One of my favorite things I’ve picked up from them is a pretty simple way of thinking about how most major discoveries start:

Hmm. That’s weird.

Discovery rarely begins with a eureka! moment. It starts with noticing instead.

Picture a scientist looking through a huge dataset and noticing one little thing that … doesn’t quite fit. A blip. It could be nothing, or it could be noise. Maybe it’s a mistake.

So they look again. They get curious about it. They pull on the thread for a while and see where it might lead. Sometimes it leads somewhere promising.

Sometimes, even to a Nobel Prize. But sometimes it doesn’t.

And you won’t know which until you investigate.

What caught your attention?

After spending so much time around people who explore the unknown for a living, I started noticing the same pattern in the way great creatives approach their work.

They may have a pretty good idea of where they’re going, but they usually don’t know what their body of work is going to look like when they’re just starting out.

Something has to catch their attention first.

Maybe it’s a detail that sticks with you, or a question you can’t quite shake. Something you read about that makes you want to know more, even though you can’t explain why.

It could be your favorite science fact (mine: that astronauts working on the space station see about 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets a day). It could be a specific color palette you can’t stop thinking about, or a resource you wish you’d had when you were going through something difficult and felt alone.

Maybe you’ll write about it or research it later. Or jot it down in your Notes app and forget about it completely. Then six months later, you remember it again.

I do this. Constantly. I’ll save something because I’m not sure why it caught my attention yet. I’ll pin something to a Pinterest board for safekeeping until I’m ready to follow up on it again.

And I’ve started making it a habit to come back to a question I’ve been circling, before I really know where it will take me.

Pay attention before you produce.

There’s a lot of pressure on creatives to be producing … all the time.

Build the portfolio. Design your personal brand. Find your niche. Make your thing. Put yourself out there. Again and again.

But there’s real value in the part of the creative process that happens before you have anything to show for it.

That space where you’re just paying attention. Collecting things that matter to you. Taking the time to notice what makes you stop for a second and think, wait, what is that?

This has always been an important part of creative work, but it feels especially relevant now that making things is something almost anyone can do. Because our tools are getting very good at helping us make things.

AI can generate an image before you’ve figured out what you want it to say. It can write a paragraph before you’ve gotten a word in. It can give you ten ideas for scaling something globally before you’ve spent enough time with the thing itself to know whether you even like where it’s going, or whether it makes sense for you to pursue.

So the question becomes:

What’s actually worth making?

Follow the thread.

For most of my early career, I thought getting where I wanted to go meant becoming some shinier, more impressive version of myself. I thought I needed one more credential, one more certificate, or one more piece of validation before I could really begin.

I see the same thing in the journalism and digital media students I mentor today: they’re already curious, already so capable, and still … always sure they need just one more thing first.

But when I look back, that’s not how the best parts of my career happened. My favorite projects and most rewarding experiences unfolded a little bit more like a blip. They started as noise in the data. Something weird I noticed, a thread I pulled and followed before I knew where it was leading.

You don't have to know where it's going.

When I started Creative Code, I didn’t have a perfectly formed idea of what it would become. But I did notice that I kept asking the same questions:

How do people actually build creative careers? What makes the work sustainable? What happens when the tools change and we need a new playbook? How much of your career do you actually get to author yourself?

So I kept going. I leaned into it.

Some of those ideas have become essays. Some are still sitting in my notes app. Some probably won’t see the light of day. And I’m okay with that.

I just want to keep paying attention.

Hmm. That’s weird.

Let me look again.

A few of you found Creative Code through my last essay, The New Creative Currency Is Signal, and I’m glad you’re here.

In that piece, I wrote about what happens when making things becomes easier than ever. When everyone has access to the same tools, the same platforms, and increasingly the same technology—how does anything we make stand out?

This is why focusing on your signal is so important: cultivating your taste, your perspective, your judgment. The things that make your creative work recognizably yours.

But you can’t develop taste without paying attention. And you can’t make anything interesting if you aren’t collecting anything interesting along the way.

Taste is built from what you notice.

Which brings me to my little black notebook.

Field Notes

I got into the habit in the summer of 2014, the year before I graduated, at a writing program in Georgia where one of my professors gave me some of the best creative advice:

“Most of what we perceive is intangible,” he told us. “But the details are what allow your creative work to reach someone else. And if you want to get better at remembering the details, you keep a list.”

So I did.

At first, maybe I kept the notebook around because I liked the idea of being the kind of person who kept a little black notebook and paid attention to the world around her. I’d pull it out to document whatever caught my attention: a sentence I overheard, something strange someone was wearing, a thought that arrived before I had anywhere to put it.

The lists went something like this:

Pink tiger lilies. A too-long kiss in the parking lot. The smell of a campfire. Somewhere, a trumpeter practices.

Or:

Brunch rush at the diner. Yellowed coffee filters. A slick of ice on the road. Peach cobbler.

I wrote down Friday nights with my friends. The sticky booth and the moths circling the ceiling fans at our favorite diner. Boxed wine at a house party.

My friends and I would drive into Atlanta, get a slice of cheesecake, wander through the High Museum. I’d sit at a coffee shop with a cortado and my bright red nails and that little black notebook on the table beside me.

And I have to admit: it looked good there.

It felt like me.

What I didn’t realize was that I was going to spend that summer training myself to pay attention to the little details.

And without knowing it, I was beginning to build the thing I’d eventually learn to call my taste.

That’s really what taste is, after all: A record of what you’ve paid attention to.

Learning to Look

Long before I would have called it “taste”, when I think about where mine began, I keep coming back to I SPY.

Do you remember those books?

I loved them as a kid. During free reading in elementary, I’d grab one off the shelf and spend the next half hour completely absorbed in worlds made from hundreds of tiny things.

A penguin, a unicycle, a stick of bubble gum. An ice cube, a pinecone, a little twist of lime.

The premise was simple: look closely.

Because the longer you looked, the more there was to see.

Every page was a little universe. Colors and textures and seemingly random objects arranged into scenes that could feel mysterious, playful, eerie, or nostalgic…without saying much of anything at all.

Someone had chosen every heart-shaped lollipop. Every curl of ribbon. Every waxy pear and chocolate coin and tiny piece of bric-a-brac.

Had decided it all mattered.

And somehow, together, those tiny decisions became a world.

I think creativity works a lot like that. It rarely begins with a fully formed idea. More often, it begins with a nudge:

I like that. Why did that make me stop? I want to remember this. There’s something else here.

You notice. You collect. You follow your curiosity a little further.

Eventually, patterns start to emerge.

And somewhere inside those patterns?

There you are.

Everything Happening in the Margins

I stopped keeping lists somewhere along the way, and years passed before I noticed I’d lost the habit completely.

I’d gotten very good at moving through my days without really looking at them. Nearly all of my attention went toward work: the next project, the next goal, whatever I needed to figure out next.

For a long time, I thought the most important parts of my life would be those goals I was moving toward—the job, the city, the next big project, the version of myself I was trying to become. And those things do matter.

But if you keep your eyes fixed on the major milestones long enough, you start missing everything delightful that’s happening in your life, right there in the margins.

After spending a while on autopilot, I began missing the other parts of myself.

The writer. The person who wanders through museums and wants to know why the lighting in one restaurant feels cozier than another. The person who notices a weird chair in a thrift store and thinks about its design the rest of the weekend.

So this weekend I bought another little black Moleskine.

And with it, I made myself a promise: to pick the art of noticing back up.

Follow the Side Quests

I almost never walk into a thrift store looking for anything specific.

That’s what I like about it.

I’ll run my hand along a rack of clothes I’d never wear. Pick up a strange tchotchke. Find a heavy wooden frame and imagine what might happen if I redesigned our living room around it. And most of the time, I leave with nothing.

But every once in a while, I find something I didn’t know I needed until it was sitting right in front of me.

And the magic of it all?

There’s no algorithm at the thrift store.

Do I like this?

Does this feel like me?

Would I have chosen this if I hadn’t happened to walk past it?

I have to decide that for myself.

I think we need more spaces like that.

In a world increasingly designed to predict what will hold our attention, we’re constantly given more and more of what we’ve already shown interest in. Our feeds learn what we like and build patterns around it. Streaming platforms suggest what to watch next based on what we’ve already seen, and liked.

But creativity needs novelty. Surprise.

You have to come across things you aren’t looking for. You have to give yourself the chance to have a reaction of your own.

I’ve been practicing this in very ordinary ways lately.

I’m writing this at a doughnut shop with light blue walls and framed prints of horses and pheasants. There’s a vanilla latte beside me and my little black notebook on the table. I walked through the gardens on my way over, taking care to notice what’s blooming, what’s fallen away, and what’s grown since last time I visited.

Turns out, “stopping to smell the roses” is actually pretty strong creative advice.

So now, I notice the room first when I go somewhere new. The lighting. The glasses on the table. The music. All the tiny decisions someone made that most of us won’t consciously register.

Someone decided all of it mattered.

Creativity Starts With Collection

We talk about creativity as though it begins when you sit down to make something.

Open the document. Pick up the camera. Throw the clay. Start the project.

But the creative process begins earlier—with what you collect before you ever begin. Things that caught your attention for no particular reason:

An overheard sentence. A strange lamp. The painting that made you stop. The restaurant where someone chose exactly the right light. A pink tiger lily. A too-long kiss in a parking lot. A little twist of lime.

Taste isn’t only knowing what looks good, or what’s culturally compelling.

It’s knowing what you, specifically, are drawn toward.

And you learn that by paying attention to your own attention.

What makes you stop?

What do you photograph even though you have no idea what you’ll do with the picture?

What do you keep thinking about three days later?

Over time, the collection becomes a pattern.

The pattern becomes taste.

And taste becomes part of the signal that makes your work recognizably yours. That’s why protecting your attention matters. It isn’t separate from the creative process. It’s where the creative process starts.

I still like knowing where I’m going. I still like having something to work toward.

But I’m learning there’s a difference between direction and tunnel vision.

It’s easy to spend so long looking toward the next thing that you stop seeing where you are now. You stop collecting. You stop noticing. And eventually, you have less and less to make from.

So when I feel stuck now, I try not to reach straight for the question of what to make next.

I look around first.

I follow whatever I’m curious about, even when I can’t tell where it’s going. I take the long way home. I let myself have side quests, and I try not to need them to add up to anything. Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t.

For now, I have my little black notebook again, and I’m writing things down.

The strange lamp. The sentence I overheard. The doughnut shop with the light blue walls. The place I want to go back to because of the way the light came through the window that day.

Small things, maybe.

But someone always decides they matter.

In the I SPY books, in the restaurant with the good light, in every little world someone has carefully arranged—someone looked closely, and chose.

This time, I get to be the one who decides.

There’s an old model for how creative careers have traditionally been built.

permission → opportunity → body of work

In it, someone gives you a chance first.

The internship. The job. The publishing deal. The seed funding. The gallery show. The introduction.

Then you begin building your body of work.

But a different path is emerging—one that starts with giving yourself permission.

body of work → signal → opportunity

I’ve been thinking about that second path a lot lately, especially as I hear from students and creatives trying to break into the industry, recover from burnout, or build careers with more ownership over their work.

The truth is, it has never been easier to begin building that path yourself.

There are still plenty of careers that begin with the “right” school, the right internship, the right introduction, or the right opportunity. A trusted recommendation, a recognizable employer, or a prestigious credential can still open doors. Those paths do exist, and they’re valuable.

