Nothing interesting lives on the surface.
I’m not one for small talk. How’s the weather? Keeping busy? How’s your meal, everything good? Big plans for the weekend? These questions annoy me. Simply not questions I’m concerned with. They’re lazy. Conversation is more interesting when you ask weird questions. Honest ones. I prefer to get right under the hood. Like this one, for example: What’s one gift you’ve gotten that you didn’t ask for? I’ll go first.
The Gift
We all have a story. This one goes back a ways.
My story started in a picture-book suburban town of Boston in the 70’s. Small town living, post-and-rail fence in the front yard, amazing supportive parents, two dogs, a hen house full of chickens, and a sister who took the pressure off in a lot of ways but mostly by being first in the birth order. We did all the fun family things together. It was like The Wonder Years just 20 years later. I was born into what’s known as the Oregon Trail generation. The last 5 years of GenXers who were handed the last leg of Earth’s pre-internet free ride. That’s not the gift, but it was a huge score in hindsight. I took my first sip of water from the garden hose at 2 years old. All my toys were made from lead.
Those were the days. Every memory ever told and every 110 film flash-cube photo in the family album was proof, our life was pretty normal. From my own personal recounts, though, my story began a few years later when I could stitch together a couple of my first real memories. In only the way that real life could show up, it took an odd turn.
Some things hit hard.
My dad died. I was 5.
That wasn’t the turn anyone was expecting; only our mom and dad had. I had learned much later in life that they were anticipating a congenitally wired but catastrophic aneurysm to hit and take him down. No timeframe, no signals. Just BAM. Barely a word was mentioned after they’d heard the prognosis. Barely a break in stride from my old man. Just an otherwise healthy 40-year-old guy tripling down on his family every second of every day, expecting it could very well be his last. Imagine that.
Everyone has their shit.
If you haven’t endured this level of grief, I am envious. Paradoxically, a little sorry. On one hand, I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. On the other hand, everyone has their shit. Death at first memory just happens to be mine. In the early days, I could have gone without the reaper’s tether to mortality, to loss, and suffering, but in the latter ones, I came to appreciate that it shot a cannon of perspective into my 5-year-old gut, which would turn out to be something I’d learn to lean into later in life.
An anchor and a late-night TV host walk into a bar.
I’ve grown to respect Steven Colbert. A great talent. Funny as hell, whip smart, and a particularly charismatic guy. It’s a fucking shame he got canceled, but he will carry on. It’s not solely the entertainer in him that’s gotten my respect, though; it’s been his honesty. ( I also love Anthony Bourdain, arguably more, for this similar, albeit grittier, zero-bullshit honesty ). Both men cut from the same “ask weird questions” cloth. I dig that. But Colbert said something in an interview with Anderson Cooper once on the death of his own father that hit me hard and has sat with me ever since.
“I have some understanding that everybody is suffering. And however imperfectly, I acknowledge their suffering, and connect with them and to love them in a deep way that makes you grateful for the fact that you have suffered so that you can know that about other people. I want to be the most human I can be. And that involves acknowledging and ultimately being grateful for the things that I wish didn’t happen because they gave me a gift.”
– Stephen Colbert
Holy hell.
These 79 words hit harder than anything I’d ever heard, and not only did they affirm a lifetime of asking myself honest questions, but they also completely reframed my thinking.
Death was my gift.
From ground zero, it was clear that nothing actually mattered. Small, inane things were impervious to caring. Perspective wasn’t a term I’d known, but I knew that this was as real as it gets. Empathy wasn’t a theory; I saw into people and could see around corners in ways modern conversation couldn’t address. Thus, my abhorrence of trite small talk. Being human, a phrase I’d also understand later, was what this whole thing was all about. And man, that’s what I really wanted to be.
The greater gift? My wife, my kids, my life. Nothing I know would be the same if things hadn’t taken that turn. Holy hell. Again! Grateful doesn’t even come close to describing what this means, but for lack of a better word, I am beyond grateful for the good, along with the bad, and certainly for the present.
The gift that keeps on giving.
Anyone who knows me knows how I show up. There is more than one answer to every question, and if something needs to be done, roll your sleeves up and get dirty. This came from the backbone of the most badass mother on the planet, who sacrificed her own happiness and gave everything she had to her two kids, so we wouldn’t turn out to be another statistic. This gift, the one no one asked for, grew into a story about humility, presence, and perspective. I’ve been lucky to observe, through experience, how we all move through spaces in every aspect of this crazy modern life. I’ve taken that approach to everything I’ve done, least of all in how I’ve approached my career.
The Signal
How could all of this possibly relate to a job?
26 years of mostly deep, some shallow notches on my belt. All earned. Creative, brand, marketing, digital, mentoring, agency-building, doing whatever’s needed to be done for big and small brands. Asking other leaders hard questions the whole time. None of my perspectives was new, if only undefined in my career. Finding purpose and pleasure in any of it is harder than they tell you. 9-to-5 blending into life as an aspirational “I was meant to do this” is a pipe dream for most of us. But I’d forced myself to confront this head-on and decided I’d ask myself the honest and weird questions, for once.
