🔥 Bait & Code-switch: In Community #121

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🔥 And now, for your weekly spark.

“Is it true… blondes have more fun?”

It’s a phrase most of us have heard countless times. It’s become a part of culture.

Few might know that it’s attributed to a Clairol hair color ad from the 1950s, written by Shirley Polykoff — one of the few women copywriters at that time.

It’s also a phrase I referenced, tongue-in-cheek, years ago when the president at my company asked me why I decided to dye my hair platinum blonde.

I was working at one of the oldest corporations in the country, known for its traditional values that helped to invent corporate America as we’d come to know it.

I came to work every day in full business attire, polished and punctual.

This was not a place where men in their 30s showed up to work one day with brightly colored dyed hair — and definitely not at corporate headquarters.

This was not a place where you experimented, at least not without deeply thinking through the implications. And I did think about it. A lot.

Not just because of the color itself, but because of what it might signal.

👉🏽 Would it change how I was read in rooms I had worked hard to get into, especially as the only one with a background like mine?

👉🏽 Would it quickly shift how seriously I was taken?

👉🏽 Was something that felt so simple actually a big risk?

That hesitation wasn’t about appearance. It was about something deeper: understanding that there’s a version of you that works — and knowing when you’re stepping outside of it.

Riz Ahmed, the sometimes-blonde, Oscar-nominated actor who, like me and another sometimes-blonde comes from a Pakistani background, described the distance between how we want to be seen and who we actually are.

"Sometimes life just feels like one big audition. It feels like we're constantly having to prove ourselves or perform a version of ourselves online or on social media … we feel vulnerable and messy and very human.”

His new show Bait explores that distance directly. Most of us have been taught that fitting in evades failure and that code-switching is a natural reaction to the status quo in our teams, brands, and environments.

If you’ve built any level of success in marketing, media, or tech — especially in spaces that weren’t designed with you in mind — you know exactly what that feels like.

Because there is a version of you that performs. More legible to the room. More aligned with what leadership is expected to sound like. And it works.

Until it doesn’t.

I’ve leaned into that version at different points, communicating in ways that felt familiar, positioning ideas so they’d be received, and operating within systems with very clear — if unspoken — rules.

But if everything is optimized for approval, what’s being optimized for connection?

Over time, we tend to see a quiet filtering effect. Ideas don’t get rejected outright — they get softened, translated, or adjusted before they’re ever fully expressed.

And that’s how you end up with work that looks right, checks the box, and it still doesn’t move people.

For those of us building brands, leading teams, or deciding where attention and budget go, this isn’t just a personal dynamic. It’s a strategic one.

Community — real community — doesn’t form around what’s polished. It forms around what feels true enough to recognize.

That requires a level of honesty that doesn’t always map neatly to how we’ve been taught to operate. It asks a different question: not just “will this work?” but “is this coming from a place people can feel?”

🎥 Less polish. More context

The tension between what performs and what feels true shows up in the work and in what resonates with people vs. what just gets approved.

It’s also the reason I’ve been approaching my YouTube channel differently.

Less polish. More context. More real thinking behind how leaders navigate in real time — across marketing, media, and business. Not just what worked, but what didn’t translate, what was unlearned, and where successful leaders chose alignment over expectation.

If you’re responsible for shaping brands, culture, or strategy, those nuances matter. And if you haven’t subscribed there yet, I’d appreciate you doing that. Not as a vanity metric — but because the more we build spaces that prioritize honesty over performance, the better the work gets for all of us.

👉🏽 Subscribe here.

At a certain point, this stops being about expression and becomes a question of effectiveness.

👉🏽 The work that moves people — the kind that builds trust, community, and long-term relevance — rarely comes from the version of you that’s been optimized for approval or from doing things the way they’ve been done.

It comes from the version that’s clear enough to say what others won’t and disciplined enough to build from it.

And in an increasingly AI-slop-laden landscape where everything starts to look and sound the same, that isn’t just about what’s been codified. It’s about what we intentionally switch.

✅ Now Hiring

Is someone you know considering what’s next for them? Here are a few roles with people hiring across the network. I list roles here every week, so stay tuned and make sure to spread the word.

💥 Director, Product Marketing — Chime (multiple other roles too)

ICYMI last week:

And before you go, consider who else might value this newsletter and what’s coming up on YouTube. Make sure to fwd this newsletter onward to them too. They can subscribe here for more directly in their inbox. 🔁 

In community,

Fahad