Saturn & Our Kids

How the tale of Zeus' dad is a warning to all parents

Before the gods of the Graeco-Roman world assumed power, the Titans ran things. The king of the Titans was Father Time, Saturn to the Romans, or Chronos to the Greeks. To say that Saturn was a terrible father is an understatement on par with saying crystal meth has some minor health defects. He’d heard this prophesy that one of his children would overthrow him, so he proposed to solve this problem by devouring whatever came out of his wife’s womb.

On a symbolic level, Saturn ate the gods because time devours all things. And the truth is that he prophesy holds true for all of us. Eventually, we will all be replaced by our children as we grow weaker with age while they grow stronger. Even Saturn can’t escape the ravages of his own dominion—time.

Like all overbearing parents, Saturn chose to avert the prophecy by consuming his kids’ life force and future in the process. Look up the Freudian archetype of the devouring mother, it’s a terrifying thing. You’ve almost certainly gone to school with one of her kids or met one of these people in your life. Parents who effectively disable their kids through the myriad ways of coddling, controlling, or otherwise crushing their spirit. Just as the devouring mother often succeeds in producing the kind of grown-up children who are totally dependent on them, only to wonder why her kids are such sissies and wimps, the domineering father rarely gets what he wants either. Instead, his kids take up his violent habits. Sometimes they use it on him, sometimes they perpetuate it amongst the next generation.

Saturn gets both. Because not even time can stop the inevitable, and Zeus eventually overthrows his dad and castrates him, rendering him literally impotent. Then he’s locked up in either the fiery hell of Tartarus or the cold, dank cave of Nyx, both of which are terrible retirement homes. Zeus and the gods then proceed to toy with their offspring and ruin many a mortal life.

Bottom line? Don’t be a dick to your kids. Feed their passions and talents, don’t devour them. Give them lots of hugs and don’t bite their heads off when they do things you can’t control. Accept that nobody, not even time itself, will matter forever. And maybe, just maybe, your kids won’t totally emasculate and banish you to some damp dark hole in Florida.

The Real Reason Why Andrew Yang Lost

He was Asian, but let me explain.

Yes, the cut mics, the outsider status, the lack of endorsement from Asian American groups played a part, but the real reason is the fact that Asian Americans aren’t in America’s history books.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have history here. Asians literally built the backbone of this nation’s economy. They built the railroads, they man the stores, and they’re a huge part of the workforce. But there is very little representation to show for it.

Maybe it’s because they’ve been able to succeed in spite of the racism. The “model minority” myth makes it so that nobody talks about us except to use us as examples of how America is equal and if you work hard… Except no matter how hard you work, you’ll never get your place atop the system because the system isn’t built for power transfer.

Maybe it’s our own culture. The one that teaches us to work for harmony, not take credit, and ask nicely instead of take by force. The cultures that largely value hard skills like STEM over arts and entertainment. So that white people have consistently played us on film. And the only thing positive representation we have in cinema—Martial Arts—can be turned into an epic starring a white woman, by a white director who last year turned the icon without whom his epic wouldn’t have been possible into a buffoon who could barely fight. Where were the Asian community leaders expressing outrage at this portrayal? Where were the Asian politicians demanding the director never make another movie? Where was the Asian Spike Lee calling for boycotts?

Because we refuse to insert ourselves into the narrative, others are doing it for us. Because we’re solely focused on hard work, others are stealing its fruits.

Andrew Yang is a badass in many ways. He’s smarter than all the other candidates, his book doesn’t read like other candidate’s ghost-written fluff so you know he can get a point across, and he might even be able to outshoot Obama in a game of HORSE. But when people look at Obama, they can think of a long tradition of strong black leaders, from W.E.B Dubois to Marcus Garvey and MLK. When they look at Andrew Yang… all the Asian leaders that come to mind are dictators from our ancestral homelands.

Because we chose to be invisible for so long, America has no frame of reference for what an Asian American president might look like.

But the good news is, it’s starting to change and it’s not too late. There’s been more representation in the last five years than I’ve seen in the 20 that preceded it.

But it’s not enough, because the best way to prove a stereotype wrong, is to defy it yourself.

The best way to stop personal injustice, is to speak up for all injustice.

That strange proverb about how crisis and opportunity are the same Chinese word might be an American lie, but it’s one we can work with.

We have a history here, and it needs to be part of the narrative. The fact that there is no Asian American Amistad, or Roots, or Schindler’s List, doesn’t mean we have to act like similar crimes never happened to our people. It just means that there’s plenty of story to tell.

And the fact that there are scant few Asian American icons just means it’s up to us to start acting more iconic.

What’s more important than showing up? Coming back.

Yes, starting is important, but we all love new beginnings. What happens when you get your blue belt and the classes become monotonous or you hit a plateau? How can you set things up so that you don’t just start, but it still feels fresh and new enough that you stay at it?

Do You Make Ads for Sport or for War?

The origins of our oldest games lie in war.

But what happens when those games are no longer needed because the way wars are fought has changed?

The game evolve into arts. The emphasis shifts to fun or aesthetics over brutality and victory-at-all-costs.

Just as the castle and knight are no longer anywhere to be found in today’s theatres of war, and chess geniuses have figured out ways to win matches that would never have worked on the ancient battlefield, most martial arts have traded martial effectiveness for more artistic notions like spirit and style.

Wander into any kendo dojo or fencing school today and you’ll witness smoothly executed techniques designed to score points, gracefully elegant forms executed with ritual perfection, and beautiful displays of grit and determination. But when the swords are sheathed and bows exchanged, you can’t deny that there’s a lot missing from a real fight.

Watch videos of HEMA practitioners against modern-day fencers, or modern kenjutsu practitioners against kendoka, and you’ll see what I mean. Techniques for real damage vs techniques for points.

And you see this everywhere across the martial arts world. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, once perfected by the Gracies and established as the ultimate fighting system, is evolving a series of highly-effective sports techniques that exploit no-striking rules and illegal techniques. Meanwhile in boxing, prizefighters are breaking their hands in bare-knuckle contests because of their reliance on sports-mandated gloves.

Which is all well and good during times of peace when once-lethal skills must find new applications for fitness and fun. But what about the individual who might actually have to use them for their intended purpose one day?

In the traditional advertising world, we’ve adapted our creative into art. We strive for standards of aesthetic beauty and creativity that—like the spirited kendoka who scores with a stroke that moves too fast for the judge to see—may not actually hit.

Meanwhile in the upstart digital world, agencies have also found ways to fudge effectiveness. Sure, the ad may have reached a bazillion eyeballs and generated endless follows and likes, but like the fencer whose rapier thrusts are designed solely to set off sensors—they fail to pierce their target’s heart.

Unlike in martial arts, audience applause and judge satisfaction are not enough. Your skills actually have to work. And sooner or later the client either notices their retainers are only good for display purposes, or they go down in defeat.

What to do? What to do?

While the agency he founded has since seemed to be even more obsessed with winning awards than its peers, David Ogilvy himself rarely had that luxury. Working as a propagandist during the Second World War, his ideas had to work because the very existence of his home country depended on it. After the war, he founded Ogilvy & Mather on the principle that, “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.”

A way of thinking that Japan’s most renowned warrior, Miyamoto Musashi, might have agreed with. When he thumbed his nose at more refined schools of swordsmanship by charging savagely into bouts with dual swords or—even more barbarically—a whittled-down beam of wood, he was using creativity in much the same way:

To win.

What Happens to Marketers Who Lie

Lying is wrong from a moral standpoint, sure, but few of us think about how terrible it is for our health.

With every lie we tell, we create two realities that our brains have to keep track of: the one that the lie exists in, and the one that actually is.

But that’s not all, studies show that the best way to beat a lie detector test is to believe wholeheartedly in what we’re saying. Like an actor, we’re more convincing when we’re ‘in character’. That means you not only have to sell others on your BS, you also have to sell yourself. At least until the people you’re lying to aren’t around anymore.

Problem is, every time someone points out where the reality that actually is contradicts the reality we fabricated, we’re stuck: do we admit the lie and accept what is, or do we protect the lie even if we have to destroy what is true? Choose the latter, and we’ll have to create lies to cover up the original lie. And with every new lie, reality for us splits yet again.

This is why people become ‘trapped’ in a ‘web’ of lies. They’re force to spend every waking moment in a world of their own fabrication, doing more and more things they don’t believe in just to hold it together. Their minds work overtime, all the time, struggling to keep up. Pretending until they can’t tell the difference. Until they go mad, for what is madness but the belief in realities that don’t actually exist?

Here’s where it gets scary: while most of us don’t believe that the Virgin Mary is speaking to us or that we are Napoleon reincarnated, many of us lie like crazy at our day jobs. To be clear, I’m not talking about exaggeration—stretching facts to tell a brighter and stronger story—we all do that to some extent, and sleep soundly at night having done it. Nor am I talking about the lies that could lead to federal indictments. Everyone knows to steer clear of those. No, I’m talking about the mundane lies, like having to pretend that our company makes the world’s greatest widget, or that millions of people can’t wait for the substandard product our team is making to reach store shelves, when that hasn’t been true for years or was never true. It’s even worse for marketers, because they not only have to trick themselves and their co-workers, they have to convince their customers too.

Here’s the truth: branding is never enough. Great branding that masks a bad product is a lie. One that’s even worse than terrible branding that masks a good one. Case in point: that time Steve Jobs hired Paul Rand to brand Next vs that time when Steve Ballmer believed the only endorsement Windows needed was Steve Ballmer.

So while bad branding is a relatively easy fix, bad products are a much harder pill to swallow. As a marketer you can try to change the former, but in most cases, the experts will be damned if you expect serious changes to the latter. Whether they secretly know it or not, the company’s too far gone. You can continue to collect their pay checks, convince yourself that the whole operation is really this close to turning the corner, and deal with the repercussions of “what were you thinking?” and the damage it’s doing to your career later. Set aside a booze budget for coping and ride that crazy train straight off the rails! Or you can find a healthier environment.

And leave an honest note on your way out prominent enough for others to see: Do not bother to resuscitate.

You’ll feel much better.