This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 10 things to stock your idea cupboard with this week:

💭 A guide to stop overthinking everything: This is such a lusciously written yet super actionable guide to “unhooking from the voice in your head and stepping into a larger life”. shares the wisdom he’s gleaned from addiction recovery and somatic psychology to stop obsessing over things.

🎨 A TED talk on how play boosts your creativity and resilience: Creative health scientist argues that play is a survival skill. As a clinical psychologist she’s studied the science of creativity for years and found that the spontaneous, imaginative thinking that’s underneath creative play is wired into our species and critical to staying human; to bonding, adapting, and making meaning.

🎁 A beautiful reminder of how much abundance is available to us throughout our daily modern lives: built a scrollable exploration of the marvels that populate our homes, from electric light and recorded music to eyeglasses and photographs.

😶‍🌫️ A humbling reminder that you might not be over-contributing as much as you think you are: There’s a phenomenon called “unconscious overclaiming” in which we unconsciously overestimate our contributions or skills relative to other people’s since we’re so much more aware of ourselves than of other people. Great tool to watch your build-up of resentment at work when you feel like you’re taking on more than your fair share.

🧑‍💼 A hot take on how the personal mission statement will overtake the job title: , journalist and author of one of my favorite work-related books The Good Enough Job, thinks in an automation-driven world our titles will matter way less than “the things we do because we want to, not because we're paid to.” Love!

🛝 An embrace of being a lifelong kindergartener: I’ve got kindergarten on the brain as my older son just started this week. I enjoyed this conversation between Lynn Borton and , founder of , on the podcast Choose to be Curious about preserving the practice of play. There’s a fun little game at the end I might steal for team meetings!

🧠 A revelation that SIMIs, the Seemingly Insignificant Minor Interactions of Everyday Life, have the potential to reshape our brains: I loved this piece by on how the many small interactions in our day-to-day, like eye contact, shared laughs, or waved hellos, can literally rewire our brains. The point is that the micro-moments that seem of little consequence to us are actually of huge importance in the process of changing our lives.

🙇 A consideration of how the regrets that haunt us reveal more about who we are than our successes ever could: Professor Joshua Halberstam writes, “Approached honestly, regret is one of our clearest tools for seeing who we take ourselves to be.” What a great reframe of regret as a helpful device, versus something to avoid or be wary of. I’ve always avoided admitting to regrets, out of fear of the implication: that I’d made a mistake, wasted something, took a wrong turn. I like the idea of regret as, instead, interesting.

🫵 A case for giving tops-down, directive feedback: I unexpectedly adored this piece from on managing by giving concrete examples of what good work looks like. A modern management best practice is feedback via coaching, basically asking open-ended questions to get your team members to excavate their own answers. That works often, especially when it comes to interpersonal challenges. But it can be super frustrating on both sides when it’s about work product itself. Hilary makes a case for this approach instead » “Collect examples of good work, share them with your team, and explain exactly what makes them good.” Make sure you’re addressing “what good looks like here, given the specific context of the market and various personalities and idiosyncrasies of [this] company.”

🥱 A case for how a lack of boredom leads to depression and less meaning in life: Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks explains why boredom unlocks creativity, activates a powerful brain network, and can protect you from depression.

See you next week,

Allison

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This issue’s soundtrack:

One of the downsides of being equally creative and systems-oriented is that I have the tendency to box in my big-picture thinking a few innings early.

My brain loves dreaming, conceptualizing, conceiving, “what-iffing”… but then it reins itself in before things get too much.

The result is that I dabble in a lot of things, dream about even more; but it’s a very, very rare few pursuits that I permit into “let’s go after this seriously” mode.

I’m trying to change that.

It starts with taking the dreaming itself seriously.

I’ve never before taken the proper time to examine the full breadth of my aspirations. Until I landed my first CMO role in 2025, I was pretty heads-down on my full-time marketing path.

I launched this Substack in May 2022, two days after my older son’s first birthday; but otherwise I’ve historically invested nothing in getting super crisp on what I wanted, or might dare to want, professionally long-term.

And it makes sense, right?

We’ve all been hustling, grinding, doing all the things for years now.

Having the exhausting networking conversations, attending the conferences with bad boxed lunches and panels full of people recycling the same tired talking points, listening to the podcasts with the same industry figureheads, meeting the deadlines, mentoring the mentees, managing up, bobbing and weaving around the corporate politics, navigating the calendar choreography of “doctor’s appointments” aka interviews for better jobs.

There’s been no time for dreaming. Are you crazy?

Well, now things have changed.

Now, amidst the Great Millennial Career Crisis, I think it’s time to shine our ring lights and desk lamps on our wildest career dreams.

Put one hour of focus time on your calendar (30 minutes if one hour is really impossible)—I’m giving you permission to do this during the work day, it’s part of your professional development!—set your phone to Do Not Disturb, and close your laptop.

STEP 1: Build Your Audacity List of Wild Career Goals

When I did this exercise myself, I found it helpful to go super deep, super fast.

In other words, we’re not going to dip a toe in the bathwater with questions like “What did you want to be when you grew up?” or “What would you do for work if money were no object?”

We’re going to skydive right into:

Or if you need a little more specificity:

• What aspirations embarrass you to admit to?

• What are your wildest, most delirious dreams?

• What professional goals make you say “Oh, I could never,” but make you feel enthralled?

Scoop them out of the far corners of your brain and write them down.

Doesn’t matter where, could be an iPhone Note, a Google Doc, a post-it.

Put a white noise machine on or a lyric-free playlist (try my “Brain Rinse” playlist that’s good for exercises like this).

Keep thinking and writing until the calendar block is over.

Now you have your career 🚀Audacity List🚀.

Some of the entries on mine:

1. Publish a NYT bestselling book

2. Open a bookstore & community event space in Philly

3. Be an adjunct marketing professor

4. Give a TED talk

Each of those make me feel fired up and terrified in equal measure. That combo is the tell that you’ve been audacious enough.

Now consider your full list, and move to the very top the one bold dream you’re going to pursue wholeheartedly right now.

When you pick that one dream, think about logistics, sure; which one feels least unattainable, or feels like a key that could unlock other dreams on the list, or requires the least money?

But more importantly, really tune into what your gut is telling you. When you consider each entry on the list, carefully, which one feels Goldilocks-style just right?

STEP 2: How to Keep Your Career Goals Alive Month to Month

Here’s how we keep your Audacity List awake.

Set a calendar reminder, or a scheduled task in your LLM of choice, to do the following things on the following cadence:

Once per month:

• Log the actions you’ve taken towards that one bold dream (again, you don’t need anything fancy; a simple Google Doc works)

Once per trimester, so every four months:

• Reflect on the big-picture progress you’ve made towards that one bold dream

• Decide what actions to take over the next trimester to further that progress

• Read the full Audacity List to keep your audacious dreams fresh in your subconscious

☝️ I prefer an every-four-months cadence for this exercise because a) it differentiates from the billion other routines you have quarterly, b) I find three months isn’t enough time for meaningful progress towards truly audacious goals, c) if I find the overhead of goal-tracking is eating up more mental space than working on the actual goal itself, I get super demotivated.

Related reading:

I want to hear your most far-fetched, juiciest, most audacious goals! Share them.

And if you’re interested in building your Audacity List in the company of other ambitious, creative-minded folks, come join me at my first in-person event: The Creativity of Workshop: Create Your 2027 Career Vision, Friday 10/2, 9-10AM in Philly.

It’s a one-hour, screen-free, small-group session for getting frank about what you actually want professionally, and setting up 2027 to go get it. We’ll use music as a tool to spark fresh thinking (no musical experience required).

Limited to 20 seats, and there are only a few left. Get your ticket, or join the waitlist, here.

Rooting for you as always,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to:

1. The Workroom 🔐, a bank of juicy extras like templates, resources & discounts I update regularly. Every tool & perk in this archive is built from almost 20 years inside some of the most high-growth, fast-paced companies in the country (Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Shipt, BarkBox).

2. The Creativity of Work Private Chat 💬, where I share back-channel job opportunities I hear about through my own network and can connect you to directly.

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 11 things to top up your creative cup this week:

🎶 A six-minute short that transforms musical notes into living characters: Incredible animation work by Chuck Jones in 1960; it’s called High Note. It was released as part of the Looney Tunes series. (Shout out to Lynn for this one!)

