28. Introduction
Hello.
I SAID HELLO!!!!!
This is, without a doubt, the most exciting edition of Agency I ever wrote.
I cannot put into words what I’m feeling.
I repeat that: I cannot put into words what I’m feeling.
But I will try. (I always do.)
It feels like getting a phone call from all presidents in the world at once and hearing that there will be world peace forever. (And the joint nationalization of Elma Chips by every country in the world, so Doritos can be distributed freely to all mankind, forever.) - that price is getting out of hand.
It feels like 220.000 birthday parties (or words written on a newsletter called Agency) all at once. FYI: The new testament of the King James Bibles has over 180.000 words. We are beyond that, homie. 😎
It feels like 10 straight nights of binge-playing Path of Exile 2 the moment a new league drops. (But no more than 10.)
It feels like… Ah, you already got it.
You just don’t know why.
Not only will I tell you, but I’ll also be the most unhinged I’ve ever been here.
I won’t even review my grammar - cuz I don’t give a 🪽flying fuck🪽 about my cursed perfectionism and chivalrous manners right now. 😇
I do care about being honestly unhinged though… because when I decided to start Agency, one of the corporate values I picked was “Honesty” and so I gotta stick to it.
In Brazilian Portuguese we usually say: “Me lasquei” as an alternative for “I screwed up.”
But I’m a man of my word.
And ‘cause men who 𝓹𝓻𝓸𝓼𝓽𝓲𝓽𝓾𝓽𝓮𝓼 their word by lying lose the most important things a man can cultivate in life: a) their authority, b) the power of their word and c) their erections masculinity.
I will also tell you the story on WHY I decided to start Agency. Here’s a spoiler: My heart was broken by a corporation and a woman all at the same time. We’ve all been there. (I guess…?)
Unhinged, I shall go forth.
Because I’m announcing… DATA SOVEREIGNTY!
And… DESIGN SOVEREIGNTY!
And… USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN SOVEREIGNTY!
And… SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION SOVEREIGNTY! (Substack has never served us that. 👍)
And… WEBSITE HOSTING SOVEREIGNTY!
And… CREATIVITY SOVEREIGNTY!
SO MUCH SOVEREIGNTY I CAN’T EVEN BREATH.
You know why? Because now we have a BLOG!
Our own blog, in our own website, built and maintained by our own majestic, flabbergasting, supimpa, shiny, perfumed, genious…
𝓐𝓾𝓽𝓸𝓷𝓸𝓶𝔂 .
BEHOLD: our new home.
Holy avocado of all smashed oblongata of guacamole piñatas. Doesn’t that look… tasty?
A perfect place to read. To study. To browse over 100 Agency articles.
FINALLY! (It will be shown in more detail further down this post. Or maybe in a separate post, who knows.)
Truth be told… Substack gave me a powerful refugee with incredible tools and features to share my voice when I first started…
But I eventually kind of outgrew it.
And I found myself limited by the very same tools that helped me start this project.
You know how it goes, every good Karate Kid surpasses their Karate Shifu when they listen to the power of ancient words.
Anywho…
Here’s one thing nobody knows… If Substack don’t properly serves Agency’s content with good SEO, it means all these 220.000 words and over 100+ articles never really sees the light of day in search engines
And so, ever since March 3rd 2023 when I published our first article (1,344 days ago.), I have been depositing all of these words, content, research and knowledge in a closed box which only few people had access to.
And now I’m about to open it to the world.
One might wonder… how did he manage to write a Bible New Testament’s worth of words without ever getting any immediate return whatsoever?
The zero answer is faith.
The first is patience.
The second is purpose.
The third is consistency.
The fourth is: the simple idea of focusing in one simple goal - to write.
The goal was never to profit, to get acknowledgement, to get any kind of gain from it other than to share what I learned in my career’s journey and what I study in my plato’s cave - sharing knowledge educating people while doing so.
When you do something thinking on the benefits of it for your ego, most of the times it’s not related to your purpose.
In the same way that most of the times, it will be related to money.
A true dream knows no value, reader.
It can’t be really bought even though many people sell theirs.
For comfort, for pleasure, for some immediate return, for status and of course, for fear AND fear of the responsibilities that real and paradigm-shifting dreams brings forward.
Agency started in a very specific moment in my life where I refused to sell one of my biggest dreams.
The dream of making the world a better place through design.
There was an attempt to take my brush away from me…
And for a while, i was dreamless. Confused. In shock. Lacking my sense of self.
But then I captured it back and became a true Dream Sentinel.
So that’s why I write and teach about creativity. That’s why Agency’s orange is an accent color for dream, warmth and energy.
Because dreams, whether dreamt while awake or sleeping - are manufactured out of creative juice. Creativity is the raw ingredient of dream milkshake.
