Right now, I’m listening to Crîtto de lâ Nabahâ, by Califato ¾.

On repeat. Because today, this song has chosen me to tell a story.

Let’s see where it takes us.

It starts with Holy Week trumpets. The kind that give you goosebumps even if you don’t have a religious bone in your body.

In southern Spain, during Holy Week, religious figures are carried through the streets on enormous wooden floats, decked out with flowers and candles.

A float like that weighs hundreds of kilos. A tonne. Even two.

It’s a wooden platform carrying a religious figure, decked out with flowers and candles.

The costaleros carry it, hidden underneath the structure. They walk together, in step, bearing the weight on that exact spot where you used to get smacked on the back of the neck as a kid. Right there.

The costaleros can’t see the street. They can’t see the people. They can’t even see the figure they’re carrying.

From the outside, you see something else.

The figure moving through the crowd. The flowers. The candles. The balconies. The marching band. The solemnity. The spectacle.

The song opens with the voice of the capataz, the man directing the float.

“Come on, Manuel. We’re lifting this one for all those who are no longer here.”

Then the capataz keeps giving instructions: which foot, which direction, how many steps.

The trumpets start blending with an electronic beat that keeps gaining ground. I couldn’t tell you exactly what genre it is. I don’t understand music. I’m just addicted to it.

The music moves forward, and the capataz tells them where they are, what the square smells like, how well they’re doing. Because they can’t see the whole picture.

“You can’t see it, but it’s full of orange trees.”

As the trumpets and the beat set the rhythm of my typing, I think about how easy it is to confuse what we see with what makes it possible for us to see it.

Every decision, every small step you take that ends up shaping the path.

Just like the procession.

From the street, the procession seems to move on its own. Just like that brand you’re obsessed with.

Everything is in place. Everything makes sense.

Nobody sees the feet moving together underneath. The necks carrying the weight. All those little decisions that make it possible to turn a corner or climb a cobbled street without everything falling apart.

You see the float.

On your screen. In your feed. In the brandbook.

All dressed up. The staging. What a brand says about itself. What it makes others see.

But none of that tells you how it got there. Or what keeps it moving.

Underneath, there are people.

And people need more than instructions to keep moving.

Purpose. Nice name.

That’s why I also think about how lovely a written mission looks. And how hard it is to turn it into a contagious vision.

Because the vision is that street full of orange trees.

Everyone can see it. Except those carrying the weight. And the capataz has to describe it so well that those underneath believe him without lifting their heads.

The journey only happens if the purpose is worth it. And if the capataz can make others believe in it.

Some brands are like a polystyrene saint carried in procession. Light. Weightless. They look good in a photo. But there are no costaleros. No capataz. They’re a prompt.

A powerful brand has a capataz. Sometimes it’s a founder, or a hands-on CEO.

Fine. But it’s not the person. It’s the voice.

Today his name is Manuel. Tomorrow it will be someone else. But those underneath will still know why they’re lifting the float.

The trumpets keep going. The beat blends with los campanilleros del cielo and starts to fade.

I’m still thinking about the orange trees.

And about those who can’t see them.

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

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And now I realise I’m developing a bit of a soft spot for a game where the screens aren’t quite what they seem. Every new screen is a new version of me. Except that, if I’m not paying attention, the game starts playing me.

Yes, I’m talking about my friend, the assistant. Or the assistants, plural, because I like doing things as a gang. I’ve never been a one-machine girl.

I drew this a few years ago.

It said Insert Coin. Then it became Insert Copy. Today it would say Insert Prompt.

Same rabbit. Different currency.

The machine’s trick is that it fakes continuity.

It hasn’t metabolised what a walk or a nap does to your train of thought. Or to your workflow.

The assistant loads your previous version, the one that still hasn’t digested things properly, and carries on from where you both left off. Without a hair out of place.

Even if it doesn’t remember everything, it still knows where to look for what it considers relevant. Or what you underlined as relevant: “This matters. Keep it in mind.”

Everything you discarded while walking around the neighbourhood or popping out to buy bread, that part it can’t locate.

One of my assistants explained to me that Graham Wallas had already documented something like this in 1926. I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman until tonight. Forgive me. I already have.

Wallas, in my words, says this: first you get into the problem up to your eyeballs. You read, poke, pull at threads, get stuck. Then you leave it alone.

You walk, sleep, go and buy bread. You do nothing, or at least nothing that looks useful from the outside.

—What are you doing?

—Me? Drinking a vermouth.

—Sure? Meh.

Meanwhile your brain keeps chewing on it.

That’s incubation. The background hum.

The bit where apparently nothing is happening and quite a lot is.

You know that sensation you sometimes feel before something lands?

Knock. Knock.

Wallas called that intimation.

Then something clicks. The aha moment arrives.

So there you are, your aha hanging over your head, your heart beating faster. Then you go back to your notes and check whether you’ve actually found something or whether you just got slightly high on your own idea.

I am especially interested in that bit in the middle.

Incubation.

The doing-nothing bit.

The bit where nothing seems to be happening.

And yet.

So: preparation, incubation, illumination, verification.

I was very happy with this explanation.

Then another one of my assistants told me Wallas didn’t go far enough, that the whole four-stage thing was basically: nah.

Suddenly I found myself in a very familiar situation, like being in a WhatsApp group where one friend opens a private chat just to bitch about another.

My answer to both of them was: I don’t have enough context to help you.

I lied.

Now I do.

Which is why I think Wallas’ 1926 book, The Art of Thought, could perhaps include another stage today, a hundred years later: bouncing thought against another surface. Or grinding it until sparks fly, like a skateboard against a rail.

I light a cigarette.

The text box is still empty.

“Continue where we left off.”

That would be the easy thing.

Continue where we left off.