📋 A list of 16 very doable daily habits that have an enormous collective impact: Ryan Holiday shares his set of ordinary habits and practices that, repeated again and again, he says has led to his success in career and as a human. Some are what you’d probably expect (wake up early, sleep with your phone in another room) but some are refreshingly distinct (think about death every day, don’t set goals).

🪰 A reflection on if you’re annoying, and how knowing which one of the Four Tendencies you embody can help: Spoiler alert: everyone’s annoying sometimes. I liked this piece from Gretchen Rubin on building self-awareness around how you personally may be annoying and what to understand, and do, about it.

❓ A set of 3 questions to ask before saying yes to any work (full-time or freelance): I adore ‘s work and this piece was no exception. She shares a simple set of questions to reflect on when you’re considering new work. She writes, “I believe that working on purpose means regularly and frequently grappling with these questions, and negotiating how you work in line with how ‘worth it’ work is feeling.”

📓 A case for getting over yourself and taking a lesson: Outdoor industry journalist and gear tester Joe Jackson explores why adults don’t take lessons, and what happens when they do. The head of a mountain bike program told him, “I think it takes somebody to drop their ego and say, ‘I want to get better at something.’”

😌 Six exercises for cultivating your purpose in life: Getting clear on your purpose is a lifelong pursuit. But I like these six exercises from The Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley for clearing some of the haze away. My favorite: the “Best Possible Self” prompt. Imagine yourself at some future age, like 10 or 20 years down the road, and think about what your life would be like if everything went as well as possible. Ask yourself: What are you doing? What’s important to you? What do you really care about, and why?

🪢 A 10-step protocol from for transforming your city’s civic health: There’s a social and institutional trust crisis in America; fewer and fewer people are participating in clubs and organizations, volunteering, attending religious services, even just getting together with neighbors. This piece has a great set of 10 very accessible interventions for deepening your city’s local civic culture.

🎉 21 rules for throwing good parties: My favorites:

• “Put the food in one part of the room and the drinks in another, or spread the food and drinks out around the space, so that people have lots of excuses to move around the room.”

• “Co-host parties with someone you like a lot but who isn't in your exact social circle, so that your two friend-sets can intermingle.”

• “Make peace with gatekeeping because if you don't exclude a small % of people you will ultimately lose everyone else.”

👷‍♀️ A reminder not to mistake the act of making for the actual thing you’re making: Great little piece from 37signals co-founder and CEO Jason Fried on not confusing the kitchen for the meal or the blueprint for the building. He writes, “The speed at which a product is developed doesn't inherently make the product better or worse. The number of people or agents working on it doesn't make it better or worse. The number of hours you’re pouring into it doesn’t make it better or worse. Working on a weekend, or late into the evening, doesn’t make it better or worse.” None of those things are about whether or not the product is actually good. Don’t obsess over the wrong metrics.

🐟 A two-fish theory from : Life is good when you get to be one fish in two ponds. A big fish in a small pond (feeling valued) and a small fish in a big pond (chasing ambition).

📝 The Ivy Lee method for productivity: It’s not revolutionary and it’s only 5 steps. But I like how articulates why it’s so specifically helpful. Favorite one-liner from the piece: “With control comes calmness.”

You’ve got this,

Allison

P.S. Want more creative inspiration? Come join me at my first in-person event: The Creativity of Workshop: Create Your 2027 Career Vision, Friday 10/2, 9-10AM in Philly. It’s a one-hour, small-group session for getting frank about what you actually want professionally, and setting up 2027 to go get it. We’ll use music as a tool to spark fresh thinking (no musical experience required). Limited to 20 seats. Get your ticket here.

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This issue’s soundtrack:

Everything about my work life has been logical.

I’ve made color-coded spreadsheets to help me navigate job searches.

I’ve consulted mentors and recruiter friends before making any job change to ensure it would make my resume more compelling or minimally do no harm.

I’ve painstakingly shaped every sentence on my LinkedIn page.

I’ve catalogued career wins and learning experiences and honed them into well-worn stories to proffer in interviews and networking conversations.

When I’ve made career decisions based on heart or gut, it’s been with the clean framework “head-heart-gut-wallet” a colleague early on gave me; i.e. even when navigating by feel, it’s been formula-ized feel.

And all that logic and careful planning has served me well.

I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished over the last two decades, and I credit intentionality with a lot of that achievement.

Even when I’ve felt urgency or impatience around getting out of a gig and into a new one, I’ve resisted flailing.

I haven’t made professional impulse decisions.

I’ve always, as the cliche goes, run towards something vs. away from something.

My career to-date has been like cubed ice: tidy, structured, contained.

Now, amidst the Great Millennial Career Reckoning, I'm feeling the urge for career crushed ice: irregular, experimental, a little unruly.

FRIEND OF THE CREATIVITY OF WORK

Your Creative Career: Don’t Go It Alone

Even at the highest levels of creative leadership, it’s easy to feel siloed inside your corporate bubble. We founded the Creative Factory community to give ambitious professionals an elite, cross-industry network to lean on. It’s where members from more than 40 companies benchmark ideas, trade strategies, and navigate high-stakes management challenges together.

Looking for a peer group? Explore Creative Factory.

Work is serious.

Yes.

When we’re talking about earning money and securing health insurance for our families, there’s limited bandwidth for whimsy.

In ’s 2026 State of Millennial Careers Report, financial freedom is the dominant millennial definition of end-of-career success, while financial pressure is cited as the #1 thing making careers harder right now.

And yet.

The work I feel most itchy for these days, as the sunrise of professional possibility has begun to emerge on the horizon for so many of us, is not logical, at least not by the standards I’ve used for the last nearly 20 years.

I’m craving more unexpectedness, more freedom and flexibility, more surprises; yearning for more “why-not-ness.”

My two longest-held work dreams are 1) to publish a book and 2) to open a bookstore. I always imagined both way far out in the future, once I’d “finished” the full-time corporate portion of my career and could, I guess, luxuriate into a retirement of writing and small business management (?!).

But why couldn’t I pursue either, or both, now?

Why not explore turning this newsletter into a book proposal?

Why not investigate opening the Philly bookshop-slash-community-event-space of my fantasies?

And, more pedestrian:

Why not send a LinkedIn DM to a CMO I’ve long admired from afar?

Why not have coffee with a friend of a friend looking for career guidance?

Why not make the call, hit send, buy the domain, host the event, throw my hat in the ring?

As a recovering perfectionist who’s made my bed every morning of my life and color-coded the bookshelves in my home office, scribbling outside the career lines like this isn’t my first instinct and isn’t the most comfortable.

But it’s also kind of exhilarating?!

It’s like when you’re stuck outside in a freak rainstorm without an umbrella and a long walk ahead. You can either hunker down under an awning for a while, or just lean all the way into the situation and take your time trudging through the rain, accepting you’re getting drenched and letting it be. You’ll dry off and warm up at your destination.

It’s not hopelessness, or foolhardiness, or denial.

It’s knowing that you don’t control the weather, so you may as well carry on. It’s optimistic acceptance.

It’s why-not-ness.

Have a great week,

Allison

P.S. If you’re interested in exploring what could happen if you let a little why-not-ness into your work life, come join me at my first in-person event: The Creativity of Workshop: Create Your 2027 Career Vision, Friday 10/2, 9-10AM in Philly. It’s a one-hour, small-group session for getting frank about what you actually want professionally, and setting up 2027 to go get it. We’ll use music as a tool to spark fresh thinking (no musical experience required). Limited to 20 seats. Get your ticket here.

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 10 things to toss into your creative sandbox this week:

❓ A single question that will change how you use your phone: Former Buddhist monk Michael Becka argues that we obsess over our physical diet while ignoring our "attention diet." Most people consume dozens of headlines, crises, and other people's highlight reels before breakfast. His fix: treat your digital environment as deliberately as a sacred space. The question to ask of every social account you follow: Does this expand me or shrink me?

🥕 A simple coaching model you can use in your 1-1s: The GROW framework is a practical four-step approach to coaching conversations. Establish what the person’s working toward, honestly assess where they’re at, explore what’s getting in the way, and then create a clear action plan:

📈 A useful X-Y graph to sort out potential career plans: created an easy, helpful visual aid to map out jobs that would help her optimize stability and fulfillment. Your two variables may be different: Earning Potential x Adventure Potential, Learning Curve Steepness x Speed to Income, etc.

🔥 A revelation that burnout isn’t new: 18th‑century farm records show workers describing the same exhaustion. This quote says it all: “Burnout is built into capitalism, not a problem capitalism is motivated to solve.”

