An apple fell on Newton’s head and he came up with a theory that still explains why you don’t shoot off into space. Even when night falls and the Earth turns over.

Asking. Questioning. Contradicting himself.

I mean, sure, he was under that apple tree taking a nap. But he’d brought a lot more into that shade than those twenty minutes.

In the shade of that tree. Not at rest.

Shaking it.

Now we’ve got apples dropping into our laps every few seconds. Prompt and done.

More trees, more fruit, more theories, more insights, more productive naps. Quite literally, now that you can play four-handed.

The thing is, the AI picks the apple at its peak, the overripe one, the one with the worm, the one that’s too sour. Slaps a label on it and says:

—It’s ready. Take it home.

Best part is, sometimes the AI can’t tell an apple tree from a pear tree. A soursop tree from an orange tree.

Fruit. Fresh fruit. Get your fresh fruit here.

Theory ready to develop.

Yesterday I was talking to a colleague. His name’s Fernando. Though if you know him, you know that’s not the name he answers to.

Fernando’s been at this for thirty years. Thirty years working with foundations, banks, media, small brands, independent brands, niche ones, and all the ones that eventually ended up in a drawer.

Anyway, he’s afraid of how the board is being set up with this whole AI thing.

He also told me about one of the best pieces of advice he was ever given.

“It’s incredible. It’s too much.”

Well, what he actually said was:

“Too many pulls.”

He’d pitched an idea and there was too much in it. Too much subtext. Too many threads to pull. Too many meanings, too many open doors.

Twenty years old, all the drive in the world, and a pitch in London that changed his life. Not because they took him. Because of what they told him.

That advice made him understand something it takes years to learn how to do well:

select, categorize, prioritize, reduce, discard.

Fernando told me something else too.

Sometimes he has an idea. He stops. Develops it. Stretches it. Pulls twenty different versions out of it.

Some are garbage. Others, fresh cream.

And sometimes he goes back to the first one.

Aha.

Not because it was the first. He’s been through the other nineteen.

He’s looked at them. Stretched them. Pulled those threads. Seen how far they went.

And then he does something a lot less impressive.

He lets it cool.

Time.

To come back tomorrow. To find out that what looked like fresh cream last night tastes like expired yogurt in the morning.

Time to take a nap under the apple tree.

Because what we’ve got in front of us now is a tool that’s brilliant at doing the exact opposite.

More trees. More fruit. More associations. More paths. More possibilities.

You can develop the good one.

The bad one too.

And the one that occurred to you seven seconds ago and that, with the right prompt, can have a name, an argument, and a theory before you’ve decided whether it actually interests you.

Everything looks ripe when ripening costs nothing.

And maybe that’s part of the mess.

More trees. More fruit. More associations. More paths. More possibilities.

Get your fresh fruit here.

And Newton?

I don’t know.

I suppose he’s still stuck on that one apple.

One.

That one.

The one worth asking why it fell and didn’t shoot back up.

The one that tasted like a question.

The one that wasn’t fresh fruit for sale.

To one of my dearest friends, Fernando, and to all the Fernandos I’ve met and I’ll meet.

Maybe you’re not here to produce anymore. Maybe you’re here to show the machine, and people like me, how to stay.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas
cultooruido.com

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Taste.

Oh, fucking taste.

Taste when you pick the bottle by the label. Taste when you go by every code that’s already been validated. Taste when you know which restaurant to book, which lamp to buy, which typeface to use, which artist to cite, which colour to put on the wall.

All correct.

All recognisable.

All so well curated.

Oh, so curated.

If all you’ve got are validated codes, you might have a taste that’s perfectly indexed. But we already have the Pinterest algorithm for that.

If you know how to train it.

Oh, education.

So, Lines: how do you train taste?

Well, look — you don’t train it. You corrupt it. You take it out of the house. You put something in front of it that it never asked for.

The tacky. The excessive. The quiet. The minimal.

Something that scratches a little. Something that doesn’t fit at all.

Something you still don’t quite know where to put.

And then we see what you do with it.

Sometimes it beats you. It’s not for you.

Fine.

Perfect.

But if you only go by what’s easy, I don’t think you can train your palate.

Oh, palate.

Training the palate takes that rough moment. That one. You know the one.

Like when you try your first beer.

Or your first gin and tonic.

Good?

Well…

Sometimes you don’t like it because it’s crap. But other times you don’t like it because you haven’t yet given it the chance to be liked. Or, at least, to be understood.

Taste seeks pleasure.

“Oh, what good taste,” said no one when what sat in front of them wasn’t aligned with their own taste.

And yet a trained palate first tolerates not understanding.

And yes, here I could talk to you about outsourcing taste to a thing that has no palate. Hello, AI!

But that would be too easy.

Besides, that same thing has probably already handed you back the word friction.

Oh, friction.

Blessed word. How I loved you. I think of you every three sentences.

Because friction is what you feel when what you taste isn’t what you expected and yet…

You taste. You compare. You come back.

You come back because you liked it, or because someone taught you to tilt the wine a different way so it opens, so that as it passes it sits differently. Or someone teaches you the mezcal ritual: inhale, drink, exhale.

And then you come back, but you come back changed.

That happens with a brand too.

Oh, branding.

At first you see it and you like it. You’re heart-eyes over it.

Then you start to contrast it with what you see, with what you learned from that first gin and tonic and with what you were told.

You start to tell things apart. What belongs to that brand and what belongs to the category. What’s a decision and what’s a trend. What looks premium because it costs money to produce and what has value even when it’s made with four elements. What word holds a position and what’s there because someone saw something similar in another deck.

You start to have references and references — and I mean the good kind.

Because a good reference is one that widens what you’re able to see. The thing that makes you reduce everything to a comparison with it isn’t a reference, it’s a customs officer.

An expensive wine that says nothing to you. One you don’t buy for the label, that surprises you. A small brand that understands exactly who it is. A brand with a budget Barça could close its star signing with and that, even so, still needs someone to explain why it should matter to you.

Something that wasn’t on your radar and, after you’ve tried it, is already one of your essentials.

And who am I. No one. Or someone. An ordinary person.

I have exquisite taste. Or questionable.

Depending on who you ask.

But my palate is trained.

And I train it every day. Not on good wine. Nor natural oysters. Nor the good cured ham.

I’m talking about being willing to step out of my comfort zone. Out of my learned codes. Out of all the stuff the feed shoves into my eyes until one day it looks like I chose it myself.

Tacky.

Maximalist.

Excessive.

Yes.

I like it.

Or neutral.

Or minimal.

That too.

You can widen the palate without losing judgement. In fact, for me that’s exactly the point.

If you know me, you know.

If you don’t, you can reach out whenever you like.

I don’t bite.

Or I do.

But I’m vaccinated.

And yes.

I’m with you.

People who choose wine by the price deserve their own piece.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas
cultooruido.com

If you know me well, this probably isn’t news to you. In fact, there’s a fair chance you’ve called me Paquita at some point.

But who the hell is Paquita?

Well.

Paquita is a character.

And a character with legs.

Talent agent. Questionable methods. Formidable instinct. A relationship with torreznos, those glorious strips of fried pork belly no doctor would ever attempt to defend on nutritional grounds. And enough quotes to keep the philosophy department of a fancy university busy for several semesters.

The fact that people started calling me Paquita was entirely my fault.

I started the joke.

Then I capitalized on it.

Strategy.

Now someone has a really good churro and thinks of me. Someone orders a slightly unnecessary drink as a digestif and thinks of me. A plate of torreznos appears and…

Call me Paquita.

Certain particularly peculiar decisions have even acquired their own grammatical category:

a Paquitada.

The best part is, I don’t even have to be there.

The code travels on its own.

That’s brand, too.

Even if it never makes it into the brandbook.

But Paquita also worked for me.

For quite a long time, I used one of her quotes to close brand presentations.

Serious presentations.

A naming. A repositioning. One of those times when you’ve spent an hour explaining why a company should stop being one thing and have the nerve to become another.

Some people closed with Steve Jobs. Simon Sinek. Seth Godin. Or that quote: “People will forget what you said and what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou, I think.

I guess she proved her point if I’m not entirely sure.

Anyway, I didn’t close like that.

No fade to black either.

I closed with Paquita Salas.

And it worked.

Ten times out of ten.

And if you think it was just a punchline, read it again.

People laughed. Obviously.

But that wasn’t why I used it.

After the research, after looking at the competition under a microscope, finding a space and building a position. After sometimes even giving the thing a new name…

The strategy was there.

What was missing was the leap.

Standing at the edge of the pool and deciding whether you’re going in with a cannonball or diving headfirst.

Or taking three steps back and heading for the sun lounger.

