This issue’s soundtrack:

I never meant to be a marketer.

Mine is the definition of a non-linear career path.

I studied English, creative writing, and art history. I played jazz drums. I tap danced.

I might as well have had “Creative” safety-pinned to my front like a race bib.

Instead I white-knuckled my way through two years of undergrad pre-med science and math classes, all of which I hated.

I remember viscerally how much I craved a clean career path, a connect-the-dots plan for what to do after graduating college; and nothing felt more linear than becoming a doctor. Impossibly challenging of course, but not confusing or unclear.

I also liked the idea of medicine as a lifelong devotion to helping people.

What I didn’t realize, until a C in physics and a miserable doctor’s office internship finally closed the piano lid on my pre-med pursuit, was that if I didn’t like the work I would be helpful to no one.

Enter: marketing.

I found my way into this field through a funky side door. Graduating into the fumes of the 2008 financial crisis, I discovered that jobs in publishing and magazines—the two fields I felt drawn to—had burnt up. I wrote freelance through college, and one of those gigs turned into a full-time role as a blog editor in 2010.

It was there I discovered marketing.

While the internet and social media emerged as important places for brands and businesses to activate, the world of digital marketing emerged as a viable place to use my creative skills while scratching the itch of a logical career plan.

Huzzah!

Except that, duh, it didn’t work out quite so squeaky-cleanly.

Over the last 18 years, I’ve:

• Worked in seven categories, from restaurants and alcohol to retail tech and pet

• Job-hopped

• Osmosed from brand marketing to retail marketing back to brand marketing then full-stack marketing (PSA: If you’re a brand marketer you CAN learn, and eventually oversee, growth marketing. If you want to talk more about this, we can cover it in Office Hours.)

It’s only when I became a CMO that I could look back over my body of work and see the throughlines.

It’s one of those annoying life truths: it would be so useful to see the macro view while you’re fumbling around in the micro day-to-day, but it’s only in retrospect that it all makes some sort of sense.

There’s still so much left to do, and build, and shape in my work life, but as someone who mentors and hires dozens of marketers every year let me tell you:

Non-linear paths are the BEST!

Job hopping, working in a broad range of industries, possessing unexpected or seemingly unrelated work or life experience: all of those things are your secret sauce.

I urge you: embrace your multidimensionality as a marketer.

Here are the three ways I’ve used my non-linear path to my advantage:

1. I turned my non-traditional background into identity capital

Identity capital is the collection of skills, experiences, and stories that make you memorable to the people who hire you. The term was coined by Dr. Meg Jay, author of The Defining Decade.

Not having a straightforward career path forced me to get better at being really clear about what makes me unique.

Through dozens of interviews and networking conversations I learned how to tell my story succinctly and articulate what sets me apart.

I also figured out what experiences and stories make great case studies to showcase.

That’s all made me more memorable to hiring managers and recruiters.

Three things I recommend, based on what’s worked for me:

• Add an “Etc.” or “Miscellaneous” section to your resume to feature specific skills, experiences, or strengths that can serve as conversation starters or memory triggers when your name comes up (what I include on my resume: “Read 100+ books a year • mom of two • jazz drummer”)

• Keep a Career Case Studies doc to catalogue learnings and wins from each job; this makes interview and networking prep easier (no digging in your files to remember specific metrics) but also helps you see how even the most idiosyncratic experiences translate into actionable knowledge

• Work out how to describe your career arc in one sentence; no matter how windy your path, if you can describe it simply you give people a narrative to track so weird detours or unpredictable decisions make sense (mine is: “Started out in digital editorial and social media, which led to broader brand marketing; spent formative decade+ in startups, then swung pendulum to massive companies to broaden skill set, then back to growth-stage-business happy place”)

2. I use cross-category experience to create fresh work

As a CMO responsible for aggressive brand and business growth there is nothing more appealing to me than someone with cross-category experience.

The pace of change and volume of complexity in today’s commercial landscape means there’s no rinse and repeat playbook anymore.

I need smart, empathetic marketers with exposure to solving business challenges from a variety of directions, not just one.

Depending on the role it might be helpful to have some exposure to the category, but I never view it as a non-negotiable.

I’ve used this perspective to my own advantage, positioning my seemingly random array of industry experience as a strength, to two ends:

• It’s proof of my flexibility and adaptability; if I can thrive in a variety of environments, I’m less of a question mark as a hire

• It’s fodder for creative ideas; if I’m not cut from the typical cloth, my work won’t be either (and people looking for freshness are the people I want to work for and with)

For example, I leveraged my Shake Shack and Sweetgreen experience turning restaurants into community gathering places to create BarkPark, a dog park retail space for an e-commerce business, including weekly programming like stand-up comedy nights and beer tastings.

More recently, I translated my experience marketing limited-edition human recipes into Ollie’s Holiday Feast, a special edition dish for dogs.

3. I learned how to learn fast

The best performance review feedback I ever got wasn't about results.

Midway through my career, a boss wrote this:

"Learning agility: you quickly learn new disciplines and adapt to new environments and challenges."

I really think my ability to learn quickly, which I credit to my non-linear path and the necessity to pick up on things and adjust fast, is the factor most responsible for my professional success.

If you have a non-analogous background to the colleagues around you, you’re the one who has to acclimate and adjust while still delivering results. That makes you a powerhouse, particularly in a corporate climate that’s changing faster than ever.

In your next mentor conversation, networking chat, or interview, share evidence of how you’ve learned fast and I promise it will make a strong impression.

Ultimately, even if we work because we have to, we still want it to feel good.

And, for me at least, understanding my non-linear marketing path as my secret sauce, the texture that sets me apart from so many people with MBAs and years of experience in traditional marketing roles (which is seriously awesome for them!) is what makes me feel engaged with this work.

It’s what makes me excited for the impact I can still make; because who knows what weird, windy detour will come next?