But we’re also living through a moment when another path has become possible—one you can build yourself.

The work you make before anyone invites you into the room often becomes the reason they eventually do.

Every time you write, design, sketch, record, experiment, or share an idea, you’re doing more than making something new.

You’re developing your perspective.

Piece by piece, those ideas become a body of work.

Over time, people begin to recognize the perspective behind it. They understand how you think long before they ever read your résumé or sit down for a conversation with you.

So when the opportunity comes...

They already know why you belong in the room.

Where Opportunity Begins

I found myself thinking about this after seeing something Shonda Rhimes shared on Threads. Someone asked how she’d break into the industry if she were starting out today.

Her answer wasn’t what I expected:

This is Shonda Rhimes—the creator behind Grey’s Anatomy, Bridgerton, and How to Get Away with Murder. A writer, producer, bestselling author, and founder of Shondaland whose stories have built worlds, launched careers, and shaped modern television.

Her advice wasn’t about waiting for the right introduction before you begin.

It was about making your work—and putting it where people can find it.

I haven’t stopped thinking about her answer because it reflects a much bigger shift happening across creative industries.

Creators are building audiences before they sign book deals. Journalists are turning newsletters into multiplatform media companies. Podcasts become streaming specials. Internet series become studio projects, with the works. Independent creators are building businesses that rival traditional institutions.

The line between independent work and traditional media feels much more porous than it used to.

For me, that’s one of the most exciting shifts happening right now.

It means more people have the chance to follow their curiosity, develop their perspective, and build meaningful work before someone else decides it’s worth paying attention to.

The rules are changing, and more people get to decide what a creative career can look like.

Building Your Signal

That’s where I keep coming back to the idea of signal.

When I talk about signal, I mean that unmistakable feeling of knowing who made something before you even see their name.

It’s their perspective.

Their curiosity. Their taste. The questions they keep returning to. The kinds of stories they can’t help but tell.

Eventually, those themes begin connecting across everything they make.

Whether it’s a newsletter, a business, a podcast, a video, or even a conversation, you begin to recognize the person behind the work.

That’s the kind of work I think is worth investing in.

I think about this often because early in my career, during an interview for a NASA internship, someone told me:

“You’d be the perfect candidate if you had a science background.”

They weren’t wrong.

I studied journalism.

But I remember thinking that maybe my different perspective was exactly why I belonged there.

I asked something along the lines of:

“Are we trying to reach more scientists? Or are we trying to reach more people like me?”

That question ended up shaping so much of my career.

I’ve spent the last several years translating complexity, looking for the human story, and helping people connect with ideas that might have otherwise felt out of reach to them.

The tools, platforms, and opportunities have changed. But developing a perspective people can recognize and connect with is still some of the most important creative work we can do.

It matters now more than ever.

Before your work opens doors for you, it changes you.

You learn what you care about.

Your taste becomes sharper.

You discover what only you can contribute.

More than that, your work becomes evidence of what you’re capable of.

By the time the invitation arrives, you’ve already built something no one can take away from you.

So I’ll leave you with a few questions I’ve been asking myself lately.

• What ideas do I keep coming back to?

• If someone discovered my work for the first time today, what would they recognize me for?

• What’s one small piece of work I could make this week that moves that body of work forward—even if no one is asking for it yet?

Not just at our neighborhood coffee shop or the garden center down the road, but in a life I’d once imagined for myself.

The restaurants that might have once lived on my “someday” vision board are now the places where friends text, Patio tonight? I spend slower evenings wandering our garden to see what decided to bloom overnight. I bake without needing a reason to, and catch myself daydreaming about what my writing rituals might look like when I finally sit down to write the book that’s been in the back of my mind for years.

Our cat, Misty, stretches into patches of afternoon sun on the red brick porch while the cicadas begin their annual hum in the trees above.

At some point, this place stopped feeling new to us and became home.

A year ago, none of this existed. Or at least, not in my everyday life.

It would be easy to look back and tell this story as though everything changed in the blink of an eye. A clean before and after.

But that isn’t really true.

If you’ve been following along with Creative Code, you know I’ve spent the last year experimenting with a different way of living. Planning a creative vision in seasons. Choosing a few guiding words instead of a list of goals. Building toward a feeling instead of a metric.

This is what the other side looks like.

Almost exactly one year ago today, Shane and I packed the last of everything we owned into a moving truck and set off for our next adventure.

One of the final things to go was a tomato plant, the last keepsake from the little cottage garden we’d built behind our place in Old Greenbelt. Somehow, it felt right that it should make the six-hour drive south with us.

We were leaving behind eight years. Eight years of routines, familiar co-op grocery stores, favorite walking paths, deep belly-laugh friendships, and the versions of ourselves we’d become there.

Not everyone gets the chance to start over. But we did.

I was fortunate enough to have a remote job, and we were both ready for something different. One afternoon, we looked at each other and asked a question that felt equally reckless and freeing.

Why not?

That small question became the beginning of everything.

Looking back, I don’t think I understood how much I needed that reset.

Nothing was wrong, exactly.

On paper, life looked good. I was building a career I loved. I had wonderful people around me. There were plenty of reasons to be grateful.

And I was.

But somewhere along the way, I’d stopped feeling like the author of my own days.

Creativity became something I squeezed into the margins. I kept waiting for life to slow down enough that I’d finally write more, host friends, make art, learn pottery, become the version of myself I imagined.

It never did.

Around the same time, I started feeling homesick for a place I hadn’t lived in for years.

For the South.

I missed hearing crickets after dark. Missed the humid green blur of summer. I missed the feeling that nature wasn’t somewhere I had to go, but something I lived inside.

It was one of the first clues that the life I wanted next wasn’t waiting where I already was.

So we left.

And then the hard part began.

Here’s what the vision board never shows you.

Starting over is uncomfortable.

Not in a cinematic, country-road-sunset kind of way. In a slow, ordinary, day-after-day kind of way.

For months, I was a stranger in a new place. It was my own choice, to be fair, but that didn’t make it easier.

I didn’t have friends to text and invite over. I had a house full of boxes, a job on a screen, and suddenly, a whole lot of extra quiet I didn’t quite know what to do with.

There’s a loneliness that lives inside any real reinvention, a stretch where you’ve left the old life behind, but the new one hasn’t fully arrived yet.

As much as it hurts, you have to be willing to stand in that space for a while.

Today, my calendar isn't really any less full.

I still have back-to-back meetings. Deadlines. Laundry to fold, groceries to buy, weeds to pull.

But the rhythm of my life feels completely different.

Now I open the back door before I open my laptop. I try to notice what’s blooming before I notice what’s new in my inbox. I chitchat with the barista before I sit a while and write. I write because I’m curious about something, not because I need to produce more.

From the outside, those changes probably sound small.

To me, they’ve changed everything.

Because I realized creativity was never another thing to fit into my life.

It was the way I wanted to live it.

The image on the vision board is the easy part.

How you get there is made of countless small choices no one sees.

You don’t wake up one morning transformed into someone new. You become someone new slowly, by choosing, again and again, to build the life anyway.

To say yes to coffee with someone you barely know.

To invite people over before the house feels ready.

To water the garden a little longer in the mornings.

To write the first paragraph.

To keep showing up for a life you want, long before it fully feels like yours, and especially through the seasons when it doesn’t feel like much of anything at all.

And then, on some completely ordinary Tuesday, you notice you’ve become a regular.

Not just somewhere.

But here, in a life you once imagined.

As summer settles in, I hope you find a few quiet moments to look inward, too.

What’s working?

What’s asking to change?

What feels heavy?

What’s making you feel alive?

You don’t have to turn everything upside down. Sometimes the next chapter begins with a single question.

Why not?

And sometimes, a year later, you look around and realize you’ve been living inside the answer all along.

I’m writing to you from the garden. I’ve spent most of the morning pulling weeds, trimming back our wild mint, and seeing what made it through the recent storm. There’s dirt under my nails and basil growing faster than we can use it.

Gardening has become one of my favorite reminders that big things start with small intentions. No matter how hard you visualize it, nobody can achieve a full, lush cottage garden overnight. First, you need to prepare the foundation for your big plans.

You pull a weed. You turn the soil over. You make room for whatever you’d like to grow there next. And you have to be ready to work with the season you’re in, not against it.

Which is why the way we usually talk about setting big goals doesn’t quite sit right with me anymore.

You probably know the standard formula for goal-setting. Pick something ambitious you want to achieve, then break it into SMART milestones: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.

It’s a useful framework, honestly. It can turn your vague desires (get healthier, grow my business, take more time to create) into something you can act on.

But one part of that acronym matters more than the rest.

Relevance.

The problem is that most traditional, long range goal-setting depends on our constant outputs … year-round.

But creative energy doesn’t work that way.

Like the garden, our creativity has its seasons. And the things that sustain your energy are often deeply personal. They’re tied to what genuinely lights you up, not just what you think you should aspire to achieve.

💬 What’s the point of pinning a Lamborghini to your vision board if you genuinely love your Honda?

The same goes for how you get where you’re going. If you have a goal of living a healthier lifestyle, that doesn’t mean you need to hit the weight room every day or you’ve failed. If your version of fitness ooks like a long walk with a friend, an evening in the garden, or Sunday yoga class, that counts too.

You can chase ambitious goals and still feel like yourself in the process, as long as that goal, and your steps towards it, actually means something to you.

A few years back, I stopped designing yearly vision boards.

I loved the act of creating them. The ritual of collecting images, imagining a future, arranging it into something that felt tangible and within reach. I just didn’t love living with those vision boards, not after a while.

By midyear, something would always start to feel a little off. The future I’d pinned up in January (beautiful and aligned at the time) no longer matched where I was actually headed at that point. By late summer, the board was just a nice-looking artifact I had outgrown.

My work as a media strategist taught me something important:

Sustainable, large-scale growth does not happen all at once.

So we plan in quarters. Three months at a time — small enough to stick with, flexible enough to adjust, structured enough to build in momentum, and short term enough that it doesn't lock us into a certain path.

One of the most freeing realizations for a team or solo project is the idea that at any moment we can change, iterate, create a new way forward. Eventually, I started wondering why I wasn’t planning my creative life the same way.

Now my vision boards change with me, and with the seasons. When my energy shifts throughout the year, the board shifts with it.

I’m a visual thinker and an emotional one, too, so this approach works well for me. It may not be your thing, and that’s okay. But if annual goal-setting has ever felt rigid, or out of step with your real life, planning in quarters can offer a little more breathing room, because it moves the way you do.

Here’s the approach I’m using as this season turns over, and we head into Q3 with July:

Skip the metrics and timelines for now.

Start with three words — three words for how you want the next few months to feel, and where you want your creative energy to go. Don’t choose words that only sound impressive or reflect what you think you’re supposed to want.

Make them relevant.

Then define them. We each carry our own associations with the same word, so write down what each one means to you. Don’t choose words because they look good on paper. Choose the ones that point to where you genuinely want your energy to go.

Think of them as a creative code for the season ahead.

Here are mine for this season:

Creativity

Making, experimenting, and inviting more play into my everyday life.

Community

Deepening relationships, contributing to something bigger than myself, and showing up well for others.

Visibility

Creating out loud. Standing behind my ideas and values. Refusing to stay small.

Next, choose your planning medium.

Pinterest is the obvious one for vision boards, but Canva, InDesign, Miro, or something physical like a scrapbook or a bulletin board work well too. I recommend making an evening of it — invite your friends over, pull out magazines and scissors, put a record on, order takeout, and enjoy the act of making something with your hands.