Because you can approve a strategy and spend the next twelve months using it to prop up a wobbly table.

You can know exactly where you want to go and still not take a single step in that direction.

And this is where Paquita stopped being a joke.

And perhaps that’s why it worked.

Because after all that strategy, Paquita could do in two lines what I couldn’t do with another twenty slides.

Put someone in front of their own decision.

I don’t know exactly when Paquita stopped being a reference I used in presentations and became a reference for me.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

Good ideas have a habit of doing that.

They grow legs.

Call me Paquita.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas
cultooruido.com

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“All I ask. All I ask. That you make life pleasant for me. If you decide to live it with me.”

That’s why you have a Roomba. You have satnav in your car. You have a dishwasher. You have all your devices connected. You have artificial intelligence.

Things. Lots of things. To make your life pleasant. To make your life easier.

And yet…

Your brand.

Uh, what do I post?
Uh, what do I communicate?
Uh, I’m not sure this fits.
Uh, the logo. Subtle, but obvious.
Uh, is this too us?

Uh.

There’s something weird about all this. Really fucking weird.

We build a brand and it feels like we’ve ended up with a civil servant on their coffee break. Their third one.

You build a brand to create more value. More money. More time. Better clients. Better relationships. Better positioning. More room to choose what we do next.

And yet… yes. Your brand.

More guidelines. More protocols. More channels. More content. More assets. More approvals. More meetings. More people making sure everything is on brand. Or one single person obsessed with making sure everything is on brand.

Doesn’t matter.

In the end…

More decisions about the thing that, in theory, should help you decide.

—Riiiiing.

—Is Brand there? Put them on, we’ve got a lot to talk about.

—Chirp, chirp.

Your brand shouldn’t become a supreme being you need to ask for permission. Or a Tamagotchi you have to feed every day, just in case the poor thing passes on to a better life.

Good brands make your life easier.

Easier.

And there’s a difference between easier and easy: basically, the difference between life itself and a good dose of smoke.

Your business will still have problems. Products that don’t work. Lines that fall apart. New players. Other tools. A team that changes and throws things off.

And one Tuesday in February at 10:45 a.m., there will be a decision that nobody had the courtesy or clairvoyance to include in the brandbook. Even if it was as deep and generous with its page count as War and Peace.

—Hey. What do we do now?

—Well, let’s check the whole manual the agency gave us.

Control + F. Search.

—Nothing.

—Nothing?

—You’re welcome.

What a surprise, right?

Well, yes. Normal. Of course it isn’t there. Because a brandbook can’t contain all the answers. Mainly because it doesn’t know all the questions.

That’s why a good identity shouldn’t be built to tell you exactly what to do, but so that deciding what to do gets easier every time.

At first, you think about your brand. A lot.

Does this fit? Can we say this? Should we be here? Better here? Does this sound like us? Does it represent us? And now what?

Then, if the work has been done properly, you start thinking with it. Through it.

And some questions don’t disappear. They become easier to deal with.

Not because someone wrote the answer on page 83. Or page 41.

Because you already have a point of reference.

Because the brand starts taking up less space in your head while taking up more space in those decisions.

And yes, a brand is something that adds.

Recognition. Differentiation. Perceived value. Preference. Margin. Awareness.

But it’s also something that takes things away.

Doubt. Explanations. Work done, redone and redone again. Uncertainty.

Because a good brand helps you say yes. And it helps you say no.

And above all, it helps you say uh less often.

It gives you more criteria instead of more dependency. And it takes away some of that uncertainty. Some. Because it gives you ground and a direction. And guess what? It doesn’t collapse like your GPS the moment a path appears that hasn’t been updated on the map yet.

Recalculating route.

If, after all the work, all the strategy, the entire visual system, the entire verbal system, all the guidelines and all the meetings, you still need to ask your own brand for permission every time you move a finger, maybe you don’t have a brand.

Maybe you have a business with an impeccable outfit.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas
cultooruido.com

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We threw her a surprise party. Thirty people, a parallel WhatsApp group and all of us crossing our fingers that nobody would fuck it up at the last minute.

The theme was songs by one of her favorite singers, and the place was one of our local bowling alleys. Nothing like the American ones. This one overlooks the beach, the cape and the estuary. Gorgeous.

One of the best things was the cake.

Pink. Very pink. With an iridescent 50, a lipstick and a Barbie sprawled across the top after vomiting confetti. I don’t really know how else to describe it because that’s exactly what it was: confetti vomit.

The party brought together people from different parts of her life. Some family, ex-partners, friends, people who have known her for years and people who came along later. Each of us knows a part of Irene.

There was good food and, in my case, a little calimocho to help with digestion. Calimocho is sangria for adults: red crianza wine, three ice cubes and a good cola. Happiness in a wide glass.

At some point between the afternoon and God knows what time, looking around at all those people, I thought that maybe getting older is also this. Being in a room full of people who know you and realising none of them knows exactly the same you.

One person’s Irene isn’t quite the same as the next person’s. There are shared stories, different times, places, conversations, things that remain under seal and things that are public knowledge.

And well, something similar happens with brands.

I could talk to you about the Ship of Theseus here.

But I’d rather talk to you about my friend Irene.

I’ve been working with a brand that’s turning 60.

Ten years older than Irene and, as far as I know, with less calimocho.

When a brand has been around that long, people know it from different places too.

Some have bought it all their lives. Others have just discovered it. Some work there. Some remember a product that doesn’t even exist anymore.

There’s a lot of history in front of you. And the first temptation is to think the answer must be buried somewhere in it. So you go through a ton of documentation. You ask what things feel “very us” and get different answers depending on who’s sitting in front of you.

Normal.

If I’d asked on Friday what is “very Irene”, I’d probably have come home with thirty different answers too. But I bet the same points would keep crossing, like a spiderweb.

Same thing with a 60-year-old brand.

I don’t care about finding the point in its history when it was supposedly more itself. Or deciding which period should become the reference for the next ones. I want to understand what we still recognise when everything else has changed.

Because 60 years give you plenty of time to change.

Yes. Please. Thank you.

Sometimes we treat a brand’s history as a list of things we need to keep safe. This? Check. That? In. Those? Of course.

Probably because we’re afraid of touching something and finding out later that that was important.

...Shit.

But thinking about this brand and Irene, nobody at that party knew exactly the Irene the person next to them. And still, we all recognized her.

I don’t think she’s the same today as she was twenty, ten or five years ago either. That’d be more boring than queueing at the supermarket checkout.

And still, there we were. Thirty people celebrating the same Irene.

Maybe when you work with a brand that’s been around for ages, you don’t have to decide which version to preserve. We're not making marmalade here.

Maybe the harder thing is letting it keep changing and, ten years from now, still being able to say:

Yes, it’s her.

Even if she’s wearing a different lipstick. Even if her playlist has got longer. Even if she’s changed her mind about this or that.

In the end, the confetti always lands in the same place.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas
cultooruido.com

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The ones you keep in your memory, not on your camera roll. Because we all know that trying to record or capture the sky on New Year’s Eve—or at a great party—is a waste of time.

And the other kind, too.

The ones we build inside a presentation. The ones we detonate with every click of a mouse.

A brilliant idea. An huge purpose. A new positioning. An impeccable brand book. A vision capable of making everyone in the room feel, for forty-five minutes and with the right soundtrack, as though we’re about to change the world.

I’ve built those too.

Because for a while I thought that was part of my job: getting people to lift their heads and look up. Making their eyes—and their faces—light up.

Then I started thinking about how fleeting that moment really is.

Building that sky is easy. Colors. Sound. A few special effects. Some carefully crafted words.

All of it fitting neatly into forty-five minutes.

The thing is, many of those skies eventually become ceilings. Cages.

Because before asking someone to look up so you can paint an explosion of meaning above their head, perhaps we should first ask whether there’s enough ground beneath their feet for them to lift their chin without feeling overwhelmed.

Knocked flat.

Because a vision can be beautiful. The music can be inspiring. The manifesto can ignite people. And still be impossible to sustain.

For a long time I thought my job was to build skies.

Now I know it’s something else. It’s about building the ground. Paving it. Stone by stone. Decision by decision. Session by session.

During the process.

Not on presentation day. Not with the feedback and the final approval. During the process.

So if you’re not willing to fire up the concrete mixer and start paving that ground over time... you and your client are fucked in trouble.

And if you think I’m talking about lowering ambition, not at all.

I’m talking about giving ambition somewhere to stand. Giving it ground.

The Ground

The ground doesn’t appear the day a manifesto gets approved. Or when the Board gives you a thumbs-up and a reassuring pat on the back. Or when the new positioning comes back from the printer, ready to be pinned to the meeting room wall.