⚡ Live Wire

A question to carry a little current through your week:

See you next Sunday,

Allison

Subscribe now

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

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☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 10 things to keep your creative blood sugar up this week:

⏳ A fascinating reframe for time: In his latest book Don’t Call it Art, talks about a South American tribe of Indigenous people called the Aymara. They refer to the future as “back” or “behind” time, and the past as “front” time. So when they talk about the past, they gesture in front of them; and when they talk about the future they gesture behind them. They think of time this way because the past is known and you’re already aware of it, whereas the future is unknown and unseeable. What a mind-blower! I love this idea of “putting the future behind you,” refusing to get spun up in the overwhelm tornado of confronting what’s coming.

🤸 A look at how revisiting childhood hobbies is a way to learn who you are as an adult: I’ve been on this exact wavelength lately, interested in how reconnecting to our childhood fascinations, interests, and abilities can juice our work lives back up. If you want to go deeper, I added a new worksheet to The Workroom 🔐 on this exact topic. It’s got six exercises to help you remember what lit you up before work entered the picture, and how that informs the work you’re meant to do now.

🐝 A guide to getting teams to work together as as a superorganism: Humans are 90% chimp and 10% bee. That bee part means we have the capacity to work in a hive, forming a superorganism to work cooperatively towards a shared ambition. SYPartners (I love their Superpower cards) shares what goes into creating transformational experiences for teams that get them to operate like a superorganism.

🐇 A new-to-me concept called “capture myopathy”: In her beautiful memoir Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton chronicles her experience saving a newborn hare at her UK countryside home during COVID. There was so much in this book that captivated me, but I loved this concept in particular: “capture myopathy” describes how prey animals experience a form of fatal trauma when they’re caught and handled. Desperate to escape unnatural confinement, they’ll hurl themselves at cage bars and break their limbs or necks. In a much less extreme comparison, it reminds me of times during my career when I’ve felt creatively or intellectually stifled; when I’ve felt like I’m wasting away in meetings about meetings about meetings, or had to dial down a campaign to appease an exec, or spent more time drowning in dashboards than actually making work.

🧶 A practical exercise for liking your job more: I’ve been really enjoying ’s new podcast Good Work, and the Marcus Buckingham episode in particular stuck with me. Marcus is the co-creator of StrengthsFinder (one of my all-time favorite work assessments!) and a NYT bestselling author. One thing he shared in this interview was how you can improve your working life without loving every part of your job. He calls the activities you love your “red threads” and suggests, based on research, aiming for roughly 20% of your work to include them. Think about that: if you make sure just 20% of your time is spent on stuff that lights you up, you can feel meh about the other 80% and still overall enjoy work. For a 45-hour workweek, 20% is 9 hours a week, or just 1 hour and 48 minutes a day across five days. The practical starting point he suggests: track what energizes and drains you for a week (here’s how I like to do an energy audit), then explore how to maximize the energizing activities up to at least that 20%.

🍽️ A fun heuristic for date night or your standing dinner with friends: Take turns picking a restaurant that starts with the next letter of the alphabet. A this time, B next time, until you make it all the way to Z. Conveniently, if you schedule one dinner every two weeks, it’s a perfect one-year adventure. (Shout out to my friend Jenny for this one!) P.S. Here are the ones I’d personally pick in Philly (and here’s my full map of favorite Philly restaurants & coffee shops):

• A: Alpen Rose (Midtown Village, steakhouse)

• B: Bomb Bomb Bar (South Philly, Italian)

• C: Cry Baby Pasta (Queen Village, Italian)

• D: Double Knot (Midtown Village, Japanese)

• E: Emilia (Kensington, Italian)

• F: Friday Saturday Sunday (Rittenhouse, contemporary American)

• G: The Good King Tavern (Bella Vista, French)

• H: Her Place Supper Club (Rittenhouse, French and Italian influenced American)

• I: Irwin’s (South Philly, modern Sicilian)

• J: Jaffa Bar (Kensington, Israeli-inspired seafood)

• K: Kalaya (Fishtown, Southern Thai)

• L: Little Water (Rittenhouse, American seafood)

• M: Mawn (Bella Vista, Cambodian)

• N: Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House (Chinatown, Northern Chinese)

• O: Osteria (North Broad, Northern Italian)

• P: Provenance (Society Hill, contemporary French)

• Q: Queen & Rook Game Cafe (South Street/Queen Village, vegetarian and vegan pub food)

• R: Royal Sushi & Izakaya (Queen Village, Japanese)

• S: Suraya (Fishtown, Lebanese)

• T: Talula’s Garden (Washington Square, seasonal American)

• U: Uchi (Rittenhouse, contemporary Japanese)

• V: Vernick Fish (Logan Square, American seafood)

• W: Wilder (Rittenhouse, contemporary American)

• X: Pho Xe Lua (Chinatown, Vietnamese)

• Y: Yanaga Kappo-Izakaya (Northern Liberties, Japanese)

• Z: Zahav (Society Hill, Israeli)

🚩A list of 11 red flags in job listings: Even if you’re mostly getting interviews from networking, vs. cold applying to job postings (remember paid subscribers get access to job opportunities and intros from my personal network!), I thought this list from was spot-on. A particularly good one: if no one from the company is posting about the open role on LinkedIn: “Is the manager excitedly posting about this role, eager to fill it with the best possible person? Is the person leaving the role shouting about how great it was? Any peers exclaiming what a great opportunity it is?”

🤖 A fascinating look at why the way we talk to bots matters even if they aren’t conscious: I’ve heard jokes about how we better be polite to our LLMs in case they eventually supersede our intelligence and hold our fate in their hands. This piece by technology researcher HennyGe Wichers makes the case for how showing patience with bots helps preserve those habits in human relationships. She writes, “If we develop a habit of talking to chatbots in an instrumental, impatient and dismissive register, we are rehearsing a way of interacting with others.”

🗣️ A viral storytelling framework from Jenny Hoyos: The 21-year-old entrepreneur, storyteller, and content strategist breaks down her framework for telling stories in 60 seconds or less. For her that translates into millions of views online, but the model works for elevating everyday conversations, too.