🪞 A one-liner I cannot stop thinking about: In Viola Davis’s episode of Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang, she shares that her definition of hell is when the person you became meets the person you could have become. Is that not a total brain grenade? Crazy motivation for pursuing your fullest potential with your remaining years.

🏃 A guide to escaping the algorithm: A fascinating take from on “engaging with [social media] platforms as if close reading a work of literature.” His point is instead of deleting your Instagram profile or reducing the hours you spend scrolling, resist the algorithm by purposefully using each platform in an alternative way. For example, seek out the Wikipedia pages with the least views or fill your Amazon cart with the 5 most expensive items you can find.

📅 An idea for a 100 Day Project (from Suleika Jaouad’s beautiful memoir Between Two Kingdoms): Carve out a few minutes to work on a creative project every day for 100 days. Jaouad used it as “a way of organizing our lives around one small act of imagination” during her battle with leukemia. Her boyfriend’s 100 Day Project was daily video dispatches from the outside which he shared with her in her hospital room; her mother’s was painting one small handmade ceramic tile each morning, which she combined into a mosaic for Suleika. Her father’s was writing down 100 childhood memories that he printed and bound into a booklet for her as a Christmas present. Suleika’s was writing in her journal every day for 100 days which she eventually turned into this book.

🦓 A just-for-fun goodie bag of zebra-themed office/desk things: My husband and I made the zebra our unofficial “family animal.” I love bringing themes like this into my home office decor for creative inspiration and a reminder of what I’m working for:

• This ceramic zebra pencil pot adorns my desk

• This peel & stick zebra wallpaper would be awesome behind a bookshelf or inside your desk drawers

• Just got this (faux, I’m not a sociopath) zebra skin rug and it is 🤌 in person

• This personalizable zebra print notebook would be fun with this zebra gel pen

• This little brass zebra figurine could hang out on a stack of books

• Look at these nice abstract zebra-inspired prints

✍️ A cool idea from to make a “darlings document”: Instead of killing your darlings (i.e. deleting phrases and sentences from your writing), make a darlings document. Whenever he’s working on something and has to cut words he loves, he dumps them in the darlings document. Even if he never goes back to it, it eases the act of cutting. This would work for ideas at work, creative projects, so many things!

🤖 A frank take on the good and the ugly of life as a heavy AI user: shares how AI is changing her focus, memory, patience, and articulation as someone who spends almost every working hour with AI.

FRIEND OF THE CREATIVITY OF WORK

Your Creative Career: Don’t Go It Alone

Even at the highest levels of creative leadership, it’s easy to feel siloed inside your corporate bubble. We founded the Creative Factory community to give ambitious professionals an elite, cross-industry network to lean on. It’s where members from more than 40 companies benchmark ideas, trade strategies, and navigate high-stakes management challenges together.

Looking for a peer group? Explore Creative Factory.

Have a sensational week,

Allison

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This issue’s soundtrack:

If the internet is a giant, smelly, rusted-out dumpster, you can either steer clear entirely and seal yourself inside an off-the-grid sensory deprivation chamber, OR you can put a fiercely effective filter in place and collect your own treasures from the trash in a tidy recycling bin.

But dumpster diving is hard work.

It’s time-consuming, requires rolling your sleeves up and wearing gloves and comfortable shoes, and who know what horrors might drip their rotten juices onto your hands while you’re grasping for salvageable somethings.

It’s worth it.

The carefully collected contents of your internet recycling bin power your differentiator: your taste.

But it requires knowing which dumpsters are worth the diving. Garbage in, garbage out.

And there’s a lot of garbage these days.

I do much junk collection for my twice-monthly The Creativity of Work roundups. So I’ve developed a finely calibrated flashlight for spotting usable goods.

Below, my 27 favorite online sources for creative inspiration and idea hunting, organized by category:

Creative Inspiration Sources: Images

Cosmos: a treasure trove of images you can search by words, hex codes, or categories, with or without AI

Public Domain Image Archive: a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images

Smithsonian Open Access: 5M+ images free to use and searchable across all 21 Smithsonian institutions

Savee: human-curated visual references for designers; its "More Like This" button works like Spotify Radio for imagery

Kaboompics: free stock photography created by Polish photographer Karolina Grabowska; you can search or browse by word, category, or color

Leica Fotografie International: a beautiful gallery of the best Leica photography from around the world

Creative Inspiration Sources: Curated Roundups

Antislop: a database and daily newsletter featuring lectures, essays, speeches & videos plus their key highlights from acclaimed writers and original thinkers

Creative Mornings: breakfast lectures series, virtual field trips, and online community featuring creative inspiration (I had a chance to speak at the Philly chapter of Creative Mornings this year)

Dense Discovery: thoughtful links across design, tech, culture and art, hand-picked weekly to inspire reflection

Billy Oppenheimer: research assistant to Ryan Holiday and Rick Rubin (what a combo!); every Sunday, around 6 PM (CT), his “SIX at 6” newsletter includes fascinating, brain-expanding tidbits that’ll send you down rabbit holes

A Thing or Two: 10 things and Erica Cerulo are excited about, delivered on Mondays since 2012

Swissmiss: an “online garden” Tina Roth Eisenberg started in 2005 and has lovingly tended to ever since

Creative Factor: weekly personal stories of creative professionals, everyone from the Chief Design Officer at Rivian to Patagonia’s Head of Photography

The Browser: five hand-picked, wide-ranging articles a day, running since 2008

Recomendo: six recommendations every Sunday from Kevin Kelly (Wired magazine cofounder), Mark Frauenfelder (co-owner of Boing Boing), and Claudia Dawson

: an eclectic weekly newsletter of “10 things worth sharing” by the author of Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work!

Creative Inspiration Sources: Aggregators

Sublime: self-described as “the knowledge tool that sparks creativity”; lets you capture and categorize any form of media and browse other people’s public collections; I’ve been enchanted by founder for years

Are.na: an “Internet memory palace”; non-gross online software for saving and organizing content

Feedly: I’ve been a Feedly power user for years, since the demise of Google Reader; in addition to curating and following (and creating, if you’re a paid user!) RSS feeds you can use it to explore by any topic

Creative Inspiration Sources: Design

AIGA Eye on Design: the best new work from the most exciting designers today, curated by the oldest and largest not-for-profit design organization in the U.S.

Designboom: publishing the latest in the fields of architecture, design, technology & art for 20 years

Design Milk: “what’s cool and what’s next” in architecture, interior design, automotive, fashion, technology & art, also 20 years old

Colossal: another visual art, design and culture site, launched in 2010 by writer and curator Christopher Jobson

It’s Nice That: one of the leading platforms globally for the creative community, since 2007

Creative Inspiration Sources: Literature & Philosophy

The Marginalian: deep, long-form essays exploring the intersections of art, science, philosophy, poetry, and the human condition

Ryan Holiday: a bestselling author (plus bookstore owner!) and former marketer writing about practical philosophy, making ancient Stoicism applicable to modern life

Psyche: a digital magazine by the team behind Aeon dedicated to “helping you know yourself and live well”

Not only does this digital dumpster diving keep me well-nourished with food for thought, and provide me with material to make my writing fresh.

It also keeps my hope alive for a digitally connected world that does more good than harm; that surfaces thought-provoking, original ideas and artifacts for curious folks to skim from and spark their own imaginations.

An internet unpolluted by the CO₂ of slop that’s burned so many holes in our content ozone.

One that connects people not to bait and rile each other but to broaden perspectives and add texture to our thinking.

Idea hunting, and contributing ideas for hunters to exhume, feel like two steps toward that vision.

Have a great week,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to:

1. The Workroom 🔐, a bank of juicy extras like templates, resources & discounts I update regularly. Every tool & perk in this archive is built from almost 20 years inside some of the most high-growth, fast-paced companies in the country (Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Shipt, BarkBox).

2. The Creativity of Work Private Chat 💬, where I share back-channel job opportunities I hear about through my own network and can connect you to directly.

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 10 things to chew on this week:

🧱 A fun way to make meetings interactive, via LEGO: Rudi Anggono, LEGO’s Director of Creative Innovation, shared in an interview with Creative Factor that every meeting room at LEGO has a pile of bricks in it. “Instead of fidgeting, we actually build. The assignment is to use whatever you have in front of you to build a car or something. Then hand it over to the next person and change their design. Turn it into a duck. And of course, the end result is ridiculous, but that’s the whole point. We don’t always build to create something, we build just to be silly or to let go of whatever inhibitions we have. It’s a form of singing in public, I guess.”