Then start gathering imagery.

Don’t aim for a literal representation of the words you chose. Aim for feeling.

For example, a word like “community” doesn’t need a photo of a crowd. It might be a set dinner table, a sunlit kitchen, a porch at golden hour, a handwritten note, or a well-worn ceramic mug. It’s about what community means to you. What it feels like, to you.

Follow the feeling more than the logic.

The shift that mattered most for me was realizing a vision board doesn’t have to be aspirational. It can simply be a collection of textures, relationships, environments, and moments you want to have more of in your life.

A snapshot of all the conditions your creativity needs in order to thrive.

This is about cultivating a different kind of approach to goal-setting, a much more sustainable one.

Once your board starts taking shape, keep it flexible. Rearrange things, remove images, add new ones. Let it evolve as you do, for a while. I’m designing mine in mid-June so I don’t feel rushed, and can arrive at a board design I really love by July.

As you edit, place your design somewhere you’ll actually see it — taped to the mirror, pinned above your desk, saved as your desktop background, tucked into your journal. Ideally, somewhere you can look at it before you jump into your day, a reminder of what matters most to you in this season.

And it’s important to remember, a vision board doesn’t change your life on its own. It isn’t magic.

So think of it more like a compass you can set.

The real shift happens in the smaller decisions you make after creating the board. How you spend your next free Saturday afternoon. What you say yes to, and what you finally stop forcing through The projects you decide to let slowly grow, instead of rushing them toward visibility before they’re fully rooted.

The point is to spend your energy where you genuinely want it to go, instead of grinding against yourself to achieve some surface level outcome or metric.

That’s how a strong creative season gets built.

And that’s what Creative Code is about. Not optimization for its own sake, or a creative life that simply looks good on the surface.

But a rhythm and a creative practice that feels good to you, and one you can actually sustain for the long game. One that leaves room for change, growth, rest, ambition, and becoming.

One season at a time.

Guess what? Creative Code* recently crossed 120 subscribers. Thank you for being here in these early days. I’d love to know what’s resonating, and what you’d like more of — essays, tools, or guides. Hit reply anytime to let me know your thoughts. I read every message.

Speaking of messages — a reader recently sent me this note, shared here with permission:

Thank you for that, T. That intersection (ambition, creativity, identity, and who we are outside of performance metrics) is most of what I think and write about here.

I’m really glad I get to keep building Creative Code alongside all of you

Creative Code — a newsletter about storytelling, creativity, and building meaningful work in the age of algorithms.

It’s easy to slowly edit yourself away without even realizing you’re doing it.

Especially online.

If you’re creating out loud, you pretty quickly figure out which parts of you people can understand the fastest. The smart part. The polished part. The strategic part. The version of you that sounds the most “credible.”

And then, without meaning to, you start creating only from that place.

I definitely did.

When I first started creating in public, I stayed very close to the version of myself that felt professionally legible. Career advice. Communications insights. Thoughtful (but safe) observations. What I knew people could most immediately categorize.

Because after spending years working in institutional storytelling, where precision and responsibility matter deeply, I think I started associating professionalism with restraint.

Like the more curated I could become, the more seriously I’d be taken.

Meanwhile, I sideline the stuff that makes me feel most energized.

Emotional storytelling. Internet culture. Narrative arcs. Human behavior. Art. Design. Nature. All the strange little things that shape how I see the world and where I find meaning in it.

I worried leaning into them too much would somehow dilute my credibility. So I treated those interests like cliff notes instead of my foundation.

But then something interesting happened: I noticed that hiding those things that make me, me, was actually starting to flatten my work.

Because our creativity, the unique quirks that make us tick, was never meant to separate from the strategy.

Creativity is the structure underneath it all.

One of the first questions I ask when approaching a major campaign (and I’ve worked with some of the biggest brands on and off the planet) is this:

What can only we say?

Not: what trend should we follow, what format is performing best right now, or what content algorithms are prioritizing right now.

Just: what perspective is uniquely ours to share?

I think that question applies to almost everything — the brands you build, the stories you tell, the communities you create, even your own presence online.

The stories that resonate most with us aren’t trying to sound universal, not at first. No. Instead, they sound very specific. And then more and more people start to recognize themselves in those stories. That’s how they scale.

The best stories have texture, details, and a real point of view. We can feel when someone is observing the world and sharing their perspective with us, instead of recycling whatever they’ve already seen online.

I had a moment of clarity around this while working on a major campaign at Kennedy Space Center. I had dreamed for years about covering a launch. Being close to something so historic. And at the same time, I’d been looking for the right moment to start sharing more of my actual creative perspective online.

But when I was finally there — at the press site, with the countdown clock, feeling the weight of that hot, sticky Florida air — I was not thinking about optimization or personal branding.

I just kept thinking:

This is the coolest thing in the world. I want people to feel what this feels like.

And as I took out my phone to record, that thought changed how I showed up. I stopped trying to sound impressive and instead, focused on bringing people into that moment with me. In that moment I abandoned every protocol, every how-to guide I’d read.

What I created then felt a lot more true to me. It reflected the way I actually move through the world.

And people responded to that.

We are living through an era where polished content is increasingly easy to replicate. At times it seems like my entire feed blurs together: same tone, cadence, and even the same ideas, all nicely packaged (and only slightly uniquely.)

But there is still something incredibly difficult to replicate:

Your perspective.

Your contradictions. Your taste. Your emotional references. Your strange obsessions. The particular things you notice. The winding path you traveled, that shaped the way you see the world.

Those things are your fingerprints, and great creative work requires them.

The creators I am most drawn to right now are unmistakably themselves. You could recognize their work before seeing their name pop up. They’ve developed a recognizable way of seeing, a sense of taste, and curation.

What audiences connect to most are often the exact aspects people try hardest to smooth away: their specific interests, emotional depth, unconventional career path, their intensity. All in the name of a fear of being called “too much" or, worse, not being understood.

Earlier in my career, my creativity sometimes felt secondary to strategy. I can remember times where I was turned away from certain rooms, because I was too creative. Now, audiences are exhausted by generic messaging and interchangeable content.

Creativity is one of the most valuable assets in communications and I would argue, in any field.

Because differentiation matters again.

Most meaningful creative identities are built from a unique blend of perspectives. Combinations that were never supposed to fit neatly together: science and storytelling, systems and emotion, institutional and creator, strategic and deeply human.

The weirdness, it turns out, is usually what people remember.

If you recently subscribed to Creative Code, there is a decent chance some part of you is trying to reconnect with your creativity too.

Maybe you are building something new. Or feeling burned out by performative productivity. Maybe you’re successful on paper but feeling disconnected from your actual voice. Maybe you are simply tired of feeling like you have to edit yourself down in order to be understood.

I think the version of me who needed this essay most was the one trying very, very hard to fit in when she was actually meant to stand out.

So here’s the question I keep coming back to:

What story can only you tell?

Not the version designed to sound impressive online.

The real one. The one shaped by your perspective, your experiences, your contradictions, your curiosity, your unique way of moving through the world.

That’s what makes people feel something.

What parts of yourself have you been editing out of your work?

Because they feel too personal, too niche, too emotional, too strange. What would happen if you let a little more of that into the room with you?

What do people consistently come to you for that feels effortless to you?

The thing you notice naturally. The way you make people feel. The perspective that feels so inherent to you, you barely recognize it as valuable any more.

Where are you trying too hard to sound “correct”?

Think about your writing, your creative work, your content, your personal brand. Where have you started performing a polished persona instead of expressing your unique perspective?

What moments made you feel most energized creatively this year?

The moments where you lost track of time, where curiosity took over. The moments that reminded you why you wanted to make things in the first place. Pay attention to the common thread.

And finally:

What story can only you tell?

The story shaped by your particular way of seeing the world. Your unique way of being.

That’s where real creativity begins.

🎨 What story can only you tell?

Hit reply. I’d genuinely love to hear it.

And if this resonated, subscribe to Creative Code for essays on storytelling, creativity, intentional living, and building meaningful work that feels unmistakably yours.

Creative Code is independent from my institutional work. The reflections here are personal — shaped by curiosity, creativity, and my experience.

I waited for permission to become creative again.

Not productive.
Not strategic.
Creative.

Growing up, storytelling came naturally to me. I think that’s true for most of us as kids. We create before we understand what it means to be perceived. Before we learn what’s practical. Before we become afraid of being embarrassing.

And then somewhere along the way, we start making ourselves smaller.

Sometimes it’s a bully. Sometimes it’s a teacher. Sometimes it’s a well-meaning parent trying to steer us toward stability. For me, one of the brightest sparks dimmed during a period of my life when I desperately wanted to belong.

Slowly, I learned how to be more agreeable and less expressive.

Sometimes we hide the parts of ourselves we’ll need most later on.

Creative Code just turned two years old.

I started it during a trip with friends along the California coast after another bout of burnout, the kind that sneaks up slowly and then hits you all at once. After six years on a certain track, I looked up and didn’t recognize the life I was building.

Wall-to-wall traffic. Gray office air. Entire weeks spent staring at screens, convincing myself that eventually, somehow, things would feel different.

I loved my work. That was never the problem.

The problem was that work had become the only thing there was, and I felt completely disconnected from myself.

One foggy morning in the redwoods, I brought my journal to a stone garden and sat alone for a while. I had tried meditating for years with little success before it suddenly changed everything. Funny how that happens. Sometimes the things we need most only click once we’re finally ready to receive them.

That morning, I let myself dream without constraints for the first time in years.

What I wanted most was authorship over my own life.

I loved helping clients bring their visions to reality, but somewhere along the way, I had stopped nurturing a vision of my own. I wanted a space to practice creativity again. To think out loud. To document what living and building and growing actually looked like in real time.

To play again. To experiment the way I did when I was younger.

So I gave myself permission to begin.

I opened my computer. Opened a new tab. Started a Substack.

I called it Red Letter Day — after one of my favorite Southern phrases, the kind my grandma used to say when I brought home a shiny report card or recited a poem at the school play.

But this time, I wanted the phrase to mean something different.

Less focusrd on collecting accolades and more about feeling connected to myself again.

It didn’t happen instantly. It wasn’t organized, graceful or linear.

But little by little, things started changing.

Today, Creative Code has surpassed 100 subscribers, and somewhere along the way, I became a paid writer of my own words.

More than the numbers, it’s been the connections, the creative opportunities, and the feeling of returning to myself after years of drifting away.

That’s what beginning changed for me.

The hardest part of creating — especially creating out loud — is rarely a lack of talent.

It’s the permission we refuse to give ourselves.

We invent endless reasons not to start. We list every person who might judge us. We convince ourselves that our fear is actually wisdom, that hesitation is somehow keeping us safe.

And so we wait.

For permission.

The Artist’s Way calls this voice the Inner Critic. And Julia Cameron is right about that. But just because that voice lives in your head doesn’t make it true.

People will judge you regardless.

They’ll have opinions whether you stay quiet or decide to build something meaningful. Whether you play small or finally allow yourself to be seen.

You might as well give them something to talk about.

If you need permission to start, let this be it.

Begin before you feel ready. Change your mind later. Start over if you need to.

Grow into it.

But begin.

This is your permission.

The one you’ve been waiting for.

Permission to begin.

Three Things

Creative Code reached #40 Rising in Arts & Illustration this week, which feels especially meaningful after writing this essay.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and growing alongside me over these last two years. I don’t take it lightly.

