The Fingerprints Are The Work If you (ahem) are of a certain age, you will be familiar with the animated films and shorts Wallace and Gromit. The next time you watch a Wallace and Gromit film, freeze it on a single frame and look closely at the characters’ faces and you will see ridges and whorls. It’s the unmistakable pattern of a human thumb pressed into clay. Those are not defects. Those are the most deliberate thing in the entire film. Nick Park is the animator behind Wallace and Gromit....
14 days ago • 3 min read
How To Stay In The Long Moment In 1986, a Princeton mathematician named Andrew Wiles walked up the stairs to the attic of his house and effectively... disappeared. He had decided to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, a problem that had defeated the best minds in the world for more than three hundred years. He told his wife and one colleague about the project and no one else. He stopped going to conferences. He set aside every other project he cared about. Then, he spent seven years alone in that...
21 days ago • 3 min read
Why I'm Building a Guitar I Don't Need I just ordered a pile of guitar parts: a body finished in Firemist Silver, aged just enough to look like it was played before I was born, a neck with a dark rosewood fretboard, carved to a profile that fits my (rather large) hands, and a set of pickups wound to sound like 1952. None of it will arrive for a a handful of months, so right now the whole thing exists only in my mind, but I can't wait to get my hands on the project. In fairness, I'm not...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
15 Years of The Accidental Creative Fifteen years ago this month (July 7th), my first book The Accidental Creative was released. I wrote it because I saw brilliant people around me burning out. They were talented, driven, and committed, and yet many of them were producing less and struggling more with each passing year. The pace of expectation was accelerating faster than their capacity to meet it. My argument was simple: if you want to be prolific, brilliant, and healthy over the long arc of...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Why Mediocre Songs Once Ruled the Radio In the 1990s I spent a lot of time around the Nashville music scene as an aspiring songwriter, chasing a question that wouldn't leave me alone: Why do so many of the best songs, written by the most talented people, never make it out of the small clubs and onto the radio? On any random Tuesday you could walk into a bar and hear original songs written by baristas or insurance agents that blew your mind, but very few of them would ever be recorded, let...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
How To Keep Trying There’s a moment every ambitious, talented person eventually reaches that doesn’t make it into their highlight reel: the silent, personal realization that a project isn't going to work or a dream simply isn't going to happen. It's failed. Too often, instead of dealing well with these endings, we let the residue of disappointment carry over into the next season, weighing us down. I was reminded of how easy this is to fall into a few years ago when I was out on a midday walk....
2 months ago • 3 min read
Talent gets you in the game, but your practices keep you at the table. Last week our Creative Leader Roundtable group discussed the practices that sustain us as creative pros. With so much uncertainty swirling and the pressure to make decisions faster than ever, it's important to know how to set your own pace rather than simply being carried along by the accelerating expectations of the world around you. Over 20+ years of working closely with talented creative pros, here's a truth that's...
3 months ago • 3 min read
What Nobody's Saying Speaks Louder Than Words Silence in a team isn't neutral. It's easy to treat it that way. When nobody pushes back in the meeting, when the group moves forward without objection, when everything seems fine on the surface, it's tempting to read that as alignment. As trust. As things working. But... often it isn't. Sometimes silence is disagreement that doesn't believe it has a home. Culture researcher Gustavo Razzetti has a useful term for what accumulates when teams go...
3 months ago • 2 min read
When "Good Enough" Becomes the Dominant Culture Something happens on teams when efficiency wins every argument. It doesn’t happen in a single meeting or a single decision. It happens slowly, in the accumulation of a hundred small moments where the person who cares most about the work learns that there are organizational priorities that are more important. I’ve been thinking about this a bit as I've been preparing several speaking engagements for clients over the past few weeks. (It's also why...
4 months ago • 2 min read