Starting Monday, August 10, I will be running a weekly column chronicling my learnings — and blunders — over the past 10 years as a marketing professional in Silicon Valley. The thread of the story — it began exactly ten years ago — is my struggle to survive a life that increasingly got more difficult as the demands of my profession pulled me away further and further from the physical world and more and more into the virtual world. A unique client engagement in 2008 helped me to articulate the condition that I and most of my peers have found ourselves in: we have become amphibian, living in two distinct worlds, and suffering as much as we are evolving as a result. In my weekly posts, I will try to tell the story of how we have all become this way, using my personal story as a source for insight (if not just amusement).

The story begins in a doctor’s office — an accomplished ADD expert in Belmont, California — who diagnosed me in 1999 and sent me off to my first job in marketing with a poignant warning. If you have ADD, a life in marketing in Silicon Valley can be a curse or a blessing; you’re actually in the job of creating the conditions and tools — the weapons of mass distraction — that make life so difficult for so many people. For me, the marketing life has been both a curse and a blessing. But for this column, I’ve chosen to highlight the former. It makes for a better story, and it is a bit closer to the truth.