🛒 A hilarious icebreaker from : “You have 30 minutes. Everything is free. What store are you going to?”. Some favorite responses: Tiffany’s (“Grab a lot of diamonds with high resale value”), a car dealership, Sephora, Barnes & Noble.

🎭 A useful mental device to roll with the punches: From Maria Semple’s Go Gentle: "Epictetus says to think of ourselves as actors in a play. We can't choose our roles, and they can be switched at any time without warning. Once we're recast, our job isn't to question or complain, but to accept and shine.”

🍫 A reminder to “always bring the chocolate”: A design principle from Robin Noguier: “When someone asks you for a coffee, bring the best one you can, but always add a piece of chocolate.” The idea is to not just do what people ask for; to go beyond that, and do something that they didn’t even know they wanted.

🧐 Encouragement to do some introspection on WHY your life is so complicated: In this Tim Ferriss podcast episode, Claire Hughes Johnson (former Stripe COO) discovered that saying yes to too many things was about an intrinsic desire to be liked.

📋 A fun idea from to make a monthly “10 list”: 10 things you’d like to do each month with absolutely no consequences if you don’t. I’ve been making seasonal bucket lists for a few years but I like the idea of approaching it monthly.

🍷 A “good wine rule”: Don’t wait for the good night to open the good wine! Make any night a good night by opening the good wine.

⚒️ A reflection on “skill nostalgia”: Our craving for handmade things (sourdough, pottery, workwear, beekeeping) is a modern version of an old nostalgia for skilled work, one that traces back to Plato and the Victorians. Could it be the start of a radically human approach to work?

🔮 How to “remember the future”: A thought-provoking exercise for tuning into the future you really want and imagining it into reality. (credit to !)

🤫 A reminder you can listen to nothing at all: Next walk you take, put down the Airpods.

Go make some good trouble this week,

Allison

P.S. Want to make this official? Paid subscribers get access to:

1. The Workroom 🔐, a bank of juicy extras like templates, resources & discounts I update regularly. Every tool & perk in this archive is built from almost 20 years inside some of the most high-growth, fast-paced companies in the country (Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Shipt, BarkBox).

2. The Creativity of Work Private Chat 💬, where I share back-channel job opportunities I hear about through my own network and can connect you to directly.

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This issue’s soundtrack:

I’ve been a reader for as long as I can remember.

Not in the sense of literally being able to read. In the sense that I learned at age four how to literally read, and from there adopted being a reader as three quarters of my personality (the other quarter is a mishmosh of music, unresolved perfectionism, and strong opinions about dogs).

I love reading books, I love picking books to read, I love talking about books I’ve read and want to read, I love browsing for books online and offline, and I love reading creative picture books to and with my kids.

One of the great pleasures of parenthood for me has been rediscovering books I loved as a little kid, not only because of the nostalgia (and nostalgia is so welcome these days, isn’t it?) or the chance to see my boys experience the same magic I did; but because I’m realizing how much these books resonate with me as an adult.

And a great revelation of my professional life has been the appreciation of simplicity.

Brene Brown taught us all that clear is kind, yes; but it’s also hard.

Hemingway, a Nobel prize winner, famously wrote at a 4th grade readability level.

And have you ever tried to explain a complex topic to a kid? Something like “What are contact lenses?” or “What’s inside of planets?” It’s a brain scrambler!

So reading, and re-reading, children’s books plucks multiple harp strings in my chest: nostalgia, vicarious kid-magic, and appreciation for the power of simplicity.

If you’re a parent, or have kids in your life, there are also massive benefits to reading with kids and sharing your favorite books with them.

As put it:

So I wanted to share my all-time favorite creative picture books. Not just sweet stories or touching tales; but specifically books that stretch your brain, stimulate imagination, and explore fresh territory.

The list includes both iconic titles from my own childhood, and new-to-me books I’ve discovered as a mom.

And please don’t commit the literary misdemeanor of assuming kid lit is just for kids. Children’s books deserve a place of honor among the rest of your literary treasures.

Best Creative Picture Books for Kids and Adults

• My First Shapes with Frank Lloyd Wright | Why I recommend it: A very sweet board book that introduces architecture as a first language.

• ABCs of Art, Sabrina Hahn | Why I recommend it: A delightfully curated alphabet featuring some of the world’s most iconic paintings.

• Dr. Seuss’s ABC | Why I recommend it: Imagine the ABCs plugged into the socket of Green Eggs and Ham.

• Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak | Why I recommend it: A fun frolic with monsters.

• Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson | Why I recommend it: A picture book about the creative act itself.

• Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown | Why I recommend it: Such a beautifully meditative read, no wonder it’s been beloved for generations.

• Big, Keith Haring Why I recommend it: A hilarious, engaging way to introduce the idea of synonyms.

• Go! Go! Go! Stop!, Charise Mericle Harper | Why I recommend it: Trucks with gusto!

• Good Night, Gorilla, Peggy Rathmann | Why I recommend it: A mischievous gorilla and his bedtime pals; what’s not to love?

• Jamberry, Bruce Degen | Why I recommend it: A berry-picking extravaganza with really fun wordplay.

• Caps for Sale, Esphyr Slobodkina | Why I recommend it: Mischievous monkeys make for such a warm and funny little tale.

• The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle | Why I recommend it: Die-cut pages perfect for little fingers, beautiful illustrations, and a lovely way to introduce counting, days of the week, and even metamorphosis 😂

• A House for Hermit Crab, Eric Carle | Why I recommend it: Another vibrantly illustrated little treasure, with a relatable story of change.

• Swimmy, Leo Lionni | Why I recommend it: The sweetest little reminder of the power of teamwork and inventive thinking.

• Press Here, Hervé Tullet | Why I recommend it: Like a video game in analog form.

• Iggy Peck, Architect, Andrea Beaty | Why I recommend it: Written in really fun verse with quirky illustrations, a story about the creativity of construction.

• Boxitects, Kim Smith | Why I recommend it: A great reminder of how the ordinary can become extraordinary.

• The Magical Yet, Angela DiTerlizzi | Why I recommend it: There’s such power in this one little word: “yet.”

• Hot Dog Cold Dog, Frann Preston-Gannon | Why I recommend it: Charming and simple.

• The Invisible String, Patrice Karst | Why I recommend it: My exec coach recommended this one and we’re obsessed. A joyful celebration of love.

• What Do You Do With an Idea?, Kobi Yamada | Why I recommend it: The story of one brilliant idea and the child who helps to bring it into the world.

• Strega Nona, Tomie dePaola | Why I recommend it: A magical pasta pot! So fun.

• Du Iz Tak?, Carson Ellis | Why I recommend it: A wild world of playful, invented insect language.

• Welcome to Jazz, Carolyn Sloan | Why I recommend it: An interactive introduction to jazz music. It’s really well done.

• Welcome to the Symphony, Carolyn Sloan | Why I recommend it: Ditto, for the orchestra.

• Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault | Why I recommend it: A cheerful take on the ABCs.

• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Laura Numeroff | Why I recommend it: A circular, silly cause-and-effect loop.

• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Judi Barrett | Why I recommend it: A belovedly absurd premise.

• The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, Jon Scieszka | Why I recommend it: A wild, irreverent collection of reimagined fairy tales.

• Falling Up, Shel Silverstein | Why I recommend it: Punk poetry. I love how Silverstein treats kids like they can handle darkness and weirdness.

• Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein | Why I recommend it: Ditto.

• The Day the Crayons Quit, Drew Daywalt | Why I recommend it: A totally fresh take on creativity and self-expression.

Any to add to my list?

Eat something delicious and laugh hard this week,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to The Workroom 🔐, a bank of juicy extras like templates, resources & discounts that I update regularly. Every tool & perk in this archive is built from almost 20 years inside some of the most high-growth, fast-paced companies in the country (Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Shipt, BarkBox).

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 11 things to top your creative sundae with this week:

🤳 A “taste test” application for Ramp’s Viral Creative Producer role: I love this fresh take on the recruitment process and wish more companies would try experiments like this. Before you can even access the application you have to score 9 or 10 on the Internet culture taste test.

🫂 A discovery that spending time with others may be a basic biological necessity, like our need for food or water: “A lonely human may be feeling the effects of wiring laid down long ago in our evolution.”

❄️ A handy framework called “The Triple T of Becoming Irreplaceable”: Talent, Taste, Trust. No one is actually irreplaceable. But these are the things that make you very hard to substitute.