World-building & on ramps.

For my friends in PR, advertising, and marketing, creativity is at an all-time premium. World-building is becoming the gold standard for modern brands, and as Rachel Karten recently pointed out, the people who succeed in this era will be the ones who create multiple “on ramps” that invite audiences into a larger story, not just a campaign.

Storytelling is infrastructure.

I was recently invited to give a talk on how creativity and story enable impact at scale. The more I work across media, partnerships, and brand ecosystems, the more convinced I become that storytelling functions as infrastructure for how ideas scale, connect, and endure. This framework can apply to everything from a global brand to a personal brand. If I wrote more about this idea, what would you want to know?

All around me are doctors, founders, artists. People trickling in after their day jobs, converging over sparkling wine and light bites. On my walk to the cobblestone patio from the car, I always cross my fingers for a spot in the sunlight.

Today, one opened at exactly the right moment. It felt fitting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about coherence lately. Convergence. What it means for ideas to connect across platforms, projects, and people.

This week, I watched students I mentor graduate from college. And almost immediately, familiar questions started surfacing. First, the “what now?” and then…

• How do I position myself?

• How do I communicate my value?

• How do I explain everything that makes me, me, when I don’t fit neatly into one box?

I understand the tension, especially for multi-hyphenates and multi-passionate people, because I am one.

We live in a culture that wants to pre-sort people. To compress them into clean labels and predictable paths. To make them immediately legible.

Especially now, in a world of algorithms and applications and personal branding, it can feel like the people who succeed are the ones who know exactly how to package themselves from the very beginning.

I want to push back on that.

You do not need a perfectly organized five-year plan to build a meaningful life.

You do not need a polished brand document to communicate who you are.

What you need is a throughline.

Not a rigid niche, or a perfectly optimized identity.

A throughline is the deeper pattern connecting your work, voice, perspective, and instincts over time.

It’s the connective tissue underneath the titles, pivots, projects, and experiments that still sounds unmistakably like you.

Importantly, your throughline is not your personal brand.

Your personal brand is how people perceive you.

Your throughline is the deeper internal pattern underneath it all. The recurring pull behind the kinds of ideas, stories, people, and projects you naturally move gravitate towards.

Mine?

Storytelling with heart and scale.

It shows up everywhere.

In how I react to a pitch in a meeting. The partnerships I pursue. The stories I’m drawn to tell. The moments I want people to feel. The kinds of conversations I linger in longer than everyone else.

It shaped decisions I was making before I had the language for it and, once I could name it, the decisions I began making more deliberately, too.

A few years ago, I started building what most people would probably call a “personal brand.” I became more intentional about what I shared on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Substack. Thoughts I once would have kept private started becoming things I explored publicly instead.

At first, I thought that exercise was about clarity. Finding “my niche.” Figuring out how to communicate my value and creative identity clearly. Positioning myself correctly. Figuring out the perfect way to package my experience into something concise and understandable.

But over time, I realized something else was happening.

The platforms changed. My roles evolved. My interests expanded. Some opportunities and connections surprised me entirely.

But certain themes kept resurfacing.

Storytelling. Curiosity. Emotional resonance. Designing systems that help people feel connected to something larger than themselves.

That was my throughline.

And once I recognized it, and committed to it, decision-making became a lot clearer.

Instead of asking, What is the goal here? I started asking:

What keeps pulling me forward?

That pull became my guide.

—

In a sea of people urging you to define your unique value proposition, build your personal brand, and package yourself into something instantly understandable and legible to others, I think the better question is simpler:

What is your throughline?

• What keeps resurfacing across environments, projects, relationships, and ideas?

• What kind of work makes you lose track of time?

• What perspective or advice do people consistently come to you for?

• What have you lived through, that makes you see the world differently?

• What themes continue showing up, even as your daily life changes shape?

That’s your signal.

And once you start recognizing it, you can begin building around that throughline with more intention.

You bring it into meetings. Into creative productions. Into leadership. Into what you share online. Into the kinds of opportunities you say yes to, or no to.

Over time, people begin to associate you with that perspective.

Not because you forced a personal brand or narrative.

But because you clarified your throughline, and started designing a life around it.

I was about to graduate college when I ran — literally ran, tears in my eyes — to find Grant Blankenship, my boss at our local GPB affiliate.

It was a small, three-person radio station in Macon, Georgia. I was the third.

Grant had spent the last year dispatching me to cover community features: a country music star donating to the county hospital, a reinternment debate at the Ocmulgee Mounds, the origin story behind a famous barbecue recipe. The kinds of stories that rarely make national news but matter enormously to the people living inside them.

It was where I fell in love with media. With storytelling as a way of reaching people where they are.

I put myself through school working two jobs. I was a Pell Grant student from a small town in Georgia. I didn’t have a roadmap.

What I had was an instinct for finding the story.

And, apparently, for applying to things I had no business getting.

Preparing to graduate, I applied on a whim to two radically different internships I never expected to land.

I got both.

One was shiny and prestigious — Gimlet Media in New York City, at the height of what felt like podcasting’s golden age.

The other was with NASA, as its inaugural science radio and podcast intern. They had dozens of shows and no real audio program to speak of.

A blank slate.

I told Grant about my dilemma. He looked at me and said:

“You could build something.”

I’ve thought about that sentence for years because it wasn’t just career advice. It was a philosophy I’d hold onto:

Build, don’t fit. Invent, don’t inherit.

When students reach out now asking how I got to NASA, the questions often arrive in a flurry. How did you get there? What did you do? How do I do the same?

Some have their next five steps mapped out in a document.

I’m often tempted to tell them to shred it.

Because the best paths, especially in creative careers, are shaped by unplanned openings. Little forks in the road you find without meaning to — ones you stumble into and only later realize were bringing you home.

At the time, choosing NASA sounded almost irresponsible. I was maxed out on student loans, aching for something beyond ramen, and wanted what everyone who grows up without much money wants:

Security.

I'd spent four years studying media. I wanted that degree to mean something in the industry. Taking a swing on NASA — even a storied institution that had literally sent humans to the Moon — felt like a detour I couldn't afford.

I went anyway.

It came down to values. I wanted to use whatever gifts I had toward something that could better the world.

Eight years later, I’m still there.

I always said I’d leave when I stopped learning, or when I got too jaded. Neither has happened.

A few years in, Gimlet was acquired by Spotify and eventually shuttered. In that same chapter, I made Forbes 30 Under 30 for helping pioneer a streaming media approach at NASA that didn’t exist when I arrived.

The blank slate turned out to be my foundation.

I’ve come to believe creativity isn’t a personality trait. It’s a way of thinking, of approaching problems. Creativity is a method, a muscle. A practice of making one plus one equal ten — finding leverage where others see a dead end.

Which means it’s something you can strengthen. Something you can live by.

For me, that’s looked like taking the community radio story nobody else wanted because I was genuinely curious where it led. Applying to two wildly different internships instead of the one that made obvious sense. Choosing the blank slate over the shiny thing, and trusting that building something from nothing was its own kind of credential.

Again and again, it has looked like following what lights me up — and trusting that aligned choices compound.

In short? It’s a practice.

So when people ask me how to get where I am, I understand the impulse to want a map.

I was that person too.

But I don’t think maps build interesting lives.

Attention does. Curiosity does. Courage does.

What looks like a career plan in hindsight was, in real time, a series of interesting yeses I made along the way.

You can start wherever you are. Not by mapping your next five steps. But by asking a different question:

What is the most interesting thing I could say yes to right now?

More often than not, that’s where your path starts.

And sometimes, where there is no path —

that’s where the building begins.

I’m writing to you from our local bookstore, which has its own coffee shop attached, appropriately named Footnotes. The greenery shining through thick black-paned windows makes the entire brick building light up like a jewel box from the outside in. Before we moved here, I had been hoping for just a place like this.

Small corners of a new hometown to belong to.

There’s a coconut latte warming beside me, and our beach trip kicks off tomorrow morning. Growing up, my dad had a tradition of taking us to the bookstore to pick out a beach read the night before a big trip. This year, I brought that tradition back.

Sitting here, it’s the first time in a little while I’ve felt myself exhale.

If you’re new here, welcome.

I started Creative Code in fall of 2025 because I was looking for a place to talk about what it actually means to build a creative life with intention and care, without abandoning yourself in the process.

The most successful creatives I’ve met aren’t the ones who sacrifice everything. They’re the ones who live by a code. A way of being in the world that lets them show up big and ambitious and still protect what matters most.

Some of you found me recently, during one of the biggest moments of my career. I’m glad you’re here for what comes after it.

Right now, it looks a lot like stillness.

This letter is a code for repair.

Earlier this year, I got to step into something I had been building toward for a long time.

For nearly eight years, I’ve worked at NASA as a storyteller and distribution strategist. For the past several of those years, that work has been woven into the Artemis program — the historic return of astronauts toward the Moon.

I got to be there for the launch of Artemis II at Kennedy Space Center this month, my very first launch experience. And I keep coming back to the moment right before the rocket lifted off.

Standing at the press site. Looking around. Realizing every single person was sharing the same moment. Scientists. Engineers. Reporters. Kids on their parents’ shoulders.

Hands on hearts. Eyes to the sky.

You feel it in your chest before you even hear it. The sound of the rocket comes after.

What stayed with me wasn’t the scale of what was happening, though it was historic and an honor. It was the shared belief in that crowd. The collective understanding that something meaningful was happening, and that we had all, in that moment, been part of it.

A few months before the launch, before most people knew the crew’s names, I sat across from Christina Koch in a recording studio.

Christina is an accomplished astronaut — and on this mission, she became the first woman to travel to deep space on a a nearly 700,000 mile journey around the Moon.

She’d solo-climbed remote mountains. Conducted research at the poles of our planet. Volunteered to live off Earth for months at a time. And she told me what grounded her through all of that was something very simple:

Perspective.

She told me she feels most at peace in places that remind her she’s part of something much bigger than herself.

I recognized that feeling immediately.

Every time I’ve felt out of place in my career. Every moment I was the only one with a certain perspective in the room. Every instance of discomfort I tried to smooth over or move past quickly — I used to interpret those feelings as friction. Something to fix.

But what if they were signals?

Discomfort isn’t always a detour.

Christina helped me understand it’s actually direction.

After the launch, I came home and felt my heart soften.

Leaving city roads for the thick cover of black walnut trees and mountain laurels. Noticing what had newly bloomed in our little garden. It gives me a different way to think about growth.

After something so extraordinary, the ordinary held even more weight.

Rest used to feel like something I had to earn. But I’ve since learned creativity doesn’t come from an empty place. Repair isn’t something that happens after the work is done. It’s a big part of the work, as necessary as the big reveal.

Athletes don’t run at top race pace every day. A field has to lie empty before it can produce an harvest again. Creative work follows the same seasonal rhythm.

Those seasons matter.

What I keep returning to, sitting here with this now-cooling latte:

Root before reveal.

Not everything meaningful happens in public.

The Artemis II story reached millions. It looked, from the outside, like a moment suspended in time. But the work that made the success possible started years earlier. Just in terms of the communications campaign, interviews with the crew recorded far before launch became the foundation for podcasts, documentaries, live broadcasts, social clips, all vessels for the same story. Stories built slowly, with intention, before anyone was watching.

The same has been true in my own creative work. Months of posts that went nowhere before one post reached millions. Ideas that took shape quietly before they resonated publicly. All because I kept experimenting, willing to try and fail in public.