📅 A reframe for the white space on your calendar: offers an invitation to reimagine unscheduled time as room to care for other people. The modern pressure to be productive has taken over our leisure time, too; we’re supposed to have lots of Instagrammable hobbies, be physically active, make stuff, grow stuff, have an abundant social life. An alternative is dedicating open time to responding when someone in our community needs help. Communities, in fact, depend on people who have capacity to show up.

From The Creativity of Work archives:

See you next Sunday,

Allison

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

The Career Advice Industrial Complex loves a reinvention story.

My algorithm is locked in lately on chronicles of people quitting their full-time jobs to build a portfolio career as consultants, freelancers, or fractional execs.

And for great reason.

The data confirms that women are exiting the workforce at a record pace. Inadequate workplace flexibility, plus insufficient wages to meet the insanely high cost of childcare, has made workforce participation totally untenable for so many women across the U.S.

I feel this, and see this, every single day. More friends and colleagues than I can count on two hands have quit the full-time grind to start their own consultancy or combine multiple part-time income streams.

If you’ve thought about quitting your full-time role to work for yourself, but struggled with how to make that work financially (maybe you’re the main breadwinner, or your partner has an unpredictable income, or your family can’t afford self-funded health insurance) or logistically (you love working on a big team, your brain reacts best to the structured routine that corporate work provides), I hear you. I am you.

So I wanted to share my own experience, and therefore worldview, on this: Not only do I not think you have to choose between full-time and freelance, I also don’t think you have to blow up your work life in order to make substantive change.

I’ve always, since my senior year of college when I interned full-time at Philadelphia Magazine, had one foot in the full-time world and one in the freelance world.

Throughout my twenties and thirties I wrote freelance while working full-time corporate jobs.

Today I hold a full-time CMO role and also write this newsletter, advise startups, and offer 1:1 marketing career coaching.

I’m proof that you can create your own one-size-fits-one work world, and it doesn’t have to include some dramatic Ctrl+Alt+Del reboot.

Two important caveats:

1. Quitting full-time work is the absolute right move for so many people for so many reasons, and that’s fantastic and inspiring; my dream is for EVERYONE to have a work life that gives them energy and meaning, whatever shape those things take.

2. My therapist once told me that the only two decisions you can’t take back in life are 1) having a baby and 2) killing someone; everything else is reversible. You can leave the full-time world, return, leave again, repeat. Life’s a game and you make your own rules. A life coach also once gave me the mantra “if it’s not a full-bodied yes, it’s a no for now”; you can decide to stay full-time for now and revisit the idea of working for yourself at any point. Your rules!!

If you’re craving more meaning and purpose in your work life but don’t have the wherewithal, brain space, or resources to quit your full-time job right now, there are three things that have worked for friends, colleagues, and myself to make work fit better.

Make one meaningful lifestyle change

You know what a family friend from childhood would do, whenever she needed a reset? She’d buy a new couch.

She wouldn’t move houses, or get a gigantic back tattoo, or change careers. She’d invest in a new object that anchored the space in which she spent much of her non-working time, using it as a lodestar to guide a fresh mentality.

I have other friends who’ve done the same with getting a haircut, or pursuing a new hobby like pottery or deadlifting.

These are all thoughtful, intentional reshaping moves that do require resources (couches are expensive! hobbies eat up time!) but don’t require throwing a grenade into your life.

A mental refresh outside of work can help renew your mindset at work.

Add one income stream

I love ’s approach to crafting her portfolio career while maintaining a full-time role. After a layoff she took 10 months to shape her solo business, then returned to full-time work alongside it.

If you’re employed full-time, you can still do the exploration and discovery Brie did: reflect on and experiment with ideas to generate income outside of your full-time career with the goal of securing one consistent side income stream.

I have friends and colleagues who work full-time but have revenue-generating side ventures like:

• 1-1 and group coaching

• Selling artwork on Etsy

• Designing wedding invitations

• Hosting floral design workshops

• Creating industry communities and events

• Angel investing

Yes, this requires time management (which in turn requires childcare or eldercare support, depending on your situation). It might even be untenable depending on the expectations and norms of your full-time role.

I’m just inviting you to consider that, if you need a ripcord-pull at work, that doesn’t have to mean blowing the whole thing up.

Find or create one peer group

There’s something insanely powerful about a professional collective. I believe in the magic of individual mentors and sponsors, but I’ve found equal alchemy from career peer groups.

I’m in several Slack communities, WhatsApp and Circle groups, and off-the-record industry forums that invite candid conversation, access, and communion in ways that have seriously unlocked doors for me professionally. (One of those doors is the ability to vent to people who understand precisely what you’re going through and what to do about it.)

If you can’t find a group that feels right or you can access yet, make it yourself. Or if you’re part of a group that feels too large to truly bond with people, start an offshoot. For example, I’m part of a marketing fellowship that now has hundreds of participants; there’s a group of 4-5 of us who are working moms and have our own meetups outside the big group.

If you’re feeling unfulfilled at work but it’s not realistic to quit right now, you have options.

Instead of a radical career overhaul, you can change your relationship with your current work from the inside out AND dabble in a combination of full-time and freelance.

If you’ve got specific questions on making any of this work, I’m here.

🥁 Hit It

A question for your brain’s compost heap this week:

Rooting for you,

Allison

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 10 things to take your creative vitamins with this week:

🪴 A reflection on the discipline NOT to scale: After almost two decades in corporate America, I think about capitalism’s obsession with growth ALL THE TIME. In this piece Ryan Holiday writes about how “the venture capitalist mindset—where success is defined by scaling 1000x—has seeped into how ordinary people think about their work.” Having worked for four VC-backed businesses, and been through three IPOs and an acquisition, I feel this so intensely. Our culture glorifies growth, and scale, and speed, and expansion more than wellbeing and balance. It can be crazy-making.

⛶ A breakdown of the anatomy of a QR code: I always wondered how these actually work. I’m such a fan of fascinating things explained clearly to laypeople.