Ground doesn’t emerge by spontaneous generation.

It appears when there’s no meaningful distance between what you say you are and what you actually are.

Which sounds simple enough. Except we’re inconsistent by nature.

Everything else —everything else— is fireworks.

If you think I’m a fireworks hater, keep reading.

You’ve probably worked with, or met, CMOs who kept looking far beyond the deck, searching for a sky worthy of spectacular fireworks. And you’ve probably seen Boards that were remarkably good at building ceilings for those CMOs.

And for you, if you happened to be part of the equation.

They never quite say no. They just make sure every decision fits perfectly inside the same Excel cell.

You’ve probably also seen brands obsessed with the display window.

The postcard. The finish-line photo. The award. The explosion. The illuminated sky. All while showing zero compound interest in the journey.

The journey that consists of repeating. Getting it wrong. Correcting (or iterating… that little word, if it suits you better).

Trying again. And above all, turning a promise into something that starts looking a lot more like a habit.

So maybe strategy isn’t there to convince anyone.

Maybe it’s there to help an organization sustain, six months from now, what it was capable of saying out loud for forty-five minutes today.

Because anyone can write a purpose. The hard part is making sure that, on any given Tuesday in March, at 10:15 in the morning, someone makes a different decision because of it.

That’s ground.

Everything else...

is fireworks.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas
cultooruido.com

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—What, you mean... FOY-ah? Follar? What?

The first time a German asked me for a light, I thought he wanted to sleep with me.

Follar is a wonderful Spanish word. It means "to fuck." Lost in translation, it became the beginning of this story.

We lasted about as long as August does. Or the time it takes to pack up a caravan for five.

If you think this is about a German, keep reading. I promise I’ll disappoint you pretty quickly.

This is about the last excuse.

We all have one.

The German. Our age. Money. The city we were born in. Our contacts. It doesn’t matter which one.

We always find a story convincing enough to keep being who we are instead of becoming who we could be. That version of ourselves who dances alone with her eyes closed and has a much wiser —and way sexier— voice inside her head.

Mine was English.

Or it was.

Seville. 2025.

There I was. Completely frozen. A person I admired. A conversation waiting to happen. And a mix of frustration and disappointment with myself that I still chew on whenever I remember it. So completely trapped inside Mari Complejines, my inner Little Miss Hang-ups, that I honestly think if someone had asked me to count to twenty, I would have stopped at seventeen.

Of course, I blamed my English.

The funny thing is that, at the very same time, I had already been working in English for months.

Consulting. Almost daily follow-ups. Long conversations. Intense ones.

And there, English was never an obstacle.

It was just another arena.

It forced me to think more slowly. To choose my words more carefully. To listen to myself while building an idea live.

It became another way of thinking about myself from a higher altitude.

And yet...

Let it beeeeeeee!

Total frozen mode.

Then things started happening.

Or rather, I started paying attention to them.

While I kept blaming English for my own shadow, English —and life— kept insisting on proving me wrong.

First, her.

One of those minds I admire. One of those people I envy for her courage.

I first heard her speak live in Seville.

Later, in a podcast, she said something that got stuck in my head with that unmistakable accent of hers:

“English is the language of business.”

And since I make a living writing —and business is my middle name— I thought:

Well... we’re in trouble.

Some time later she read several of my articles. We started exchanging ideas. And I thought:

Well... I must be doing something right.

Then came him.

We talked for a while. Later he started recommending my work while I was still writing only in Spanish.

And I was like:

Lines Aja... wake up. Signs. You’re not Joaquin Phoenix, but maybe pay attention to the signs.

Swing the bat!

Not because I particularly believe in destiny.

But because there comes a point when the same idea keeps showing up wearing different costumes. Costumes so loud that, once you look closely enough, pretending you haven’t seen them stops being an option.

A colleague, just a few days ago, this time in Spanish, tells me about hyperstition.

The idea is simple.

And it hits like a brick.

Some beliefs don’t describe reality.

They create it.

Like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And then I started thinking about all the sentences that had marked me.

Not the ones I remembered. The ones I kept following without even noticing. Or maybe I did notice. I’m not that innocent either.

“Ideas don’t wear rank.”

Meaning it doesn’t matter whether you’ve been doing this for three years or thirty-three. Ideas don’t care about job titles, and some people never even manage to warm up the chair.

“What are you afraid of? Success?”

“Step on the gas.”

And a few more.

So while I was thinking about cognitive biases (yep, you know me), self-fulfilling prophecies and all those sentences that had shaped me, I realized they were never just combinations of words.

Because there are sentences you repeat to yourself. Stories you keep telling yourself. And hypotheses about yourself that only you decide whether to turn into theories.

And then I remembered that German again. Because that had never been a language problem. It had been a story problem.

I didn’t misunderstand his words. I misunderstood the story my head wrote around them.

And maybe I’d been doing exactly the same thing to myself for years. I’d come across a few words, build a sentence around them, and then an entire world.

English had never been the problem. It had been my last excuse.

The last story I’d been telling myself so I wouldn’t have to step into the places I wanted to belong.

I’m sure Paulo Coelho has a quote for this.

But here’s the thing.

The moment the excuse disappears...

Only I remain.

Or you.

No one else to blame.

Just that version of yourself that’s been waiting far too long for permission to step onto the field instead of warming the bench.

Even if you misunderstood a few words. Even with your accent.

Maybe especially because of your accent.

Making peace with the sound of your own voice in voice notes and recordings...

Well.

That’ll probably take a little longer.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com

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My father’s, to begin with.

Historical fiction. Thrillers. And, of course, self-help. How Easy It Is to Learn to Run. The specialist in learning to run from the sofa, while watching war films in black and white.

He never told me about them. I’m finding out now.

By the spines. By the most dog-eared pages. By the corners. By that curious wear only time leaves, when someone goes back to the same place again and again.

I read him through what he read. And it’s the one gaze I’ll never meet again — and that still rewrites me in real time.

There’s another book. On the table. A friend’s. Just arrived.

Since I sent him the proof-of-life photo, he’s asked me everything. The paper weight. The ink. The cover. Is the size appetising? Does the stock sit right?

E v e r y t h i n g. Everything.

Except what I made of it.

What? Surprised? I’m not. Not strange at all. Not in the least.

It seems perfectly normal to me, and I don’t hold it against him, because I do exactly the same.

All of us. We always ask about the paper so we don’t have to ask about the gaze. We circle the question that weighs with something about grammage. We look for confirmation. And, deep down, we pray no one is entirely honest.

There’s another book on the side table. My cousin’s.

It’s been there for months. It’s probably the one I most want to read. And the one I most put off. Not out of laziness.

The opposite.

Because I know who wrote it. Because I know her eye. Because I know the years behind it.

She’s spent half a life training that eye to find places where the rest of us only see streets.

And I think that’s why I don’t want to open it just anyhow. I tell myself I can’t find the moment. That I don’t have the rigour. And it’s true. But not as an excuse — as respect.

The nerve, you’re thinking. My cousin probably too.

My cousin and I meet for a drink and a good long natter all the time. I go with her to her openings. And she never asks whether I’ve started. She gives me rope. She knows it doesn’t mean I love her any less. That I’m a disaster. That I’m hopeless with time.

I suppose that’s what friends are for. And cousins who are friends. To keep your place until you manage to give yourself your own.

Because some books you consume; others inhabit you — even the ones you never began.

And, well. Then there’s the last book.

Mine. In design.

It might be the flop of the century. I’m not after a bestseller. I don’t want to move more units. I don’t want flashbulbs or microphones. I want something dearer: presence.

And I know that’s asking a lot.

It’s not an airport book. It makes you slow down. And it can’t be divided without breaking. Like prime identities.

That’s what it’s about. Physics. Prime identities. Haikus.

Maybe that’s why I feel no vertigo. Well — maybe once we go to print that word will fit me better. But what I feel right now isn’t vertigo. It’s much closer to querencia.

To the chance that, for once, someone might read me without reading me small. Without translating me. Without summarising me. Without keeping one nice line to take home. Or my drawing on the cover.

With my accent. And the place I think from.

Maybe that’s why I still haven’t started my cousin’s book. Because I don’t want to consume it. I want to be present, so it can inhabit me.

I hope mine finds someone willing to do exactly the same.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com

Blur?
Turn it up.

Muted colours.
Clean sans serif.
A hint of personality. Playful.

Slightly retro.
Fresh. Well... nostalgic. But fresh. You know the look.

Don’t you?

It’s every independent brand. A bistro. A soda company. That design studio. There’s an aesthetic of independence. And maybe that’s the problem.