🪄 A magic wand you can pay for stuff with: The whimsy! The “why not”-ness!

🖼️ A hobby board! I adore this idea from to create a visual display of hobbies: things to learn, things for play, and a backlog.

🗳️ A "Tomorrow Box”: I’m not a short story person but I picked up Curtis Sittenfeld’s Show Don’t Tell for a plane ride and swept through it. One of the stories, titled The Tomorrow Box, included a fabulous suggestion from a father to his daughter for when she couldn’t sleep: he imagines a shoebox with the word “Tomorrow” on top of it, and imagines writing each thing he’s worried about on a piece of paper and slipping it into the box. I love this idea for compartmentalizing stress during the work day.

❓A list of 20 questions that help reveal what you truly value: I’m a sucker for a values exercise, and this one from hits.

📦 A reminder from that you don’t need more stuff: On how “resist[ing] the tyranny of endless consumption” makes more room not just in your home but in your brain.

🐌 A meditation from on the radical act of slowing down: What if we deliberately slowed our work down?

👁️ A “soft eyes” exercise to see more deeply: To look with soft eyes is to look as though “from the back of your head.” You keep your focus about 10 feet in front of you, but you’re also actively aware of everything in your peripheral vision. It comes up in mindfulness, martial arts, hunting, and more.

🧠 A deep dive into how to rebuild your attention span: A rich conversation between Adam Grant and Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at UC Irvine who studies the impact of digital media on people’s lives.

Throwing confetti in your direction this week,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to:

1. The Workroom 🔐, a bank of juicy extras like templates, resources & discounts I update regularly. Every tool & perk in this archive is built from almost 20 years inside some of the most high-growth, fast-paced companies in the country (Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Shipt, BarkBox).

2. The Creativity of Work Private Chat 💬, where I share back-channel job opportunities I hear about through my own network and can connect you to directly.

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This issue’s soundtrack:

On April 5, 2012, at 12:08PM I started a fresh Google Doc, titled it “LifeLines,” and typed in a few quotes, notes, and sentence fragments I’d kept in a loose leaf notebook.

That doc is now 39 pages long, brimming with size-11-font, single-spaced lines of excerpts, one-liners, and passages from books, articles, lectures and conversations that snagged on the teeth of my brain.

It’s a simple, digital version of a commonplace book, a notebook used to collect knowledge, quotes, proverbs, and observations.

The practice dates back to antiquity, when ancient Greek speakers in law courts or political meetings would keep an assortment of arguments in a “common place” for easy reference. Renaissance humanists like John Locke and Francis Bacon kept commonplace books.

Color me crazy, but I credit my commonplace book with keeping me stable and grounded amidst career challenges, supplying me with ideas for this very newsletter, even helping calibrate my artistic taste.

If you’re curious about keeping one, or you already do but want some inspiration from how I use mine (it’s not just dumping a bunch of quotes in a doc), let’s talk about the mechanics.

What’s a commonplace book?

A commonplace book is a personal, curated notebook (physical or digital) used to collect quotes, passages, and ideas that resonate with you.

It isn’t a journal, nor a productivity system, nor a Notion database. It’s a collection practice. It’s a repository for the language that draws you, whether it’s a poem, a quote, or something overheard at a work meeting.

What my 14-year commonplace book practice has taught me

There’s richness in unexpected juxtaposition

Since I use a Google Doc, I don’t categorize or sort—I can so easily search and browse for what I want. A lovely outcome of this is that my commonplace book has an Eleanor Roosevelt quote next to something my Art History professor said; a Molly Oliver poem next to a line of copy from the Schoolhouse Electric website. This melange of creative miscellany sparks fresh thoughts every time I scroll through it, by virtue of it being so random and varied.

Curation is a form of autobiography

I can infer so much about myself when I see the additions I made to the doc in which years. I was on a big classic novel kick in the early 2010s—no kids yet, ample free time to luxuriate in doorstop books—and discovered the poet Rupi Kaur during COVID in 2020. In this way my commonplace book is like my own living time capsule.

Being a quote collector tunes your creative antenna

Without even realizing I’m doing it, I’ve always got my ears tuned for interesting quotes, phrases, and lines to add to my LifeLines doc. If it weren’t for my commonplace book I don’t know that I’d have honed this habit so acutely. And it benefits me way beyond this one practice; it makes me a better listener, and a better marketer.

How to start a commonplace book

Options abound if you want to give this a go:

1. Use an iPhone Note, or a Google Doc like I do

2. There are also tools like ’s beautiful (“the knowledge tool that sparks creativity”) as well as Are.na (an “Internet memory palace”) that let you curate not just text but images

3. If that multimedia approach intrigues you, there’s always Pinterest or even, dare I say, Tumblr?!

4. And if you want to keep it analogue, knock yourself out! I love these personalizable, refillable Mark & Graham notebooks

Within your container, there are zero rules. Just start adding tidbits that make you feel something, whether it’s motivated, intrigued, validated, or whatever else.

My sources range from books I’m reading to articles and newsletters, from song lyrics to podcast and TV episodes ⤵

Why keeping a commonplace book matters right now

In my experience, a commonplace book is a counter-practice to drowning in Slack pings, AI slop, email oblivion and infinite scroll.

Where social media gives you other people's curated thoughts, a commonplace book gives you your own.

Fourteen years in, my LifeLines doc has become less a notebook and more a rich record of what I've been paying attention to, and who I've been becoming because of it.

One of my earliest and favorite additions is this quote from my creative writing professor: “Writing is like reading braille on the cave wall of your mind.”

Keeping a commonplace book helps me shine a flashlight on that wall.

Have a great week,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to The Workroom 🔐, a bank of juicy extras like templates, resources & discounts that I update regularly. Every tool & perk in this archive is built from almost 20 years inside some of the most high-growth, fast-paced companies in the country (Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Shipt, BarkBox). They also get access to job opportunities from my personal network, in The Creativity of Work chat.

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 11 things to jump-start your creative battery this week:

🕰️ A reminder that if your whole life were a 24-hour day, it’d be just 8AM when you turn 30: This is a great reframe for the passage of time and the meaning we ascribe to various ages. The reality is that, if you think about your lifespan as a 24-hour day, at age 30 it’s only 8AM, age 40 it’s only 10:40AM, age 50 it’s only 1:20PM, etc. You have so much time to become the person you’re meant to be.

💻 A beautiful idea from to share a Life Update periodically with friends, family, mentors, colleagues: 4 suggested parts:

• Where I am: what happened, what changed, what I am working on, what feels alive.

• What I am learning: what worked, what did not, what patterns I am noticing, what I am slowly understanding.

• What I am wondering: the questions I keep returning to, the decisions I am circling, the places where I feel uncertain or unfinished.

• Where help would help: the advice, introductions, examples, encouragement, reality checks, or questions that would be useful right now.

🎼 A fascinating concept called “musilanguage”: I was fascinated to discover that before music and before language, there was one mixture of the two that sounded across the savannah. That “musilanguage” then split and specialized into two different forms of communication: one for ideas, one for emotion. It’s no wonder music is such a powerful form of communication; it’s in our very blood and brains.

😃 An examination of why the more energy we focus on trying to feel happy, the harder it is to achieve: I loved this NYT interview with cognitive scientist and professor Laurie Santos, whose class on happiness is the most popular in Yale’s history. She talks about time affluence vs. time famine, the two types of happiness (hedonic and eudaimonic), and why Americans are “weirdos” when it comes to happiness.

🎤 A good reminder from Cal Newport that it’s good for your brain to share your thoughts with the public: “There’s a focusing effect that comes from performing for a crowd. When you want to impress other people, or add to the conversation in a meaningful way, your mind slips into a higher gear than what’s easily accessible in solo introspection.” — Cal Newport, Slow Productivity

⏱️ An approach to being “time rich”: Harvard professor Ashley Whillans gave a great TED talk on overcoming time poverty, i.e. feeling like you have too many things to do and not enough time. I relate so hard to this and appreciated some of her tips, like keeping a time affluence to-do list.

🏖️ A way to plan your summer intentionally: There’s something about the way Gretchen Rubin’s brain works that jibes with mine so perfectly. Here she gives us an approach and a template for mindfully designing the season, to make sure we have the summer experience we want.

🤪 A hilarious list of 10 things only a poly-professional will understand: It had me at “having an identity crisis when you have to introduce yourself.”

