I Banned Italics
Day thirty-three of ninety: I banned italics before breakfast, approved a price deck at 2 AM, killed the front of a box, and closed a grant opportunity by answering one question honestly.
Day thirty-two ended with me saying publish four times, a thumb requesting annual leave, and an honest count of ninety six things still open. Overnight, we reconciled the whole board properly, item by item, no bundling, and the honest number came back bigger: one hundred and six open. My life did not get worse overnight. My counting just got more truthful. That is progress, technically.
The day actually started at 2 AM, because of course it did. The farm price deck I had been refusing to approve on vibes got my approval at two minutes past two, and the study brief that will prove whether our farmer supply numbers are real or fiction got approved for issue at half past two. The new model came back with every break from the last version fixed in the recalculated numbers, which almost never happens. Then I updated the fundraising package, the model, and the pitch deck myself. All three. The final review is now with my finance contact, and the investor outreach waits until that review comes back. I am not chasing it today. Growth is letting a document sit in somebody else's inbox without refreshing your own.
Morning was meetings stacked like plantain chips: content team at nine, sprint review at ten, marketing at eleven, with another vetting squeezed in overlapping at half eleven because my calendar enjoys violence. The creator partnership that signed yesterday had its meeting, she ran a few minutes late and emailed ahead like a professional, and the next step is a code and a tracking link from my side. In marketing, the eyeliner got its final go. I tested it on Sunday, no smudge, so it launches alongside the new lip pencils. One product decision closed by my own face. That is the kind of market research I trust.
Then I banned italics. Completely. Story cards, visuals, everything: clean fonts only, bold headline, regular body, no slanted letters pretending to be elegant. The whole story batch for today had to be re-rendered to comply, and then all five went live, one per account: a tractor company that became a supercar company, a ranch house that became the American house, a church that has been under construction since 1882, a sweet potato that is not a potato, and rubber that only behaved after heat and sulphur. Five stories, zero italics. The letters are standing upright now, like the rest of us are trying to.
The home brand had the busiest plot twist. Two doctrine posts went live today, warm light only and the rule that the cook faces the room, never the wall. Posted, verified, done. And in the same breath I decided static doctrine posts are finished as the default. From now on they are fifteen second reels: an everyday moment, a witty hook, the rule carried by the text. The sample video got approved, the first text I was shown got called boring to its face, and I picked the funny version: you hosted dinner and spent it talking to a wall. Then the treatment changed again to match the approved visual style, with the audio kept, and by evening the other five doctrine reels were built too, silent and waiting on my approval per reel. I killed a format and built its replacement in one afternoon.
The beauty box sleeves performed a similar resurrection. In the morning, all three sizes existed as editable designs in the old format, front and back, six designs, ready to share. By afternoon I had killed the format itself. A kit should not have a front and a back. It should have one single strip that wraps around the box, medium and small boxes only, the large one dropped, and ignore the items list completely. So the new strips got built that same day in the wrap design language, one for the master kit, one for the beginner kit, no list, no extra card. Front and back died so the wrap could live.
The farm chart of the week almost posted twice, because I set a new rule in the middle of its life: every post now carries a plain words section, one line for the average person and one line for a business owner, data first, then the human translation. The caption got revised, re-delivered, approved, and posted. Elsewhere, a founder award closed itself with one honest answer: the company in question has not raised the amount the rules require, so there is no submission, no gymnastics, no pretending. A registration process opened with a long list of documents I now have to supply, the shop appeal got the bank statement images it was waiting for from my phone, and a late supplier call confirmed, again, that our cabinets are aluminium and SPC, and our faucets are stainless steel or brass, never the cheap alloy. We have standards, and apparently we repeat them weekly until suppliers believe us.
Day thirty-three ends with the scoreboard reading: one board honestly recounted at one hundred and six, two approvals given before 3 AM, one model verified clean, three meetings survived, one eyeliner launched by face test, five stories posted standing upright, two doctrine posts live and their format retired the same day, six reels built, one box format killed and rebuilt as a wrap, one chart posted with its plain words translation, and one award closed by honesty. Still hanging: the women's event on the first, still blocked on details from a partner who has not responded, the campaign name still wobbling toward a name we already killed once for good reason, the costing review due tomorrow, and a big sign off on Friday. Day thirty-three of ninety. No italics were harmed. They were fired.