Stratermagize
Rules are for narcs
I once told Andreas Carlsson, Sweden’s Simon Cowell and writer of N’Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye”, that he was responsible for my second marriage.
I did this during a meet-and-greet in a room of about 10 other people. We were all in that room because Carlsson, who is also behind Britney Spears’ “Can’t Make You Love Me”, had written a musical, and he wanted to source the leads for the show through an online talent contest.
In a lot of ways his idea was ahead of its time. But unfortunately, in other, more important ways, the musical he had written was a hot pile of steaming garbage. It was very hard to feel excited about it, which was coming through in the pitch.
And so because of that, and also because my bosses had made the fatal error of praising me for whipping out stories during pitch meetings, I waited for a lull in the proceedings and then nonchalantly, apropos of nothing, looked at Andreas Carlsson and said, “You know, you’re the reason I got married”.
Back in the liminal days of 2020, when it felt like the walls were fading away and truly anything could and would happen, I decided to adopt a few rules. Something to guide my actions, align my energies, and pull my taffy intentions into a shape resembling purpose.
Everyone has written a rule book. The sack of sour milk in a suit called Jordan Peterson wrote one. Jason Derulo wrote one. Charlie, a fictional Cairn Terrier, wrote one.
Ethan Hawke, a real human being who plays characters I once modeled 100% of my aesthetic after, penned Rules for a Knight to make it easier to talk to his children about hard topics.1 (This admirable purpose led to a pretty middling book.)
During the urban lumberjack days of the early oughts there was a general sentiment people had forgotten how to people, and if we could just return to a former, politer time, a time of prescribed steps for social interactions, we’d be a lot better for it.
We needed rules.
Blog posts proliferated on proper methods for holding a conversation (“a great lost art”), holding a dinner party (“a dying institution”), holding a dance partner (“no one dances anymore”). I’m not saying selvedge denim and hand-poured candles led to MAGA. I’m just pinning things to the wall.
I wrote a post about it to come up with my own rules.
The rules I picked 5 years ago were:
Choose small.
Show appreciation.
Defund the police.
Honestly? I forgot I wrote them.
Biden became president. Lockdown lifted. I moved to the Netherlands and got into electronic music festivals and collecting records. I went to Japan. I went to Japan again.
Then 2024 crashed the party plane, and 2025 confirmed the pilots were permanently drunk. I started thinking about rules again. Could rules calm my seemingly permanent anxiety? Could I Marie Kondo-structure my internal life to a peaceful hum?
HOWEVER.
If Jordan Peterson and Jason Derulo and a fictional terrier think we need rules… maybe we don’t need rules. Rules prescribe outcomes. They say, follow this and this will happen and also if you don’t follow this you’ll regret it.
That’s how narcs live, and this is a narc-free zone.
Maybe what I need are strategies. Back when I worked in advertising we’d get a creative brief and then a strategist would look at it, laugh, get drunk, do some key bumps, tear apart the brief and regurgitate something they’d seen on Russian Facebook. )This might have just been the strategists I worked with.) The point is, before I’d even start thinking about how to tell the story of Heineken’s latest can design and what that meant to F1 someone had given me 5 increasingly unhinged ways of framing my idea. And yes, this was actually helpful.
Ok, so the story goes like this:
I’m getting a ride home from the woman who would become my second wife. In the backseat is her best friend from high school. It’s 2005. We’re scanning channels on the radio because everyone is tired of what’s on their iPod.
The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”2 comes on. Andreas Carlsson’s “I Want It That Way.” She gives me a guilty glance and goes to change the channel but I protest. I love this song, I say, and proceed to sing the entire thing, yes, including the key change.
The song ends as we’re pulling up to my place, and I stay in the car that extra moment to do the a capella AJ voice quaver, “caaause I… want it… thaaahaaat way.” Then it’s silent. The bad kind. I think, oh man maybe I misjudged that.
(At this point Carlsson is just staring at me with his unmoving rich person face. Like his face didn’t move at all. I’m not sure he blinked. Ever.)
Years later she’d tell me that after I went inside her friend leaned into the front of the car and said, you’re going to marry that guy. I tell this to Andreas Carlsson. He smiles an inscrutable smile. No one says anything. Then Carlsson says, that was an interesting song to write. The opening notes go in the reverse order of what you’re expecting. And then he hums them forwards and backwards. See?
An hour after the meeting we’re invited to pitch in the final round.
Here are my strategies for 2026.
Buy no new clothes.*
Say no to money.
Read more books.
Once we got the green light to pitch a new person joined our team with the title “Creative Strategist”.
If you’ve never worked in advertising or watched Mad Men, pitches happen at a few levels. There’s the “you already hired us but have to okay our proposals/budgets for campaigns”. There’s “no one has been hired yet and all of you are competing for our business”. And there’s “we’re not even sure who we want to hear from so we’re talking to a bunch of you to find out”.
We’d made it past the last one for the privilege of doing the second.
The creative strategist who joined us on a contract stood out in a few ways. For one thing he dressed like a Soundcloud rapper who might go by “sQuee96”. He would draw continuously during meetings and then when they were over show us a fully-formed idea he’d hatched as we were talking. And, perhaps most importantly, he took pitching an online talent search for a terrible musical very seriously. Not without humor and even a wry smile. But definitely as seriously as if this were the British Heart Foundations anti-smoking campaign.
The more I worked with sQuee the more I realized how utterly unprepared I was for a life in advertising. When sQuee had an idea he could make it happen, sometimes just with office supplies and things he’d find on the street. The only ideas I could make happen were ones exclusively made up of words.
sQuee was aware of the epic level of bullshit involved in planning an ad campaign without being completely demotivated by it. The whole enterprise seemed like an art project to him. There’d be moments when we were stuck in a conference room trying to decipher Carlsson’s byzantine vision for the competition, when everyone else was quietly dying inside, and I’d look over at sQuee and he’d just be smiling and laughing before rushing to the whiteboard to sketch another madcap idea.
Is this guy… enjoying himself?
Of all the creative strategies sQuee brought to the table, the one that mattered most, the one I’ve tried and somewhat failed to apply but nevertheless firmly believe in, is “we have to do this anyway so we might as well have fun”.
So 2026. Buy no new clothes *except during my trip to Japan. This caveated resolution popped up on the NTS Discord and was so on the nose, so headshot targeted at me I had to adopt it as my own.
Say no to money. As in, don’t do anything just because it makes financial sense, or only because it does. Wishing for an end to capitalism while working at the world’s most valuable company is maybe not the path to enlightenment.
Read more books. As of January 26 I’ve finished six books and hope to finish two more by the end of the month. Books are algorithm-resistant, refuse optimization, and lead to conversations with strangers.
3 strategies for the Year of the Fire Horse, my 50th year, the year of unending change. As sQuee once said to me, “Lil B loves you”. And then he said, “You gotta eat a really nice lunch”. But THEN he said, “I got a fake Rolex I keep at home and a real Rolex I wear out. Always keep them guessing.”
#sQueeLife
The book received some criticism for its "anachronistic nature" - Wikipedia editors are absolutely savage.
Here’s a fun fact: The demo version of this features the lyric, “I always want to hear you say, I want it that way”. This makes roughly 1000x more sense than the recorded version. If we’d nailed the landing I’d have asked Carlsson this question at the after party.
sQueeeeeeee is the sound i made while reading this! So fun 👏
okay, banger