Time to focus for the rentrée (plus old and new dad news)
This was first published as an email newsletter on 24th September 2025, sign up here to receive in your inbox next month! (Je publie aussi une édition en français, en général les articles sont différents).
It's been back to school September for the past few weeks, la rentrée. The whole of France, from political leaders to pupils, seem to all suddenly wake up from the summer break. Suddenly networking event invitations, sales messages, and friends' birthdays abound. So much so I began writing this a couple of weeks ago and have been busy enough to keep putting off finishing and publishing it.
The past few months have been interesting. I'm doing my best to keep my general mood focused and positive, with noticeable ups, downs, and distractions. My big life changing news is that I'm going to be a father for the first time by the end of the year! My partner Katie and I are expecting a baby boy in December. It's amazing news, I'm looking forward to it, and I've also been feeling like little is working as well as I'd like it to.
Intellectually, I am on board with the idea that things will never be ideal (the opening scene of the movie Idiocracy comes to mind). Experience is different though: I sometimes gutturally feel like I'm not ready, and that I should be in a better place in a variety of areas, in particular professionally and financially. Thankfully, talking with my siblings and friends who have been parents for years already, at least any feelings of not being ready seem normal, so I do my best to be at peace with them. Meditation and journaling helps.
I've also been thinking about my father. He passed away in 2020 (from cancer). In the midst of the pandemic, plus his death, things not going all that great work wise, and just having had enough of social media, I pulled back from a lot of online presence. I still believe that was and generally still is a good idea, though shortly after I also stopped podcasting and writing my newsletter.
My dad was one of my greatest fans and supporters. He used to listen to every one of my podcast episodes and read my newsletters, gave me feedback, and it generated conversation topics. It may sound silly, or not like much of an audience, but it was great to talk about that with him. Even though I recorded and published a few more episodes in 2021, I think I was mostly done – with that particular stint anyways; I began live streaming with my friend James on different topics (discussing students questions about their career, studies, and the future). At the time, I thought I was mostly rejecting social media, which I was, though now I also think it had to do with grieving my father.
At the beginning of this year, I thought I felt ready to somehow say more, in writing, maybe audio though I didn't get around to that. I'm doing my best to carve some order and discipline for writing for both personal and professional initiatives. Cal Newport's Deep Questions podcast is being helpful on that front. He is a computer science professor and best-selling author of Deep Work that I read and enjoyed a few years ago. Many of his ideas revolve around practices for discipline and focused time to produce value out of thinking. He also advocates for reducing or removing distractions in the form of social media apps – particularly the ones who earn money from our undivided, borderline drooling, attention.
As a result, I removed Reddit from my phone's main screen last month because I realised I was opening the app and mindlessly scrolling as a distraction way too often. I'd replaced other social media I used before the pandemic with Reddit, and over time I slowly used it more frequently.
I'm also blocking time for tasks in my calendar again. It is helping me be more realistic about what I can and cannot do in a day and week. As much as possible, the first time slot in the morning is reserved for focused writing and thinky projects, even if it's only an hour.
Last month, I wrote a draft for an exciting strategy sprint in a theme park, and I progressed with a couple of other training ideas in last week's edition of the Outside Perspective strategy community newsletter. In the interest of pragmatism, I am also on a simple introductory presentation: a free one hour long module to introduce my way of working, to showcase and demonstrate playful brand strategy ideas and methods. Feel free to contact me if you'd like to chat about any questions you may have about your brand or marketing initiatives.
Last but not least, I am just starting to play with my objectives this year. I mean I have a fiction writing goal of a short story, the point being to complete one, because I tend to have a lot of new ideas, begin a lot of things, and finish few (or none when it comes to fiction writing).
Why not play with the format? I didn't impose myself a word count, just to finish a story. It could be an extremely short story, about one to three sentences, as long as it has a beginning, middle, and end.
So long story short, here is one for you. A first draft of a complete very short story :
On a grey and rainy autumn day, a boy jumps in a puddle to splash some fun. The puddle is much stranger and deeper than expected though, he falls in and gets lost in the city's watery mirror image. Following urban weather patterns and swirling currents, a wise-cracking alligator and a serious umbrella help him find his way back home.
I think this kind of short exercise helps me give up that the end should be something extraordinary. I still want to spend time writing a longer project, though it is quite possible fiction writing will remain at the exercise stage in 2025. As I mentioned earlier, scheduling time and being honest about what I can or will do and won't do is also valuable.
What else have I been up to?
I am reading Invitation to a Banquet: the story of Chinese food by Fuchsia Dunlop, and it is phenomenal. I am thoroughly enjoying it. If you’re interested in a cross-section of history, culture, language, and food it’s not to be missed.
We had a fantastic CreativeMornings event hosted by Adobe in Paris last week, Gaëtan Du Peloux, famed award-winning creative director (no co-president at Publicis advertising agency Marcel), gave us an inspiring talk. I was reminded of the energy and motivation I had for getting into this industry, and the fact that being paid to come up with ideas is and can still be a joy. You can watch the talk in video on the CreativeMornings website here.
I spent a weekend walking and reading in a forest not too far away from Paris, close to where I grew up actually, and our father would take us on walks when I was a child. Nice pink clouds appeared for the sunset after a couple of hours of rain, that’s the photo in the header.
I attended the Strategies Summit (France’s comms industry magazine) last week and posted about some of the talks on Linkedin.
I finished updating and preparing all my teaching class content ahead of time and started my fourth year ‘strategic planning and consumer insights’ module at ISCOM a couple of weeks ago.
How are you these days? Reply and give me some news!
As ever, thank you for reading,
Willem
