On No Big Posts This Week

Sorry about that. I’m working on a few articles at once and want to make sure final products are quality. Additionally, there’s also this odd scheduling aspect of attempting to add reported work to a piece, but never quite knowing when responses will come in. I say “attempting” because I’m gun shy on overpromising now after I once teased an article on flashy real estate mogul Grant Cardone and it didn’t come to pass. In the end, I couldn’t quite crack the case like I wanted, and that’s too bad, because, just look at the hypnotically materialistic videos Cardone puts out.

Excuses, excuses, I know. Perhaps the customer has little reason to care but if you’re curious, there is a process where pieces sometimes end up getting scrapped or put on hold. I just want everything here to have the right amount of effort behind it, especially if I’m dealing with fraught subject material. That inclination might be less rooted in sensitivity towards others than in wanting to actually earn whatever hell the article catches. I can live with potential readers and formerly friendly peers rejecting me over, say, the Nike essay, because I really thought about it and meant every word. They don’t like it? Oh well. I tried.

What’s harder to stomach is losing customers or even friends over something you didn’t entirely mean or half-meant, or could have realized as a compelling full vision, if only you’d given the effort. It’s my main reason for Twitter avoidance and perhaps it speaks to a certain weakness: I don’t like the idea of glibly ruining my reputation. The control freak in me is fine with a ruined reputation, maybe even craving it at some level, so long as it happened due to painstaking intent. That faith in effort is my cope for dealing in some amount of controversy, a talisman that informs this naïve belief that I can beat the take economy system without going insane.

So, apologies for that detour into Me-ville, but I figure some customers appreciate a glance at why the articles are what they are, and how they come to be (or not to be). Look forward to next week, when we’ll be pumping out pods and pieces. Take care.