The visible moment is rarely the whole story.

The waiting. The uncertainty. The stretch where nothing seems to click.

That’s where the work takes root.

You will not feel ready. Begin anyway.

But also: pause when you need to. Repair before you push again.

Christina didn’t build an extraordinary life by waiting for certainty. She moved toward the unknown, again and again, trusting that something on the other side would meet her there.

I didn’t wait either. I am committed to driving right in, and trusting myself in the process.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be somewhere with salt air and a book I picked out the night before, just like I used to.

A small ritual, but a crucial one. A little return to self.

And when I come back — to the garden, to this newsletter, to the big bold work I love — I’ll come back differently than I left.

Not starting over. But rooted.

Creative Code is for creatives who play the long game. Slowly. Intentionally. On their own terms.

For more letters like this,

Subscribe now

Most people do.

We wake up earlier. Start with new productivity systems. Try to force longer stretches of focus time. And when our creative work still feels harder than it should, we assume we just need to try harder.

Here’s what I’ve learned: discipline isn’t the first system that shapes creativity. Environment is.

Before you try to train your attention, ask a simpler question: what kind of environment is your attention living inside?

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk about creative longevity at Monday Girl’s Tastemakers Series. Someone in the audience asked: if you could only fix one creative system first, what would it be?

I didn’t hesitate to reply:

Your attention.

Train your attention before you optimize anything else. It’s the input stream for every creative thought you’ll ever have. If that stream is fragmented and constantly interrupted, no productivity system you kick off later down the line will touch the actual problem.

But there’s a follow-up I didn’t get to share in that room.

Attention doesn’t exist in isolation. It lives somewhere. And that somewhere is shaping how you approach creativity every single day — whether you’ve designed it that way or not.

About a year ago, we made what I’d now call an attention decision — though I didn’t have that language for it at the time.

I thought we were making a lifestyle change. Looking back, it was an experiment in environment.

Where I’d been, the pace and density ran on urgency. Every meeting, notification, and context switch pulls from the same limited mental energy — the kind of focus it takes to get through a demanding day. When that reserve runs low, what disappears first is the capacity to think openly and explore. The kind of thinking where creative ideas actually form.

The change didn’t affect how hard I worked. But it changed what kind of inputs my brain was swimming in all day.

Now, my first input of the morning is birdsong. I walk the dogs before I open a single tab. I reduced the number of decisions my environment was making for me before 9am. My neighbors are artists and makers, and that energy is contagious in the best way.

I didn’t intentionally design it this way. By changing my environment, I just stopped being too busy to notice what was working.

Environmental psychologists call this Attention Restoration Theory — the idea that some environments help the brain actually recover between demands.

Low demand, gentle stimulation, room to wander.

When it stops spending energy filtering noise, it shifts into a different gear — the one where reflection happens and ideas start connecting.

Studies show that several days immersed in nature can improve creative problem-solving by roughly 50 percent. A single walk outside improves the kind of thinking that generates new ideas in ways an urban walk doesn’t.

Your art history teacher knew this. That’s why she moved class outside when the weather warmed. Larry Page knew it too — he didn’t build Google’s makerspaces out of nostalgia. He wanted the conditions for creativity back. The garage was the environment where the collaborative thinking happened.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to:

Your environment is constantly programming the brain you use to create.

This isn’t only a personal creative practice problem. One of the most reliable ways I’ve watched good thinking die in professional settings is the endless parade of new meeting invitations. You spend so much time talking about the work that you never have time to think critically about what you actually want to make.

Good work cannot be rushed or squeezed between back-to-backs.

For any organization serious about creativity, protecting thinking time is a necessity, not a perk.

Here’s what I find most interesting: most people already know which environments restore them. The signal is there. What’s missing is the habit of acting on it.

Ask someone whether they’d rather think in a quiet library or a crowded café, in the mountains or by the ocean. The answer is usually immediate. No deliberation needed.

That response is data. Your brain is telling you what kind of input allows it to think well. Most of us notice the preference and then build lives that ignore it completely.

For me it's space between things — fewer inputs, slower mornings, room to think. For you it might be the sound of water, or a specific quality of morning light.

The pattern is the same for everyone, even if the specifics look different.

If you want to improve your creative output, start with your environment. Here’s the audit I run for myself once a quarter.

The Creative Environment Audit Three questions. Ten minutes. Once a quarter.

1. What is my environment optimizing my attention for right now?

Not what you want it to do. What it’s actually doing right now. Does your morning give your brain a chance to settle, or does it hit the ground already reactive? Look at your workspace. Did you design it, or did it just accumulate around you?

2. What did I inherit that I never intentionally designed?

Notification settings. The direction your desk faces. The first app you open. Most of these weren’t chosen — they just became habit. Pick one thing you never consciously decided on and ask whether it’s actually working for you.

When I transitioned to remote work, I realized I was spending entire days in my office without moving. So I started building in small resets — a walk around the block, a trip to refill my water between meetings. Tiny changes. But they changed the texture of my thinking by afternoon.

3. What is one thing I could change this week?

Not a cross-country move or a major renovation. One concrete change, this week. Work somewhere different for a few hours. Walk before you open your inbox. Turn your desk toward a window. Eat lunch outside.

These feel too small to matter, but they do.

Better conditions beat forcing. Every time.

The brain that creates your work is shaped long before the work begins. Design the conditions, and the work changes with them.

Each week I share essays on creativity, attention, and designing a life that supports meaningful work.

If you run the audit, hit reply and tell me what you discovered. I read every response *

Not professionally. Creatively.

On paper, everything looked fine. My projects were moving forward. And, from the outside, nothing appeared stalled. But inside my own creative practice, it felt different.

I was doing the work. Reading and researching widely. Sketching out new ideas. Filling my notebooks with half-formed thoughts.

But there was nothing polished enough to share, or complete enough to post. So I felt a little immobilized.

For months, it felt like I was circling my ideas instead of moving forward on them.

Then one afternoon, standing over a bare patch of soil, it finally clicked.

I wasn’t stuck. I was underground.

The garden is where I first understood it.

Early spring is a strange time in the garden. You won’t find vibrant color, or any visible evidence that the work you did weeks ago has made any impact at all.

But gardeners know something important: the underground phase is the deepest work they can do. Summer blooms are simply the announcement.

Late last year, I’d been tilling beds. Clearing the dead underbrush, crushing fall leaves into the soil. Hauling manure from my aunt’s farm to spread across ground that still looks completely bare.

But underneath the surface, my garden is already beginning. Roots stretching downward. Seeds splitting open quietly in the dark.

Sometimes things need to root before they reveal.

We’re trained to measure progress by output.

Posts published. Projects launched. Momentum visible.

So when we enter a slower creative season (a period of reading, thinking, sitting with something half-formed) it registers as failure. Falling behind. Not doing “enough.”

But that’s not what’s happening.

The projects that look effortless on the outside are almost never effortless on the inside. Campaigns that land in a big way, ideas that make you feel something. Career pivots that appear bold and decisive.

Almost all of them began somewhere softer.

I spent nearly a year thinking about Creative Code before I wrote a single essay on it.

During that time, I held planning sessions in the garden. Took long, reflecting walks. Collected notes scattered across half-filled notebooks.

Part of that was the slow process of getting comfortable with my own voice again — (which, if you work in brand or communications, is much harder than it sounds.) When your job is shaping other people’s stories, finding your own takes time.

Nobody saw what I was building that year. And, really? There was nothing to show.

But the thinking that looks idle is often the most productive kind.

Now I think back on all the walks, my half-finished drafts. When I find myself in those seasons, I try to remember I’m not falling behind.

I’m tending roots.

Our home is a 1960s brick cottage tucked into the woods. It once belonged to a watercolor artist and his family. Two lanterns line the brick pathway up the hill. Ferns frame the front steps — someone planted them years ago and tended them through seasons we’ll never know.

Every move before this one came with someone else’s decision attached. I went where I was hired, wherever the compass pointed next. This is the first place I’ve ever chosen simply because it felt like me.

Months before we moved, I opened a notebook and wrote two words:

Get settled.

At the time, I thought it meant finishing the logistics of a move. Box by box. Room by room. But a few months into life here — showing up to new places, meeting new people, building a rhythm in a town I chose for myself — I understood.

Getting settled wasn’t a task to check off my list. It was a season.

Showing up before I felt ready. Putting down roots before anything had visibly grown.

That’s always been how the most meaningful work begins.

One of the most dangerous things you can do to a creative project is demand that it reveal itself before it’s ready. Premature reveal doesn’t just disrupt the work. It can collapse it entirely. You’re not sharing something unfinished. You’re uprooting something still forming — exposing it before it’s had time to form.

The enemy of a strong root system is impatience.

Before you launch something — a project, post, pitch, or announcement — pause and ask a different question. Not: Is this ready to show?

Ask instead:

Are the roots strong enough to support what I’m about to reveal?

That might mean clarifying the real idea behind your work, or building a repeatable workflow before scaling. Or even letting something sit one more week before you announce it to the world.

You can’t always control the timing of the reveal. But you almost always control the depth of the roots.

Tend those first, and trust the bloom will follow.

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Mercer is my alma mater. It’s where I first learned convergence journalism, working alongside a public radio station, a local newspaper, and a broadcast studio, all in service of the same community. Not competing. Converging.

My favorite part of these visits is always the time I spend with the students.

This year didn’t disappoint.

One thing I noticed across students at the Murphy Center this year: they didn’t arrive as journalists. They arrived as something else first, and brought that expertise with them.

One came in determined to cover politics at a legacy institution and left seeing new possibilities entirely. Independent creators. Substack writers. People building their own media ecosystems instead of waiting for a newsroom assignment. Another saw it as an act of inclusion. Stories for the people who have historically been left out of them. A third admitted she used to think journalists just write things. Now she develops multimedia packages for the local paper, helping translate legacy reporting for a new generation of news consumers.

That convergence is the point.

A student who studies science, art, or policy and then learns how to communicate it at scale is exactly the profile the industry needs. People who understand something deeply and have trained themselves to make other people care about it too.

Creativity in Journalism Is a Competitive Advantage

What struck me most was the shift from anxiety to agency.

AI. The political climate. The instability of traditional media models. These topics surfaced quickly during the student panel and felt heavy at first.

But inside a program that teaches you to make things, the tone changes. Documentary work. Community reporting. Audio storytelling. When you are building, uncertainty stops being a threat and starts feeling like an invitation.

If you already have a native lens, science, culture, economics, policy, you are not starting from zero. You are translating.

That’s a durable skill.

Tools will change. Platforms will rise and fall. Algorithms will rewrite the rules without warning. The ability to see something clearly and shape it into a story that lands with another human being? That compounds over time, and across platforms.

Creativity is now critical infrastructure for anyone building the future of media.

What Gen Z Actually Wants From Media

I asked the students how they decide what media to engage with.

The answer was not the algorithm.

Yes, they mentioned platforms. TikTok because it makes it easy to follow your curiosity. Instagram and X because they let you go deeper on something you already care about. But underneath all of it was something more specific. They are looking for evidence that someone real looked critically at the work and decided how to shape it. The edit. The curation. The sense that a real person made a decision about what mattered.

These students are not passive consumers. They are scanning for evidence of craft. They want to feel a person on the other side of the work.

In a landscape flooding with generated content, authenticity is a survival mechanism and not just a brand value.

AI and Media: Why Creative Discipline Still Wins

The question everyone in media is asking right now: will AI replace journalists, creators, and storytellers?