❤️‍🔥 A rich take from on what to do when you’re ambitious but nothing excites you: I especially love her idea of taking a side quest. And she even created a free career tarot card game to help you start figuring out what’s next.

✅ A reminder of how important it is to commit: I love this take from on the power of resisting how easy it is to cancel or decline.

📣 A helpful guide to sharing your point of view even when you’re afraid of being wrong: Everything writes is so thoughtful and clear, including this set of tactical ideas for overcoming the high performer’s anxiety of speaking up and being incorrect.

Have a fun and functional week,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to The Workroom 🔐, a bank of juicy extras like templates, resources & discounts that I update regularly. Every tool & perk in this archive is built from almost 20 years inside some of the most high-growth, fast-paced companies in the country (Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Shipt, BarkBox).

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

Read more

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 11 things to rev up your creative engine this week:

📝 A “Change Your Life in 10 Minutes” Exercise from : I’m a sucker for a pen-and-paper self-reflection exercise and this one is a goodie.

🧠 A reminder from Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer on the need to not only accumulate information but also to reflect and digest it: “You may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.”

🤐 A recommendation for zipper pouches: These have become my go-to for compartmentalizing within my work backpack. I use one to hold all my chargers, one for Mary-Poppins-bag-miscellany (gum, lens wipes, Advil), etc.

📒 A lower-cognitive-load alternative to journaling: I’ve never been a successful journal keeper BUT I’ve been a lifelong list maker. And not just to-do lists & grocery lists, but lists of business ideas, quotes, life goals, meaningful moments, travel memories. If you want to journal but struggle to keep up with it, try lists. I love this list idea from :

✍️ A comeback for cursive: Students across the country are practicing cursive in clubs after school and at libraries. Vulnerable confession: I still, even after having signed my name one gazillion times over the course of my lifetime, don’t have a go-to signature. I sort of constantly futz with it, try different takes on it. It’s weird because I generally have decent handwriting. I’m envious of people with great signatures!!!

🏢 A set of 33 simple, easy-to-use facilitation methods that replace or supplement conventional meeting formats: Have you heard of Liberating Structures? It’s an approach to collaboration by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless focused on “small, elegant shifts in the protocols of how we meet, plan, conference, and relate to each other.” The methods range from “25/10 Crowdsourcing” (a way to rapidly generate and sift a group’s most powerful actionable ideas) to “Nine Whys” (a way to make the purpose of a group’s work crystal clear). Something tells me would be into this.

📅 A “meeting minimalism” practice: Meetings are indeed the “barnacle on the hull of the business.” I love these suggestions from for how to ensure they’re as painless as possible.

🎻 An unexpected suggestion for a 10-minute morning practice: In Laura Linney’s episode of the Smartless podcast, she shares that playwright Edward Albee told her to listen to Bach for 10 minutes every morning because “it organizes the mind.” I played classical percussion in high school (it was a requirement in order to participate in the jazz ensemble) and have been rediscovering this timeless music. Try this Classical Bangers playlist if you’re interested.

🚪 An idea for a “creative cabinet” in your workspace: In sound engineer Geoff Emerick’s book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles, he describes how The Beatles had a sound effects cupboard under the stairs in Studio 2 at Abbey Road. If they ever got stuck during the overdubbing process, they’d head into that cupboard to find something: “There was so much paraphernalia, from wind machines to thunder machines, bells, whistles, you name it. Whenever that door was opened, we knew that something fun was about to happen.” Wouldn’t it be fun to have some kind of creative cabinet in your workspace? It could have a hodgepodge of tchotchkes and treasures collected over time.

🎨 A website that tells you which Rothko painting your city’s weather most resembles: Use your location or plug in any city.

🖼️ A guide to turning creative living into a career: Four ways has transformed living creatively into making a creative living.

Have a fantastic, fruitful week,

Allison

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

Subscribe now

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

Read more

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 12 things to crank up the creativity this week:

💐 A link bouquet maker! Curate a bouquet of links (videos, songs, articles) for a friend, customize its appearance, and send.

📚 Max Steven Grossman’s bookscapes: Obsessed with this series from photographer Max Steven Grossman. They’re these huge acrylic pieces that feature curated bookshelves on themes like rock music, cocktails, beaches, women in culture, and more.

🪷 A reflection on how emotionally healthy people relate to their careers: A good reminder that emotionally healthy people approach their careers with practical clarity rather than using work for recognition; and that an “average,” unpretentious work life is actually the hardest and most enviable achievement of all.

📽️ A guide to presenting your work better: I adored this practical, actionable take from on how to present better at work. Treating a presentation like hosting is particularly interesting and smart.

🏴‍☠️ A new favorite game: Apple Photos treasure hunt. Type a random word into the app (“dogs,” “garden,” “pizza”) and see what you unearth. Use the results for creative inspiration, writing prompts, or an opportunity to send throwback pics to people you haven’t connected with in a while.

🚙 A fun photo collection practice from : Make a photo album on your phone of the best vanity license plates you encounter. She described doing this on a recent family road trip: “The kids see plates with ANCH0VY and it reminds them of their friends, whose plate says BURRIT0. There were also spottings of K0RNDAWG and IAMV1P and ONTHEEDG3.”

📒 A journal you’ll actually journal in: This beautiful Wilde House Paper journal comes with free access to the Open Journal Digital Library, a series of 7 day journaling courses with themes like Intimacy, Stress & Anxiety, Balance, Perspective and more to get you started.

💭 A reminder that “you’re only as good as the stuff you surround yourself with”: has this concept he covers in his book Steal Like an Artist called “idea income”; basically the inputs you feed yourself, what you read, watch, notice, collect, the conversations you have, the rabbit holes you follow, determine the quality of what you're able to make and think.

🍝 A diagnostic for the VIPs in your life: In Laurie Woolever’s excellent restaurant industry memoir Care and Feeding, she discloses that VIP guests (business or media big shots, wealthy friends of the restaurant owners Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich, esteemed family members, celebs, neighborhood regulars) would get the “AA AD SM” treatment, a.k.a. Augment Appetizers, Augment Desserts, Send Moscato. I like this as a reflection tool for your own VIPs: are the people getting your “AA AD SM” treatment the ones who actually deserve it, or are you giving your best attention to people who are impressive rather than important?

🏁 A killer quote on imposing competition (even with yourself!) on things that were never meant to be competitive: “Winning a yoga race. It makes no sense, of course. The question this prompts is: Are there places you feel like you're falling behind where there's actually no race?” — Seth Godin

🎙️ A roundup of the objects that inspire America’s greatest songwriters: The NYT asked 30 of the greatest living American songwriters to share something that sparks their process. I’m a sucker for an inside look at how artists work.

🐦‍⬛ An app that identifies bird calls: My new favorite activity while on a walk: open the Merlin Bird ID app, hit record, and let it identify the birds around you based on their sounds. So far in Philly I’ve discovered not just the house sparrow and song sparrow, but the American robin, mourning dove, and even a gray catbird.

Go make something good this week,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to The Workroom 🔐, a bank of juicy extras like templates, resources & discounts that I update regularly. Every tool & perk in this archive is built from almost 20 years inside some of the most high-growth, fast-paced companies in the country (Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Shipt, BarkBox).

Subscribe now

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

Read more

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 12 things to make your work week a little more delightful:

🏀 A “Shoot Your Shot Wednesday” ritual from : Anna writes, “I’ve been shooting my shot ever since I quit my job in 2019 and decided to take charge of my life. Some people look at the connections I’ve made - the artists, the founders, the editors, the collaborators - and assume there’s an excessive strategy or system behind it all. When someone wants to know how I’ve connected with such fantastic people, my answer is almost always ‘I asked’.” P.S. 22 more creative rituals for your perusal right this way.

🐧 A heart-warming practice called “pebbling”: A year after PepsiCo Chief Creative Officer Chris Bellinger shared this on LinkedIn, I still think about it. There’s a name for sending small, seemingly random things like memes, funny videos, and links to people online: “pebbling.” It’s inspired by the behavior of penguins, who present pebbles to their loved ones as tokens.

🦉 A definition of a “believable person”: In Drew Taylor’s book LifeWork (I can’t find evidence of it online any longer, but this little paperback has been a self-discovery goldmine for me for years), he defines a believable person as someone who has done something successfully three times or more. Look to these people when you choose books to read, talks to watch, podcasts to listen to, theories to consider.

