Am I a Landman?

I’m entering my 14th year at the same company.

Which means three things are true at the same time:

1. I like what I do.

2. I’m good at my job (most of the time)

3. I occasionally find myself asking, “What other jobs would I be weirdly good at?” (if you think you don’t do this, you’re lying to yourself)

In corporate America, when you want to grow, you’re often told to take on a “stretch assignment”.

Something a little uncomfortable.Something that isn’t already in your muscle memory.Something that forces you to show up differently.

So this year, I’m giving myself one.

Once a month, I’m going to write.Not a post. Not a hot take.An actual article.

No slides. No deck. No edit rounds.

Just a story, a point of view, and a little curiosity about work, creativity, and leadership—often through places you wouldn’t expect. The Careers I wasn’t Qualified For… 

Which brings me to a show I didn’t expect to love.

There are a lot of shows I casually watch.

And then there are shows I weirdly can’t stop thinking about.

Right now, that show is Landman.

I didn’t expect this. I’m not in oil and gas. I don’t know the first thing about mineral rights. And I definitely don’t own boots sturdy enough for West Texas.

But here I am… deep into season 2—thinking:

If I could have any job in the world… I’d want to try that one.

Specifically, Billy Bob Thornton’s character, Tommy Norris.

And not for the reasons you’d expect.

At a glance, Tommy’s job looks intense, important, and mildly terrifying.Negotiating land deals. Managing egos. Operating in heat, pressure, and constant uncertainty.

But the more I watched, the more I realized something:

His job isn’t oil.

It’s people.

Every episode, he’s standing in the middle of chaos—between experts who speak in technical absolutes and executives who want certainty yesterday. Between landowners who feel wronged and corporations who feel entitled. Between risk, money, politics, and reality.

No clean answers. No perfect data. Just relying on his judgment.

Which is where this started to feel… uncomfortably familiar.

Here’s the part of the show I really love.

Tommy doesn’t win by being the smartest guy in the room.He wins by translating.

He listens to people who speak entirely different languages—engineers, lawyers, landowners, executives—and somehow turns all of that noise into a decision that can actually move forward.

Sometimes it’s the right decision.Sometimes it’s just the least bad one.

And either way, he owns it.

That’s the part that stuck with me.

Because if you strip away the oil rigs and the dust and the very real threat of everything blowing up (literally)…

That’s modern work.

Swap drilling rigs for brand campaigns.

Swap mineral rights for stakeholder alignment.

Swap West Texas for a Fortune 100 company.

The environment changes. The pressure doesn’t.

That’s where this quietly overlaps with what I do every day.

As a Creative Director, the job isn’t just ideas or aesthetics. It’s operating in that middle space—between strategy and execution, ambition and reality, speed and care.

You listen.You synthesize.You decide.

And then you live with the consequences.

That’s what makes certain jobs compelling to watch. They reveal that leadership often looks less like confidence and more like judgment under pressure.

As a Creative Director, I spend a lot of time in that same in-between space—working with incredibly smart people who all care deeply, often want different things, and are usually operating with incomplete information and very real constraints.

The job isn’t having the most ideas.

It’s knowing which ones survive contact with the real world.

Speaking of real world tie-ins… That familiarity probably has something to do with the fact that not long ago, I found myself standing in the Utah desert, wearing a hard hat, interviewing energy employees as part of a work project with a geothermal energy company.

That experience and the photo with this post (me in a hard hat, very much out of my usual environment and clearly sharing because it obviously looks very cool!), represents the same theme as what I see when I watch Landman:

Growth happens when you step into unfamiliar territory and learn how things really work.

What Landman reminded me of is something we don’t talk about enough:

Creativity in the workplace isn’t just expression.

It’s risk management.

It’s judgment under pressure.

It’s taste plus accountability.

It’s saying, “This is the direction,” when there are ten reasonable alternatives and no guarantee you’re right.

That’s not glamorous.

But it’s The Work.

So no, I don’t actually want to negotiate land deals in West Texas.

But I do love watching a character whose job is to stand in ambiguity, make sense of complexity, and move things forward anyway.

Different boots. Same pressure.

And apparently, a show I didn’t expect to like just turned into a pretty good mirror for the job I already have. 

So this article kicks off my self-imposed stretch assignment for 2026.

A commitment to writing once a month, publicly. To pull lessons from unexpected places. To exploring jobs I don’t have—but weirdly recognize.

This month, it was a landman.

Next month? I’m not sure yet.

But that’s kind of the point.