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Atlanta is poised to be the Florence of the Digital Age.

There’s a rumbling of chatter and growing excitement about Atlanta and its future. You hear it at every marketing event. Every digital conference. You hear it every time a local politician speaks. You see it on billboards and in blog posts written by community leaders.

And I suppose everybody wants their city to be the best. To believe their city is the best. But in Atlanta, that feeling doesn’t come from a place of default hometown pride. It doesn’t come from a place of hubris or lack of worldliness.

It comes from experiencing, first-hand, exactly what it is that makes Atlanta so special. A feeling you can only understand once you’ve lived here. Worked here. Grown your career here or started a family here.

Nebo celebrated its 10th birthday earlier this year. To say we’ve been very fortunate along the way would be an understatement.

We’ve grown for 10 consecutive years. We’ve been named to the Inc. 5000 list for the past four years. We’ve never laid off a single employee. We’ve never had a down year. We’ve won over 100 digital awards in the past two years alone. We have 50 of the most talented and passionate people in the industry.

Yet, I’m still completely terrified. I still feel like we haven’t made it. I still feel as scared and humble as I did the day we decided to launch Nebo.

Conventional wisdom says empathy can’t be taught, learned, or strengthened. Conventional wisdom assumes our empathy ability is relatively set in stone.

But our empathy system is complex. It’s an interesting interaction of several neurological elements working together. Part of empathy is relating to others. Part of empathy is being able to understand what others feel and think. Part of empathy is going beyond knowing, but caring and feeling.

Thankfully, the term empathy is moving beyond pseudo science and toward actual science. Thanks to fMRIs and other tools we can actually see, measure, and evaluate “empathy”.

In a previous post, I mentioned that empathy was the most important tool in a marketer’s toolkit. Not fake empathy. Not user personas. Not demographics. Not primary or secondary research. Not insights or key motivators.

Actual, real empathy.

Marketing is fun—especially digital. This industry is packed with super-talented and passionate people.

However, this fun environment—this talent and passion—creates a unique breeding ground for growing and nurturing assholes. And not your average assholes. All industries have assholes, but ours have some of the worst.

We have the marketing asshole.

Senator Elizabeth Warren recently published a piece in which she argued for the importance of equal pay. She began by saying, “I honestly can’t believe that we’re still arguing over equal pay in 2014.”

But are we really arguing about it? It seems like most people of sound mind are for equal pay, though they may disagree on how best to legislate it.

And that’s the problem. This inequality runs deep in our culture – deeper than just a male-biased culture that refuses to pay women fairly -- and the issue has proven difficult to enforce. Warren has placed a great deal of optimism in the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would make salary practices more transparent and force companies to prove that pay discrepancies are due to performance or merit and not sex.

Maybe the Act will pass and make a difference. Maybe it won’t. But there is a bigger point that many are missing:

Equal pay won’t be the most pressing issue facing women in the workplace in the coming years.