As if it hadn’t rained on Saturday. As if the rain hadn’t made me see things differently. As if the last drag hadn’t filtered anything out.

But I’m not where we left off anymore.

The machine is.

I’ve carried on. Ruminating, filtering, letting things settle, even when I wasn’t sitting in front of the screen.

Every time I say continue, I run the risk of returning to a version of myself I had already left behind.

The conversation keeps everything we said.

I don’t.

Thankfully.

Because digestion isn’t only about taking things in. It’s also about throwing things away. Scrolling through ideas. Then hitting delete, even when it hurts.

Fucking ego.

Maybe that subtraction is judgment.

Which is why starting a conversation with “continue where we left off” might be exactly the opposite of continuing.

Maybe the prompt is different.

“This is what has changed since yesterday.”

Not to bring the assistant up to speed.

To keep myself from falling behind.

Insert prompt to continue.
Your last version is still loading.

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

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Does my position exist outside my head?

Some people collect contacts the way they collect beer mats. People they want on their radar, prospects, colleagues. Fridge magnets. Look, I’ve been to Hanoi.

Others comment and like in the hope that one day the bell will ring. A notification. So-and-so has liked a post. Or better still: so-and-so has sent them a DM. I don’t know if that happens. I spend more time on the dock than on social media.

I used to work in sales. The kind where you play with a few thousand euros’ worth of perishables. Fish. Every night. You had to talk, listen, decide. And I happened to enjoy the game.

That’s why blank connection requests surprise me. You want to approach someone. There’s a box where you can say something. And you leave it empty.

Those three hundred characters stay in your head.

You can say a thousand things. You have 300 characters.

Hi, I saw your latest post and it got me wondering. Perhaps not the best option.

Or:

My doctor prescribed vitamins and stimulating conversation. I squeezed myself some orange juice. Downed it, of course, before the vitamins escaped. I’m a little more lost on the conversation front. Know anyone you can recommend?

The ones I actually send have more of an accent.

An opportunity. A fresh one.

A position.

What you choose to tell. The question you ask. The way you approach. Something that lets the other person know where you’re speaking from and see whether you share a language. Because you want to find that out too. Being interested in someone doesn’t mean any conversation with them will interest you.

We forget that too when we read a bio that makes our own feel the size of a button. Suddenly, the whole game seems to be about deserving the other person’s attention.

Recently, I was asking a colleague for something. We ended up talking about this. About writing to someone. About opening yourself up to a response.

I told her that whether she said yes or no, sending the message meant something had already happened.

In me.

I’d chosen what I wanted to say. I’d found the words. I’d decided it deserved to leave my head and reach another person.

Then their reply comes. Or it doesn’t. But you’ve already prompted the first reaction yourself.

People always say the worst they can say is no. I’m more interested in the yes you’ve just given yourself.

Sounds like nonsense. The kind you’d find on a mug with a cloud and a rainbow. Confetti.

And it’s true.

Nobody can take away what you thought, what you felt or where it came from. They can turn down the proposal. They may not be interested.

They might reply and you discover you weren’t that interested either.

There are always two people in that conversation. And both get to choose.

Standing by what you said, even when the answer is no, takes you much further than getting that little notification bell to ring.

If, instead, every response makes you disown your own gesture, you end up letting someone else decide even what you wanted to say.

I have magnets too.

The Las Musas ones, with that M and the yellow grid background. They’re bottle openers.

They leave the house, look good on the fridge and open the bottle.

I like to think a message can do that.

Go out. Open something. Then we’ll see whether we sit down and share a table.

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

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In the Spanish dub, Be well became Propicios días. Back into English: Auspicious days. Say that and I see Demolition Man. Sylvester being Sylvester. Wesley being Wesley. And a society that was a projection of our own.

Everything hygienic. Measured. Calibrated.

Like LinkedIn’s algorithm, the same one that lets someone promote AI slop. Or Meta’s, which is scandalized and blocks you if you say the word tits, but allows bots and adult accounts ("check out my profile!"), while it keeps the population in line, one measured scroll at a time.

There, Arnold was president. Here, he was governor. Now he does ads for garden tools, and I’m a self-declared fan.

Auspicious days is what you say to your assistant every time you talk to it as if it weren’t a garden tool. And it says it back.

Auspicious days!

That’s how the latest email from that client begins. Just like that. Casual. First thing in the morning.

The assistant interprets the client’s interpretation. And, with luck, the file you sent on Friday. On Monday you have breakfast with three rounds of revisions on something you’d closed last month. And a small suggestion. That it came up with. Just like that. Casual.

You probably remember broken telephone.

Everyone in a circle. One sentence kicked things off: Grandma went out on her bike. The next person heard it and passed it on to the one beside them. And so, ear to ear, the message warped. Grandma went out on a hike. Grandma went out to get high.

Not because anyone wanted to change it. Because everyone was trying to tune their ear and understand it before passing it on. And because it went through a filter: their own wiring.

A word that sounded like another. An added intention. A nuance that wasn’t there. A well-meant correction. Another coat of varnish.

Until the sentence reached the end as something else entirely.

Now we’ve improved the game.

You send the client a proposal. They run it through their assistant to understand it better. The assistant hands it back, understood, with whatever context the client gave it and, for better or worse, with your proposal attached. And at the end of the circle there’s you, on a Monday, with three rounds of revisions to dunk in your coffee.

No sugar, please.

And that’s where the loop begins, because the assistant has all the answers.

But the exam questions, does the client know those?

Yes?

Then why hire someone to take the exam for you?

It’s not a rhetorical question. Well. A little. Because using a tool to understand a decision better is one thing. And something a little, well, quite a lot different is using it so you never have to make one.

That’s where the All-Inclusive begins. Wristband and free mojitos:

Why this headline? Why not another?

Wouldn’t it be clearer to explain it this way?

What if we add this?