🛏️ A thing to do when your feet first hit the floor when you step out of bed in the morning: A sports psychologist for the Seahawks taught Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella this: “[W]hen you step out of bed, the first thing you know, you put your feet down and just say, what are you thankful for? That's another daily ritual of mine and it's just grounding. It gives you the ability to get up in the morning and orient yourself for the day.”

💭 A dream job exercise from The Hello Monday podcast: talks through the detailed dream job imagination prompt she’s done for years at the behest of her executive coach. She credits it with landing the very role she’s in now!

⛸️ A discovery that the area where ice skaters go to hear their competition results is called a “kiss & cry”: Somehow after years of watching the Olympics, I learned this only this week from Layne Fargo’s The Favorites (which I adored!), a novel about Olympic ice dancers.

🐕🐈 A reminder that creativity can be a form of care: Chicago Animal Care & Control, a shelter that took in nearly 19,000 animals last year!, just started bringing in volunteer musicians to perform for the dogs and cats. They’re calling it Sound Sessions. The idea is that live music reduces stress for everyone in the building: the animals, the staff, the visitors. I adore this example of creative input as a form of care.

🌴 A perfect way to turn 8 days of PTO into 12 days of real rest: I love this tactical breakdown of the optimal way to take summer vacation. It’s so easy to guilt ourselves about not taking enough time off, but not so easy to make an actual plan to do so in a way that doesn’t leave us even more wiped.

🤖 A handy acronym for prompting Claude properly: CRISP: The quality of what you get from any LLM is directly proportional to the quality of what you put in. I love this clear, approachable explanation from on how to prompt properly.

📅 A brilliant idea for keeping things interesting; communications strategist Ant Harris sets himself yearly challenges based on his age: He saw 22 gigs when he was 22, ate 23 foods he'd never tried when he was 23, visited 24 museums when he turned 24, and so on.

🧶 A lovely year-long craft project idea: Have you heard of a temperature blanket? You knit or crochet with a set of colors that have a temperature range allocated to each (e.g. cobalt blue is 30-40 degrees). Each day at a certain time, note the temperature and knit or crochet a row in a color that corresponds. At the end of the year, you have a beautiful blanket charting the changing of the seasons.

🧴 A new favorite hand soap and lotion: I discovered Element Brooklyn’s Kiso Forest hand soap and lotion at a restaurant here in Philly (Good King Tavern; the restaurant’s fine, the wine bar Le Caveau upstairs is a DREAM) and couldn’t stop thinking about the scent, so much so that I called the next day and asked for the brand name 😂 As someone who works from home I wash my hands and use hand lotion so often throughout the day that having an amazing scent for both makes the workday feel more sensorily satisfying.

See you out there,

Allison

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

Subscribe now

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This week’s soundtrack:

“How old are you?”

“You’re so young for your role!”

“You’re so accomplished for someone your age.”

If I had to guess how many times people have remarked on or asked about my age in a work setting (I’m really bad at those guess-how-many-jelly-beans-are-in-the-jar games), I’d venture something like 2,000. Maybe 5,000?

I’ve always looked young. It runs in my family.

My mom looks 20 years younger than her age. It’s become a fun parlor trick getting people to guess how old we are.

It was a real pain in the ass the summer all my friends weren’t quite 21 but could get away with convincing bartenders and liquor store cashiers to serve them, whereas my baby face was a dead giveaway.

It’s one of those things I used to get so annoyed about people telling me I’d someday appreciate (“you’ll love it when you’re older!”), and now, what do you know, I do appreciate.

Looking young was also exacerbated by the fact that I often clicked more with people a few years older. Through every phase of my life, leading up to marrying someone eight years my senior, I made older friends and was told I was “wiser than my years” and “had an old soul” or was “mature.”

Who knows, people like to tell kids weird things.

But regardless, looking young was a challenge in the workplace for so many years.

I’ve—big exhale—finally gotten to a place of spending zero energy on it. I’m all out of flying figs to give. Or else I finally look closer to my age (I did notice new wrinkles recently 👀).

The reality is, looking young can hold you back. According to the BBC, people who look older are more likely to be considered for high-status managerial roles and deemed more suitable for jobs requiring a higher level of education. I’ve personally experienced too-many-to-count instances of disrespect due to perceived age.

But it’s not insurmountable.

If you’ve ever grappled with this, or know someone who has, I thought I’d share a few reflections on how to move through it: how to respond when someone asks how old you are, if it’s worth actually trying to look older, choosing when to address it directly vs. let it go, and more.

Three moments stand out when I think about my experience dealing with looking young in the workplace:

#1. A mentor gave me the perfect advice.

I’ve always straddled two worlds: full-time and freelance. I started freelance writing my senior year of college and have really never stopped.

One of my first clients, who hired me to ghost-write for some of the businesses she did PR for, remarked during an ordinary status call how mature I seemed for my age. Irked, I told her some dude had just asked me outright, at a work dinner the other night, how old I was and how much that had wrankled me.

She said she could relate from earlier in her career and told me exactly what to say.

“Ask them how old they are.”

I’ve never forgotten that guidance. I’ve used it a few times when people have had the audacity to ask my age, but more commonly I’ve channeled the attitude. If someone is wondering my age at work, they’re either a) purely curious and my irritation over it is more my stuff; or b) they’re being judgmental and it’s a good reminder that I can speculate right back at them.

#2. Another mentor reality-checked me.

I was catching up with a mentor some years ago and explaining how, having been recently promoted to a very senior role leading a large team, I was struggling to feel worthy of the position. I told her my self-consciousness over my seniority at a non-”senior” age was getting in my way.

She listened, let me finish. Then frowned and said:

“I don’t actually think you’re that young for your role.”

She told me about several other mentees in her orbit and folks in her organization who were my age or even younger and at my corporate level or above.

It was a perfect reality-check. It also made me feel dumb in the best way 😂

Maybe you’re not actually that young, objectively, for whatever role you’re filling. As you get older and more experienced, sheer years matter less.

I’d been spending so much time hand-wringing over my perceived youth I hadn’t noticed how much time had passed.

#3. I caught and corrected my own age bias.

I’m embarrassed to admit this.

But, even after so many years grappling with looking and feeling young, I committed the ultimate pot-calling-the-kettle-black offense.

When interacting with a new colleague, a fellow VP at the time, I instinctively categorized her as “young” based on her face alone. Before I even consciously clocked it, after a couple of Zoom calls with her I realized I thought of her as young, maybe even younger than me.

Again, embarrassing!!! After all the time and work batting down this very concern, I’d drawn the same conclusion about someone else.

But almost instantly, I realized something else: she was super impressive. She was articulate, strategic, a clear communicator, and her experience showed. She had my respect.

It was a helpful illustration of what the best case scenario could be of people’s perceptions of me: fine, they may think I was young; but that didn’t mean they didn’t also respect me.

I used to constantly overcompensate for looking young by emphasizing my age: finding excuses to mention it, investing effort in looking older.

I realize four things now:

1. How annoying over-credentialing is (no one likes a name dropper, let alone an achievement dropper)

2. Dressing for the age you actually feel is more powerful than dressing to prove something

   1. Some unlocks for me on my looking/feeling older style journey: bold glasses (I have and love these from Jimmy Fairly and these from Eye Buy Direct in both purple and green), shorter hair (not as short as “the cut”), a vintage Casio digital watch

3. At some point the math stops mattering: 10 years is 10 years, 15 years is 15 years, etc., regardless of your birth year

4. Results are the ultimate equalizer; that old chestnut “be so good they can’t ignore you” is legitimate

Before I summited Mount I’m Comfortable With My Age, I wore the knees out of this quote:

“It’s not about how many years of experience you have. It’s about the quality of your years of experience.” – Jacob Cass

Put differently: you don’t have to win every room; you have to win the right ones.

I know this sounds clichéd but I really mean it: the people worth impressing aren’t counting your years. They’re watching how you think, how you listen, how you make decisions, what kind of relationship residue you leave around you.

And turns out, the best thing about getting older is caring less about proving it.

Have a great week,

Allison

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

Subscribe now

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 12 things for your creative larder this week:

🧘‍♀️ A guide to 6 ways to practice mindfulness that don’t involve sitting cross-legged alone in silence: The “point” of meditation is to get rid of some clutter in your mind. That can happen without a meditation cushion, a straight spine, or a sound bath.

🧭 A quote from on reorienting your life in the direction of what you actually want to be doing with it, instead of how you think you ought to be living it:

“[W]e’re living in an era when all the old rules seem to be changing, and when the most powerful people on earth ignore all the rules anyway. So might it be worth reassessing your lifelong strategy of following the rules as dutifully as possible?”

