It's a bit dramatic, I know. But since this is the first install went of field notes, I thought a bit of table setting is in order. I first read about ancient Greek concept of *Kairos* in Andrea Marcolongo's ***The Art of Running***. Essentially referring to flow state, Marcolongo described it as "an expanding dot on the line." I haven't been able to shake the analogy since. I've even been appropriating it, most recently as a very useful way to think, about marketing. Funnels and buying journeys are constructs, but I'm not piling on with the-"their dead" takes. It's all about intent (see what I did there?). If you use a funnel to describe how a single, irrational human being might be transported from blissfully unaware to raving fan, you'll be disappointed. If you use a funnel to diagram a system of people interacting with your brand and the messages, ideas, and activities that are important and most relevant as people move in and out of phase - that's an operating framework. Frankly, I'd rather gouge my eyes out than regurgitate the tired SaaS rhetoric. (it's about awareness," Demand Generation! No that's not real.) There's absolutely nothing SaaS marketers love more than marketing to each other, and in service of that we continually reinvent old concepts and present them as shiny new objects, usually under the guise of a new framework, or tool. It generates an incredible amount of noise, and often does very little more than codify a short term practice that will inevitably habituate. This is as good of a place as any to draw a line- this is not a place for hacks and theory merchants. I'm not selling you shortcuts and silver bullets because this is not a casino and that is not real life. I've spent too long in the trenches building, sifted through lukewarm takes to perpetuate that paradigm. What we do is simple, but it's not easy. this is a publication that celebrates the work, One that brings the concept and the graft a little closer together. I've seen for too many "X is dead" posts in the last 12 months, Usually accompanied by a video demo and packaged up as perfectly formatted "thesis, single Iine spaced body, hook/CTA" engagement bait. "Comment BANANA for my actual prompts!" It is itself a microcosm illustrating the next great era of marketing. The last 15 years of marketing was dominated by specialization-the future will be defined by judgment. Okay, okay, It's always been about judgment. I'm lampooning myself here. But we all love when a good hook resolves, and it wouldn't be a newsletter about marketing w/out some craft. Tell me that Al will replace industries wholesale and you're telling me you don't understand the work or the technology. This isn't a judgment on the essential nature of Al - regardless of how any of us feel about it, it's here now. It can be cool, confusing, concerning all to understand at once. But what we need to understand about AI is that it's statistically regreessive by design. Fundamentally, embeddings & transformers map concepts in a vector space and use math to calculate similarity and infer meaning. When you ask a GPT to do something, it's trained to pick the next statistically probable word, token, or output. Prompt engineering systems and rules based can control for or moderate, but the longshot is that the work agents do on your behalf will converge on existing patterns. Let's not downplay that. We're seeing just how transformative it can be for knowledge work. But it should also tell us something about where and how to use these tools. Like any self aware tech marketer I have the normal amount of skepticism and self-loathing that comes with the job, but I haven't fully abdicated thinking yet. Which brings us back Kairos. This idea that' 'if time is a straight line with a beginning and an end, Kairos is a circle that expands on every point of the line we put to good use." It's an apt metaphor for both doing GTM work and describing the relationship between the market and your brand. There are moments in which both doing and receiving marketing conforms to type. One way specialization has shaped the profession is responding to the increasingly complex digital universe we inhabit. The more varied and technology mediated our lives became, the more we needed ically specialists to navigate the techno- human exchange. Those single-spaced, comment for resource posts weren't written for you. They've techno-coded vessels, emitting the access codes to the great harbors of potential attention. For many years the ability to decode and create these patterns, to effectively mediate this human- machine exchange, has dominated the conversation around marketing effectiveness. It's only now, as technology folds in on itself, that the conversation meaningfully turns from the vessel to the payload. When everyone has the tools to decode and recreate successful marketing patterns were reminded that the true purpose of marketing is to build and break the patterns. themselves. The principal characteristic of successful GTM: judgment. knowing when to break patterns, when to conform to type. How to use all of the tools available to go fast and slow in all the right places. To deeply understand who you're for, and build systems that expand on the line in the right places.