And hopefully, it’s the only divine capacity that the machines will never truly develop.
So now, grab a cup of tea (or milkshake) and sit comfortably.
I will tell you the story about the time where a corporation tried to steal one of my dream.
28.1 The Genesis of Agency
Or how it came to existence.
The year was 2022. I was 26 years old, and I landed the job my teenage self had dreamed of - Senior User Experience Designer at an american startup.
For the first time, I would be able to use my design skills (which I had been developing ever since my 14 years old when I used to design wallpapers for my father) in a corporate position which would demand my utmost best.
It felt like the definitive way for my american dream - a 5-digit salary, remote arrangement and a lot of time spent in one of my favorite places in the world: Figma, the software where I spend more time than I spend in a bed, and a bathroom, and a dinner table summed together.
At the start, I really liked the challenges and responsibilities I had there. It pushed me to new level of technical skills (and to learn a specific technique in Figma that is one of the best inventions in the last decade of web development software: AUTO-FUCKING-LAYOUT!
Yep, the same technique I used to design 400 screens in a month for:
And the same technique I used to design the colossal infograph at:
But… some unexpected things happened.
Being one of them… well… love.
I fell for my design duo.
Guilty as charged: corporate love affair. 🙈
A journalist who pulled a full career pivot into design is a rare breed.
And let no one kows that but Journalism is also a passion of mine.
HOWEVER, before you judge me for mixing business with feelings…
I dare you to answer me this one question: If to design means to create, and if creating regards infusing feelings into the action of making something new - how exactly is a designer (or any type of creative professional) supposed to avoid mixing business with feelings?
Duh.
Makes no sense.
And I have talked about this subject in the past at TOBM.2 - The New CEO of Your Life:
“Separate your emotions from business” is perhaps the biggest illusionary mantra in the business world because it has and still is cowardly used to justify the most absurd treatments and moral abuses that happen in plain daylight, sometimes even with an audience watching.
The Orange Book of Marketing
The year is 2026, people apply more loyalty, time and faith into their badges and uniforms then they actually apply and spend in their homes, churches or even families.
And everyone is supposed to “separate their emotions from business”.
𝓕𝓾𝓬𝓴 𝓵𝓸𝓰𝓲𝓬.
That sentence makes no sense whatsoever.
Think about it for a second:
We spend about ⅓ of our waking lives working. Count sleep too, and it’s about 23% of our year.
We also spend about 30% of our year sleeping.
In other words: we spend 23% of our time suppressing our feelings,
and another 30% sleeping, a state in which we don’t really feel anything.
So that leaves us with whatever’s left after work and sleep take their share…
47% - Less than half of our lives to actually feel something.
Complete bollocks mate.
“separate your emotions from business”.
That sentence is utter, complete bollocks.
💩
We can conclude, on a solid basis of extremely real science, and common sense that such phrase was invented by Henry Ford, or some other maniac of industrialism and punch clocks, back when manufacturing actually needed human effort and factories actually paid fair wages for boring, repetitive work.
In the era of late-capitalism that we are living, its bollocks.
And within the design profession it’s even more pointless because it can produce incompetent designers that don’t create with true intention (and feelings).
Back to the story I was telling…
In my defense, that company had a charming little nepotism problem.
I didn’t start no trend with her.
I guess we got too carried away with the synergy behind our teamwork and creative process. So what?
Truth be told, I never thought the romance was why things went sideways at that job.
After my second month there, we shipped a big delivery, but my spider-sense picked up something shady.
Something I had seen many times before, and that the best mentor I ever had trained me to stand up to…
A power move was made against me.
And to this day, I’m convinced it was xenophobia, plain and simple. Confidence is a virtue when it has an American passport. From a young dude from Brazil, it’s insolence.
What can I say? When it comes to work I’m not really a shark. I’m a fucking Megalodon, my dude.
I digest demands, tasks, the biggest freakin’ challenges and even technocrats if needed like I take morning vitamins with a sip of water. Not only because I was trained to do that, but also because I fucking love my craft.
And I also got a weird chronic perfectionism. Every pixel matter and everything needs to be aligned before exported.
Trust me, I’ve seen it firsthand: whoever gets in the way of my serious, beautiful, inspiring, honest, professional work… gets totally fucked.
NOT IN THE WAY YOU ARE THINKING, LOL.
Listen to this.
You know Nubank? Brazilian’s biggest Digital Bank? (NYSE: NU, worth north of $60 billion).
One of its five official corporate values is “we think and act like owners”. There’s nothing wrong with bringing forth CEO mentality and attitude in your job. It is actually a mindset adopted by the biggest startups out there nowadays…
Unless there is competition rather than teamwork inside a company.
