the name, not me. i’m brazilian. born and raised in tijuca, rio de janeiro. i couldn’t point to lebanon on a map without googling it or calling my grandma, the original rachid. what does that say about me? absolutely nothing.
what maybe says a little: i’ve been a construction worker, cheese seller, private physics tutor, gym rat, drummer, hippie, paulista, lisboan, gaucho, and even australian. i ended up in the only profession where all of that could actually be useful at the same time: i became a copywriter.
a copywriter who, before writing anything, annoys a lot of people: the one who brought the briefing, the one who developed the product, the one who sells it, the one who uses it, the one who doesn’t like it, my coworkers.
to me, strategy is creativity. and creativity is strategy.
before coming up with concepts, scripts, or ideas, i need to know what i’m talking about. sometimes i wonder if that still makes me “just” a copywriter. maybe it’s an excellent way of being one. maybe it’s a terrible one. what matters is that after all that, i feel confident enough to actually start writing. and that writing becomes much more of a translation of something already in the air — something said by the audience, or latent in the product — than a eureka moment.
if you’ve read this far, congratulations and thank you: you’ve won the fake attention war against the goldfish.
(i never read that article.)