⏱️ A method to tackle annoying tasks efficiently: I love ’s Power Hour idea: one hour, once a week, tackle all your one-time, no-deadline tasks that have been sitting untouched for months. Stuff like clearing out your fridge, updating weak passwords, redeeming cash-back rewards, auditing your subscription delivery frequencies. I’d add making a 1-hour playlist as your timer. I love ideas like this to make something mundane a little more delightful.

🧰 A take on how “maxxing”—optimizing every detail of daily life—flattens human existence by reducing life’s mysteries into problems to be solved: I relate so hard to the idea of trying to “do life right,” i.e. sleeping well, meal prepping, perfecting my morning routine, limiting my screen time, batching my tasks, scheduling self-care, especially in my 20s and early 30s (before having kids tunnel-visioned my brain capacity into keeping everyone in the house safe and fed, with having fun as an occasional, unguaranteed bonus). The problem, Håkon Evjemo argues, is when this effort slides into “solving” mode. He writes, “When we fully reduce life to a series of problems in need of solutions, and when we rely exclusively on these solutions as the means to live a good life, we have succumbed to what I call the scientification of the good life.” What’s the solve? Evjemo suggests it’s this: “[S]top trying to perfect the system of yourself. Instead, cultivate a willingness to be surprised by your own existence, to acknowledge what cannot be measured or fixed.”

🤢 A perfect word for the specific overwhelm of online over-consumption: “Consumer’s indigestion.”

📱 A look at how private equity and Big Tech have infiltrated the fashion world, leading to “fashion slop”: How we got here, and how you can shop more intentionally.

☀️ A reminder to look up and appreciate how lucky we are to be here: The ice cream stand at Shady Brook Farm in Yardley, PA has this sign screwed into its wooden menu board. Who says meditation has to be a whole ergonomic-cushioned, mind-cleared thing?

📖 An assertion on what it takes to be a great reader, and why it’s worth it: I’ve probably spent more hours reading than anything else in my life, including sleep, school, work, and time with friends and family. Reading books, and thinking about reading books, is core to who I am. So much so that sometimes I wonder why reading matters so much to me. And I think Ryan Holiday captured it perfectly:

“To be a great reader, it’s not enough to read—you have to question, challenge, verify, and mark things up. You have to put books through the wringer and authors on trial. You have to go chase things down, follow footnotes, look up references, look up words you don’t know. You have to have a practice of capturing information and organizing it so it can be drawn on when you need it later.”

For me, reading books is so meaningful not just because of the consumption of material (funny, useful, brain-expanding, or otherwise); it’s about the almost athletic, sleeves-rolled-up interactiveness of how I engage with books and the self-knowledge and wisdom I get in return.

🌱 A genius system (Grow, Water, Kill) from on being brutally honest with yourself about how to spend your time: A devastating truth I forget every few years and then re-remember when I’ve overloaded my plate again: energy and time are finite. I love starting things, building things, trying things, exploring things. I’m interested in so much, and find it MADDENING that we only get one life to live. In this piece Ali shares how trying to be great at everything reached a point of making her miserable, and how she navigated out of it.

🎤 A list of hot takes on live concerts: I loved ’s concert hot takes. I’m at a very dinner-at-5PM-bedtime-at-8PM time of life so here are mine:

• Book aisle seats for easy slip-out access

• Binge the headliner’s music exclusively the day of the concert to fully embody the headspace

• Research the set list so I know how early I can leave without missing my favorites (knowing I’ll miss at least one or two as the closer and encore)

From The Creativity of Work archives:

See you next Sunday,

Allison

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

I’ll never forget the day I found out my male coworker made 300% more than I did.

I remember exactly where I was (walking along Broadway below Canal Street, on my way to the train after a yoga class).

I remember these two cliche things literally happened: I stopped in my tracks. And my jaw dropped open.

Then I was furious.

Then I was embarrassed.

And then I had to face a really hard and annoying truth, which truthfully took another few years to settle in:

NOBODY owns your career except you.

I’d been assuming, subconsciously waiting, for my talent alone to take care of things. I thought my hard work would speak for itself. I thought good leaders would notice and reward me. I thought the system would make things fair.

I know how naive that sounds now. But that’s exactly what I was. Until that day I’d never seen the seams of the corporate world’s lining.

More than a decade later, corporate life has changed me in so many ways.

I’ve so often been if not the only female leader in the room, one of the very few. There’s a unique exhaustion and pressure with that experience that’s only alleviated through sharing.

So I‘m sharing below, and if you can relate to any of this, I’d love to hear.

Change #1: I’m hyper-aware of the other women in the room

I had an opportunity very early on in my career, as a Marketing Manager, to present to our board of directors. My four other colleagues and I spent weeks preparing and rehearsing our presentation.

On the big day, I was viscerally aware that I was one of two women in a room full of men.

The only other woman in the room was the sole female board member, a modest celebrity who’d go onto even more pronounced acclaim.

And over the course of our presentation, she was the only person in that room to give me eye contact. She even asked a follow-up question and directed it straight at me.

That experience embossed itself onto my brain. There seemed to be an unspoken camaraderie she had chosen to stitch around us.

Since then I’m hyper-aware of other women in the room, especially a meeting with high stakes. If I can make someone feel not-alone the way she made me feel all those years ago, I want to.

The mutual benefits are real: research by Northwestern, Notre Dame, and the Kellogg School of Management found that women with close inner circles of female contacts reach leadership positions with authority and pay levels 2.5 times higher than peers without such networks.

Change #2: I’m always mindful of what I’m wearing

No low collars, loose buttons, above-knee hems, sleeveless shirts.

Short of accidentally calling your boss “Mom,” I can’t think of anything more intensely cringe-inducing than exposing too much skin at work.

I have no judgement for anyone else’s wardrobe decisions. I’m just so conscious at a bone-deep level of wanting to keep any kind of weird boundary crossing about 700,000 feet away.

I had a few extremely uncomfortable experiences early on in my career, as 60% of women have, and my neurons never forgot.

