Create a brand people love from someone who does it for a living. — I will say this until undertakers shovel gravel and dirt over my face — data is directional, but definitive. Data is your tour guide, your backstage pass, and the operator’s manual you instantly bin when you unpack IKEA furniture or complex appliances. …

Hey there! Welcome to my virtual home. — Vitals Born & raised in New York. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for the past six years. Started career at an investment bank: A time I’d like to forget. Ditched the suit to build a profitable dot.com in 1999. Built a boutique digital agency from $1MM to $20MM in 4 years. …

Are we really in this together? Or do the deepest cuts come from one another? — We trade stories about men holding us back like baseball cards. We talk about the boy’s club, and how we’re still denied access to entry. There exists no golden parachutes or keys to the corporate kingdom. Our nods are collective and knowing. We pass around articles about America’s obsession with…

I don’t care. — In a world that’s heating up by the second, where cities are underwater, where we can count the number of white rhinos on one hand, where people are often terrible and proud of it, where in Los Angeles, in the city I live, in the midst of a heat wave…

Because the work is about integrity, how you impact one person. — Why does everybody have to die? Because everyone does. It’s 2001, and it’s months before a taxi barrels down the Lower East Side and I’m convinced I’m having a heart attack because too much cocaine, and I wander out of a cab and a boy from the college I used…

When the foundation of your brand is cold, robotic, and far from helpful. — Customers remember the experience they have with a brand above all else. In fact, the definition of a brand is not your logo, website, or story — it’s how people perceive you. …

You actually have to do the work. — Years ago, a slew of bloggers found it fashionable to write about brand building. They slapped up SEO-drenched articles, published them in “marketing” publications, included quotes from “experts,” and earned legions in coin and followers. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t define the term “brand” correctly, nor had they actually…

That’s the deepest hole you can dig? — Look at you, smelling of days-old tobacco, bad haircuts, and a lifetime of regret. Look at me — the hands and feet you snatched and stuffed into Ikea bags. You were surprised how much weight those bags could carry. Don’t you know I can’t swim without my arms and legs…

The stories we tell ourselves to get through the days without screaming. — Before Sophie died in my arms, I tried to remember her as she was rather than the skin, jutting bones and matted hair she’d become. When I first saw her, she streaked across the room like a star burning bright and hot. And, as the years passed, she’d proven that…