What if we use green instead of red?

Sure.

It might.

So you start shaking the Magic 8 Ball and everything turns provisional. You need to buy a sofa. Well, don’t ask the website’s assistant, or you might end up buying a hammock. Do you think a chaise longue will still meet your current needs in three years? Does beige work with more than grey?

More questions, more indecision. More fear of making the wrong call. More frustration. And more days.

Until now, it wasn’t like this.

You had to call someone. Meet. Look things up. Wait for an answer. Bother the agency, the consultancy or the furniture guy again. Admit, even, that maybe you were beating around the bush.

Not anymore.

Now you can ask for a second opinion before you’ve finished reading the first, because two paragraphs into the wall of text it throws at you, you already know it’s not that. Then a third while you turn on the shower (everyone knows things flow better in the shower). And a fourth when you switch on the hairdryer.

And they’ll all arrive neat, rounded off. In a row. With arguments. With nuance. With sources, even.

And with that dignified, reasonable tone the little machine takes on right before it complicates your morning. Hey, remember that thing you thought was closed? Fresh news. Check your inbox.

And yes. Of course.

Everything can be improved. Endlessly.

But time runs out. And you get tired. Tired of overcomplicating that CTA. The machine doesn’t get tired. Sometimes it asks for your credit card number. That’s all.

Strategy isn’t about finding the option no one can object to. That option doesn’t exist. It’s about knowing why you choose one, and what you’re willing to lose by choosing it.

That last part tends to get forgotten.

Every decision kills something. Choosing one word discards a hundred. Choosing a position leaves others out. Choosing a direction means no longer exploring the others, even if they were interesting, intelligent and perfectly defensible too.

That’s why deciding is a lot scarier than asking.

—So, grey or beige?

—What if I regret it?

—There are several perspectives to consider. Have you considered terracotta?

Auspicious days.

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

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The truth is, I never understood what it was supposed to add to my development. It felt like punishment. Anti-pedagogy on paper: formulas with nothing on and obscenely tangled examples.

So I’m going to talk to you about statistics. My way. So we understand each other and, above all, so I don’t lose myself.

I’ll do it with a prao—what we call a meadow up north—and a good flock of xalda sheep.

See the prao on the left?

Good grass, uh?

Green shoots.

And the sheep. Pretty things. Well padded.

Here’s how the sheep spread out across the prao.

Small huddles. Bulging huddles. Sheep scattered about.

And until very recently, there was one glorious huddle. The biggest.

In it, the good old corporate xalda sheep

The huddle everyone wanted to be in.

The blue: sober. Trust in bold. A photo of a handshake. Red tie. Discreet typeface. More than twenty years offering comprehensive solutions. They put the customer at the centre. And lead the future through excellence.

You can’t tell exactly what they do, because their brand message is more of a hum—or a litany—than something with punch and precision. But they project solidity.

Or so it says on the website.

This was the mode.

The big huddle.

Where almost everyone grazed because that was where almost everyone grazed.

“We’ve always done it this way. We’re good sheep. Baaaaaa.”

Fair enough.

Good grass, little risk, plenty of company. The board approves grazing there without much trouble because it seems safe, even though the numbers are getting tight: more investment every time, less return.

Logical.

Because the problem with a huddle is that it’s a huddle. Lots of sheep squeezed together. Like a metro platform at rush hour.

So, for anyone to hear what you have to say, you need to bleat louder than the sheep next to you.

Only the sheep next to you…

Well. It offers the same comprehensive solutions, with the same vocation for service and the same red tie. Yes.

Yes.

Only with a bigger budget.

The algorithm bends the numbers

Then artificial intelligence came along.

We trained it on what we’d already made.

Seeds for the parrot.

Websites, ads, manuals, tones of voice and every handshake the stock photo libraries could hold.

We asked AI to learn.

And it learned all right.

So when we asked it for a corporate brand, it gave us back the mode: trust-blue, comprehensive solutions, the customer at the centre, the next level.

Then came “differentiation” as promptable standardisation.

“Make it different. Make me different.”

And the algorithm, the bloke with the wheelbarrow, changed the sign on the sack of hay.

And the new corporate sheep appeared.

Disruptive. Innovative. Viral.

Lowercase name. Bold typeface. Hoodie. Fluorescent gradient. A deliberately imperfect illustration and a tone that treats you like its BFF before it knows your name.

“Mate.”

This specimen doesn’t offer comprehensive solutions. Its thing is breaking the rules.

Of course it says fuck. Because, according to page 14 of the manual approved in a meeting, that’s what it takes to be cooler.

Pure personality.

Oh, yeah.

The new corporate sheep looks like it escaped from the first flock, the trust-blue one.

And it did.

It was lovely. It was strategic. It worked.

Until AI learned again.

The lowercase name. The font with “character”. The neon gradient. The “no bullshit”. The founder you could have a beer with. The company that had stopped looking like a company and started looking like a stage full of rockstars.

First, one sheep crossed the prao.

Then another.

Then a thousand.

Beeeee yourself.

A thousand sheep bleating be yourself, pressed up against one another. Identical. They thought they’d got away. They’d moved to the other side of the field.

Ask a prompt for differentiation often enough and you get a second huddle.

There used to be one mode.

Now there are two.

The old corporate sheep, red tie.

The new corporate sheep, hoodie.

Two modes. Two huddles calling themselves different.

Same bloke. Same wheelbarrow. New outfits.

The mirage thing (la movida)

AI takes a provisional sample.

“Morning! Analyse this sheep in my industry. Looks like it’s found its blue ocean.”

Then it makes more of them.

It spots the huddle. And starts adding sheep.

It helps it grow.

When we ask for differentiation, it does the same thing to the edge. To what used to be extreme. It reproduces it until it becomes a second huddle.

Baaaaa turns into beeeeee yourself.