Independence isn’t something you signal. It’s something you practise, decision by decision.

Being independent isn’t about making brands that look independent. Or trying to be the most rebellious one in the room. Independence isn’t an art direction. It’s self-discipline. Judgment. The willingness to question yourself.

Maybe that’s why so much of what we call independent ends up looking exactly the same. Not because people are. Because it’s much easier to copy the aesthetic than to sustain the conditions that make it possible.

Anyone can copy the look of independence. Independence itself is another story.

You stake it on the clients you say yes to. And the ones you don’t. On the people you choose to work with. On how you decide to grow your studio. On how much is enough. On the deadlines you accept. On the ideas you publish. And the ones you decide to keep to yourself.

I admire independent people, brands and studios. They have that particular kind of stubbornness. The kind that survives invoices, forecasts and spreadsheets. That’s the kind of independence that earns my respect.

Maybe that’s why I write. I’m not afraid of losing clients because of how I think or where I stand. If anything, my writing does part of the filtering for me. It saves me emails, calls and meetings that should never have happened in the first place.

There are too many thoughtful people who can’t say what they really think. Not because they don’t want to. Because they’ve built businesses that can’t absorb the consequences of saying it.

And I think that’s a terrible loss.

That’s why I consider myself fortunate. I’ve managed to build a business that still lets me make that choice. I know not everyone can.

We often confuse the freedom to do whatever we want with the ability to live with what it costs.

Independence has a price.

If it doesn’t, maybe it’s just indie.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com

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Overbooked.
Come back tomorrow. Try another one.

The word is still there. It’s in the dictionary. Nobody banned it. Nobody stops you from writing it.

And still, you can’t get inside it anymore.

Not because it changed meaning. Because it changed neighborhood.

There are neighborhoods where something like this happens. They don’t disappear. Same streets, same buildings, same names. Even the same bakery on the corner.

But one day you come back and you don’t recognize anyone. You don’t know exactly when it happened. You just feel something hard to explain: the neighborhood is the same, but it doesn’t seem like yours anymore.

I think some words are living through that.

They haven’t stopped holding meaning. They’ve started pulling in too many people. Not dictionaries. People. Millions of sentences pouring into the same words until it gets harder and harder to tell who’s speaking.

I know because it happened with mine.

Curated. Criterion. Friction.

Even inevitable.

Words I’d used for years. And one day I started writing them and stopped halfway.

I deleted them.

Not because they’d stopped saying what I meant. Because they’d started sounding like someone else had written them before me. And there it was, a discomfort I hadn’t counted on. Like a pebble in your shoe.

The nuisance in the heel of using the word, no. The other one. The one of finding out I’d started watching them. Like someone at the window counting new neighbors.

That’s when I asked myself something I still can’t answer. With this, am I defending language… or defending my neighborhood?

Some people live this with anger. It’s understandable. For a long time language was expensive territory.

Expensive not in money. In time.

You had to read. Write. Get it wrong. Find a voice.

Now the barrier to entry is much lower. And when that happens, the same conversations show up that show up in any neighborhood.

That we used to have standards. That now anyone can. That this isn’t what it used to be.

If you think about it, getting angry over this is defending a customs house. And customs houses around language are almost always built by whoever was already inside.

Gentrification starts pushing to the edges everything that doesn’t fit. Everything that takes too long. Everything that asks more time than we’re willing to give it.

And inside, everything starts to look the same.

One neighborhood looks like another that looks like another. The same café with the same tiles in three different cities. One message that looks like another message. The same voice coming out of mouths that have never met.

It sends to the outskirts what doesn’t fit. And clones into the next prompt what does.

There’s an overbooking of words. And more tourists than residents.

But the difference isn’t between who got here first and who just arrived.

It’s between those who pass through a word, take the photo, and keep walking… and those who decide to stay and live inside it long enough to hand it back a meaning that can’t be confused with the one next door.

No card grants that.

Not the intellectual’s. Not the technician’s.

Not even the one who writes for a living.

The one who just arrived can do it better than whoever’s been here all their life. Because inhabiting a word was never about owning it. It was about knowing exactly how much it weighs.

And then a machine arrived.

I don’t know if you write with it. I don’t know you well enough. But I do know you talk to it. And every conversation hands back words that don’t show up by chance. They show up because they’re the most probable.

The ones that work best. The ones that have proven useful most often.

Like when you leave a conference and spend two weeks using the same expression you just learned.

Only now we all leave the same conference.

Sorry.

The same summary.

And little by little we start to resemble each other, not because we think alike. But because the road to our words starts in exactly the same place, with a bluish light and a cursor that no longer blinks.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com

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I remember an image: newly hatched goslings following an Austrian man in boots around a garden.

Goslings follow the first moving figure they encounter during a very specific period of their development. It might be their mother.

It might be a pair of boots.

The gosling doesn’t care.

Not exactly.

The gosling can’t care yet.

Konrad Lorenz — the Austrian man — called this imprinting. During a sensitive period of development, the animal fixes on a reference and begins to follow it. It doesn’t compare. It doesn’t look for alternatives. It doesn’t open three tabs and benchmark mothers.

It sees.

It follows.

And something gets written.

What interests me about the goose isn’t that it mistook Lorenz for its mother. It’s that perhaps, before Lorenz, what we call mother didn’t fully exist yet.

There was something unfinished. Waiting for the world to complete it.

And then a pair of boots appears.

The boots don’t take the mother’s place. They help build it.

There are things we experience as natural without knowing why.

Ways of sitting at a table. Of filling a silence. Of knowing when someone important has entered the room. Of saying ‘we should catch up’ to someone you both know you never will.

Nobody had to explain them to you.

You saw. You followed. Something got written.

Then you learned words.

Serious.

Elegant.

Professional.

Expensive.

Cheap.

Brand.

Long before anyone explained to me what a brand was, I already knew how to recognise one. Or so I thought.

I’d seen hundreds. Thousands. Like you. Like anyone.

I knew luxury spoke in a whisper. That technology looked ahead. That craft needed hands. That banks smiled with just enough teeth. That serious companies had blue somewhere and that, if a typeface looked handwritten, it probably sold something made slowly.

Nobody taught me that class.

They didn’t need to.

There were geese ahead of me.

Years later, I learned longer words. Positioning. Archetype. Territory. Differentiation. Architecture. Verbal identity.

I learned to dissect the goose. Measure it. Explain why it walked where it walked.

It took me much longer to ask a simpler question:

What the fuck was I following?

We say a brand needs to differentiate itself within its category. So we do something perfectly logical. We look at the category.

Direct competitors. Indirect competitors. Emerging players. References. Trends. Codes.

We put them together on a slide. Which colours repeat. Which words. Which promises. Which tone. Which shapes. What space each one occupies and which space appears to have been left open.

We watch where all the geese are walking.

And then we ask a newly hatched brand to imagine where it wants to go.

That order interests me.

First, we show it the world.

Then we ask it to think outside it.

A category isn’t just the collection of brands you compete against. It’s a learned way of recognising what belongs and what doesn’t. What looks like an insurance company. What sounds like a consultancy. What is allowed to sell luxury. What an artificial intelligence brand looks like. Which words a bank can say without someone in the room starting to sweat.

Categories organise. And they’re useful. They let us recognise something before we fully understand it.

See.

Classify.

Follow.

The problem begins when we mistake that organisation for the nature of things. When “this is how it's recognised” quietly becomes “this is how it is”.

And “this is how it is” limits far more than a colour palette. It limits the thinkable.

Maybe that’s why some new brands look old from day one.

Not because they’re copying.

Copying would almost be reassuring. It requires an original, a decision and, somewhere along the way, an awareness that you’re reproducing something.

Imprinting happens earlier.

They are born inside a pre-existing idea of what a brand is and devote an extraordinary amount of talent, money and meetings to becoming a different version of something they never questioned.

To the left.

To the right.

A little faster.

With one yellow feather.

Different.

All the while, we keep walking behind the boots.

And then we’re surprised when, after analysing the same references, identifying the same codes and asking the same questions, we end up finding different gaps in the same line.

Maybe benchmarking doesn’t just study the category. Maybe it imprints it.

The part I can’t stop thinking about is that the goose doesn’t see the boots. It sees the world. And later, it recognises something that looks like a category.

A mother.

Or a pair of boots.

A brand.

Or a template.

Maybe differentiating a brand doesn’t begin by asking what everyone else is doing.

Maybe it begins a little earlier. By asking what we’ve learned to consider a brand in the first place.

What we take for granted when we say premium. Professional. Innovative. Approachable. Bold. What images appear before we can stop them. Which boots we’ve been following for years without ever looking down.

Konrad Lorenz died in 1989.