Which is usually a result of toxic corporate culture.
And that is exactly what my spider sense caught when a senseless power move was made in my second month working on that company.
Anyone can develop pattern recognition. The book Pattern Recognition by William Gibson is a good start. God bless Science fiction for giving me nerd super powers. 🙏
Think with me, dear reader.
A conversation, a reprimand, being called out, being micromanaged, a written warning: there are plenty of ways to communicate to an employee that you’re unhappy with them. But what happened was something else entirely.
We delivered two projects, and I played it strategically: one would win on quality, the other on speed.
So that regardless of the outcome, I could know which approach was valued there.
They refunded both clients for the projects we had delivered.
But they also let the clients keep and use the work anyway. (?)
For some days, I went through the worst impostor syndrome crisis of my life.
I started doubting the one thing I’d been doing since I was a teenager: my ability to design.
It felt like someone was trying to take away my own identity from me.
But then I started making questions and make sense of things, because something was way off.
What happened was not only wrong but also evil.
The thing about corporate culture is that it flows in a vertical downstream.
And so, if that was done to me, then the boss of a boss of a boss, or the investor of an investor of an investor, was probably doing the same thing to other investors, bosses, and team members.
It felt like a problem that was rooted in something much more deep than just that company, but rather, the whole industry.
The image I had of Sillicon Valley was completely shattered in disappointment.
The concept of the american dream I grew up admiring reaveled itself to be a boring bollywood fever dream.
And at that moment I noticed two choices were laid before me:
A) Stay there for a good while, delivering soulless work like a designer on an assembly line, building a nest egg while my passion for the craft slowly died.
B) Hit back with the most lethal power move of all. The one weapon every single person holds, at every single moment of their life, no matter the circumstances or context: to simply… quit and leave through the same door I entered.
And so I quit. I wrote a resignation letter and forever got away with my brush and its naive dream of making a world a better place by designing things with love, care and intention.
Which was in fact something I could not do there.
Below is the resignation letter with proper redacts.
I was very polite, but inside, I was profoundly frustrated.
Deciding to quit meant, above all, facing the fact that I might never land a job like that again.
(I actually landed many UX/UI projects later)
But I did it anyway, because my dignity and the custody of my own brush mattered far more.
What came some time later was… Agency!
At one point, people had tried to convince me I was a fraud.
Then the opposite happened: I felt the urge to start writing about everything I’d learned about my craft (marketing & design) in over 9 years in the field.
The ONE thing I didn’t expect was that I “fired” Silicon Valley just a few months before it blew up in a scandal: the very same kind of problem I had sensed from inside that corporate culture.
In March 3, 2023, this substack was created and issue.0 - Row Your Boat, Sailor opened with a crisis. After all, good storytelling always needs conflict. The scenario that launched Agency, and that became a device for teaching the themes we’ve explored here ever since, was a simple image: a boat adrift at sea, its paddles floating away, while a tsunami gathered on the horizon.
The perfect fictional context to teach about the autonomy and importance behind marketing.
Exactly one week later, on March 10, 2023, while I was publishing Issue.6 - Time & Consumer Psychology In Crisis, The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank occurred.
In other words, in 7 days I wrote 6 articles about marketing and design in times of crisis and in the 7th day, a crisis directly related to the company and industry I quit really happened.
I was so shocked that I sat down for many days and wrote Issue.7 to better understand what happened. (Please open this issue for a second and just quickly scroll down to see what’s inside.)
One thing is a fact, it’s all documented. I can always open an Agency Issue here in Substack and update the content or fix the grammar whenever I want but newsletters are sent via email and I can’t modify or unsend that.
And the best part is that, on our new blog, you can easily find (and read) every publication in chronological order, so the whole story makes sense.
Call it coincidence, clairvoyance, pattern recognition, prophecy, karma, avocado, cowabunga, economical bubble… Call it whatever you want, just don’t tell me I caused the collapse of the Sillicon Valley Bank.
How could I possibly have done that by only writing words in a newsletter?
How can anyone consider that logical?
Humanly plausible?
Or even entertain it rationally?
What? Do you really think I’m a Megalodon?
Megalodon, after all, is a mere byproduct of science fiction. lol.
And so the tale of the Genesis of Agency comes to an end.
Farewell.
But wait.
A good storyteller never leaves a loose end, and I left one.
What happened to the romance that started with all of this story?
Well, after the power move they pulled on me, she came to believe I was some kind of fraud.
Turns out she was a journalist who believed in fake news. (lol.)
And so she lost, forever, the chance to share my brush for life.
(Pun intended.)
PS. No in-depth blog announcement this time - I will be back with a newsletter with more details and a link soon!
Here’s another teaser:
About the Author
Thiago Patriota