That framing misses the deeper shift.

AI can generate volume and mimic structure. It can remix existing patterns at scale. What it cannot do is originate a lived perspective. It cannot care. It cannot translate that specific texture of a human experience into something that makes another person feel less alone.

The students who will thrive are not the ones who master every new tool the fastest. They are the ones who develop creative discipline. The muscle of observation. The instinct for what resonates. The courage to publish before they feel fully ready. To show up and say: here is what I am seeing. Do you feel it too?

Agency is not a soft skill. It is the difference between waiting to be assigned a platform and building one.

The future of journalism belongs to those who resonate. Not the ones with the biggest distribution. Not the ones who scaled the fastest. The ones who are unmistakably, irreducibly themselves.

This is already happening at scale. This week, National Geographic announced its first Creator Cohort, partnering with eight independent creators across nature, science, travel, and history to extend its storytelling reach on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. These aren’t influencers hired to post pretty pictures. They are domain experts with native lenses and built-in audiences.

Nat Geo is betting that the future of its brand lives inside the perspectives of people who already care deeply about something.

That is the convergence the students were describing. Reverse engineered.

Building a Durable Creative Career

Here is what I saw in that room this weekend:

Students with adjacent expertise who learned storytelling as a force multiplier. Creators who see journalism as a vehicle, not a job title. Young media builders who value craft over clout. People who want their work to carry the fingerprint of someone who actually cared.

They are not chasing legacy media as the only path. They are building fluency across mediums. Audio, video, longform, shortform, community-based storytelling, owned platforms, collaborative ecosystems.

Importantly, that is not a lesser version of journalism. It’s a far more resilient one.

And media organizations and mission-driven brands need it now.

Creativity is not a personality trait. It is a practice. The willingness to refine your lens, edit your work, choose what matters, translate complexity into clarity, and keep building even when the system feels unstable.

That skill travels. Across industries, platforms, and technological shifts none of us can fully predict.

Build the creative muscle.

The rest follows.

Three Questions to Build Creative Durability

Based on what I saw at Mercer—and what I’ve learned building media at scale—here are the questions that matter:

1. What’s your native lens?

What do you understand deeply that most people don’t? Science? Community dynamics? Systems thinking? Your durable skill isn’t “content creation.” It’s translating your specific expertise into stories that land.

2. What medium lets you think best?

Audio? Longform? Visual? The students thriving weren’t the ones doing everything. They were the ones who found their format and went deep.

3. Where are you building fluency, not just content?

Fluency = ability to create across contexts. Can you take the same insight and shape it for different platforms, audiences, formats? That’s what travels.

Answer these, and you’re not just making content. You’re building infrastructure.

If this resonated, the next one is worth your time too. I publish Creative Code every Monday—frameworks for building creative work that lasts, even when the systems around you are unstable. For people who are building, not waiting to be assigned a platform. Subscribe here:

Imposter syndrome doesn’t go away. I say this as someone who has the awards on the wall and the career highlights to point to.

I’m still grappling with it. Not every day. But it does still surface, especially when what I’m working on is a little more personal.

So when Monday Girl asked me to present a talk for their Tastemakers Series, I felt that familiar lump in my throat. I’ve been on stages at SXSW and Podcast Movement talking about audio strategy and documenting historic missions. That feels natural. This (talking about how I actually design my life and creative work) feels different. Especially when the audience is other ambitious women in the media and tech industry, women whose work I admire.

When I first connected with the MG founders at the end of last year, something interesting happened. They weren’t that interested in my resume. They wanted to talk with me about the themes I’d been slowly exploring in my newsletter — back when it was still called Red Letter Day. Before it had a strategy, or really, an identity, outside of a free write practice.

They saw something in those early, still-forming ideas and asked me to bring them to their community.

That caught me off guard.

And then I thought about it more. The thing you build quietly, on your own terms, before it’s ready for anyone else — often says more about who you are than your résumé ever will. Sometimes it finds its audience before you’ve even decided what it’s becoming, because you’re showing your homework, the way you think.

When MG members submitted their questions ahead of the talk, I read through them and felt something shift. I thought: I’m still navigating these exact things. How to keep going when your work feels heavy. How to tell if what you’re good at is actually what you love. How to build something resilient when everything keeps shifting around you. How to design a career that sustains you.

Anyone who pretends these questions have perfect answers is lying.

The pressure at the start of a new season always looks the same for me. I start thinking about forward motion — what I’ll publish, commit to, say yes to, in order to reach my goal.

Momentum and output, fatigue and stress, can all feel like proof that I’m doing something right.

I pick up a new project and feel that first rush. I announce the thing publicly because saying it out loud makes it feel more real. I fill the calendar, color-code the tracker, tell myself that this time, my approach will be different.

And for a week or two, it is.

Then life shows up. A hard week at work, or the end of a season that asks more than I planned for. A creative project that needs more thinking than output, and honestly? More energy than I can give.

The beautiful color-coded system sits untouched and the guilt of not using it becomes its own weight.

The part I keep skipping is the design.

To sustain your own creativity, try designing a code.

Design is deciding what the work actually needs before you start moving. What kind of attention it requires. What pace you could realistically sustain not for two weeks but for six months. What would make you feel supported instead of squeezed.

I wanted to write more consistently, so I built an entire color-coded Notion dashboard — recurring reminders, pre-drafted outlines, the works. It looked exactly like a system that should hold. It hollowed me out within week.

What actually worked was simpler, and directly connected to my own code. Changing my environment. A warm latte at my favorite café. An hour with no agenda. Writing whatever came to mind, knowing I could edit later. That small redesign is why I’ve only missed one week of Creative Code in the eight weeks since I launched on December 30th

.

The thing that’s helped most isn’t a system at all. It’s a compass.

Mine has four points: creativity, curiosity, impact, and connection. I call them pillars — a small set of values I return to when I’m making decisions, feeling stuck, or trying to figure out if I’m moving in the right direction.

I didn’t arrive at them by taking a personality quiz or mapping a five-year plan. I arrived at them by taking the time to actually slow down, and notice what was present in the seasons I felt most like myself — and what was missing in the ones where I didn’t.

The specific pillars can shift over time. The practice of returning to them doesn’t.

When I have a decision to make, I check it against all four. Not as a rubric. More like a gut test. Does this feed what I care about most, or does it drain it?

Having four means no single one carries all the weight. When work is your only pillar, work has all the leverage over your sense of self. Spread the weight and you get something back — the ability to move through a hard season without it collapsing your sense of who you are.

If you want the full framework, the [Quarterly Vision Framework] walks through exactly how I use it.

I don’t have it figured out. I’m walking into this week’s talk with that truth in my pocket instead of hiding it.

But I have something to return to. And I’ve learned that’s enough.

Creative Code is a weekly letter on creative strategy and sustainable practice.

Producers have a run of show. Architects have blueprints. Athletes train in cycles.

Creatives are expected to just keep creating.

Finish the project. Hit send. Close the laptop. Start working on the next thing.

And when that starts to feel unsustainable, we assume the problem is us. That we need more motivation. A better routine. Maybe even a total reinvention.

But what we really need is structure.

I’m Katie. I’m a writer and media strategist, and I’ve spent most of the last decade making things inside high-visibility, high-pressure environments. Launches with millions of viewers. Stories that have to work across platforms, teams, and timelines. Creative work that only works when the structure underneath it does, too.

And somewhere along the way, I became just as interested in that structure as I was in the work itself.

What helps us keep making things over time?

How do we build a body of work without letting our work become our entire identity? How do we recognize the throughline between interests that don’t seem to belong together? How do we protect our attention, change direction, or begin again without feeling like we’re starting from zero?

And how do we build lives that leave room for all of it?

That’s why I started Creative Code.

I think most of us are more creative than we give ourselves credit for. Creativity is often much more ordinary than we make it out to be: paying attention, being resourceful, following what interests you, learning your own taste, making something before you know whether it’s good.

Working with what you have.

Creative Code is about building a life that gives you room to keep doing those things.

Some weeks I’ll send you an essay. Other weeks, it might be a question, something I’ve noticed, an idea I can’t shake, or something practical you can use in your own work.

If you want somewhere to start, these are a few pieces that get to the heart of it:

• You Need a Throughline — on finding the deeper pattern connecting your work, voice, and perspective

• Everything in the Margins — on the art of noticing, and why creativity starts with what you collect

• Design Before Momentum — on why sustainable systems matter more than constant output

• Train Your Attention — on protecting your attention in an overstimulated world

• A Seasonal Guide for Creatives — on working in creative cycles instead of chasing constant output

And before you go, I’d love to know something:

💬 What are you trying to make room for right now? A project. A career change. A creative practice. A different chapter. Hit reply and introduce yourself. I read every response.

See you next week,

Katie

CREATIVE CODE ✳
Building with intention, from your work to your world

As a recovering perfectionist, it’s no surprise that I spent a long time thinking about how to show up publicly online before I ever actually started.

When I first began my Substack, I was genuinely impressed by writers who had turned their work into full media brands. Beautiful design systems. Cohesive visual identities. Alliterative titles. Everything looked intentional, well packaged, complete.

As a media strategist, I couldn’t turn off the instinct to treat my personal creative work like a professional project. Start with the landscape. Define the positioning. Analyze the competition. I found myself up at 3 a.m. adjusting title cards and taglines before I’d even finished writing for myself.

And there’s no shortage of advice out there — the five keys to your first thousand followers, the fastest way to game an algorithm, the “right” way to structure a landing page. But if you absorb enough of it, you start building from someone else’s blueprint instead of your own instincts. The result might look okay. It might even perform well. But it won’t feel like yours. You can spend so much time studying how everyone else does it that you forget to figure out how you do it.

Which is kind of the whole point of making things.

We’re living in the era of infinite polish. AI tools, Canva templates, tutorials for everything. The barrier to entry in having your work look professional and put together has never been lower.

So polish isn’t as important as it once was. Your taste is.

The same pattern shows up whether you’re building a newsletter, making pottery, writing music, or designing a campaign. When work stops feeling like yours, it stops being the thing only you can make — which is ultimately what others value most.

The Algorithm Problem

When you consume more than you create, the algorithm becomes your internalized creative director. And it’s pretty bad at the job.

It feeds you what’s already popular, and it doesn’t care about what’s uniquely yours. Scroll long enough and your taste will start to blur. You begin to unconsciously make decisions based on what other people are doing, not based on what matters to you. Your creative instincts start pulling you toward group consensus instead of your inner originality.

Think about it — if your creative director’s entire strategy was “do what’s already working for other people,” you’d fire them.

So why let our algorithms make all the creative decisions for us?

I wrote recently about discovering an AI-generated artist in my Spotify playlist. The music sounded nice, and it even fit the vibe. But underneath its polished veneer, there was no lived experience from that artist to keep me listening. It fell flat for me.

That’s what algorithm-directed creative work starts to feel like. Polished surface. Nothing underneath.

But remember: we show up for the artist, not the output.

What Actually Fills the Well

I want to tell you what actually inspires me, because I think the specificity matters here. It’s not following other people’s content strategies, or 10 step routines. It’s following my curiosity.

In college, I took a type design class on a whim. I even learned to design my own typeface. It was completely new to me, but it energized me in a way I couldn’t explain. I’d come to the art desk every week with the task of building something from scratch — following prompts that had just enough structure to guide me, but ample freedom for me to explore my way through the work.

