Late on a Friday back in 2011, a trusted colleague called me up to request that I take on an 18-month project for one of his highly technical clients, an aerospace and defense company. He said there would be a big learning curve and asked if I might be up to the task. I’d be interfacing with marketing people in Connecticut as well as engineers in California. There were a lot of products. And it was a lot to take on.

I assessed the workload over the weekend and I came up with a solution: I just needed a crash course in ‘blowing sh*t up’ (Michael Bay style). So I called up my colleague and agreed to the job. Then I hired a friend of mine who was an engineer at Lockheed Martin. I paid him the following week to spend 10 hours with me drawing pictures and dumbing down all this complex info into digestible parts from which I would at least have a baseline to communicate with EBAD’s engineers.

It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever called me ‘industrious.’ But that’s exactly what my old colleague called me with equal parts joy and admiration in his voice. And it was a word I really liked. I decided I wanted to be industrious from then on.

The client loved the work - it struck the right tone, it was just technical enough but with the right touch of marketing. They barely changed a word of my copy - a rarity under any circumstance. It was 18 months well spent.

And, what do you know: here it is 2020 and the original copy is still there. Have a look.