The geese kept walking.

That’s why, when a brand tells me it wants to be different, I don’t first look at where it wants to go.

I look at what it saw when it hatched.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com

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Not bad as in wrong. Bad as in unripe.

They scrape the tongue. They tighten something behind your ears. They pull that face a kid makes when biting a plum too soon. And the first thing you want to do is spit them out.

Sometimes we do. Almost always.

Then, months later, someone says something close. But red now. Sweet. Bright. We get it right away and think: damn, good idea.

Yeah.

Could’ve been ours.

Some people think good ideas arrive finished.

Ripe, red, gleaming. The apple that drops into your lap while you nap under the tree.

The ones I remember came sour. Awkward. A little ugly. With that edge where you think maybe they weren’t much after all, and at the same time something in your gut won’t let you throw them out.

That something is a pain in your ass.

Because now you have to stay. To stop.

And we’re badly built for stopping.

We’ve grown used to the now. To asking an idea to prove, from day one, everything it might become. To answer for itself before it grows. To bring ROI, storytelling and a well-tied pair of booties so it can take those first steps.

If not, next.

And now that you can ask for an idea and get it back in ten seconds: round, red, ready to eat…

Who resists?

Go on, laugh at Eve and that bite of hers.

Everyone’s tree. Heavy with ripe fruit.

The problem with always eating sweet is that the palate goes dull.

We learn to distrust anything that scrapes. To spit out the sour before we know what it could’ve become.

The feed shifts it. And the algorithm blesses it.

So on a diet of likes, or the lack of them, there comes a point where nobody needs to take the green idea from you anymore.

You spit it out yourself.

And I’m telling you this because I think with machines. Several. Every day. A lot. And they’re extraordinarily good at taking me to the center.

That’s why I use them. I want to know where it is.

I want to see the probable answer. The word that comes next. The idea that statistically has every ticket to look like a good idea.

To rule it out.

Because the machine has no problem with ideas. It has a problem with ideas that don’t look like an idea yet. It reads noise where you, with luck, feel a prick.

And lately I chew on that prick a lot. Because it’s getting harder to feel.

More and more I see the same apple with a different sticker. The same post with a different profile photo. The same brand with a different naming. The same round little idea showing up on time to a conversation that started months ago.

Take it, and you’re not creative — you’re punctual.

And that punctuality worries me. Worries me that we reward it so much.

The machine doesn’t take the green idea from you. It just doesn’t fit its statistics. So it nudges you — kind words, kid gloves — toward the ripe.

The probable.

And the probable, when it’s everyone’s bet, is worth nothing. It turns into a place too common.

At rush hour.

Strategy doesn’t start with an answer.

It starts well before. With a question and the awkward silence it leaves behind. That stretch where you still don’t know. Where there’s no line. No concept. No three creative territories on a slide with their matching moodboards.

There’s a gap.

And the gap makes people nervous.

So we fill it. With the first idea that passes. With something that worked once. With an answer that sounds like an answer. Anything rather than admit we’ve spent three days staring at a green apple with no clue yet what the hell to do with it.

So the problem isn’t that the machine thinks for you. It’s that it takes you, gently, to the place where everyone already is. And a brand that reaches the place where everyone already is arrives late, even if it arrives first.

We think creating is about having ideas.

And it is.

The thing is, what costs — the heavy lifting — is bearing them. Living with an idea that’s still uncomfortable long enough not to kill it trying to make it presentable.

Not dressing it up. Not simplifying it. Not swapping it for another that shines sooner just because it shines.

Because some ideas need you not to understand them yet.

They need to sit badly a while. They need you to carry them in your pocket, take them out, turn them over again, forget them two days and find them again looking back at you from the table.

Training the palate for the sour is training judgment.

It’s not patience. It’s not about enjoying what scrapes. It’s about knowing why it scrapes. Telling a bad idea from a green one.

Knowing green isn’t worse than red.

It’s before.

And maybe strategy is exactly that: knowing what not to spit on the floor yet.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com

In it, my forearm is covered in ink. An orange eye. Blue lines tracing the veins. A red stroke crossing the wrist as if it had decided to change direction halfway through.

It wasn’t a tattoo. It wasn’t a performance. The notebook simply ran out before the idea did.

We like to think good ideas arrive complete. Neatly packaged. Ready to become a slide deck, a strategy, a company, a book.

They rarely do.

Good ideas are excessive. They spill. They leak into margins, conversations, sleepless nights, paper napkins, voice notes, walls, arms. They refuse to stay where they first appeared.

Maybe that’s because we’ve misunderstood creativity. We describe it as a mental faculty — a talent for generating concepts, solving problems, connecting dots.

I’m not so sure.

Some days, creativity behaves much more like a liquid. It doesn't ask for permission. It looks for the next available surface.

Living ideas always become larger than the container they were born in.

Which makes me wonder whether the problem isn’t a lack of creativity. It’s an obsession with containers.

Before we even know what we’re trying to think, we ask where it will fit. Is this a carousel? A keynote? A newsletter? A prompt? A pitch deck? How many words, how many slides, how many seconds?

We no longer begin with the idea. We begin with its packaging. As if the first question were no longer What wants to exist? but What format does this belong to?

The container has quietly become the starting point of imagination.

And containers are never neutral. A spreadsheet thinks differently from a notebook. A slide deck thinks differently from an essay. A feed thinks differently from a walk. They don’t just hold ideas — they teach ideas what shape they’re allowed to take.

We’ve never had so many tools for producing creativity. Frameworks. Canvases. Prompts. Templates. Optimization systems. And yet creativity has rarely looked so well behaved.

We don’t ask where an idea wants to go. We ask how to make it perform. How to make it fit. How to make it publishable before we’ve even understood what the hell it was trying to become.

It’s like asking a river which spreadsheet it belongs in.

Creativity isn’t the ability to produce more ideas. It’s the willingness to let an idea remain larger than its first container.

Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to that photograph. I don’t see a painted arm. I see proof that the notebook simply wasn’t enough.

And I wonder how many extraordinary ideas never become extraordinary because they spend their whole lives trying to fit inside a container they were never meant to inhabit.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com

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For a while I thought my job was about finding better ideas, about getting to the one idea that ordered everything sooner and further than anyone else.

Today I think it’s about something far less glamorous and far harder: creating the conditions under which someone can choose them.

Because there’s a part of strategy that never shows up on the invoice, that doesn’t get billed as a line item, and that, even so, decides whether everything else was worth anything at all.

It isn’t research, it isn’t writing, it isn’t building a concept. It’s moving a mind.

Moving a mind is the slowest thing you do in the whole process, because the best decisions almost never stall for lack of information. They stall from an excess of vertigo.

The client, nearly always, already knows.

Knows what brand they want to build, knows what tone speaks for them, knows what they should leave behind.

They recognise it the moment it's in front of them. What they don’t know — and this changes everything — is whether they’ll be able to live there.

That’s why I believe less and less in convincing.

Convincing implies the other person is wrong, and that isn’t where I start: I start from the fact that most of my clients already know the answer the moment they see it — they just can't see it yet on their own. And that the only thing they’re missing isn’t a better argument, but enough ground under their feet to take the step.

So I talk more about mindset than typefaces. I dismantle fears more often than I present work. And I spend more time asking what would have to happen for this to stop scaring them than defending the idea itself.

Because a brilliant strategy handed to a mind still living in “maybe” is, quite simply, a dead strategy.

“Maybe” is a curious place, because it’s almost never a real doubt. It’s usually a yes that hasn’t grown legs yet.

The job isn’t to push that yes — pushing it only frightens it more — but to build the road to it: to widen the frame the client is looking through, to shift the axis, to change the place they’re seeing the problem from.

Only then does a decision appear that no longer needs defending, because all of a sudden it looks like the only one that ever made sense. It looks inevitable.

That’s why I’ll take a “fuck” over a “how lovely” any day. Every time.

“How lovely” usually means everything still fit, comfortably, inside the same head the client walked into the meeting with. “Fuck” means that head just moved into a bigger room.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com

The sharpener. The sharpenerrrrrr. The sharpener has come to your door. Right there, at your gate. Knives to sharpen.

The sharpener, at your very doorstep.

fiuuuuuuuuuuu

I don’t know if you know that sound where you come from.

The sharpener would arrive on a motorbike or a bicycle. You didn’t see him first. You felt him. A thin whistle that slipped under the door, climbed up your spine and settled behind your eyes before your brain had time to name it.

By the time you turned your head, your body had already decided.

You’d grab the scissors, the knife that wouldn’t cut, whatever had lost its edge around the house. You’d do it without blinking. Instinctively. Because your body already knew what to do before your brain caught up.

fiuuuuuuuuuuu

Hold that whistle. We’ll come back to it.

