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...
8 days 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...
15 days 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....
22 days 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...
about 1 month 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...
about 2 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...
3 months ago • 2 min read
BRAVE • FOCUSED • BRILLIANT Playing Different Games at the Same Table Everyone is optimizing for something. That's the reason your team's tension might not be a problem to solve but a reality to name. Every person in your organization is trying to optimize for something. The problem is, they're probably not all optimizing for the same thing. And, neither are you. This is the invisible source of a tremendous amount of organizational tension. We assume that conflict is about personality clashes...
4 months ago • 4 min read
BRAVE • FOCUSED • BRILLIANT What To Do When You're Overwhelmed Three moves to help you re-gain focus, drive, and clarity when it seems the world is spinning. In 1915, Ernest Shackleton watched his ship sink. The Endurance had been trapped in Antarctic pack ice for ten months. Now it was gone, crushed by the ice and swallowed by the sea. His crew of 27 men was stranded on a floating ice shelf with three small lifeboats, limited supplies, and no way to call for help. By any rational measure,...
4 months ago • 3 min read
BRAVE • FOCUSED • BRILLIANT Battling the "End of History" Illusion Liz Tran believes that agility is the most important skill for the future. Recent trends are proving her right. Would you keep fighting a war long after it’s ended, simply because no one told you to stop? This week, I sat down with Liz Tran, founder of AQ Learning Lab and author of AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing. Together, we talked through psychological traps, why our old playbooks don't...
5 months ago • 3 min read