My Life as an Amphibian — Part II: The Colonel of Silicon Valley

The doctor I visited in the summer of 1999 — in a non-descript medical-professional strip mall in Belmont, California — was of the latter variety. He struggled through elementary school, middle school, high school, and medical school, never understanding why he had to work so much harder than everyone else around him. He didn’t work harder on the things that most people found difficult — he was great at math, sciences, and other things that require a facility for abstraction. It was the little things — or littler things — that made life so difficult for him. Like showing up to class on time. Like remembering people’s names. Like putting on his shoes — from the same pair — in the morning. He became a famous ADD doctor — highly recommended by someone close to me and my wife — and a legend in Silicon Valley, though few of his patients will reveal his name. Not because it would expose the patients as ADD people, but because revealing would be rude. The doctor was a gentleman, the furthest thing from rude. He spoke in a hard-to-exactly-place Southern accent, appeared to wear the same suit every time you visited, sported a well-groomed beard, clean, snow-white, cut with a flair. On the right day, he looked just like Colonel Sanders. I will respect the doctor’s anonymity — kinda — and call him the Colonel. I owe him that respect. I may have been his last patient.

My Life as An Amphibian

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.