A friend confessed to me the other day that she’s a reggaeton fan. But in the closet.

Her playlist is indie. Curated. Intelligent.

Reggaeton, next to it, looks like a stain on the record. Like playing it out loud, no headphones, would put her in a box labelled in permanent marker: immature, no taste, too easy to like.

At first it made me laugh, because I’ve been listening to reggaeton since before I knew it was called reggaeton. I enjoy an evening at the opera just as much as I enjoy a sunrise dripping with sweat in the afterparty.

Maybe that’s why the story stayed with me. Because I realised my friend’s issue wasn’t a dissonance caused by a trained musical ear.

It wasn’t about taste at all. It was shame.

You could hear it in the way she lowered her voice when she said it. Like she was admitting to something slightly dirty. Something that, if said too loud, might make her less serious in someone else’s eyes.

Taste looks at the work.

Shame, on the other hand, looks first to see who’s watching. And depending on who that is, it says out loud: “I’m not one of them.”

It dresses up as class. Even if saying it means denying yourself and building a closet to the measure of your prejudices.

And I get it.

The signalling around reggaeton is obvious. After all, it’s the devil’s music with shitty lyrics — according to the experts of the Royal Academy of Good Musical Taste.

And if by now you still think this is about reggaeton, this is about something else.

It’s about who holds the power to decide whether what you feel is legitimate or not. About who gets to tell you whether what you feel deserves to take up space out loud, or should stay in the back room, headphones on, door shut.

It’s about that uncomfortable zone where something moves you before you can justify it. Before you can defend it with a citation, a review, an award, an institution, or a respectable enough lineage.

Because the funniest thing is, even those experts, the ones who hate the genre with all their might, get their bones moving when a track comes on.

They do. Even if their intellect shakes its head to deny that movement.

Don’t raise that eyebrow — this isn’t me talking. It’s science.

In 2021, neurosurgeon Jesús Martín-Fernández and his team put twenty-eight people with no musical training into a functional MRI scanner and played them fragments of four genres: classical, reggaeton, electronic and folk.

The study used only instrumental fragments. Not a single word. Naked.

They measured what lit up.

The result?

Reggaeton was, of the four, the one that most activated the auditory-motor network. Reggaeton. Not a symphony.

But that wasn’t what stopped the team cold.

What left them open-mouthed was something else: even with the body completely still, reggaeton lit up the basal ganglia. The oldest thing we carry inside us. The structures that read rhythm and start predicting the beat before a single muscle moves.

Because the stimulus is so rhythmic, so persistent, that the brain begins to anticipate when the next beat will drop. And when it does, the body is already braced to move. No movement yet. Just the readiness.

It doesn’t pass through the cortex where good taste is debated and criteria are signed off.

It processes downstairs. In the basement. In the mechanisms we share with those who danced around fires before the word “fire” existed.

The body prepares to move before you decide to move. Before you have time to judge whether that movement is legitimate or not. Before you analyse anything.

Are you surprised?

Good. Now let’s see what happens when you put the right words to that rhythm.

Puerto Rico. September 2017. Hurricane Maria devastates the island.

The government declares that the number of deaths from that catastrophe stands at 64.

64.

In mid-2018, a Harvard study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It analyses excess deaths between September 20 and December 31, 2017, in Puerto Rico.

The figure: 4,645.

When the news breaks, people start placing empty shoes in the square in front of the Capitol. In three days, they leave more than three thousand pairs.

Two systems. Two ways of measuring reality.

And a cemetery of shoes.

Months pass. Nothing happens. Nothing. Until, suddenly, everything explodes.

July 2019.

889 pages of a private Telegram chat are leaked.

Inside, the Governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosselló, and eleven of his top officials exchange thousands of messages. Jokes. And something else. Something that opens a wound that never quite closed.

In that chat, the participants mock the dead of Hurricane Maria.

The leak spreads like wildfire. The streets move from disbelief to outrage. And that’s when three people decide to get together and lock themselves in a studio to record a track.

In less than twelve hours, they record and mix it.

René Pérez Joglar — Residente — put the verb to the accusation. Verse by verse, he described corruption with the precision of someone who’s been sharpening that blade for years.

Benito Antonio — Bad Bunny — stopped his European tour and stepped into the mud in the name of a generation: the “I won’t be pushed around” generation.

And Ileana Cabrera — iLe — who, in her own words, had been waiting her whole life for a moment like this, provided the hook: the chorus that turned rage into something singable, repeatable, chantable.

On the morning of July 17th, just as the streets were beginning to fill again, they drop the song for free on YouTube.

Afilando los cuchillos. Sharpening knives.

A song that doesn’t open with a beat. It opens with a whistle.

Yes. That whistle.

The sharpener’s whistle.

fiuuuuuuuuuuu

When they released the song, they didn’t have to explain a thing. The island already knew the code.

Just as I recognise it, or anyone who’s ever heard that whistle.

On July 22nd, between eight hundred thousand and a million people filled the widest highway in San Juan, the Expreso Las Américas.

Nearly a third of the island’s population moving.

Motorbikes patrolling at night. Black flags. Cooking pots. Perreo in the face of tear gas. A crowd moving before it could even fully explain itself. Like someone reaching for the scissors when they hear the whistle, before they understand what they’re doing.

Twelve days after the first protest in front of La Fortaleza, Rosselló capitulated. It was midnight on July 24th. Never before — not under Spanish rule, not under American rule — had a governor of Puerto Rico been ousted by direct street pressure.

That night, a governor fell. And an illusion too: the illusion that history changes when someone convinces others with arguments.

Sometimes history is rewritten when you manage to synchronise enough bodies at once. Sometimes all you need is for a whistle to stop being domestic.

There is always something that puts you in the closet. Something that makes the box seat wrinkle its nose.

Before, it was the blues. Jazz. Hip hop. Rock. Camarón’s flamenco. The Beatles.

Everything that once smelled of “this has enough standing to be one of mine”. Until, suddenly, it does.

And then it happens.

What was demonized starts being accepted across the board. And the cultural arbiters look you straight in the eye, place a hand solemnly on their chest, and say:

“Respectability is this. You can now press play on that song, contemplate that sculpture, read that book. That movement and the smile it brings to your face — they are now legitimate. Endorsed. Certified. Your experience is authorised.”

The box seat always arrives late. Five minutes late, deliberately.

Long enough for risk and judgment to disappear. Long enough for the rhythm and the narrative to sync up.

Although your basal ganglia knew it first.

The tribunal always appears.

The box seat. The class. The category.

The little voice that doesn’t ask “what is this doing to me?” but “what does it say about me that this is happening?”.

The body doesn’t wait for permission. It never did.

But sometimes you feel you need someone with cultural authority to allow what moves you.

Purists. Pedigree. The pulpit.

Someone to confirm that you’re not losing value in front of everyone else when the beat drops and your body moves. When your head turns at the whistle.

That kind of knowledge has no certificate. It doesn’t need it.

It has the pulse that lives beneath.

fiuuuuuuuuuuu

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com

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“I found this in my notes. It’s good. But I don’t know if it’s mine.”

She didn’t know if it had come from a conversation, a series, a book, a newsletter, or a machine. And honestly, it didn’t matter. Because the interesting question was never where it came from. The question was another one: what does this idea connect to inside you?

Silence.

Not because she couldn’t remember the source. Because she couldn’t remember the thread. She didn’t know what other ideas it joined, what problem it was trying to solve, what inner conversation had provoked it, where it was taking her.

The idea was there. But it seemed to have arrived complete. Like a found object.

Ideas have a history.

We don’t always remember where we first saw them, and it doesn’t much matter. No idea appears in a vacuum. We read, we listen, we copy, we mix, we forget. What matters isn’t the origin. It’s the mark the journey leaves.

The ideas that end up being yours rarely stay intact. They get contaminated. They mix with other readings, contradict themselves, strain against experience. They lose pieces, gain others, until they deform and come to resemble whoever thinks them more than whoever formulated them first.

That’s why some ideas you can trace backward. Not all the way to the origin, necessarily. But to the process.

You can explain what conversation activated them, what book gave them language, what experience made them inevitable, what contradiction forced them to evolve. You can pull the thread and it keeps appearing — like Ariadne’s, the thread that lets you walk the labyrinth in reverse.

Others, no.

Others arrive finished. Brilliant, polished, perfectly encapsulated. But you pull on them and nothing appears. No connections. No obsessions. No questions. No bridges. Just the sentence. As if it had landed directly on the page.

And that’s where the difference begins between repeating an idea and having thought it. Because thinking isn’t arriving at a conclusion. Thinking is knowing how to find your way back to it.