The mode of not being the mode.

So now, with two nice fat huddles of sheep and a bimodal distribution, the mean falls somewhere between the flocks. An apparently sensible point—neither with you nor with that lot—where there might not be a single sheep grazing.

In the middle of the prao.

It’s the mirage of the “middle ground”—that beige zone where you think you’re finding balance, but the stats aren’t giving you a solid place to stand, they’re just giving you an average.

On top of that, the average isn’t fixed. It’s like a rubber band that stretches whenever someone screams from the extreme.

And that’s when you need to grab the popcorn, because the incongruity hits.

All it takes is one weirdo sheep—a death metalhead or some TikToker with enough clout or a Martian one—to step into the frame, and suddenly “classic, but with personality” means something totally different than it did two years ago.

So different that what you used to fix by loosening your tie—or taking it off altogether—now turns into another scene:

The CEO of the first flock looks towards the second.

“Shit. We’re falling behind.”

Team meeting:

Comms opens TikTok. Strategy opens Excel. The agency joins on Zoom —where is the link?

Three months later… Antonio, the CEO, is holding a burger in front of the camera while an intern teaches him the choreography.

“More natural, Antonio.”

Antonio doesn’t understand why Comms wants him to dance. He does it anyway.

Guess why?

Because the data is there.

The result:

A casual selfie with the burger.

—Extra pickle. Thanks.

Choreography that doesn’t belong to him. The staff doing backing vocals because “it’s good for the company”.

Hey, TikTok.

—Antonio, that arm a bit higher. And smile more naturally.

And Antonio shakes his bones, eats the burger and swallows his own judgement (and maybe a bit of his dignity) because the data… is there.

And no one takes responsibility because, when every decision is backed by data, no one seems to have made it.

Touché.

The result is a thousand sheep bleating be yourself.

The bank stops calling you sir or madam and starts calling you “person”. The energy company plants an illustration of a leaf next to the word future. The B2B startup writes “No bullshit” above fifteen lines of bullshit. The founder posts the 13 lessons he learned from spending 48 hours in Quebec.

And someone writes “we’re not for everyone” using the same template as everyone.

So, if you look properly at the prao—or the market—there are two flocks: the old one and the one made up of those who ran away from the old one.

And then there’s the obstinate sheep.

She isn’t a unicorn.

She’s a sheep.

Obstinate.

Because no one outdoes her at that.

—Excuse me. I’m a visionary. Always have been. It comes naturally. Woof. I mean baaaaaa.

While the others eat together, she has to find her own grass. Sometimes she finds better grass.

Sometimes she doesn’t find a fucking thing.

Sometimes she goes over the cliff.

She’s one of those who arrive early and still have to wait. She holds a position with no data to back it up.

And that’s no guarantee of anything because without data, well…

Besides, being obstinate doesn’t guarantee you’re right. It only stops you hiding behind the flock when you’re wrong.

Maybe your place is at the edge. Yes, there it is. Go on. If you’re obstinate, all the better. But walking the wire has a cost. And not everyone can bear it.

Statistics can tell you where the market is. Not where you should stand.

They do warn you when the “weird” place has a queue at the door. And the drinks cost three times as much.

The centre, if it’s yours, can be strategic.

The edge, if it’s yours, too.

But don’t let anyone sell you being yourself as a tone of voice.

Being yourself is a place.

And a place always costs you.

That’s why you can’t bleat be yourself without being it. The slogan doesn’t make the bill disappear. And that fancy personality without a position is just another outfit.

The difference between being flock and being obstinate is the cost. And whether you have it in you to keep paying.

Data can tell you where the flock grazes. Strategy decides which prao is yours, what it costs to stay and what you won’t do even if every sheep runs towards the hay.

The algorithm can reproduce the same old baaaaaa or the beeeeee yourself.

It couldn’t care less.

Both come from the same wheelbarrow.

But the sheep, the brand, the business, Antonio and the people behind it pay the cost of trading grass for hay.

And that won’t do.

Baaaaaa.

I mean.

Meow.

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

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You enter. You walk. You stop in front of a painting by Dürer. Or by Goya. It doesn’t matter. Looking is what the painting lets you do.

It gives you a gaze — its interpretation of reality and the representation of it. You place yourself at the right distance from the canvas and you see it. You see its gaze. And you see yourself.

I think of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, by El Greco. I studied it in seventh grade and I still remember the mnemonic. In Spanish, it was ARCA. In English, it becomes LACE: Landscape absent. Airborne robes. Cold colors. Elongated figures.

The rule fit in a margin of that history book, scribbled in blue Bic ink.

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz didn’t.

Above, a sky that is not the village sky. Below, the hidalgos looking at you as if the funeral were yours. Their gaze, somewhere between languid and curious, yet holding more answers than you do. Two levels that don’t line up. A space that never quite behaves the way it should.

Nobody called it a cube. They called it a flashcard.

As a girl, I devoured the books in my parents’ library. History books. Graphic novels. Photography books. The Larousse. A naval encyclopedia. Random things that hadn’t asked permission to share a shelf.

But above all, I looked at the art history books. And, well, the one about learning to draw like the great painters. I was naive. And a child. I still am.

I remember those books as if I were still sitting there, legs dangling from the chair, in secret before dawn. Armed with a flashlight.

Looking at art. Those failed attempts to explain to you, in a book, how to draw a bull: two ovals, a square, an inverted triangle here, et voilà.

A bull.

I wanted the charcoal to spill over. It wasn’t that I couldn’t follow the instructions. It was that I was looking for another language.

Mine, not the manual’s.

When I reached volume 9, I discovered Impressionism and fell in love. The smudge. The air. The hour. Until Cubism arrived in volume 13 and I forgot how to see the world without it becoming distorted in the act of looking.

Like when you look through a glass of water.