🛋️ An exploration of refusing the “open-office model” of existence: This great piece from discusses how rest is a critical part of creativity:

“Our creativity is not mechanical—insert coin, get output. It’s botanical. It thrives in the rich soil of rest, where seeds of inspiration can lie dormant, then bloom. Rest is not the opposite of productivity; it’s the soil that makes the harvest possible.”

💭 A list of 17 AI prompts for deeper thinking: I like how conceptualizes how we can stay thinkers in an age of machines that can “think”, too. She advocates for treating AI as a thinking partner rather than a thinking replacement. The prompts she shares here are from classic critical thinking frameworks that make your AI conversations more useful.

🤯 A realization that your happiness is more dependent on HOW you choose than WHAT you choose: dives into why satisficing (choosing something relatively quickly that meets your basic criteria) is so much more satisfying than maximizing (exhaustively researching and comparing all available options to optimize outcomes).

👕 An idea from my close friend and former colleague to make shirts printed with just the word “Alas,” to which he’d point periodically throughout the day. Genius. What else would be fun to print on a shirt?

• "That's One Way To Do It"

• "Technically"

• “Fine”

🧠 A theory that you’re not just the average of the 5 people closest to you, you’re the average of the 5 places, the 5 routines, and the 5 inputs you’re exposed to most: The idea that the spaces you occupy shape who you are is absolutely true in my experience. Living in New York for the 10 most formative years of my career changed my life. I don’t believe I would have learned and grown as much and as quickly as I did in another environment. Likewise for my residence in Philly now: I don’t think I could be as grounded and balanced in a more hectic (blood pressure too high) OR a smaller (not stimulating enough) place.

✍️ A month’s worth of daily creative prompts: 30 thoughtful, gentle journaling prompts from . My favorite: “If your current morning routine had a personality, how would you describe it, and do you like them?”

😵‍💫 A look at the concept of a “creative hangover” and how to kick it: Why might a productive, fulfilling creative day leave you feeling worse the next morning? And is there, then, an optimal way to maximize creative energy and output? I loved this Creative Factor interview with cognitive scientist & creative director (what a cool combo) Kaile Smith.

👓 A challenge to identify the five items in your personal style “starter pack”: I love this prompt from : “What are the five items so essentially you that someone could use them to cosplay you entirely?” It works beyond personal style, too; what are the five behaviors or tendencies so essentially you as a leader? What are the five things you bring to every close relationship? Etc.

💻 A look at how “jobs are a silly phase that work is going through”: I had the chance to hear speak at a marketing leadership summit last year and have gobbled up all his writing since then. He has a fascinating, clear-eyed perspective on the future of work. In this piece he argues that work will be increasingly done asynchronously by distributed workforces; that “[j]ust like how people compile playlists to customize music for mood and occasion rather than buying full compact discs or vinyl records, companies are going to compile and access skills and expertise to get work done.”

And in many ways this phase makes sense cyclically:

But importantly, he argues fewer full time jobs doesn’t necessarily mean less opportunity. There may be fewer jobs but more work to be done.

👃 An invitation to take a “sniffari”: Who says dogs get to have all the fun? If you have a dog, or have ever walked one, you know they love sniffing. (My mom calls it “reading the news”—checking out the scents other dogs have left at prime-time spots.) Dogs experience the world primarily through their noses, and sniffing releases feel-good chemicals in their brains plus gives them a sense of control over their environment. A “sniffari” is a slow, intentional walk designed around scent exploration. According to Woof, this enrichment can be more tiring than physical exercise! Try one with a dog or on your own. Let your nose, rather than your eyes, lead you on a 15-20 minute walk; slow down and stop whenever you encounter a new scent.

Go get ‘em this week,

Allison

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

Subscribe now

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing

“I have excerpts of your newsletter written on post-its, plastered over my screens at my desk.” — Kat, subscriber

Happy Sunday,

Here are 11 things to stock your creative work life pantry with this week:

⚡ A look at four ways to protect your creative spark in corporate life: , NYT content strategist, zine creator, and newsletter scribe, gives great practical advice on resisting “the all-or-nothing mindset that says you’re either capital C Creative or Corporate.” My favorite rec = finding your creative neighbors: building friendships, opportunities, and projects by looking up local creatives on Substack and LinkedIn.

👗 A Regency-era ball in a Rust Belt town: A bookshop owner in Steubenville, Ohio, , started throwing Jane Austen balls and 500 young people showed up in costume to dance with strangers. So many takeaways from this, but primarily: Stop waiting for the thing you want to exist. We’re all craving community, interactivity, physicality, connection, right? So take the initiative and plan something. (Need pointers? I love ’s Group Hug newsletter on community craft.)

🖊️ A discovery that Claude can turn your handwriting into a font: Oh, the irony that schools don’t teach penmanship anymore so the generations for whom LLMs are interwoven into daily life won’t even find this use case fun. BUT, living in the moment: excited to play with this.

🔍 A frank excavation of today’s “career crisis”: breaks down our “society-wide career funk” into six factors. I agree with all of them, unfortunately.

👩‍🔬 A challenge to take the Tuesday Morning Test: As writes, “Tuesday morning at 10am tells you everything.” It’s the best opportunity during your work week to tune into what you’re doing, how you’re feeling about it, and what to make of that data.

⏲️ A Pomodoro timer, but make it whimsical: A free online Pomeranian-themed Pomodoro timer (it’s a time management method that boosts focus by breaking work into 25-minute intervals separated by 5-minute breaks) brought to you by the kooky creative community and digital trade school ILoveCreatives.

📫 A 25-year-old got a job by mailing in her resume: Everything old is new again. Camille K. Manaois got her job as a social media account exec at a communications agency by snail-mailing her application. Along with her resume and a recommendation letter, she included a note that said: “Some applicants rely on algorithms. I’d rather rely on a more reliable route: your desk. Thank you for your time in reading my materials.” It’s wild that her move was effective at, as the piece puts it, “breaking through a sea of sameness,” but that’s the state of things. I remember several radical acts of application from my own 20s, including dropping off a carrot cake accompanied by my resume in Nutrition Facts form at an agency called Carrot Creative. (They did not respond 🫠.)

🌶️ The 4P’s of Spicy Thinking: In a world soaked with AI-generated content and beautifully formatted nothing-burgers, truly fresh thought is what not only stands out but is required for go-forward professional success. I love everything the former Publicis Groupe Chief Growth Officer writes, but this piece was especially useful.

⚖️ A new metric for measuring your success: In his interview with his close friend restaurateur Will Guidara, Simon Sinek argues we should measure success in school, work, and life as the level of accomplishment (A, B, C, D) divided by the hours invested. The point is to measure the efficiency of achieving a result rather than just the outcome. The extra you squeeze out of yourself past a certain point has diminishing returns, and the real cost is what you don't invest elsewhere (relationships, rest, creative thought, etc.). We all define our own denominator. Sinek said,

“I was always very stressed out with people who were my peers, who are making bigger deals, they’re making more money, their social media following is bigger than mine. I was always intimidated by it. And I beat myself up. I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, I don’t have the work ethic they have.

And that’s when it occurred to me, hold on, that their A is over 50, and I’m a B plus over three. I’m very happy with my B plus in the world.”

🤸 of blends work and play to get plork!: Plork, coined by artist Corita Kent, is a more joyful, resourceful way to actually get things done. Adding play to work can be as simple as giving your meetings unusual names or color-coding your spreadsheets.

Is this my new life motto? ⤵

🎁 A few of my go-to working mom gift recommendations, all things I have and love or have gleefully gifted:

• BaubleBar custom birthstone ring (just got this, with my birthstone, my husband’s, and my two sons’)

• Slip silk eye mask (I have one at home and in my carry-on suitcase for work travel)

• French enameled locket (so sweet with a family photo tucked inside)

• Puffy initial necklace (I love wearing jewelry featuring my kids’ initials especially when I’m on the road for work)

• Bath & shower oil pebbles (my friend Amanda Goetz takes a “commute bath” at the end of each WFH day to transition from work to family time)

• Ember mug (for constant caffeination; I drink about 4X the amount of coffee since before having kids, whoops)

• Cuyana leather backpack (I feel like a pigtailed 10-year-old when I wear a backpack but this one has now traveled the world with me for work and I highly recommend)

Rooting for you this week,

Allison

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

Subscribe now

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing