Personal Planning Language

In 2017, Virgil Abloh gave a lecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. In a presentation titled “Insert Complicated Title Here,” Abloh opened up by walking the room through how his career took form and Off-White took off.

In the age of information, Virgil generously gifted students (and designers) a playbook on how his brand and brilliance came to be. A strict yet imaginative language by which Abloh goes from idea to Off-White, Notes app thought to Nike collaboration item, and voice memo to Louis Vuitton runway concept.

Like many streetwear fans, I was glued to the screen, writing down each and every one of this genius’ words, thoughts on creativity, and profound insights.

Unlike many of my streetwear contemporaries, I happened to be reading Ray Dalio’s Principles during the weeks prior to Virgil’s lecture. In this book, the billionaire hedge fund manager outlines his strict personal guidelines to success in life and in work, which has earned him a net worth of $15.6 billion.

At that point, I knew I had to do the same. And, yes, I know I’m not Abloh or Dalio. But at that moment I knew an evolving language and set of principles by which to think and work would be enormously beneficial to my career.

The first iteration of my Personal Planning Language was written in March of 2021 and today I wanted to give it a 2025 update.

Strategy is extremely competitive and without a playbook that is unique and easy to remember for myself as a planner, how could I be asked to create distinctive and memorable work for my clients?

But having a repeatable planning language has helped me test, refine, and implement my own strategic process to make me a better planner and student of the game.

Without further ado, I present 10 pieces to my (updated) Personal Planning Language.

1. Combine — What we do as planners is not an art or a science. It is not simply a creative endeavor nor just a commercial one. It is a combination of both, the rational and the irrational, to make ideas happen. Robert Rauschenberg screamed the words “COMBINE!” when endlessly asked whether his artistic expressions were paintings or sculptures. Jasper Johns coined the term for Rauschenberg as he continued to create his famous three-dimensional expressions for a decade. The idea of combining, or lateral thinking, is central to my life and success in the planning discipline.

2. Brand as a stock strategy —Strategy is about driving effectiveness. The idea that a brand and its assets can be used to increase pricing power, open doors to new products and categories, and, ultimately, increase its stock price is why we all play the game. Warren Buffett, in an interview I lost the link to years ago, spoke about brand as a stock strategy. The last year of uncertainty has added an important element to his phrase for me. Brand isn’t just a stock strategy but one of defense in protecting your future.

3. “I am not uncertain” — Stolen from Dollar Bill on Billions, this line frames my approach to research. As a planner with a journalism degree, I do not complete a brief or assignment until a reporter-like belief that I have investigated enough data points and exhausted all avenues has set in. In order to feel certain, or not uncertain, I cannot just rely on desktop research or focus groups. I have to go out, listen to people and see how they engage with the world around them. Leonardo Da Vinci once said, “Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.” The same can be said about research, insight, and however close we can get to certainty.

4. Strategy turns uncertainty into mitigated risk — These words from Faris Yakob show strategy’s purpose. When looking through a Wall Street lens, strategists are quite similar to portfolio managers. Both are tasked with taking client’s money and delivering outsized returns versus the competition. Both use data and insight, although with different tools, to unlock a path to manage client risk and increase the value of their initial capital. Our tool is the brand and, ultimately, it works back on The Street.

5. Strategy is a creative act that asks questions — I do not have one answer for what strategy is. Sure, it’s about getting from point A to point B. But what is the problem we’re really trying to solve? The audience we’re really trying to reach? The message and visual that will resonate? How to grow our brand? How to balance the long term and the short term? Strategy is a creative act, but it never requires the same actions. Confining strategy to one definition misses its greater purpose. Strategy make the work, work. To do that, we ask questions of our ourselves, our customers, clients and creatives that lead us to a more human, effective, and advantageous place.

6. Insight is an unspoken truth you can’t unhear that sheds light on a problem — Every planner has their own (often loose) definition of an insight. A few years ago, Conner Huber, dentsumcgarrybowen NY’s CSO, said to me that “an insight must make you lean forward.” To me, that was about the need for tension and paradox in my life as a planner and writer of insights. While on a Sweathead episode around the same time, Tom Morton, RGA’s CSO, said, “An insight is something you can’t unhear.” And in Mark Pollard’s book, Strategy Is Your Words, he defines an insight as “an unspoken human truth that sheds new light on a problem.” Combining those three schools of thought formed my loose, evolving definition of the word “insight.”

7. Good artists copy, great artists steal — This well-known Picasso quote echoes Virgil’s much-discussed “Duchamp is my lawyer”philosophy. Creativity isn’t about coming up with something new, but combining things that already exist into something that is yours and has never been thought to be brought together. Steve Jobs shared this feeling when he said, “Creativity is just connecting things.” In a business of ideas, the ability to steal, connect, and combine thoughts is vital to creative success.

8. Vision without execution is hallucination —This Thomas Edison quote drives my communications strategy work daily. When, where, and how you experience anything has a major impact on your response and your retention. If the objective of advertising is to reach an audience, inspire an action or a change in perception, you’d think the medium would be brought in earlier. Yet, for some reason, we start with big manifestos delivered through TV scripts. In a landscape as fragmented as ours, with technology enhancing brand experience everywhere, that inclination is outdated, negligent, and ineffective. If the medium is the message, as comms theorist Marshall McLuhan declared in 1964, the best strategists must be as diligent about where the brand expression lives as they are about what it says. To turn vision into reality.

9. In the particular is contained the universal. — Often times marketers focus too much on the target and not enough on what will move them. You don’t need the audience featured in your ad, you need a message, a subject or an action they will remember. This quote by James Joyce inspires my audience analysis work and more.

10. Wallet Share vs. Market Share — If the account lead protects the client, the strategy lead protects the consumer. And consumers don’t just think about their spending habits in terms of your industry. Sure, when shopping for clothes or cars they’re comparing brands within a category. Within those purchases, however, people consider what else they could do with that money. A car or a nicer apartment? Designer clothes or a fun vacation? Eating out or an Uber uptown? Netflix or sleep? Venture inside the mind and wallet of the audience when sizing up its true competition.

11. I would’ve written you a shorter letter but I ran out of time — This quote from Mark Twain is always in my head while writing creative briefs. They are, in fact, meant to be brief, concise, sharp and clear documents that inspire creative teams and clients of a possible new direction for the brand. It’s also in my mind when strategists are increasingly asked to do their jobs on shorter timelines yet the same level of clarity is required. If you want a brief to be brief, give us time. And don’t blame us, blame one of the greatest American writers of all time.

Okay, fine. That’s 11. You got me. Ten sounded better than eleven.