I still remember watching the documentary Helvetica and realizing that tiny decisions about spacing, weight, and negative space shape how entire societies experience a message.

Now I can’t imagine my work without that foundation. I’m drawn to color, to stark contrast, to playful type. I’m curious about how packaging and story work together. It’s not any one designer I love — it’s how texts and types and textures come together to create a sensory world. (If you’re a fellow type nerd, you know exactly what I mean.)

Some of my best creative work has come from giving myself permission to follow a curiosity like that — and trusting that those instincts will find their way back into my creative work.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about training your attention — designing your environment around what you actually value instead of what the algorithm serves you. This is the other half of that equation. Once you’ve trained your attention, where do you point it? Not toward what’s trending. Toward the ideas that refuse to leave you alone.

Fire the Algorithm. Hire Yourself.

Good creative work always comes back to the same question:

How do you build a story that only you can tell, in only the way you can tell it?

The answer starts the same way whether you’re a space agency or a solo creator. You stop borrowing someone else’s filter and start building your own.

What does that look like in practice? For me, it’s been three things: go offline, go slower, go weirder:

Keep an inspiration list. Not a Pinterest board. Not a bookmark folder. A real list. Write down what catches your attention and why. The “why” is the whole game. It’s the difference between collecting pretty things and understanding your own taste.

Choose slow inputs. Books and magazines instead of feeds. Slow media asks you to stay with an idea instead of swiping past it. You don’t develop a point of view from content designed to be forgotten in three seconds.

Let curiosity lead. Spend an afternoon in a science museum. An art gallery. A weird shop you’ve never walked into. When I lived in D.C., my creativity was fueled by places where media, art, and technology collided — like Artechouse, or a Smithsonian. Now, in the foothills, it’s the woods and the art studio.

Maybe none of this is abstract for you right now. Maybe you’re in that weird space between chapters — mid-pivot, post-burnout, standing at the edge of something you can feel but don’t yet have the words for.

I’ve been there. I’m kind of there now. That’s why this newsletter exists — I’m figuring it out in real time, building the toolkit as I go, and sharing what I find. The systems, the instincts, the creative filters no algorithm can hand you.

If that’s the kind of work you want to do, I’d love to have you here.

🌀 Keep reading: Last week, I wrote about how pottery mirrors the modern creative life. You start with centering, not with the finished product. You can’t “hack” clay — you need steady hands, an idea of what you want to make, and a foundation. And when your first attempt comes out looking like a mess, you don’t get to call yourself a failure. Your hands are learning. Show up again next week and you may just make something beautiful.

So much of my day now moves through screens. Emails, feeds, Slack pings, breaking news alerts. Even when I think I’m resting, my nervous system is still activated. The input never really stops.

That constant stimulation keeps me in a mild state of stress. Cortisol stays elevated. My brain stays in reaction mode.

Maybe that’s part of why I’ve been drifting back toward analog hobbies—and why I see so many others doing the same.

Woodworking. Knitting. Gardening. Puzzles. Pottery.

Activities where the pace slows down and the outcome isn’t the point. Places where I can experiment, make a mess, and follow curiosity instead of a project brief.

Working with my hands gives my brain something it can actually feel. Texture, resistance, temperature, rhythm. It’s feedback that pulls me out of the abstract (i.e my head) and back feeling grounded in my environment.

It’s one of the reasons why I took up pottery. Why others are learning to bake bread, or tend gardens.

Is it really because we need more bowls or loaves or tomatoes?

No, it’s because we need our brains back.

Pottery isn’t something you can “hack.” You can’t rush clay. It moves at its own pace, and if you want to get better, you have to move with it.

When I chose “creativity” as my word of the year in 2025, I joined the Savage Mill Studio for a 10-week intro class on wheel throwing.

I’d done some hand building with clay in high school, and had admired pottery studios and shops on trips to Asheville with Shane and the dogs. But when it came to actually working with clay on the wheel? I was a complete beginner.

So the first time I tried to center clay, I failed. Miserably.

I watched as my classmates’ dishes spun pleasantly while mine nearly shook with a wet lump of unbalanced clay. The left wall teetered high over the right. Was this a bowl, a vase, or some avant-garde art piece?

The instructor came over.

“One of the things I love about pottery is you always start with a practice throw,” she said. “You need to warm your hands back up to remember the sensation, the feeling, the flow. It gives you time to adjust. To find center.”

She showed me how you lob a lump of clay at the middle of the wheel. You can tell if you’ve centered correctly by watching if the piece wobbles as it turns—from a ball of clay to the piece you’re trying to make. Most people get it wrong on the first try, she said. The practice throw is just that: a throwaway, a chance to warm back up.

The practice lowered the stakes.

Find center first. Then build.

I loved that failure wasn’t just expected. It was built into the plan. The practice throw is a key part of the creative process.

Here’s what she didn’t tell me: you can skip centering.

You can pull up walls on off-center clay. Shape a rim. Make your piece look good for a while, at least from one angle.

But the inevitable always happens.

I ignored the centering rule when I felt impatient. After a stressful work week or a disagreement with a friend, I’d sit at the wheel, music blasting, needing to let off steam. I’d just … go.

Each iteration came out … wrong. Thin, wobbly, too far left, too close to the right. I could spend entire, stubborn sessions that way—with nothing to show for it. I ended up feeling friction, frustration, stuck-ness. That familiar feeling of imposter syndrome welled back up.

You’re no good at this, so why even bother?

But every time I started with centering the clay, I’d have a better time at the wheel. I could actually make things, enjoy the process. Eventually I kiln-fired a ring dish. A gnome for my father-in-law.

But to make anything in that class, I had to loosen my grip, be open to where the clay wanted to go that day.

When you center first, you start in a better place. You know what you want to build to, and you have a strong foundation to guide you.

After a few weeks at the wheel, I noticed I was bringing its lessons on centering before building into my professional work.

I tried the centering approach on a creative campaign—the rollout of a documentary. Something I had not done before, bringing together different team members with various ideas, skill levels, and contributions. Our goal: orchestrate a global media rollout that felt connection-focused, resonant, impactful.

So I thought, why not start with centering?

We got in alignment early, clear on the plan. When it was time to shape the bowl (so to speak), we built it with integrity.

Here’s the thing: everyone’s process looks different.

My friend does yoga before her D.C. commute and arrives at work with ideas fresh, ready for pitch meetings. Our local cafe owner bikes downtown to get his thoughts brewing before serving the morning crowd.

For me, I need my hands busy. Clay, camera, pen on paper. That’s when my brain shifts into the mode where ideas flow.

It happens on nature walks too, watching light filter through leaves, taking out my camera. Anything that lets me focus on environment, color, light, beauty. My best ideas don’t come at my desk. They come after an afternoon in the garden. When I’ve run a bath and am looking through design moodboards. Reading a novel. Walking the dogs. In the shower. At the wheel.

Those are the areas where I slip into a meditative state, relaxed enough to brainstorm, to create without pressure of building something grand.

I know I’m off-center when I’m crabby. When I spent the day glued to screens, back arched (“shrimp mode”, as my friend Emily calls it), obsessing and looping on work meetings.

This is fight-or-flight. Your prefrontal cortex—the part responsible for creative thinking—goes offline. Your brain is too busy scanning for threats to think of creative possibilities.

When we’re relaxed, our brains produce alpha waves—the frequency associated with creative thinking. Stress shuts this down. Your best ideas come when your nervous system feels safe.

To find your creative center, ask:

1. What puts your brain in a different operating mode? When do ideas come easiest? What makes time disappear? Notice what you're drawn to when you procrastinate. Do you pick up objects and turn them over? Rearrange furniture? Hum while working? Pace while thinking? These are clues.

2. What kind of feedback does your brain need? Not what you should need. What actually works:

• 🧶 Tactile - Hands busy (pottery, baking, gardening)

• 🏃🏻‍♀️ Kinesthetic - Body moving (walking, yoga, biking)

• 📸 Visual - Seeing, arranging, photographing

• 🎶 Auditory - Music, conversation, silence

• 📲 Social - Collaboration, thinking out loud

3. What conditions help you stay centered? Is it a time of day? Environment? Ritual? Morning quiet or evening wind-down? A cleared desk or cozy maximalism? Daily journaling or weekly nature walks? The answers tell you how to design your creative foundation.

Working with clay, you can add, take away, edit and refine. It’s almost completely focused on feeling.

Notice it cracking? Add water. Want it narrower? Increase pressure. Wider? Tug the edges, gently.

As a Georgia native, it’s no mystery why the studio, thick with the smell of fresh, wet clay, earthy and deep, instantly made me feel at home.

I finished those 10 weeks with so much more than practical experience. It taught me about foundation-building.

We’ve since moved to North Carolina. Now that our boxes are unpacked and it’s starting to feel like home, I’m ready to start again.

Notice what you’re drawn to. When you procrastinate, where does your attention go? What makes you lose track of time? Those aren’t distractions—they’re clues.

Add one analog practice. Something that gets your hands busy and your mind quiet. Pottery, baking, gardening, drawing, walking without your phone. Pick one. Try it once this week.

Start your next project by centering first. Before you jump into action, ask: What do I want this to feel like? What foundation do I need? Set your intention, then build.

Don’t force your way to creativity. Feel your way there.

Start with center, every time.

🎨 If you’re trying to find your creative center again, find more Creative Code essays here.

Every Monday, I send a new letter exploring environment design, cultural trends, creative practice, and building creative work that makes a difference.

P.S. Next week: How your media diet shapes your creative environment—and a 3-question audit for a digital detox.

P.P.S. If this resonated, forward it to someone who’s been grinding themselves into the ground trying to “be more creative.” Sometimes we all need permission to enjoy the process instead.

Rolling Stone reported she’s likely entirely AI-generated. I recognized her album cover while scrolling Instagram—sandwiched between memes and vacation photos.

It made me pause.

Is a love song still moving if you’re not sure the artist ever actually felt what they’re describing?

Here’s what really got me: I’d been listening to this artist for weeks by the time I saw that headline. I’d connected to her music. Those lilting R&B notes, the runs, the phrasing.

But the moment I read “AI-generated,” something broke. I felt, honestly, a little betrayed.

And that’s exactly the point.

We don’t just want good work. We want to feel connected to the person behind it.

The Real Problem With How We Think About Creativity

When asked how they’d feel if their favorite podcasts featured AI hosts, 47 percent of listeners surveyed by Sounds Profitable said they’d be less likely to keep listening. Including 28 percent who said they’d be much less likely.

We care deeply about the person behind the work.

What separates work that truly resonates from work that’s just fine? A unique perspective. The ability to notice patterns others miss. To see where two lines intersect.

But here’s what almost everyone gets wrong: they think creativity is about working harder, being more disciplined, or finding the right hack.

Actually, creativity lives in your environment.

And most of us are trying to create in environments designed for everything except creativity.

What Happens When You Stop Demanding More From Yourself

There’s a quote I love: when a plant starts to wilt, you don’t demand more effort from it.

You change its environment instead.

Think about the last time you had your best creative idea. I’m willing to bet it didn’t happen during your scheduled “creative time” at your desk.

It happened in the shower. On a walk. While making dinner.

Your brain needs specific conditions to do creative work, consistently. And “trying harder” actually makes those conditions harder to get to.

Offline hobbies are on the rise for a reason.

Gardening. Baking. Pottery. Running clubs. Book clubs.

We’re craving “analog” practices because we’re trying to reintroduce something we’ve lost: texture, experimentation, play. The ability to think without a deliverable attached.