Change #3: I’m a corporate chameleon

I’ve always been able to thrive in a variety of environments.

I grew up in suburbia, but have lived in major cities (New York, Philly) my whole adult life; I’ve worked in 100-person startups and 100,000-person global conglomerates; I’ve spent time in a broad range of industries from tech to pet.

Adapting to the tone and energy of who I’m engaging with, whether at school drop-off or a marketing conference, comes naturally to me. I never mind attending events where I don’t know anyone.

And because human connection is my number one value (the others are creativity and growth), the interpersonal dynamic I can nurture quickly is always rooted in something real; it’s not like a phony, tooth-whitened insta-bond.

I’ve found being the only, or one of very few, women at work brings my ability to be a corporate chameleon to the forefront.

I’ve gotten well-practiced at adapting conversation topics to male-dominated rooms; at calibrating how and how often to point out unintentional slights (for example, assuming an unknown senior executive is male 🙄); or how and how often to point out gender-coded behavior (like a man interrupting women, but not other men); at not feeling inferior or excluded by the golf-courses-and-college-football of it all.

Change #4: I’ve discovered a personal leadership style I’m proud of

Forging a path through the brambles of corporate America without my Old White Man Card has meant that, since I’m never going to convince anyone I’m anything but a baby-faced woman, I’ve shaped my own style.

Being one of the only women in leadership, and growing through and past the associated impostor syndrome, has led to a full-throated embodiment of me.

Speaking on panels, or leading meetings, I often find myself sharing an unvarnished perspective or naming the 14,000-pound elephant in the room in a way that feels good, that feels truthful.

And I don’t think I would have gotten to this place of go-for-it honesty without the reality of knowing I’d be sticking out anyway and therefore might as well make it count.

I’m not endorsing any of this, by the way. It’s not fun or, like, great for society for women to have to worry about baring some collarbone at work or how to fake-laugh at a “happy wife, happy life” joke.

And I’m so grateful to have worked for, and with, so many kind, brilliant, thoughtful, supportive men over the years.

I’m also extremely conscious of how many minorities experience workplace discrimination. 3 in 5 U.S. employees have experienced or witnessed discrimination based on age, race, gender, or sexual orientation.

So much of how we work today is broken. But I do think it’s salvageable. And one stepping stone on that path is sharing and exploring our own and others’ work experiences.

🥁 Hit It

A question for your brain’s compost heap this week:

Onward and upward,

Allison

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This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 10 things to blend into your cognitive cake mix this week:

🎬 A reminder to be a doer (instead of just watching other people do things): writes, “We can scroll, critique, compare, get jealous, and have plenty of opinions about what others are doing, but eventually we have to look down at our own paper.” What are you actually doing about the things you want?

🎂 Four questions to ask yourself on your next birthday: I adored this piece by on tracking the natural cycles of life, from the nine-year cycles of numerology to the eight-phase lunar cycle. A particular favorite: four questions to ask on your solar return cycle, a.k.a your birthday.

🎷 A jazz orchestra that celebrates the the best themes from video games: I just discovered The 8-Bit Big Band, a Grammy award winning 30-65 member Jazz/Pops orchestra that plays some of the best musical themes written from various video games. What fun!

🚪 A revelation that researchers don’t see personality as fixed: My exec coach Kari threw a grenade into something I thought was true my whole life: that I’m an impatient person. I’ve always been impatient, just like I’ve always been stubborn and have always liked things organized. I just accepted it as part of my identity, one of my crosses to bear. We were talking about my struggle with patience as a mom of little kids; I was reflecting on how I could dedicate effort to increasing my patience over time. She said (here was the grenade), “Or, you could just decide to be more patient.” 😆 I had been telling myself a story about how I was an impatient person and changing this very ingrained trait would take energy and focus. She threw open a door and invited me to walk through it: I could simply decide to be a patient person. Recent research indicates there’s real science behind this. According to this article in Psychology Today, “Instead of viewing traits as fixed qualities, psychologists increasingly recognize personality as patterns that can evolve.”

💻 A managing-up playbook from : I loved this simple system to make sure your boss, your peers, and your clients actually see your work, including five copy-paste AI prompts. I like to think of managing up as conducting without a baton; your boss may be the conductor in your workplace, but a great musician (that’s you) still anticipates changes and subtly guides the energy of the group.

🌱 A beautiful, new-to-me concept called thigmotropism: It’s a directional growth movement in which a plant moves or changes in response to touch or physical contact. I discovered it in ’s newsletter, which includes some lovely images of thigmotropism in the wild. What a gorgeous metaphor for resilience and adaptability.

🎮 A devastating reflection on the gamification of leisure: Justin Neuman writes in Aeon,

“The entire architecture of digital life… nudges us towards chasing outputs rather than generating meaning. We track our sleep and score our calm. Fitness apps turn the morning run into a contest; meditation apps gamify stillness with streak counters; language apps award achievement badges for what used to be called curiosity... The gamification of leisure has turned into work everything that used to exist as its counterpoint. Leisure has become a third shift with its own metrics, its own guilt, and its own sense of falling behind.”

This is such a powerful articulation of why everything feels so supremely exhausting. Even our ostensible “rest” is not restful anymore.

🥃 A liqueur with a fascinating past and present: I’ve become obsessed with the story of Chartreuse. It’s been made by Carthusian monks, deep in the French Alps, since the 18th century. The recipe is based on an ancient manuscript called “The Elixir of Long Life,” and a ton of a secrecy still surrounds it. Only three monks are allowed to oversee the production of the liqueur, with each one only being privy to two-thirds of the recipe and bound to a vow of silence! I find the mythology surrounding something as seemingly simple as a liquid so special in our era of over-sharing.

📞 A 100 Person Project: Brand strategist Shenee Howard embarked on a journey to figure out her professional purpose by talking to 100 regular people, asking them about their problems and using her unique skills to find solutions for them. Some of the calls led to paid work, others led to strong relationships. Four months into her 100 Person Project, Shenee had developed a paid product offering and it sold out.