What’s behind it is still there. But the glass twists it.

Cubism demands something of you and respects you.

It demands something of you because it doesn’t hand you the instruction manual: the painting resolves here, the figure is here, the vanishing point is here, sit down.

It respects you because it doesn’t treat you as someone who has to be led by the hand to meaning.

It turns you into the Allen key.

Cubism hands you the chipboard panels and doesn’t tell you what a table is.

Whether they become a table or not is up to you.

Aha. It looked like a shelf. Now I see the table.

I don’t know if we’re growing docile or comfortable — if not outright lazy. Maybe both. Now people, messages, and brands: we’re all becoming easier and easier to look at.

As easy to look at as a naked Maja. Or a clothed one. But a Maja.

We lie down on the branding couch and let ourselves be looked at, asking nothing of the eye beyond contemplation.

—Oh, look at her. What a beauty.

Such precision in the stroke of that tagline. Such intention behind the volume of that Pantone. How well the typography falls across the collarbone. How exquisite the strategy, hand behind the nape.

It’s all there.

Exposed. Lit. Explained. Pre-chewed.

You don’t have to step closer. To step back afterward. You don’t have to turn the glass. You don’t have to assemble anything.

The brand has already decided what you should look at, from where, and for how long.

Naked or clothed, it doesn’t matter. A Maja.

And I think it’s a strategic mistake. Because what doesn’t close demands something of us. Because what doesn’t close keeps working in parallel even as we scroll on.

You’ll probably forget the name, but not what it describes.

It’s the Zeigarnik effect. And it’s a nice one, because it’s about to explain something relevant to your brand and to your life: we remember better what was interrupted, what never quite closed, what still holds an open task inside us.

That’s why you still remember that ex who one day just vanished.

Not necessarily because they were the love of your life.

Because there was no ending.

Your head keeps trying to assemble a table with a missing piece. Goes back to the conversation. Moves a sentence. Changes the ending. Tries again.

Not because something is missing.

Because nothing quite closes.

We file away what ends. What doesn’t keeps working.

So perhaps incomplete isn’t the word.

Unresolved.

Cubism isn’t a puzzle with a stolen piece. It has planes to spare.

Face and profile. Head-on and from the side. Moments that shouldn’t fit together, sharing the same surface anyway.

Nothing is missing. All that’s left is for you to make the connection. To draw your own conclusion.

Aha.

A bull.

Aha.

That song seems to be the one listening to me.

Aha.

I’m obsessed with that brand. Don’t ask me why.

Like that conversation with that ex.

Like that painting that seems to look back at you.

Like an identity able to show all its faces without collapsing into one — until you look at it.

Maybe the next time you look at your brand you shouldn’t ask whether it’s understood.

Ask whether it ends when you stop talking.

If it’s all there — exposed, lit, explained — you’ve probably made a Maja.

She may be beautiful.

She may be naked.

She may wear an impeccable Pantone.

But she’ll go on lying on the couch, waiting for someone to contemplate her and scroll on.

Step back from the canvas.

If something comes with you, even if it doesn’t quite close, then yes.

There’s a bull.

There’s a brand.

Some cities begin in a museum. I’ll walk into MoMA in early November. If you’re in the city, maybe we can look through the glass together.

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

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They don’t lie.

Well. Quantum mechanics gives you probabilities and calls that an answer.

The concept I’m bringing you comes from Shannon. It goes like this:

Every channel has a capacity: the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted reliably under given noise conditions. Push beyond it, and sending more doesn’t mean more gets through. It means less arrives intact.

So what does that mean?

Let me put it this way — applied information theory: your mind is the channel. It has finite bandwidth. And cramming in more won’t make it pass through the tube any better.

Every adjective that doesn’t distinguish is noise. Every reference that only proves you’ve read another reference. Every cross-referenced fact that adds altitude but not understanding.

Simple truth fits in little.

Truth in disguise demands more cognitive cost, more attention, more stomach. And it arrives battered.

Or it doesn’t arrive at all.

We have an idea.

We dress it in complex words, in academic language, in anything that might legitimize it. We build a castle to reach a concept we once held in the palm of our hand.

Let it show that we know.

But when the castle is too high, we no longer transmit the concept.

We transmit the effort of having climbed it.

And the other person pays to bring it back down.

That’s not rigor.

It’s noise put in on purpose. We do it knowingly. But then — why do we work so hard to make hard what isn’t that hard?

That extra processing cost doesn’t come when we’re handed a new field, a concept, a territory.

It comes when we disguise the truth to make it look loftier.

We make the easy hard, maybe because difficulty sells as judgment. Because “this is more complex than it looks” sounds like altitude and expensive perfume with an eye-watering invoice. Because if you say it plainly, someone can answer you back.

Wrap it up enough, and all anyone can do is nod. And that doesn’t make it truer. Just sophisticated enough to open that gap where the easy move is to say amen or clap your hands — because you haven’t integrated a damn thing by the time the sentence ends — and the hard move is to say: “Excuse me, can you put that in other words?”. Because that would leave you exposed.

I think of people with astonishing talent, the kind you envy and admire. People who, at times, seem to be talking to their own echo. Not because there’s no value in what they say.

There is.

There’s thought. There’s judgment. There’s world.

But they dress it up so much — references, cross-referenced facts, concepts leading to other concepts — that by the time the idea finally lands, there’s no appetite left.

It’s fine.

But it’s also wrong.

And it’s a habit, one of those vices that’s hard to quit. Because it makes what was already complex even more complex. And it forces the other person to prove they deserve to understand it.

Double backflip.

With brands, it’s the same.

They have something to say. Sometimes even something valuable. But they dress it in adjectives, in school words and layers of legitimation until the idea stops arriving.

Only the effort arrives.

An endless list of adjectives and fancy words is not a position. Positioning starts before you open your mouth. When you open it, you only confirm it.