When so much of our time is filtered through screens and metrics, working with our hands offers something different.

It’s feedback you can feel.

If you’re tired of forcing creative work and want to redesign how it happens, subscribe to Creative Code - I send essays like this every week.

The Science Behind Why This Works

As more AI tools enter our lives, what defines a “creative” is shifting. It’s becoming less about the final product and more about how that creative thinks.

From a scientific perspective, creativity is shaped by neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to form new neural connections in real time.

Novelty nudges our brains out of autopilot and into active problem-solving. That’s where creativity lives.

So when you’re stuck, you might need unfamiliarity more than inspiration.

Taking a different route home. Trying a nail polish color you wouldn’t normally choose. Ordering a different pastry at your local café.

Learning a new skill—pottery, a language, sourdough—creates measurable changes in how the brain communicates with itself. Imaginative practices strengthen divergent thinking: the ability to generate multiple possibilities instead of default answers.

To think in color, rather than black and white.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I’ve never felt more creative than when I started taking pottery classes in 2025.

The way some people clock off and head to the gym, I did the same thing. But instead, I sat at the pottery wheel.

No deliverable or audience metrics in sight. Just my hands, the clay, and trying my best to make a bowl that would either hold water or collapse.

And here’s what surprised me: the creativity I was building at the pottery wheel started showing up everywhere else.

Better ideas at work. Clearer writing. More interesting solutions to problems I’d been stuck on for months.

Because I’d changed my environment. I’d given my brain permission to play, to fail, to notice things without immediately needing to productize them.

I love the process part of creativity. Brainstorming. Testing. Adjusting. The middle—the stretch of time where nothing is finished yet, everything is in flux.

Most people skip this part. They go straight from idea to execution, then wonder why the work feels forced.

Your Environment Is Everything

Lately, I’ve been returning to photography. Something I loved in college.

Our woods are shifting with this icy winter season, and I’ve been paying attention to how winter light moves through bare branches.

When our hands are busy—framing a shot, kneading dough, shaping clay—the mind can soften a little. Physical, analog activities expose our brains to texture, resistance, and rhythm.

There’s a phrase I keep coming back to: be stubborn with the vision, flexible with the plan.

Soon, I’m heading to Kennedy Space Center for the Artemis II launch. It’s my first time working launch operations. That mix of familiar and unfamiliar—I know the venue, but not this vantage point. I’ll see old friends but build something new together.

That edge between known and unknown? That’s where I want to stay.

What Makes Your Work Irreplaceable

In a world where AI can generate a love song, a podcast, a piece of art—what makes your work irreplaceable is that you’ve lived it.

You’ve failed at something and had to start over. You’ve been surprised by what worked. You’ve had a conversation that changed how you see a problem. You’ve tasted something that reminded you of childhood. You’ve felt the weight of a decision. You’ve stayed up too late working on something that didn’t matter to anyone but you.

Only humans can do that.

But you can’t access that creative depth when you’re grinding, forcing, demanding more from yourself. You access it by changing your environment.

Here’s What You Can Do This Week

Three small changes that create big shifts:

1. Add one analog practice to your week
Something that gets your hands busy and your mind quiet. Baking. Gardening. Drawing. Walking without your phone.

2. Change one small routine
Take a different route. Order something new. Sit in a different spot. Your brain needs novelty to break patterns.

3. Protect one block of “middle time”
Not productive time. Time to brainstorm, wander, notice. No deliverable required.

Stop trying to force creativity through willpower. Start designing an environment where it can actually emerge.

What Comes Next

Creative Code is my weekly letter for people who want to build creative work that actually matters.

Work that comes from living, noticing, being stubborn with your vision and flexible with your plan.

Every week (usually Tuesday), I send an essay exploring creativity as a practice—backed by science, grounded in real experience, designed to help you build work that feels natural instead of forced.

What you’ll get:

• Weekly essays on creativity, environment design, and work that matters

• Practical frameworks like the “plant” principle

• Real examples from digital media, pottery, photography, and launch operations

• Science-backed insights on neuroplasticity and creative problem-solving

• A community of 60+ makers, writers, and creators choosing depth over hustle

What you won’t get:

• Productivity hacks or “10 tips to unlock your creativity”

• Generic advice about discipline and motivation

• Content designed to go viral instead of create real change

If you’re tired of forcing creative work and ready to redesign how it happens, you’re in the right place.

P.S. Next week, I’m going deeper on what I learned at the pottery wheel—including the moment everything collapsed and what that taught me about creative problem-solving. Subscribe now and it’ll be in your inbox Monday morning.

P.P.S. If this resonated, share it with someone who’s been grinding themselves into the ground trying to “be more creative.” Sometimes we all need permission to try something different.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about calibration.

I can feel myself drifting back toward old defaults. Moving quickly. Responding fast. Letting urgency (often of my own making) set the tone for how I approach my creative work. Those instincts aren’t wrong. They’ve helped me build momentum and create opportunities.

But when I’m not paying attention, this mode can hum along automatically in the background, shaping my days before I’ve decided whether that pace is actually required for what’s in front of me for the day.

If you care deeply about what you make, this may be a familiar feeling.

Here’s the question I revisit:

Id moving this way necessary right now, or is it just what I’ve been practicing for a long time?

“You are always committed to something.”

You can be committed to speed. To responsiveness. To staying available. To keeping pace. You can also be committed to the belief that meaningful creativity must be difficult. That your rest has to be justified. That slowing down is risky, and overextending is proof you must be doing something right.

These commitments take shape through habit. Through repetition.

Over time, they compound.

I’ve worked in creative media for more than a decade, learning how algorithms behave and how content systems scale. That experience has sharpened my instincts. I know how quickly momentum can be created, and how easily speed becomes the default.

I’ve also had the chance to peel back the curtain and see what really stays with people.

This year, I’ve been building my own platforms with intention. Creative Code is where I’m practicing a different pace, and I feel the shift.

Here’s what I’m learning so far:

When there’s time and intention going all the way into a project’s roots or foundation, that changes what it becomes as well as who it reaches.

When ideas move too quickly from ideation to publication, audiences struggle to understand what you’re really trying to say. Over time, that gap erodes trust.

This tension is also a cultural one.

Audiences are gravitating toward longer, more immersive work. Toward ideas that feel lived with rather than rushed out. There’s a growing appetite for depth in our world.

That has implications for those of us doing the making.

You can’t consistently create from a state of constant acceleration.

Creativity that lasts tends to grow steadily. It strengthens through consistency rather than intensity. It leaves room for revision, uncertainty, and the perspective of others.

When we move too quickly, we respond before we’ve fully listened. We publish before we’ve fully understood what we’re trying to make.

In a landscape shaped by trends and replication, authenticity is less about exposure and more about presence over performance with our creativity.

That discernment is part of the creative code.

If there’s a question or creative challenge you’d like to see explored in Creative Code next, you can reply and tell me. I read every note.

We need to sit with ourselves more often.

Not to spend that time scrolling or optimizing. And not just until a 💡 lightbulb moment hits, when we immediately start thinking about how to scale, package, or grow the idea.

Stillness can feel indulgent. Especially if you work in creative spaces where output becomes the metric running beneath everything.

• Are you posting regularly?

• Are things moving forward?

• Is your work visible enough?

• Should you stop, adjust it, and try again?

In that environment, making time to rest starts to feel a little suspicious to you. It’s all too easy to wave it off as something you earn later, once the real work is done.

Except the real work does not happen without it.

Think about the last time you stayed with an idea long enough to understand it. Let it linger without deciding what it needed to become. Noticed how it felt before deciding what to do with it.

That part often gets skipped.

There’s a reason so many people feel refreshed over the holidays. For most, it isn’t the travel or the festivities. It’s the downtime we’ve been depriving ourselves of all year.

A brief stretch where pressure eases, schedules loosen. If you’re able to take a day or two off, you suddenly have permission to spend days the way you want to.

For me, time off looks simple. Longer mornings with coffee and writing. Fewer time-sensitive decisions. Large blocks in my calendar that aren’t immediately spoken for.

The issue isn’t that we need weeks off all the time.

It’s that we’ve treated that kind of permission as something reserved for special occasions, instead of something we can design into regular life in smaller ways.

Often, that means changing environments. Sitting somewhere unfamiliar. Letting a question stay unanswered a little longer than feels productive to you.

Those moments are harder to come by now. And because they’re rare, we underestimate how fundamental they truly are.

Instead, we stay in motion. Consume endlessly and call it research. Confuse our activity and constant output with progress.

But anything meaningful needs to root down deep before it grows. The blooms are prettier that way.

When I’m planning something new, whether it’s a personal project, a gathering, a season at work, I don’t start with the end result in mind. At least, not in the tradition sense.

I start with the feeling instead.

So, I don’t think about what it should accomplish, how it will be received, how it will look once it’s packaged, fully finished.

Instead I like to think about how I want the work to feel. For me. Or for someone on the other side of it.

Calm.
Curious.
Steady.
Open.

Once that intention is clear, the micro decisions feel lighter, too. You stop forcing momentum and start moving with intention.

This works for creative work and for life design because you’re no longer chasing a finish line. You’re setting a direction, then orienting toward it.

That may be a better way of working. And a more sustainable one.

As someone who works full time in digital media, I spend a lot of time brainstorming. Gathering references. Talking things through with others. Asking why something works and why something else doesn’t quite fit. And, of course: what could be better?

I love collaboration. It sharpens ideas quickly.

But I also need time alone with ideas. Just me, a notebook. A quiet hour at my favorite coffee shop. Space to follow a thought without the pressure of explaining it to others just yet.

Stories scale better when they’re built from the inside out. When you understand what you’re really trying to say before asking anyone else to engage.

That’s design before momentum.

I’ve stopped pretending my best work can happen anytime, under any conditions.

Instead, I’m designing my schedule around those moments where I can go deep on a subject. It’s not a perfect practice, and doesn’t happen every week, but I’ve been trying to be more intentional withe the open time I actually have.

Some days are for writing, strategy, and long-range planning. Others are better for meetings, admin, and collaboration with teams. Giving myself permission to operate that way, and not try to force output when what I really need are inputs, has made such a difference.

Noticing when you’re forcing momentum, and reminding yourself to pull back instead, is progress.

I’m more honest about the state I’m in when I sit down to make something. If the goal is to reach people, move them, or help them feel connected, I can’t do that from a place of depletion.

(Trust me, burnout leaks into your work, even when everything looks fine on paper.)

That’s become one of the clearest ways I can tell whether something is aligned, or whether I’m trying to muscle my way through it.

I saw another Substacker put it simply this week. Anfisa Nikitina wrote: What’s yours will meet you with ease. Not endless resistance.

I don’t read that as everything should be effortless. Creative work is work, after all.

But there’s a difference between effort and friction.

Effort feels like focus and care.
Friction feels like constant forcing, often uphill.

When I’m aligned with my work, momentum builds gradually. When I’m not, everything feels heavier than it should. That’s usually my cue to slow down and redesign the conditions, not demand better results from myself.

If you’re feeling stuck or disconnected from work you care about, the answer might not be to push harder.

It might be to pause a little longer. Listen more closely. Try to let an idea take shape before asking it to do anything useful for you.

That isn’t self-indulgent.

It’s practical.

And it’s something we can practice quietly, week to week, in whatever small moments we have, in whatever way we choose.

Before you go, a Creative Code for your week:
”Stay with the idea before deciding what it becomes.”