Growing up in Massachusetts, I spent most of my Super Bowl evenings fairly stressed.

In the roughly twenty Super Bowls I’ve watched since 1999, my Patriots have played in nine of them. Those were nine evenings where I was frantic about the game, guzzling beer, annoyed at my friends, stress piling my face with pita chips, or usually some combination of all of the above.

This year, I was particularly excited.

While I’d been on an overnight flight sleeping through last year’s Super Bowl, this year was different. …

✍️ This piece was originally published as part of my new Substack newsletter, the Marketing Mind Meld. Subscribe there for weekly marketing reads!

I was eight years old at Universal Studios when I first learned about the existence of ET, Steven Spielberg’s mini extraterrestrial masterpiece.

I was enamored by its concept: I wanted to believe ET was not just a fabric of our imagination, that aliens had a high probability of greeting us and helping us fly bicycles into the sky.

As childhood passed and I watched UFO documentaries, my conviction became stronger that aliens not only existed but that…

SOCIAL MEDIA

Last Wednesday was the U.S. inauguration, a day typically reserved for surprising celebrity appearances, bold platitudes from the new president, and general atmospheric optimism for the incoming political party.

But if you hopped on the internet to find any big takeaways from the presidential speech or the event, you may have been curious to find another image trending instead — one that had little to do with the president.

A cold man with crossed arms, a brown coat, kaleidoscopic brown mittens, and a stoic, impatient impression took the internet by storm.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who is no stranger to the…

Everyone has that one moment.

Your first job. Your first successful meeting. Your first conference panel. Your first launched marketing campaign.

An indelible feeling of accomplishment. You’re on top of the world.

Then — without warning — your insides squeeze.

You start asking yourself questions.

What if it was just beginner’s luck? What if I’m one mistake away from losing everything? How easy was this if even I could accomplish it? How many other people could have done this?

While not all those questions are valid concerns, it’s true that many people do fear success — that with success, comes…

✍️ This piece was originally published as part of my new Substack newsletter, the Marketing Mind Meld. Subscribe there for weekly marketing reads!

In early December, I was back home for the holidays when a package arrived that caused everyone in my family to raise an eyebrow.

It was a scented candle, which in itself wasn’t surprising. Everyone knows I’m quite the candle hoarder.

But it was the scent itself that shocked them.

It was a Dunkin Donuts scented candle.

Growing up in Northeast Massachusetts, Dunkin Donuts was a cultural phenomenon — a restaurant that carried all the frenzied popularity…

In my 2019 reflection, I mentioned how 2019 was one of my hardest years personally and professionally.

LOL.

As you can imagine, the momentum that came out of that reflection sputtered quickly into early 2020, forcing a whole new set of life adjustments. While it was a series of tough times, there are also some fun things retrospectively that happened in 2020:

• Chatted regularly with a therapist for the first time
• Took the longest hiatus from drinking since before 21 (almost 3 months)
• Lost close to 30 pounds in peak quarantine (Mid-July)
• Started a newsletter and actually shellshocked my imposter…

I remember one of the first moments I fell in love with marketing.

It was the Summer of 2015, I was working at IBM as a Strategy Consultant and I was casually scrolling Twitter at work, at the precipice of a growing controversy.

Meek Mill had accused Drake (both rappers) of ghostwriting his songs. Naturally annoyed, Drake responded with a series of cathartic disses and social media became a hotbed of debate around the feud.

Whataburger, White Castle, and Rosetta Stone all made quick jokes on Twitter at Meek Mill’s expense (his response to Drake was not well-received) and enjoyed…

✍️ This piece was originally published as part of my new Substack newsletter, the Marketing Mind Meld. Subscribe there for weekly marketing reads!

When I was seven years old, I remember attending an after school program where we were assigned an odd activity: We had to mix granola with glitter and put it into a Ziploc bag.

This was followed by an even more odd instruction. We were told to sprinkle it on the driveway right as the sun began to set on Christmas Eve so that we could make sure it got there just in time for Santa’s reindeer.

…