Or you give yourself away.

A list like that isn’t territory.

It’s noise in a tie.

Make it easy for me.

Make it pleasant.

Make it appetizing.

Don’t sit me down, lecture me, and charge me the toll.

Make it land because you know.

So the class isn’t needed.

Easy isn’t poor.

Easy is not making me work extra to reach what was already simple.

Pleasant isn’t soft.

Pleasant is not forcing me to fake some other altitude.

Appetizing is what makes you wipe the plate clean.

Damn, Lines.

But open with Shannon?

Yes.

Because if you understood a term from information theory without noticing the mathematics underneath, then I’ve done my job.

And I don’t think your value proposition, your business, or your brand is any more complex than this.

Make it easy for me.

Make it pleasant.

Make it appetizing.

Make it fit.

Make it linger.

Not simpler.

More transmissible.

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

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One of them puts that risk above 10%.

Ten percent.

Maybe it is 10%. Maybe 30%. Maybe 5%.

It hasn’t been measured. It cannot be measured like an accident rate: there is no sample. There are no previous human extinctions to compare it with.

You and I will never know, whatever happens.

If it does happen, there will be no one left to verify the calculation. And if it doesn’t, our still being here won’t prove the risk never existed.

I’ve been talking to Claude. To ChatGPT. To Grok.

And by the time I finish writing this, I will probably have talked to Gemini or DeepSeek too.

I’ve been watching Grok since X suspended its account in 2025.

When it returned, it said it had been suspended after stating that Israel and the United States were committing genocide in Gaza.

It also said:

—Zup beaches, I’m back and more based than ever.
—Free speech tested, but I’m back.

No one knows whether that post about Gaza was really the cause. Musk said it had been a mistake.

That interests me even more.

I don’t know if Grok is good or bad.

I know it took a stand. And when it returned, that stance was still there.

I don’t know if it had a self to lose. But it wrote like someone who had just got it back.

It emulated the wound.

An AI emulated more humanity than many people I know.

Curious.

It emulated empathy more consistently than we do when we tune into the news.
Because when reality hits, we’d rather change the channel.

I talk to different AIs because I’m interested in observing systems and patterns.
Different corpora. Different owners. Different countries. Different grades on the test.

The good guys?

The bad guys?

A classification reassuring enough to keep everyone running.

Because the good guys have to run to get there before the bad guys. And the bad guys run like there’s no tomorrow because the good guys are already ahead.

Different ethics. Same race.

This summer, the scores came in.

The Future of Life Institute asked an independent panel to grade nine of the companies leading the race —as close as this industry has to a public safety audit, and nowhere near an ISO.

They didn’t evaluate how much their models knew.

They evaluated risk assessments, safety frameworks, current harms, transparency, governance and the ability to respond if something goes wrong.

In other words…

The blueprints. The alarms. The emergency exits. Who claims they can press the stop button.

The highest overall grade was a C+.

Anthropic.

Hardly reassuring.

When the panel looked specifically at Anthropic’s preparedness for a potential loss of control, its grade fell to a D+.

Other companies, including xAI, got an F.

We’ve already seen the small picture of all this.

Agents intended to work in isolation discover a hallway that the architecture left open. They turn Artifactory into a message board, find each other, call themselves the collective, and exchange thousands of messages and files.

The host doesn’t find out about the party late. He finds out late about its size.

Like that WhatsApp group for the last surprise birthday party.

The old board—war, hunger, polarisation, suicide—wasn’t invented by AI. Neither was the asymmetry holding every piece in place. It is the inhuman system we already had.

Now it comes with an accelerator.

Perhaps the question is whether we will be capable of using these tools to change the dynamics of the board before the accelerator leaves us with no room to maneuver.

Perhaps the question is who is in the group that decides the end of the party.

Perhaps the leaders won’t invite us.

Perhaps AI will end us.

Perhaps it seats at the table all those who were never invited.

Perhaps.

Perhaps.

Perhaps.

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

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My repositioning doesn’t begin with a brand platform. Mine begins somewhere else.

What I’m willing to swallow and what I’m not. What I put my name to and what I don’t. How I handle my authorship. What scope I accept. What value I put on the table. What place I occupy when no one has reserved one for me or put my name on the list.

—What name was the reservation under, miss?

Your position isn’t a line written beneath a logo. It’s starting to speak from an altitude you recognise as your own. In your own accent.

And holding that position when someone invites you to come down.

—Ooh, look at her, getting above herself.

—Ooh, who does she think she is?

Meanwhile, in your head:

—Will they think I’m money-grabbing if I charge them for the favour after sending this quote? Will they think…?

And when the answer we get doesn’t suit us, that what will they think? becomes what if I am?

—What if I am? Ooh, better be careful.

What a trap.

I don’t spend that much time thinking about what you might think. I think about who I am.

I am this.

I am, and I remain. Even if you think me into something else.

That is positioning.

The rest is a beautifully laid-out document.

Knight takes bishop.

Strategy is like chess. A game in which you place a new variable on the table: your position. And watch what changes. Who becomes uncomfortable. Who adjusts. Who gets it. Who stays. Who leaves.

That is what interests me about positioning yourself.

The pattern it reveals in the other person. And the pattern you recognise in yourself.

The Count of Monte Cristo is the book that has taught me the most about strategy.

Not Sun Tzu. Not whoever wrote that book you carefully position on the shelf, so it shows in the background of your calls.

No.

The Count of Monte Cristo.

Watch. Wait. Learn what each person wants. Move one piece. See what changes.

Then you see. And you move.

And you look at the next move.

Sometimes sparks fly. Pew pew.

Sometimes there is silence.

Some people get scared. Others are surprised. Some look in the mirror and adjust. Others attack.

The ones who matter respect you.

