No Agenda Brands

The market is today is crowded by brands using competition as a strategy.

Did you see the two cans of sparkling water with the same brand design? Or Hims and Roman (which one’s which again?) Or the commercials at the Super Bowl…

Being different isn’t about strategy.

It’s about courage.

And it’s about authenticity.

Each one of us has a burning question that we carry buried beneath the surface.

Each one of us has an idea that we believe in at our core.

It’s our insight, our lens for how we see the world. It’s something you think about all of the time, it’s constantly on your mind.

It could be your belief system, or just a topic that fascinates you (permaculture, or collecting leather books).

It could be… something obscure, something that you feel no one would fully understand. But you do, or at least you're starting to.

It's like you've found this thread, and the more you pull on it the more you find is there. It fascinates you and it's always present in your mind and interactions.

But no one has ever asked you about it for…

No Agenda is about asking the obvious question that everyone else has missed because they didn’t see it or didn’t give you the space.

No Agenda is a way of being as a person or a brand, where we let down our guard and…

Lean into that thread of an idea.

I’ll tell you the secret of brand building today.

The secret that will sound simple but is incredibly difficult to achieve.

First because we’ve been trained to do the exact opposite.

Second because you will have to have a lot of trust in yourself.

The secret is this:

What you think to be practical is wholly unpractical.

What *feels* intuitively right, but logically wrong...

Is wholly practical.

We have been stuck in a bind.

In my work with founders, creators, and coaches all over the world I’ve noticed a pattern.

In my process, the cycle is the same. And so is the solution.

Founders feel stuck, torn between two ideas.

They have the inspiration and aspiration to be something great. They can picture it. They have the vision, it feels just within reach.

But here, now, in reality-today… there are many things that do not align with that vision. And so there is this tension between who we feel we are today and who we know we can be.

We feel a vision and we feel we fall short.

We fear missing out on what we’re capable of.

To reach the capable is to follow a feeling.

To reach the known is to follow practicality.

The known will keep you stuck and the practical will increase your tension.

If you follow the feeling…You will open up and growth will rush in.

If you allow yourself to listen to yourself at your core…

If you do not care for convention, but instead invention...

If you nurture this hidden idea, growing it, and then expressing it….

You will break the struggle of being torn between two worlds.

You will flip this equation inside out.

You will follow the feeling, and it will practically work for you.

You will neglect the thought of what is conventionally practical, knowing that it will be wholly unpractical for you to follow.

And you will find your voice.

You will find something that is so expansive that you will wonder why you would have chosen to play in such a small sandbox.

The Best Brands Are.

They exist because they rest upon an incredible mountain, sky, river and landscape, designed by its founders over years of discovery, curiosity, inquiry, and eventually…

Belief.

That landscape is so rich, so robust, so worked through that it will not bend when the wind blows it.

If you find this spaciousness within yourself (which we all have).

If you get accustomed to living there.

If you speak out loud, express ideas from that space at your core, opening yourself up…

No Agenda Brands take action without expectation.

No Agenda Brands sell without selling.

They open this space for the public to view, and those who see what is to offer rush in on their own right.

No Agenda Brands play.

They skip the competition by speaking layers beneath the surface.

No Agenda Brands invite others in, simply by going first.

And No Agenda Brands have courage to flip the equation.

To let go of the dilemma they have been holding onto, of thinking about who they are not.

Instead of feeling who they are.

xx David