And building that road has a price.

Not a metaphor. A literal price.

We’re used to talking about ideas as if they were vapor.

As if they appeared from some abstract place called creativity. But thinking is a physical process. It burns glucose. It burns oxygen. It burns time. It burns your body. Every new connection has to force its way through a network that didn’t exist before. And forcing a path always costs energy.

The brain weighs roughly 2% of the body and yet consumes close to 20% of all the energy we spend. Around twenty constant watts. A bulb burning inside the skull.

Every time an idea moves, millions of neurons exchange electrical and chemical signals. Every connection has a cost. Every bridge burns fuel. Every crossing leaves a mark.

When you work those connections again and again, you become a contortionist. Not of the concept. Of the process.

A contortionist doesn’t master a posture because they’ve seen it. They master it because they remember every fall. The body keeps memory of each failed attempt, each loss of balance, each movement that didn’t work before finding the one that did.

Something similar happens with ideas.

When you return to an idea you’ve genuinely thought, you don’t repeat a routine. You come back with memory. You can explore variations. You can strain it. You can take it to new places. You can answer questions you’d never asked yourself. Because you know the terrain underneath.

Whoever copied the posture has the final photograph.

They might even get the applause. But they have none of the falls. And at the first variation — the first question the script didn’t account for — the spell breaks. There’s no memory of stumbling to pull from. No journey. No bridges.

The first time you hear one of your own concepts in someone else’s mouth, you doubt yourself.

Maybe it’s the red car.

You learn a word and suddenly it’s everywhere. You buy a red car and half the city is driving one. You name something and start seeing it repeated on every corner. Convergence, coincidence, the trap of attention suddenly hunting for what you’ve just learned to see.

Maybe that’s all it is.

Or maybe there’s something underneath, more uncomfortable. Because when an idea has been with you a long time, you develop an ear for it. You recognize its shape even when it changes clothes: other examples, other references, other words. And your shape underneath. And then the real doubt arrives.

Did we get to the same place by different roads? Are we looking at the same thing and naming it alike? Or did someone mistake proximity for authorship?

You can’t always know. But over time you learn to tell one thing apart: when an idea has roots and when it only has surface.

So let’s go back to the price.

A study estimated that transmitting information across the cortex burns far more energy than computing it. Not quite the same as thinking — but the ratio stays with you: moving something costs more than producing it. Connecting more than concluding. It costs 35 times more.

A penny for your thoughts.

I suspect the math falls short. The conclusion costs a penny. The bridges cost thirty-five.

Because the conclusion is the visible part. The result. The sentence. What anyone can repeat.

The bridges are something else.

They’re the invisible connections that hold the idea up. The associations. The contradictions. The readings. The mistakes. The questions that made it possible to reach it.

That’s the seal. And the deal.

Not the idea. That’s the cheap part.

Your seal, the real deal, is the energy burned building the bridges. The heat accumulated in every connection. The thermal trace of having walked the road so many times you can return to it in the dark.

It’s the wax seal pressed while it’s still hot.

Take the line.

The seal was set hot. That one doesn’t lift.

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com

The thirty-five is real, but borrowed. It comes from Levy and Calvert (PNAS, 2021): in the human cortex, communication burns 35 times more energy than computation. They were measuring neurons, not thoughts. The jump from one to the other is mine. So here’s the thread, if you want to walk it back

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Queen Elizabeth II.

Not in records or stadiums. In something stranger: recognition, reach, the ability of a single face to travel across coins, tea towels, mugs and postage stamps without losing its shape.

Years later I looked it up.A brand consultancy had valued the British monarchy at forty-four billion pounds. The number isn’t the interesting part. The split is.

Eighteen billion was tangible: palaces, jewels, land, assets. Twenty-six billion was intangible: the value of simply being the institution. More than half the worth sat in the part nobody could touch.

Hold that thought, because the entire argument lives inside that statistic.

Every brand has two layers. The surface. And the root.

The surface is everything that can be stretched: products, formats, campaigns, collaborations, merchandise, distribution.

The root is everything that can’t: meaning, identity, legitimacy, relationship, belief.

Most branding conversations collapse those two layers into one. That’s where the trouble starts. Because a brand doesn’t fail when it stretches its surface. It fails when it stretches its root as if it were surface.

The Crown is one of the most elastic brands in history precisely because it understands the distinction. It stretches the surface to absurdity. Tourism. Documentaries. Merchandise. Scandals. Divorces. Netflix.

The surface bends endlessly. The root doesn’t move.

The King is dead. Long live the King.

Bodies change. The shape holds.

The Papacy operates under a similar physics.

Different faces. Different centuries. Different political realities. Same claim. Maximum adaptation on the outside. A declared this part doesn’t move on the inside.

That’s what institutions understand that individuals often don’t. Elasticity isn’t the ability to become anything. Elasticity is the ability to stretch without losing the thing that made you recognisable in the first place. And that raises a more interesting question.

Not how famous a brand is. Not how rich. Not how visible. How elastic. And whether it knows which layer it’s stretching. Because once you see brands through that lens, you start noticing the same pattern everywhere.

Some organisations protect the root and commercialise the surface. Others commercialise both. The difference doesn’t show up immediately. Every stretch comes back looking clean. Until one doesn’t.

And that’s where the case of one of the most elastic brands I’ve studied up close begins.

Because elasticity becomes most interesting at the point where it stops looking like strength and starts looking like deformation.

The full case is behind the wall.

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They ban playing ball the same way they ban thinking outside the box. Funny, considering “disruption” is what everybody sells. Or asks of you. Real disruption is almost never what people dare to do.

I’ve been seeing it clearly these days. Madrid does that to you when you come from a village. Your eyes fill with stimulus, concerts, conversations, nights that still seem to want something. And watching, listening, talking, you realise there are more kids wanting to kick the ball than ever.

The difference is that now the code, the algorithm, the pattern, the template slowly clip their wings — and bury the want in them.

That’s why I stopped when I saw this sign.

Guaje is what we call a kid in Asturias. A word from a language with no official status. A language that survives because people keep speaking it. On the streets. In the valleys. Around kitchen tables. In places where life happens before institutions get a chance to name it.

And there it was.

On an official road sign.

Not niños.

Not children.

Guajes.

A tiny act of cultural stubbornness. The kind I like.

Because the most dangerous things rarely disappear all at once. They disappear word by word. Game by game. Street by street. Until one day everybody is speaking correctly and nobody is saying anything alive.

Marketing does something similar. It fills the village square with signs.

Don’t write long.

Don’t lose attention.

Don’t go off-script.

Don’t make people think too hard.

Don’t risk being misunderstood.

The result is a world full of permission and very little play.

The brands that matter are built where culture, play and philosophy cross — by people willing to spray BAN BANNING across the wall and hand the street back to those it always belonged to.

Because creativity isn’t cool. That’s the lie they sell you. Creativity is rebellion with a purpose, practicing itself. Most days it feels closer to skating on a bad knee — walking the edge of a blade — than floating through clouds.

It’s risk. It’s friction. It’s refusing to let inertia, comfort or fear decide what gets built and what doesn’t. It’s running flat out after something that tastes like purpose.

A bruised knee. A chipped tooth. A scar or two. Scars, or stripes — from the skateboard they feel the same. Proof that you were here. Proof that you played.

The streets belong to us. We never left.

Lines Aja

Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®

cultooruido.com

I spent Monday morning at a client’s office. We’ve been working together for months, almost all of it on screens, and he cleared the day so we could sit without an agenda and close what we’d left open. We had lunch: grilled artichoke flowers, Barbastro tomato with the good oil, a brasa-grilled turbot fit for a maharaja.

I let myself be looked after — and anyone who knows me knows I’m not easily won over, that I’m more giver than receiver. But I let myself be carried.

We didn’t go to lunch alone. He brought along his point person from the team. And watching how he treated her told me more than everything in the files they sent me back at the start. That is leading.

I speak from privilege and it’s worth saying out loud: the privilege of being born on the good side, of owning my own time, of not handing over my judgment to the highest bidder. I enjoy closing a deal as much as I enjoy saying no to a project I know isn’t for me. For me, that is also leading.

Tuesday was another story.

I put on my raw linen wrap jumpsuit — judoka-style, in case things went south and I had to put someone in a hold, and because it was hot as hell. I took a taxi (I wasn’t getting on the metro in that sun) and arrived early to map the place before the event began. There I ran into the person who had invited me. He planted two kisses on me at the door. So good to have you here. We took the service lift up to the loft on the sixth floor. That is also leading.