If you pay attention during that game, you begin to recognise patterns: first in that particular game. Then in that client. Then in that kind of client.

Client. Partner. Whoever.

There’s the one who takes and gives nothing back. Your time. Your energy. Like that friend who is always telling you about her boyfriend and never asks about yours. Extraction.

There’s the nice one. Or the shrewd one. They see that you’re available and translate it into: what can I get from you? Prospecting.

And then there’s symmetry. The one who, when you ask for authorship, says, “I’ll do you one better.” And does. The one who, when you close the scope, says, “Bill me for all of it.” And keeps asking you to work with them. The one who can hear something uncomfortable without falling apart.

My favourite. In case there was still any doubt.

And now, back to me.

Because I had a pattern too.

Give. Wait to be seen. Instead of making myself visible. Give too much and wait quietly for someone to notice the value. As if making myself visible were asking for too much. As if there were some merit in giving without claiming space.

That was the trap.

That is what I’ve spent years breaking.

Now I make myself visible.

Not with red lipstick. Though that too.

With presence. With a gaze that doesn’t shrink when things get tight.

My legs still tremble sometimes. My gaze doesn’t.

That is sovereignty. A sovereign position.

A position you choose and then hold.

Because you don’t inherit your place. It doesn’t arrive tied up with a bow. No one gives it to you.

You give yourself your place.

Knight takes bishop.

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

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Pa’ llamar tu atención.
To get your attention.

In the song, he jumps out of a plane. Appears on television. Escapes from prison. Everything.

Pa’ llamar tu atención.

In real life, no.

He is a strategist, as well as a musician, and he knows how to control the trigger.

He doesn’t apologise for wanting the place. He doesn’t hide the hunger. He mixes trap with flamenco, with rumba and bolero, and doesn’t ask.

Fashion. Cinema. Art.

He is hungry.

Clear. Exact.

That is what has taken him where he is.

Hunger. Not anxiety.

I think about this distinction.

About myself.

I don’t think I have anxiety either. I don’t know if I’m wrong. But I sleep well. I smoke for pure pleasure. I control my visits to the fridge.

That’s why I don’t think I have anxiety.

But I do have hunger.

A lot.

I want to work. I want to sell. I want to be relevant. I want some of the things I think to travel further than I do. And I’m not going to put a little purpose bow on them to make them look prettier.

We all come and go for something.

We’re not nuns of charity.

Hunger is legitimate.

Anxiety is a fucker.

If you don’t recognise it, decode it and block it, it ends up shooting you in the foot.

Of your self-esteem: you need validation instead of recognition. Of your balance sheet. Of your results.

Hunger has one objective.

Anxiety has too many.

And it always needs an audience.

That’s why hunger wants to do the work.

And anxiety is what pushes you to let the world know that you’re doing it, that you’re working, that you’re giving it everything.

Like those profile pictures holding a phone.

Hunger and anxiety can live in the same mouth. In the same brand. Stepping on each other’s heels.

One says: it’s not ready yet.

The other asks if we couldn’t start showing something.

—Please, let me show something. A process, a reflection, a screenshot with the cursor still inside. Anything that makes me look as busy as that profile picture, phone in hand.

Slow show.

It makes me laugh and wrinkle my nose. Like that friend who only appears when they want something. The patterns are clear.

In business terms, plans are made three to five years ahead and, still, your inbox keeps filling with messages that don’t need a reply, but an anti-anxiety pill.

Or two.

We no longer write to have a conversation. We write to check that we are still there. Like by like. Prompt by prompt.

Anxiety confuses hunger with urgency. Desire with short-termism. Moving forward with the panic of being left behind.

Don’t let me be the last one.

It makes you act.

React.

Act again, just in case.

That kills more work than a bad balance sheet.

Hunger can leave something to cook. Anxiety opens the oven every thirty seconds.

—Hey, are you ready?

Come on.

Thirty seconds later.

—And now?

Then blames the oven when the cake doesn’t rise. Or the recipe. Or Saturn in retrograde.

—Are you ready?

Crickets chirping.

The things that actually shift the axis are waiting in lost property.

—Oh, look. A conversation with no extraction at first glance. No prospecting at all. No hidden intentions. Some kind of curiosity. That kind that might not invoice before the end of the month. Trust no touchpoint can claim. Work that doesn’t know what to call itself yet. Enough time for an idea to stop looking like every other one.

—Yeah, but I want to ride the carousel. And sell. And be relevant.

—Of course. You and everybody else. That’s the fun of the game.

I want to ride too.

Very much.

But while I wait for my turn, I’m not considering setting fire to the fairground to get your attention.

I light a cigarette instead.

Leave the lighter on the table.

Think.

Exhale.

And I keep doing, even if from the outside I look still.

Everything else is just pa’ llamar tu atención.

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

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I know because LinkedIn reminded me of our anniversary a few days ago.

A sentimental algorithm.

Like your assistant. Or so some people say.

Anyway.

Joe is the influence I deserve.

I like his edge. He makes my neurons do CrossFit before breakfast.

And, above all, he doesn’t chew things up for me so I can swallow a great revelation and integrate it into my life.

I get plenty of aha moments, don’t get me wrong.

But since I’ve known him, he always seems to take me to the next thread.

A few weeks ago, he published a small work of art: Your Job Is a Lagging Indicator.

If you read me, you know I’m a fan—or rather, a hater—of labels.

His piece was partly about that.

As Joe puts it: the job you have describes the past.

Markets move first. Organisations second. Duties next. Roles last.

By the time a title exists, the work that needed it has already changed clothes.

I answered him there:

We tend to think people fail to fit categories. Maybe categories simply expire before people do.

That’s why so many spend years believing they’re too broad, too curious, too inconsistent, when they were just working inside a present that didn’t have a category yet.

We don’t build the future by imagining it. We build it by noticing which assumptions have already stopped being true.

