Who the heck am I?

No one special really. Just another dude. Living in New York City. My Hometown.

Ok, well I guess I have to tell you a little bit about myself so here goes.

I am Zachary Adam Cohen and I am the principal of Zachary Adam Cohen LLC, a company I founded in September 2009 to help businesses with social media strategy. I primarily work with restaurants and other small businesses in the hospitality industry and there are reasons for that…

But first, I should tell you about how I arrived here. It’s a story worth hearing.

After graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans, I returned home to New York City without a fig of an idea of what to do with my life. I studied Creative Writing, English Literature and Art History in school, and yet had no intention of pursuing a creative career. New York City was seeing a boom in financial services and well, we all know how that ended. But I got to live it.

First I interned at The New York Mercantile Exchange or NYMEX, the largest energy commodities exchange in the world. There I was exposed to the sophisticated world of derivative trading. I worked in the marketing department, where my internship quickly morphed into a full-fledged job.

I spent fantastic 18 months at NYMEX, travelling around the country marketing NYMEX products and services. I was exposed to hedge funds, oil and gas companies, municipalities, utility companies, banks and other major players in the energy markets. It was all very thrilling and I got the chance to work with some amazing people.

What was most striking about this world was that commodities were in the middle of a generational boom that would culminate in the Summer 0f 2008 when Crude Oil peaked above $140 a barrel.

Fast forward a few years, and I am working at Societe Generale, the venerable French bank, trading commodities. Another amazing experience where I was exposed to the absolute heights of the financial world. Working with investment bankers, commodity traders and multinational corporations, I was literally in the thick of things. By all accounts, my life was set. I had made it. My future was secure.

But something kept gnawing at me. A feeling that, for years, had been lingering around the back of my mind.

That thought was the feeling of my creativity and happiness being suppressed by a host of conventions and socially engineered value systems that I had adopted, but were not mine. No matter how hard I tried or how firmly I convinced myself that I would have a long successful career in banking, I just wasn’t buying it. And the sprouts of unhappiness never stopped trying to break through.

It was through social media that I found a way to let that happiness and creativity back into my life.