The event began. Two heavyweights of the industry played masters of ceremony. Let’s say they work with the kind of brands we all dream of and brag about — in the closet, in the garage, in the feed. The room filled up. Forty-nine international creatives. And me.

Brilliant people. People playing Champions League. And also people working with smaller clients, mid-size ones. Craft studios, circuit voices, names you recognize and names you don’t yet. The whole spectrum.

I spent the night listening.

I didn’t go quiet out of fear, or out of feeling out of place. And I didn’t go quiet out of precision either, though that too — live English without two beers wasn’t going to land where I wanted it. I went quiet, above all, to listen. I haven’t been at this that long.

And though I speak from the privilege I’ve already named — my own time, judgment that isn’t for sale, partners in mind who aren’t on a payroll — precisely because of that, it was my turn to keep quiet. To let the voices of those who’ve walked more of this road, who carry the same weight without the net I have, map out in their own words what I suspect is endemic. I didn’t want to leave an echo. I wanted to receive one.

That is also craft. Knowing when privilege is exercised by speaking and when it’s exercised by listening.

And listening from the other side I noticed something I’d already sensed but had never seen operate among strangers: the ache was the same. Transversal. The same in the one signing work for global brands as in the one running a small studio.

The system wears you down equally from inside the premium pen as from outside it. Exhaustion. Quiet fatigue. The sense of feeding something that drains you.

It wasn’t a cliché. Clichés go lukewarm the moment they’re named. This one didn’t. It recognized itself without needing to be explained, and that is exactly what tells a room with skin apart from a room with a script.

What I’ve been trying to put in order for days is this: we’ve confused validation with recognition.

Validation asks for volume, speed, noise — and we hand it our work in exchange for the next spike in visibility. Recognition asks for something else, much more expensive: time, witnesses, someone who, after months of work and a flight, tells you it’s taken you ten years to get here. But how good that you came. No sprint produces that sentence.

In Spanish we say comerse la rana — to eat the frog. A beautiful way of saying you kissed a supposed prince who turned out to be a frog, and you swallowed him anyway.

We all eat the occasional frog. I’ll grant that. But if you have frog for starter, frog for main, and frog for dessert because that’s how the numbers add up, good for you — it works. Only it has a cost. And the cost doesn’t show on the balance sheet because we don’t know how to count it. It shows up as absence. It shows up as that night in the loft, where forty-nine brilliant people quietly admitted they were tired of their own success.

On the way back to the hotel, part walking part metro, and enjoying a cigarette, I thought about how messed up the world is: that we all loathe it and keep feeding what drains us.

This morning I went back to my client’s office. We closed a new project, talked about the next ones, and he drove me to the airport. In the car I understood what I’d been failing to put in order for two days.

Between Monday and today a whole room of international exhaustion fit inside that room. But the week wasn't decided by that — not by the loft, not by the names on the billboard. It was decided by the two ends. The skin of a client who brings his point person along to lunch because that is leading. The skin of someone who waits for you at the door with two kisses and a so good to have you here. The skin of the drive to the airport.

Maybe the verb we keep in progress without ever conjugating is to choose. Choose the client. Choose the pace. Choose who you share a room with and who you don’t. Choose when to get on the plane and when to get off the project. Choose to eat one frog or three. The word lives in every manifesto. The verb, almost never.

But when it gets exercised, it leaves skin.

It takes you to lunch. It takes you to the airport. It opens doors you didn’t ask for. It gives you two kisses at the entrance and a so good to have you here worth more than any fee. It tells you ten years late, but how good.

The rest — the noise, the manifesto, the quarter, the three-course frog — is words in progress.

Words in progress.

Forever

Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com

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The weeping of the guitar begins.
The wine glasses of dawn shatter.
It’s useless to silence it.
It’s impossible to silence it.

…

I learn more from a poem by Lorca, and from what reading it does to my identity, than from the latest personal branding book you have to read or else. Because if you don’t, your thinking won’t fit in a quote. And if it doesn’t fit in a quote, it can’t be shared.

Business schools. Schools of thought. Schools. Everything gets rule-bound. Everything gets standardized. Everything gets packed into neat boxes that fit in an Excel sheet and export to a PowerPoint. Those slides also fit the grand words we all repeat — like synergy. A synergy that doesn’t exist outside the slide where it was drawn.

And it makes sense. Because your thinking, yours, is worth nothing unless you can cite someone as collateral. Someone you feel articulated, in better words, what you think but can’t yet name. Someone who can validate you.

That’s how it works.

If your thinking can’t be filed inside a mental frame, a thinking model, or a framework (which sounds like a higher invoice) that someone articulated a few decades ago to fit reality into a mold that was theirs… good luck with that.

That’s how authority gets transferred. That’s how responsibility gets outsourced. That’s how we forget to think in depth, to push back, to question. We’ve shed our skin: we went from producing thought to translating what others thought before us.

We translate, and we let ourselves be translated along the way. Even if it’s more lost in translation than found in meaning, in terms of identity.

The scenario

Look around you. Look at your feed. Look at your inbox.

Brands now hand us everything pre-translated. Well-chewed. So nothing gets lost. So everything gets standardized. So everything scales. So everything fits into a function, into a mathematical operation.

And then we believe we’re making magic.

We translate trends. We translate content for the algorithm and algorithms for the audience. We translate what we feel into slide-speak. We translate what we know into client-speak. We translate what the client tells us on Monday into the brief we sign on Friday. We live translating.

And when everything is translation, there’s nothing original left to translate. Just copies of copies.

We keep operating with other people’s thoughts to define a reality that isn’t yours, but theirs. Another context, other vectors, another window in time. Athens. Boston. The seventies. The nineties. The one before this thing you're living right now even existed.

But context shifts, decades pass, and yet synaptic absolutism still reigns: the same connections, the same quotes, the same molds. As if thinking meant repeating the neural pathways someone else installed.

And I’m not a “no-past” girl. This isn’t about denying the past. It’s about not letting yourself be reduced to what others have already named, thought, or dreamed.

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Translate vs. Transduce

There’s a concept in physics and biology that fascinates me: transduction.

Cells do it all the time. They convert an external stimulus — the bass of a song — into an internal signal — your smile, your feet keeping the beat. They’re waves, and yet they become chemistry.

That’s what it means to transduce: to be crossed by something and come out converted into something else, without ceasing to be what you were. The wave doesn’t translate into feet. The wave becomes your feet.

When you think outside the boxes of the standard someone else defined, you have two options: translate or transduce.

Translating is what keeps words that no longer mean anything to anyone — because nobody remembers what they actually meant — circulating with the backing of the quote.

The quote gets repeated, restacked, printed on a t-shirt, attributed right if you’re lucky, wrong most of the time, doesn’t matter. The phrase no longer means what it meant. It just circulates. Fast.

Transducing is something else.

Brands get translated into their most scalable, most replicable version, until their real meaning becomes a footnote.

The brands that transduce, and let themselves be transduced, don’t fall into that trap. They operate from another frame, from another altitude. And that altitude changes the pressure, changes the light, changes the air you breathe. And if you’ve ever climbed a real peak, you know this isn’t a metaphor.

Culture can’t be translated

Brands want to transcend. They want to permeate culture. And they want culture to cross back through them. They want to be transducers.

But now culture is being squeezed into a text box. And made scalable as a concept. And turned into a commodity, sold to the highest bidder.

Sad, but true.

Brands factorize culture.

They break it down into its minimum operable parts — format, hook, trend, beat, hashtag — and recombine them into something that looks like culture, exports like culture, measures like culture, but no longer crosses you, transforms you, or changes you.

Trying to turn culture into something that fits the format is a waste of time. No matter how much taste and curated have become the new synergy and essence. In five years, or five months, they’ll make us laugh, or rage, but in the meantime, they scale.

I find life a bit bland. From taking away the salt and the substance, we’ve lost the savor. Right when everything is as liquid as the screen you scroll through on loop, while your finger slides on its own. Right when we want to put more dams in the sea.

We pretend to turn culture into a commodity for the market. The funny thing is, you can’t fence a field. You can’t dam the middle of the ocean.

No matter how hard you try to reduce it to a frame, to an algorithmic function, to a prompt, culture is one of those invisible forces. One that won’t be caught, drawn, or corseted. One that exists only to cross through you.

And if you’re awake — awake enough — it’s precisely the force that, when it crosses you, doesn’t leave you in the same position, or in the same place.

Everything fits in boxes. What pretends to be culture, the brands that factorize it, schools of thought, business schools. They standardize. And whatever falls outside the box gets treated as a footnote. If that.

Deep drag. Long sip. Bitter.

Because coffee, like thinking, is better when you take out the sugar.

Lines Aja

Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®

cultooruido.com

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