🤔 A fantastic reflection question: What are you brute-forcing your way into making work? (And what are the side effects?) Former finance exec-turned business founder Will McTighe writes about his experience strong-arming his way through a career that didn’t feel like him, and how he found his way into one that did. I love this question as a truth serum for what feels overly effortful in your work life.

From The Creativity of Work archives:

Take good care this week,

Allison

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🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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I’m a quotation curator.

I have iPhone notes and Google Docs and spiral-bound notebooks filled with quotes, poems, passages, song lyrics, and one-liners to suit most occasions.

Many of them live in my digital commonplace book.

Some live in slides I’ve used in all-hands meetings.

Others live on post-its stuck on my desk, or fashioned into laptop desktop wallpaper.

I find words can be talismans.

In mantra form, they can ground us in high-stress parenting and professional moments and disrupt unhelpful thought spirals. (I use the phrase “Keep it moving” to avoid dwelling and the phrase “No Fear”, which I stole from a former leader, to skydive into scary situations.)

In quote and excerpt form, words can be little tasseled red carpets that transport us. When something feels untenable, or maddening, or depressing, someone else’s beautifully stitched words can be precisely what we need.

I thought I’d share 16 of my go-to, go-get-’em quotes and excerpts for when you need a creative pep talk.

Maybe you got tough feedback, or your team is missing goals, or you’re questioning the value of your work, or you can’t scrounge up the motivation to keep going when everything in the world’s rusting around you.

I hope this compilation, culled carefully from my personal stash of underlines and dog-ears, provides some solace when you need it.

When it feels like you’re not making progress

“Progress is rarely noticeable at a snapshot in time—it unfolds over extended periods of time. If you focus your attention on a specific difficult moment, it’s easy to feel stuck. It’s only when you look at your trajectory over the course of weeks, months, or years that you appreciate the distance you’ve traveled.” — Adam Grant, Hidden Potential

“The chess master’s lightning moves come from decades of slow study.” — Shane Parrish

When you failed at something

“Even in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn’t define you. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from.” — Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

“Most of the things that we do have two possible outcomes: they might work or they might not. Being able to live with the possibility of either is essential if we’re going to move forward.” — Seth Godin

When you have to have a hard conversation

“Freedom lies across the field of the difficult conversation. And the more difficult the conversation, the greater the freedom.” — Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes

When it feels like everyone around you is going farther, faster

“Swim in your lane. Every second you spend looking at a person in another lane comes at the cost of your progress. Focus on yourself.” — Shane Parrish

“He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

When you can’t stop ruminating

“The further you zoom back, the smaller each experience becomes. Zoom in and obsess. Zoom out and observe. We get to choose.” — Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

When your work feels meaningless

“It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing.” — Laura McBride, We Are Called to Rise

“If you want to change the world, stop trying to change the world. It’s impossible. Fix something broken, solve a problem, make something, make something better, make something beautiful, tell a story, hold a mirror up to the world and show the rest of the world how it is. If you absolutely must be more ambitious than that, do any of those things in a way that changes the way a few people see the world. Maybe they’ll do the same as a consequence and maybe, just maybe, you’ll end up doing that first thing which will go unnamed without realizing it. Either in your lifetime or long after you’re gone. Absolutely worst-case scenario, doing it that way usually makes it a little bit easier to wake up the next morning and try and probably fail to do the same thing all over again. It’s the only thing that’s worked for me.” — Franklin Leonard

“I’ve often wished—especially when I was younger—that my work was better, that it rose to the level of genius, that I could write well enough to make something worth remembering. But I think that way of imagining art might make individuals too important. Maybe in the end art and life are more like the world’s largest ball of paint. You carefully choose your colors, and then you add your layer as best you can. In time, it gets painted over. The ball gets painted again and again until there is no visible remnant of your paint. And eventually, maybe nobody knows about it except for you. But that doesn’t mean your layer of paint is irrelevant or a failure. You have permanently, if slightly, changed the larger sphere. You’ve made it more beautiful, and more interesting. The world’s largest ball of paint looks nothing like the baseball it used to be, and you’re part of the reason. In the end, that’s what art is for me. You paint the ball, which changes the way someone else thinks about painting the ball, and so on, until some guy overwhelmed with grief and dread drives out to Alexandria, Indiana, to see what beautiful foolishness thousands of people have made together, and feels a hope that cannot be explained or shared except by painting. That guy adds a layer of his own to the ball, one that won’t last but still matters. Art is not only a genius going forth, as James Joyce put it, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Art is also picking a light blue for your layer of the world’s largest ball of paint, knowing that it will soon be painted over, and painting anyway.” ― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

When your work feels unoriginal

“Aspiring writers will often tell me, ‘I have an idea, but I’m afraid it’s already been done.’ Well, yes, it probably has already been done. Most things have already been done — but they have not yet been done by you.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

When you’re fried

"You can only climb as hard as you rest." — Jared Leto, Fast Company February 2016 issue

“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.” — Tim Kreider

When everything feels too gloomy to even bother

“A lot can happen between now and never.” — Petyr Baelish, Game of Thrones

“If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.” — Anita Roddick, founder of Body Shop

Go absolutely crush it this week,

Allison

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🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 12 things to get fired up by this week:

✍️ A simple site to help you write 500 words a day: If you’re trying to build a regular writing practice, this site will hold you accountable.

😮‍💨 A line I absolutely cannot stop thinking about: “Girls learn to work. Boys learn to win.” From journalist Lindsay Crouse’s NYT essay on how women live longer, but not necessarily better. Research shows that under stress, women power through to their own detriment while men go to extremes: they either take more risks or quit completely.

⏱️ A new concept of time that’s really working for me: I just read Gay Hendricks’s book The Big Leap and dog-eared the crap out of it. So many sticky takeaways. A particular favorite: “Newtonian time” vs." “Einstein time.” In the former, time is something fixed outside of us. There’s only so much of it and we never have enough. In the latter, we’re the source of time and can make as much of it as we need. Our experience of time isn’t nearly as fixed as we think it is; for example, an hour with someone you love can disappear, while a minute touching a hot stove feels endless. To integrate this concept into your life, Hendricks suggests putting yourself on a “time diet.” Every time you think or say something about not having enough time, stop yourself. You aren’t the victim of time; you’re its origin.

