Strands of Genius: WARC Open House, Desert Island Discussions, ELC#2
plus our thoughts on: living inside out
WRITING FROM | Nashville, TN
WORKING ON | updating Beyond Boring Briefs for a virtual training
LOOKING AHEAD
Sept 28 - Oct 20: Nashville, TN
Oct 20 - 29: Beersheba Springs, TN
Oct 29 - Nov 16: Athens, GA
Nov 16 - 23: St. Petersburg, FL
Nov 24-Dec 3: Beersheba Springs, TN
Dec 3 - 10: TBD
Dec 10 - Jan 16: Nashville, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
Rosie voted early! We’ve been working on various aspects of our life, including deliverables for current clients, a design revamp for the School of Stolen Genius, content plans for the School for 2021, immediate living arrangements, and then longer term considerations around work, location and life next year.
We have much-discussed uncertainty this year, amongst our friends, community, clients and -selves and we are all having to manage it in different ways.
Psychologically, we are all trying to come to terms with the reminder that nothing is or was ever certain. Logistically, people are moving around the country as the patterns of work and life reshuffle around the ongoingness of everything — and the difficulty in imagining what a stable equilibrium after might look like. Emotionally, we are all trying to manage as the drumbeat of the upcoming democracy event steadily intensifies.
It’s hard to decide where you want to live at the best of times [or worst] of times. Commitment is always hard because making promises about a future you based on a belief about a future world are subject to a lot of uncertainty, but perhaps that’s also their strength - providing consistency against the vagaries of fate.
Are you an active user on Slack?
If so, we want to hear from you! Hit reply and let us know :)
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Slack, Scooter&T, Lisa, our ELCs (we’ve decided that’s pronounced ‘elks’), Matt&Dana&Walt, Lauren and the birthday dinner, more cheese plates, fire pit hangs, massage chairs, The Boys, Upload (both Amazon Prime), Harlan Coben shows on Netflix, Lovecraft Country, and yoghurt ice cream bars.
NIMBLY PRESENTS
How Brands Can Meaningfully Respond to the Black Lives Matter Movement
Our friends over at Nimbly collaborated with strategy wizards Lexie Perez and Julian Cole to dive into the Black Lives Matter movement, and consider how brands can meaningfully be involved. You may recall that Lexie & Julian had previously put together a deck of 100+ brand responses — It covered what brands *were* doing, and this work with Nimbly takes it a step further, talking to consumers to understand how they think brands should be involved in BLM.
:: THE LINKS ::
WARC OPEN HOUSE
Tuesday, October 27, is the World Advertising Research Council [WARC] 'Open House'. By signing up, you get a free one-day access to WARC, including case studies, best practice guides, research papers, special reports &c. (WARC)
DESERT ISLAND DISCUSSION
Faris spoke to Eaon Pritchard for his Shot by Both Sides pod about everything from COVID to Hindu advice for living via the mental health problem in advertising, status anxiety, drum'n'bass and more whilst picking his playlist. (Spotify / Apple)
ICYMI: APPLICATIONS OPEN FOR 2ND ELC COHORT | Nov 3/4 - Dec 14/15
We’re over halfway through our first ELC, and it’s been more than we could have imagined. There’s something magical about the alchemical nature, bringing together global perspectives from all sorts of roles within the world of marketing and communications. Each week, we tackle a topic - like challenging conventions. There’s an exercise related to the topic, where we take advantage of those Zoom breakout rooms, and then debrief as a larger group. The exercises are designed for you to take back into your organization, because, you know, genius steals ;) “It's a fantastic crew and such an interesting program,” said one participant, who also declared that the first session alone was worth the investment.
We’re seeking applicants for our second ELC cohort. Applications will remain open until October 27th and participants will be contacted on October 30th. If you’re close to the Eastern time zone of the US, this is an afternoon option for you — with meetings at 4p ET each Tuesday afternoon. For those of you in the Antipodes, that’s Wednesdays for you — 9a for Sydneysiders & 11a for Kiwis.
Strands of Genius is currently read by 12,000 subscribers. Support us by sponsoring an issue, becoming a member of The School of Stolen Genius or encouraging friends or colleagues to subscribe.
Thanks to our friends over at Nimbly, the most daring insight agency, for sponsoring this issue.
:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: INSIDE OUT ::
The human condition, at its most basic, is characterized by an awareness of an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’.
Consciousness comes with the sensation of totality, the illusion that reality is a pocket of our perceptions. It takes children a few months to learn that they aren’t the universe and, therefore, it doesn’t conform to their wishes. When babies cry, they seem to believe they are summoning part of themselves rather than making a request for someone else to do something because they don’t have theory of mind or an awareness of self.
Once you become aware of your mind and its inherent isolation, human existence becomes an ongoing process of trying to understand and manage the relationship between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
Psychology, philosophy, medicine, and magic are ultimately about how we manage the relationship between the internal world and the external world as we experience the two.
Despite feeling the seemingly insurmountable separation, we experience how one clearly affects the other. The outside happens and it affects the inside. We are not the universe but we are part of it and cannot separate ourselves from it. So we look to learn how it works because it becomes obvious that the outside has rules - repeating, predictable phenomena we can either leverage or ignore to our detriment. We start out thinking we are the universe and intuitively feel that the inside should affect the outside, once we discover it. We want control, to get what we want, to feel loved, and to know what we want. We feel the inside so keenly and yet often without clarity.
Based on our experience of the lossy translation between inside and outside we intuit that other people’s insides are far from our inside, if they truly exist. [The Zombie problem]. (Yes, lossy is a word and a good one at that.)
Science, superstition, religion and reason are all tools we use to decode the experience of inside vs. outside. Language evolved because once the chasm between the two appears we scramble to cross it. We communicate, with each other and the outside, seeking communion, the sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, with the hope that such a thing is possible. With the hope of being embraced for who we truly are but the fear that it’s impossible. We try, far and wide. We converse, seeking people like us or might become so. We communicate "to create people whose minds think like ours" [Dan Gilbert]. All communication is persuasion.
If everything was the same, there would be nothing. It’s only because inside is not outside that there is a reality to experience. We live inside out. We have experienced in our lives the great impact, wonderful and worrisome, that others can have on us, regardless of their intention or even knowledge.
So we intuit the outside persists and that we affect it regardless of our intent. We realize that inside must be an illusion since it does not persist. It feels counterintuitive to our lived experience, trapped in the present, that things can be and also will not be, yet everything is impermanent.
Separateness is a requirement. Without that we cannot experience a circumscribed consciousness…but that separation can’t be real in some absolute sense - where would it spring from? How can anything be other to everything?
There are always magical answers but they don’t answer anything, they just infinitely move the question beyond reach.
We confront the reality that inside is just a fractal of outside.
Over time we observe that inside isn’t static, despite the overwhelming illusion of consistency.
Living feels like an endless concatenation of moments being experienced by the same inside but reflection allows us to observe that can’t be the case.
Your younger self could not think the thoughts you are currently thinking. We can’t have the thoughts we had as a child. Innocence is an experience which colors all others. We cannot imaginatively un-know something or experience anything novel again. We can’t step in, or out, of the same river twice. In changes out, changes sides, changes I. We impose consistency, trying to harmonize, beat-matching. Wondering how to align what we do with what we want done, manage the semi-permeable membrane between inside and out, and... breathe. Breathing, constantly flowing, inside and out.
:: AND NOW… BRANDS & BLACK LIVES MATTER VIA NIMBLY ::

The report from our friends at Nimbly is available here.
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)