I’m just Isaiah

The title chase

Isaiah’s twenties ran on titles. Agencies hand them out generously. Then someone dangled vice president. “VP before 30,” he remembers thinking. “That would be the coolest thing in the world.”

It didn’t happen. He felt bamboozled and quit. The next company let him keep the director title, but the job was account management under a bigger name. Later he was still a director on paper, but he worked five different jobs in three years. “It really diluted the meaning of these titles to me.”

The last push came from a role that paid very well and he was brought in to fix a broken team. It lasted five months. Then came the six months and the thousand applications. By the end, he said, he had killed off “all semblance of what mattered to me.”

Marco knows the arc. He walked into his first job “super cocky,” sure he’d earned the next bump, and it took about a year for the work to break him of it. For both of them, the title got replaced by a longer, plainer list. Is the work interesting? Is the pay right for it? “Am I around people that I’m learning from? Are those people good people? Is the client a good person?”

Marco keeps his title out of his email signature. He’s just as unimpressed by the ladders some companies build, the Director IIs and the L7s. “What does that even mean?”

“Be yourself”

When Isaiah landed at Hmde., he did what any former director would do. He asked what the job was. Should he manage the agency? The in-house team? Support the client lead?

Kris Belau, co-founder at Hmde., told him: “Be yourself.” Isaiah asked the same questions to the client lead and the answer was “Yes.”

“Okay, that’s vague as hell,” Isaiah thought. It took a month or two of picking up small projects before he knew the business well enough to see what really needed doing. Almost two years in, he calls it the closest thing to a dream job he’s had. The role started in paid media and spread from there: landing page development, budget projections with finance, lead quality with sales. “I’m not just a paid media person anymore,” he said. “I’m just Isaiah.”

Marco thinks that first year of finding your footing should be normal, not a warning sign. “It could take you a year just to figure out what the hell it is you’re supposed to be doing.” Promotion calendars assume everyone learns at the same speed. “We’re timing it without knowing if that’s actually what it needs to take.”

A machine reading a machine

Isaiah didn’t start in AI as a believer. When colleagues at earlier jobs started using it, he held off. “I felt like it was cheating,” he said. Everything it wrote sounded the same.

He came in sideways. First through small questions he was too embarrassed to ask anyone, like when exactly BC turns into AD. Then, during those six months out of work, through the job search itself. He used it to match his resume to each posting and to draft cover letters. That’s how one person sends a thousand applications.

Marco saw the catch right away. Isaiah wasn’t the only one doing it. “Now you have a machine analyzing a machine’s response to what maybe was a hundred applications, which probably now is hitting an inbox of 2,000.” So how does anyone get hired without knowing someone?

Isaiah’s answer is the one his own story proves. It takes a village: community, relationships, real conversations. The things a screen can’t send for you.

AI also turned Isaiah into what he calls “a glorified, untrained, unlicensed product manager.” He wanted a simple way to track a habit he was quitting, so he described an app to an AI model and shipped it. It has a daily counter, the money saved each month, and milestones he sets himself. He called it Quitter and posted it on LinkedIn and Instagram. People have already tried it.

He’s a fan. He’s also worried. The worried half is what the rest of the conversation was about.

The case for friction

“That friction is what creates strength,” Isaiah said. “It creates grit.”

The whole promise of technology is to remove friction, and he doesn’t deny that’s useful. But he can see what leaves along with it. People who never need to leave the house. Offices that sit empty even when coming in is encouraged. Dating and friendship getting harder as they move behind a screen. Comfortable, he said, with “a really quick half-life.”

Marco carried it into the office. He’d been talking with Kris about how creative gets judged against performance numbers, and how mid-level managers have stopped taking chances. “Nobody wants to be responsible for an outcome that isn’t guaranteed by some metric that already exists.” No risk means no boundaries get pushed.

Then he took it home. In college he was terrified to walk up to people. He did it anyway, and it often went badly. He counts that as part of who he became. “What are you made of when it’s hard?” Not hard as in dramatic. Hard as in ordinary. “The answer is no to your idea at work. Deal with it.”

Smoother brains

Isaiah’s own fear, as he leaned into AI, was losing the ability to think things through. So he set a rule. He tells the tool not to give him the answer until he has started working the problem himself.

“What I don’t want to happen is where I outsource my entire brain over to something else,” he said, “because then I lose who I am.”

When it comes to the work environment, you can see this situation playing out in the opposite direction. Someone pastes a problem into a chatbot and brings back the verdict. “Here’s what AI thinks is wrong with our challenge.” Isaiah can see himself responding to this, and answering it point by point, and the reply can come back: “Well, AI says this, though.” But the chatbot wasn’t there for the last year and a half. It doesn’t know what has been tried, or why it failed. He compares this type of scenario to the Dunning-Kruger effect: overnight experts, now on a faster schedule.

Marco has one question for anyone who says they did their research. Did you look at the sources? Did you verify them? Isaiah’s diagnosis: “By reducing the friction, it’s making our brains smoother.”

Marco pushed back, and the conversation got better for it. If AI takes the rote work, doesn’t your brain get freed up for something bigger? Isaiah agreed, with one condition. “Are you doing that? That’s where the problem lies.” Automating busywork is smart. Letting AI do all the work for you has consequences.