🤝 Eight rules for deep, fulfilling connection from The School of Life: I loved these tangible tips for deepening your friendships. This one is such a mind-blower: “A key part of the art of friendship is to know yourself as well as possible and use the data about who you are as a guide to who others are liable to be.” The older I get, the more I think true self-awareness is the cheat code to everything.

🪞 The three tectonic plates of self-help: Say what you will about Tim Ferriss, but the man knows his way around self-help. I really enjoyed this piece in which he distills 20 years of “optimizing” himself into key takeaways. The most poignant, for me, was the revelation that self-help is really, oxymoronically, about improving our relationships with others. Great quote: “Obsessing over the self never provides peace. It cannot make you whole, as you aren’t the whole.”

⚡ A wake-up call that you’re a terrible witness to your own life: writes a great slap-upside-the-head about how we’re all so much farther than we think. We just never give ourselves credit. We normalize our own growth like it’s no big deal. She writes, “You are sitting inside a life a previous version of you was trying to build.”

🎨 A fun idea to start a color album on your phone: collects colors from the cities she visits. I could see this being super fun with kids, too.

🏫 A back-to-school checklist for adults: A fun roundup from featuring suggestions like, yes, resetting your workspace and purging your closet, but also watching a campus movie and reading a campus novel.

🪉 A look at the post-pandemic musical renaissance: Apparently gen Zers are increasingly learning to play instruments. “In an age defined by endless scrolling, instruments like the harp, piano or violin have come to capture a yearning for ancient, analogue crafts.” Here for it! At a recent talk I gave, when I asked the room of about 30 executives how many people played an instrument growing up, only 3 or 4 raised their hands. It’ll be interesting to see if this trend holds.

💌 How to make work people will actually care about: covers five fantastic pointers on how to create work that moves people so you can avoid “the deafening silence surrounding your work [that] can crush your soul.” My favorite: write specifically for someone you know. Stop thinking about your audience as a vague, faceless collection of people; instead, write (or create, whatever your medium is) for a specific person with real feelings, experiences, and a story.

🖌️ A fantastic quote on making corporate work more creative, from Google’s VP of Design Ivy Ross (via her interview with Creative Factor): “[A] company is a petri dish of humanity. It’s a great way to experiment, understand people, and push them to be creative.”

♻️ A satisfying way to spend 10 minutes per week: I’ve been using this site to opt out of all the print catalogues I never subscribed to (I usually get 5+ a week)—so much waste, especially since these are mostly brands I’d never buy from!

From The Creativity of Work archives:

• Six ways to use music to motivate your team: A (karaoke-free) roundup of six suggestions for using music to inspire, energize, and connect at work.

See you next Sunday,

Allison

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

I tell my teams that every time someone has to follow up with them, to bump an unanswered Slack or email, a fairy dies.

You know when else a fairy dies?

When you “should” on yourself.

My exec coach told me years ago to stop “should”-ing on myself.

Translation: when you tell yourself you “should” do something, or be something, or want something, it’s like you shoulder a giant backpack filled with bricks and push yourself merrily off onto a steep hiking path in the midst of a thunderstorm.

You ignore your instincts and agency. You set yourself up to fail, and be miserable while failing.

One of the best parts of this Great Millennial Career Reckoning we’re living through is the destruction of the linear career ladder. When you think of your career as a jungle gym instead of a ladder, the “shoulds” fall away. They drop to the mulch beneath you.

When the paths of possibility are multiple, and three-dimensional, and twisty, sure you might have to contort your body a bit to gain a new foothold; but that new vantage point is so refreshing. It’s freeing!

You no longer need to fret about following in your boss’s or mentor’s footsteps, or wonder why you don’t really want to pursue the obvious next move in your career while being unsure if you’re allowed to not want it.

If this is you, you're in enormous company. Randstad’s 2024 survey found 42% of U.S. workers don't want a promotion, and a 2026 Aerotek report says 41% of job seekers have no interest in becoming managers.

When I talk to early-career marketers who aren’t sure they want to become CMOs, I think it’s awesome. There are five billion other options!

Good marketers tend to be good writers and good strategic thinkers; have good creative instincts and a good grasp on how people think and make decisions.

Do you know how many other lines of work those skills open up? To name just a few:

• Communications/PR

• Economics

• Content creation

• Teaching

• Product management

• Venture capital

If you’re in this place right now, questioning what to do when you don’t want the role you’re “supposed” to want next, here’s what I’d do.

1. Congratulate yourself for listening to your intuition

What an incredible first step. You have the self-awareness to tune into something feeling off professionally, and the guts to explore that feeling.

That pluck alone is enough to set you apart from infinite other professionals.

2. Catalogue your skills, interests, and career values

Don’t overthink this. Literally make a Google Doc, iPhone Note, or Notion page and list each of these out.

Skills: I like to reflect on character skills and technical skills and for many years have kept a running doc (it’s literally called Professional Skills List) to track these skills that are either strengths, or that I need to develop.

Character skills are things like relationship-building, learning agility, confidence.

Technical skills are things like budget management, writing, and whatever else is relevant in your field.

Interests: Just jot down (remember, we’re not overthinking) the stuff you legitimately like to do at work. I’m also a fan of creating an annual work energy audit to attune to the meetings and tasks that energize vs. deplete you.

Values: If you’ve worked somewhere that makes you feel ill, you know what it feels like to be out of professional alignment with your values.

Examples from my experience where it was clear my values were not aligned with the organization’s, leading me to eventually resign:

• I worked somewhere where queer people could not comfortably share their sexual identity

• A company I worked at had photos of women in bikinis baked into their deck templates

• At another job, there was so much backstabbing, political maneuvering, and dishonest decision-making it made me cross-eyed

The most powerful place to make career decisions from is your values. It winnows down all the complex factors of pursuing, or accepting, a job into a clear lens: does this role/company align with my worldview, or does it not?