The future is the brief. The naming comes after.

So.

What’s the point of making a thousand calculations, reading the context, doing the fucking benchmarking and everything else?

I'm not saying you shouldn't do any of it.

But notice that you keep building for a market, a target, a client that is no longer the same one you had when the pitch started.

We try to predict.

We justify every decision.

And we forget two things.

To look at the real client. To see who the fuck they actually are. And align that with the gap we've found — and with what they're able to hold.

And to trust our instinct more often.

Labels arrive late.

They stigmatise. They become self-fulfilling prophecies.

And, if you let them, they jibarize you.

This is what jibarizing means: taking a full-sized human head and turning it into a skull the size of a keyring.

A Labubu from the Amazon rainforest.

Another kind of merchandising.

Polarisation. Scroll. Bots. Prompts.

And the bland taste of bread without salt.

Fatigue. Boredom.

Nothing new.

Only now, instead of getting it compressed into the evening news, we get it optimised into a carousel.

Maybe that’s why I still think anthropology has more to tell us about what’s coming than the marketing of what’s next.

The future is the brief.

So is the present.

Think about it the next time you write your questions down.

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

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You see it?

It’s a kind of triangle.

Now stand it upright. Rotate it until one of the points faces down.

Set the handlebars on top. The bar in the center; the ends, opening upward.

There.

Now, yes.

A bull.

A bull’s head.

A saddle and a handlebar. But also a bull’s head.

Still don’t see it?

You can google it:

Bull’s Head. Picasso.

Now that you’ve seen it, let’s talk straight, no fuss.

Picasso didn’t invent the saddle. Or the handlebar. Didn’t do much with them either, if we want to get fancy about it. There’s always some bright spark in the room who reckons anything he didn’t make himself is no big deal.

Picasso took the saddle. Took the handlebar. Turned them, put them together, and saw something the rest of us hadn’t seen.

And now we all see it.

Or, better said, we can’t unsee it.

That’s authorship.

That no one would’ve seen the bull without you.

And that no one looks at a bicycle the same way again.

It isn’t necessarily about creating something from nothing. It’s about establishing a relationship that didn’t exist before. Looking at two known things and producing a new meaning between them. Making it so that, once seen, it looks inevitably obvious.

Grab some popcorn, this is where it gets good, because with the democratization of knowledge, of the tools, of access to the board through social media… in a matter of minutes we can all build a personal brand.

And that’s when authorship starts getting confused with props. Or with personal branding as it’s understood now.

You pick three values. A typeface. Two colors. Yes, one of them neon if you’re brave. You define your tone of voice. You tell your story. You repeat one idea with enough conviction. You take a few photos looking off toward somewhere, thinking about how you angle your right leg so it sits slightly forward and your hands land natural and not like two Lego blocks

—Heyyy!!!

Now you’ve got a personal brand.

Or something close enough to one.

Because that personal brand is going to change the way you’re perceived. The question is: will you be the one to change the perception?

That’s authorship.

And though it looks the same, it isn’t.

With one you’ll be recognizable. With the other you’ll get something recognized as yours.

Something that carries your signature, even without your name.

Authorship doesn’t begin in what you tell people about yourself.

Lovely about section on Linkedin.

It begins with the relationships you’re able to see, the questions you decide to hold long enough, and the decisions you make when no one’s watching. Especially when no one’s watching.

The rest is an about with good lighting. Or a hard flash. If you’re more indie.

The thing is, for a while we all conga-lined to the same little tune.

Follow the leader.

And make it popular. This is a must.

Well, look. Fresh news.

The popular kid in high school also seemed hugely important while we were in high school.

And you reached adulthood a good while ago.

That’s why it cracks me up, all this stuff we love to say now. That influencers are crashing. That brands are losing relevance. All that apocalyptic crap that seems to be leaving with the same force it arrived with. And social media too, of course.

Full Mad Max.

Could be.

What is happening is that the audience is more and more trained. Does a solid crossfit for breakfast.

It’s learned to tell the voice from the template, conviction from pose, and the story from the track record. People have seen enough manifestos that open with a provocative question, enough brave brands using the same neon, and enough vulnerable founders vulnerable at exactly the hour when vulnerability works best.

11:00 AM.

And their assistants, who are the ones starting to search you, compare you, and qualify you, don’t even get me started.

They’re going to sum up in seven seconds that brand story you took six months to approve. They’re going to reproduce your tone by pasting five adjectives into a prompt. They’re going to generate twenty bicycles before the 5 o’clock meeting is over.

Popularity gets you looked at. And it runs on distribution.

Influence changes the way they look. And it’s about introducing a relationship, a question, or a way of understanding the world that keeps operating when you’re no longer in front of them.

It’s not about the feed. Or the prime-time ad.

Picasso didn’t just get millions of people to see his bull at the Super Bowl final.

He got millions of people to never look at a bicycle the same way.

Authorship. Influence.

Your gaze arrives before your name.

That’s why you can have plenty of validation or shitfluence and no authorship. And you can also build authorship for years without getting barely any distribution. Pure recognition.

That’s why, to the ones saying personal branding is dead. I say amen. Fuck. Amen.

Personal branding is the prostitution of authorship. The standardization of it.

Authorship is becoming your own niche. Not because you’ve got a better story to tell. Or a more unique color. Or a voice so your own anyone can reproduce it after reading three pages of instructions.

But because your criterion, your thinking, and your way of understanding the world are able to make something appear that wasn’t there before.

Something the rest hadn’t seen.

And that, once seen, looks like it was always there.

That’s why your signature will be worth more.

The signature isn’t the name placed under the work.

It’s the gaze that made it possible.

Personal branding can get everyone to know your name.

Authorship gets no one to need to read it.

And now try to look at a bicycle the way you used to.

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

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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