The long way first

Isaiah’s rule comes from high school calculus. There’s a long way to solve the problem and a shortcut. “If you don’t know how to do the long way first, you can’t appreciate the shortcut.”

Writing works the same way. Using AI to fill out an email when you already know what you want to say is fine. Not being able to write the note that wins back an unhappy client without it is a problem. “What if it’s down?”

Marco offered himself as the example. He recently started dictating everything, now that transcription finally gets him right. English isn’t his first language, and the grammar suggestions keep flagging his sentence structure, because Romance languages put things in a different order. He leaves most of it alone on purpose. “I wanted it to feel like it’s me.”

It took him about 15 years to know what “me” sounds like. That’s the part that gets skipped now. “Everything sounds the same.”

Isaiah calls it homogeneity. When everyone uses the same tools, the work starts to gray out. He can often tell which AI built a deck. “It looks good. I know it looks good. But I know what you did.”

So the order matters. Isaiah tells the people he mentors to nail the basics first: the email, the project plan, talking a client off a ledge. “The more you do it right, the more confident you feel, then you can let your swagger out. That’s where your personality comes into your work.”

He had a recent favorite. Kris built a client proposal as a web page instead of a slide deck: short, simple, easy to move through. “No one does that,” Isaiah said. Without AI, he added, it would have needed a web developer and a copywriter. This time it took someone who knew what good looked like and had the tools to get there.

Marco isn’t nostalgic about the old way. He has copied and pasted proposals and swapped the client name to make a deadline. “Was it good? No.” Corners got cut long before AI. The tools just raise the stakes on whether you did the thinking first.

The car and the hotel

Isaiah is open about why he can be blunt. “I have no skin in this game,” he tells the in-house people he works with at his client. Staff often can’t say “the uncomfortable thing,” because their jobs are on the line. An outside partner can. “I will say the thing that you don’t want to hear, because that’s why you pay for me.”

Marco thinks that’s where agencies are going. Companies used to bring in an agency for a fresh creative eye when the in-house team went stale. Now the role looks more like a hybrid marketing consultancy: the partner who can say in the room what the client can’t. “That’s what we’re actually paid to do.”

Some of those uncomfortable things are about blame. Paid media is one of the biggest monthly line items, so it’s the first suspect when results dip. Isaiah’s analogy: “They’re blaming the car that takes you to the hotel for the hotel being bad.” Ads bring people to the site. What happens after that is a different conversation, and now he’s part of it.

Some are about what winning means. For example: “Why does efficiency matter if we’re not hitting the number one target?” Isaiah said. “That’s a moral victory. We only lost by one. We still lost.” He’d rather take an ugly win. Marco put it more briefly: “You’re taking a bigger piece of a smaller thing.”

Isaiah’s bigger complaint is that every department optimizes its own lane. He pictures a marketing org as an orchestra where “every section is playing a different song,” all supposedly aiming at the same result.

Five in a room

How to fix that is where Marco and Kris part ways a little, and Marco says so on the record. Kris believes the specialist’s weight is fading: a critical thinker who understands the whole marketing system can use tools to cover the specialist work. Marco is “85% of the way there.” He’s not sure a media expert can judge creative, or that anyone, even a creative director 20 years in, can be an expert in all of it.

Isaiah splits the difference in one line. “It’s not about someone who can do it all. It’s someone who can understand it all.”

Marco’s picture of the new marketing department comes from soccer, where a side plays total football only when all 11 fit together. A great media plan with weak creative gets an 8% lift that should have been 20%. Great creative with a bad go-to-market plan never gets seen. “Five sharp generalists with a slightly skewed skill set will beat a 40-person team in marketing any day,” he said. One with a feel for creative. One who sees the whole marketing picture. One who leans toward finance and performance. “Give me four people in a room like that. And I don’t think you could do that before.”

He compares it to a special forces unit: four or five people, each with a specialty, who only work if they click. “The worst thing you can do is separate that team.” Isaiah added a rule of his own: don’t make someone do the thing they’re worst at. His comparison was the Avengers. No two are alike, and without all of them the whole thing falls apart. Marco summed it up: “It has to be the sum.”

Who you want in the kitchen

The hard part, both of them admit, is finding those people. They know the traits: curiosity, grit, and what Isaiah calls radical ownership. “If I don’t know it, I’ll learn how and then do it.” For years, he said, companies hired for a narrow slot instead, “which is why it took forever for me to find my fit.”

But those traits are easy to claim. “People can say they’re curious,” Marco said, “but until they’re in a role, you don’t really know.” A resume can be gamed. So can an interview, if you’ve sat through enough of them. That’s part of why he thinks a company like Hmde. has to be built to teach.

It’s also why the candidate whose first question is about the title probably won’t fit. Marco is careful to say that’s no judgment. It’s just not this kitchen. Here, anyone does anything. Marco doesn’t enjoy reading financial statements, but somebody has to. He sweeps the office floors. Isaiah says he loves doing dishes, and doesn’t know why.

Maybe that’s the long way too. Isaiah doesn’t talk like someone who has finished it. He’s still learning what he doesn’t know yet, still answering the chatbot point by point, still doing the dishes. No title required. He’s just Isaiah.