Last year I spent 6 months asking myself questions about the industry that I was indoctrinated in, why was I continually cutting against the grain, what made the greatest creative great? Wow, what an exercise, and wow, did I find out that I have a few axes to grind.
What was I creating for? Was all of this only meant to sell more things? Ultimately, yes, that’s the end-all brief. Is it to persuade them that your thing is better than the others? That’s what we’ve been told. Is that the only way? Not at all. Are most companies shoe-horning products and services down people’s throats? 100%
The result of my lengthy introspection was clear: The business world has lost its way. Most brands have lost the signal. AI is real, it’s relevant, and an existential threat. We’ve been optimizing for the wrong things. Templates have taken over. The algorithm has made brands efficient, but they’ve also made them invisible. We’ve lost the ability to feel something, and we’ve lost the narrative. The antagonist is running the show.
But hold on, WE are running the show.
Humans, us, people of the real world, are in the driver’s seat. We are the ones who create. Art, science, culture, dumpster fires, poetry, language, all of it. We create. We are broad and diverse. Creative AF storytellers, fervent consumers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, friends, emotional, rational beings. We feel first, we rationalize second. We are messy, illogical, and we are so god damned interesting. But why are so many businesses marketing to us like we’re robots?
In the marketing world, we’re asking people the wrong questions. The small-talk equivalent that shows up as “Got any big plans next quarter?” My first axe to grind was that we need more child-inspired adults in the room who can start asking the honest questions again. My other axe was that marketers and creatives need to make better things for brands to close the gap with actual humans ( I call that Human Proximity, but this is for a later post ). Between these two axes — that’s where I found my breakthrough, living on life support.
The Build
I gave this breakthrough a place to breathe.
Part Human. The one thing most brands have stopped being. Part Human. A human-centered brand and creative agency for businesses bold enough to be honest in a world that’s forgotten how. Part Human. We build brands that move people because…well, because. This is it.
Once you have looked under the hood, you cannot un-see it. This consumer complex is sqwaking at us like robots, and each of us is walking around carrying something much more interesting and complicated. A father who taught you how to use a wrench. A teacher who saw something in you before anyone else did. A song from a year you would not want to live again. A friend who showed up when you did not ask. A mistake you have still not fully forgiven yourself for. A summer that changed everything.
Everyone has a story. Everyone is built by what has happened to them. The big things. The small things. The in-between things. Almost none of which are in the version they show up with. And businesses are fucking blind to it.
Let me show you what I mean.
The cheap option is right there. The math says go cheap. You don’t. Not because you can see the difference (you probably can’t). You avoid it because buying cheap tells people something about you that you’re not ready to be. That’s identity. It runs the show before your wallet ever opens.
You can get good coffee anywhere. But you go out of your way to drive across town because the barista remembers your name. That’s memory. The recognition costs them nothing and buys them a customer for life.
You didn’t watch that show because Netflix made it easy to find. You binge-watched it because both your friend and your coworker told you it was great. That’s social proof. We’ve been wired for it forever.
You said yes to that meeting even though you knew it didn’t really need an agenda. You went anyway because you hadn’t left your apartment or talked to another adult in three days. That’s relationship. The need to be near another human is real, and most of the day we’re pretending it isn’t.
These aren’t quirks. They’re part of the mechanism.
The architecture underneath all of it.
Every decision a human makes runs on the same operating system. We feel first. We decide second. We rationalize after. Always in that order. The architecture doesn’t care if you’re buying coffee or signing a contract. It works the same way. Joy. Fear. Anger. Longing. Hope. Shame. Awe. Disgust. These run the show. The decision before the decision.
We built our creative brand method around this. Emotion + Logic = Action. We call it Human Response™. We use all the tools in our creative tool shed to build for the response. We optimize for the feeling. Everything else follows.
That’s the work. Brand strategy and creative built on the actual architecture of how humans decide. Not on what the dashboard wants to be true. On what is.
You’ll know if this is you.
We work with Challengers who refuse to wait. Scale-ups outgrowing their origin story. Market leaders tired of becoming the wallpaper they used to set. Founders and executives who feel the urgency and know the brand is the lever, because a brand that connects is a business that converts.
Humans are so much more interesting than the spreadsheets built to describe us.
So we built Part Human to close the gap and find the signal again.
If you’re with us here, vigorously nodding your head, then subscribe to this substack and buckle up.
We’ve got a lot to say on the matter.
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You can follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can also dig in and see how we roll at parthuman.co
If you’re already on board, let’s chat. It all starts with a discussion.
parthuman.co/contact
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About this Substack. Proof of Life is our space to think out loud. The patterns, the misses, the breakthroughs, the rants. The brand stuff most agencies are too polite to say. If you build brands, lead them, or care about how they get built, we made this for you. Subscribe and we’ll send the next one to your inbox. Buckle up. We’ve got a lot to say on the matter.