If you’re not sure what your values are, start with my friends at ’s list of 20 questions that help reveal what you truly value.

3. Fill out your ikigai

Ikigai (生き甲斐, “a reason for being”) is a Japanese concept of an individual’s definition of the meaning of their life.

Use the results of your skills, interests, and values reflection to fill out the four-section ikigai Venn diagram: what you love, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, and what you’re good at.

4. Factor in the season of life you're actually in

We’re not quite done.

With a sense of where the work you love to do and that you’re good at intersects what the world needs and what you can be compensated for, next consider the season of life you’re in.

I love ’s Career Ecology Framework for this.

Part of why you don’t want the role you “should” want is probably due to what’s going on in your world.

Maybe your partner lost their job so you need more stability right now, and the promotion would come with too much risk.

Maybe you’re craving a deeper sense of meaning in your work, and the job that “naturally” comes next feels like more pointless bureaucracy, more meetings about meetings, and dumb, boring debates that’ll fry your brain.

Knowledge is power, baby. So use it.

Tap into where you’re at and how that affects what you need out of your work right now to get even more crisp on what feels right.

5. Go get ‘em: pull a & reach out to 100 people in 100 days

You already know what to do to get the role you “should” want.

You know who you need to network with, you know how to work the internal politics to position yourself for a promotion, you know the types of companies who might be hiring for that role, you know how to refine your resume to showcase your achievements in a way that’ll set you up for candidacy.

What you don’t know how to do is go after the work you actually do want, the work you discovered piques your interest in steps 2, 3, and 4.

So the final step in our five-step reset is going after it.

Making a plan makes it less intimidating. has an awesome tool for this called TETHER, but you can also just make your own list in a doc, note, or spreadsheet of 100 people to contact, and what you want to offer and receive from each of them.

Then set a calendar reminder or scheduled LLM task to send one note a day for 100 days.

Maybe you can’t identify all 100 yet, but you can start by listing out 100 types of people and fill the list in with actual names as you go. For example, maybe you want to contact five alumni from your university who do the type of work you’re intrigued by, ten ex-colleagues who can provide connections to hiring managers at their new companies, etc.

Each conversation will also lead to more conversations if you ask the person who else they might connect you with.

Five steps aren’t going to magically transform your professional landscape. I realize it’s not as simple as that.

BUT I also fundamentally believe two things:

1. Everyone deserves (they can, and should, have) work that lights them up and fires them up in equal measure

2. It doesn’t have to be painful, or expensive, or distressing to find it

So you don’t want the job you “should” want?

Even though you’ve spent years of workplace grind towards it?

Even though everyone says you’re perfect for it?

Even though the math you did to calculate how worthwhile the education investment would be means you “owe” it however many more years?

What a fantastically freeing realization!

Approach this whole professional reimagining with curiosity and eagerness, and you might find that the version of work you actually want is much closer, and feels even better, than you thought.

Always in your corner,

Allison

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you next week,

Allison

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

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

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

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

I’m trying to change that.

It starts with taking the dreaming itself seriously.

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

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

And it makes sense, right?

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

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

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

Well, now things have changed.

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

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

STEP 1: Build Your Audacity List of Wild Career Goals

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

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

We’re going to skydive right into:

Or if you need a little more specificity:

• What aspirations embarrass you to admit to?

• What are your wildest, most delirious dreams?

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

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

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

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

Keep thinking and writing until the calendar block is over.

Now you have your career 🚀Audacity List🚀.

Some of the entries on mine:

1. Publish a NYT bestselling book

2. Open a bookstore & community event space in Philly

3. Be an adjunct marketing professor

4. Give a TED talk

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how we keep your Audacity List awake.

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

Once per month:

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

Once per trimester, so every four months:

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

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

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

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

Related reading:

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

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

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

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

Rooting for you as always,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to:

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

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

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🎉 21 rules for throwing good parties: My favorites:

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’ve got this,

Allison

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

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

Everything about my work life has been logical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I haven’t made professional impulse decisions.

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

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

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

FRIEND OF THE CREATIVITY OF WORK

Your Creative Career: Don’t Go It Alone

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

Looking for a peer group? Explore Creative Factory.

Work is serious.

Yes.

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

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

And yet.

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

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

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

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

Why not explore turning this newsletter into a book proposal?

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

And, more pedestrian:

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

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

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

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

But it’s also kind of exhilarating?!

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

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

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

It’s why-not-ness.

Have a great week,

Allison

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

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• This ceramic zebra pencil pot adorns my desk

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

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

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

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

• Look at these nice abstract zebra-inspired prints

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

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

FRIEND OF THE CREATIVITY OF WORK

Your Creative Career: Don’t Go It Alone

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

Looking for a peer group? Explore Creative Factory.

Have a sensational week,

Allison

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

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

But dumpster diving is hard work.

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

It’s worth it.

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

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

And there’s a lot of garbage these days.

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

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

Creative Inspiration Sources: Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative Inspiration Sources: Curated Roundups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative Inspiration Sources: Aggregators

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

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

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

Creative Inspiration Sources: Design

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

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

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

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

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

Creative Inspiration Sources: Literature & Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a great week,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to:

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

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

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 10 things to chew on this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go make some good trouble this week,

Allison

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As put it:

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

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

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

Best Creative Picture Books for Kids and Adults

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any to add to my list?

Eat something delicious and laugh hard this week,

Allison

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

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

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This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Throwing confetti in your direction this week,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to:

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

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

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s a commonplace book?

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

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

What my 14-year commonplace book practice has taught me

There’s richness in unexpected juxtaposition

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

Curation is a form of autobiography

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

Being a quote collector tunes your creative antenna

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

How to start a commonplace book

Options abound if you want to give this a go:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why keeping a commonplace book matters right now

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

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

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

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

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

Have a great week,

Allison

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

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a fun and functional week,

Allison

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

Subscribe now

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

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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

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