The products features; 2). The customer’s wishes and desires; and you take 3). language that conveys that.

Then you distribute that into something they call channels, and people will become so enamored of your writing style that they drop everything they are doing and rush to the digital destination of your choice and input things that you want them to input and then you own them.

Well, that doesn’t work for me exactly. I can’t possibly see how these antiquarian ways of thinking actually produce results. There are four reasons for this:

1. People are not paying attention to anything that doesn’t interest them. They are omniverous in their habits and in their culture practices. They have plenty to do without a brand getting in the way.
2. Language is boring for most people. It’s also an ineffective medium for persuasion, especially in a culture online that is…
3. Visually-stimulated, and emotionally engaged in things that make them feel comfortable and are familiar. Any brand is always attempting to be something new, so it’s by default not familiar. And marketing messaging is very invasive and it treats the consumer audience as if it is not paying attention — which it is not — so the language in and of itself is not at all comfortable
4. Brands have a veneer over them, and the veneer is whatever you would call that feeling you get when you meet someone who is only interested in themselves and what they have to say and what they feel. Narcissistic? Arrogant?

Yeah, maybe narcissistic. Brands are narcissists and consumers are their reflecting pools.

See the trouble? How can any language use that purports to reflect to a consumer that the brand knows something about how THEY feel even come close to succeeding at that, when it’s obvious the brand’s main reason to use the language is to convince the consumer how awesome THE BRAND is?

Well, in a phrase, “I give up.”

So, for the next 100 days, I am only going to do what any responsible brand manager would do in digital media or community building verticals. I am going to say, fuck it.

I am going to spend more time trying to understand other people and have real conversations. And, in the process start a few 100 days challenges so that I can feel more like a human being again.

My 100 Days Challenges are:

1. Learn some kind of coding or programming language
2. Lose weight
3. Build muscle
4. Build endurance by running from my house to the top of Twin Peaks every morning or evening to see if I can become faster at it each time
5. Read 25 books that educate me and enlighten me
6. Save enough money to make sound and strategic investments

And I will report on it every day. I will use Medium to show how my life and my time have helped me evolve.

And maybe I become something else. Less a digital marketing guy at a big company, and more of a human being who knows what he really wants to do with his life.