I was recently interviewed for a publication about my career, and one of the questions was: What have been your keys to success?

It’s a perfectly reasonable question. I just found it surprisingly difficult to answer.

How long is a piece of string?

I’ve spent nearly two decades building businesses, brands and ideas. I’ve made some excellent decisions and some spectacularly questionable ones. I’ve had mentors, lucky breaks, periods of extraordinary momentum and many moments when I’ve wondered what the fuck I’m doing. I’ve built things, broken things, sold things and started again an ugly amount of times.

How do you attribute an outcome to any one part of that?

And then there’s the word success, which I’ve always found a little slippery.

From the outside, success tends to be measured in milestones. Revenue. Recognition. An exit. The size of the business. The happiness of your family. The impressive things you can point to and say, Look what I did. Look what I have.

But I’ve never reached a particular milestone and thought, Right. I’ve made it.

For me, success has become something much less theatrical.

It’s the freedom to spend my time how I want. The ability to follow an idea because I find it interesting. The flexibility to arrange my working day around my brain, my children and whatever I’m excited about creating. Having the resources to pursue something without needing somebody else’s permission.

It’s being able to wake up on a Tuesday and decide entirely myself what this particular Tuesday looks like.

I don’t think I was ever chasing success as much as I was chasing autonomy.

And somewhere along the way, I built a life that gives me quite a lot of it.

But the interview question stayed with me. Because while I couldn’t point to a single defining moment or extraordinary talent, I could identify something else.

Habits.

Quite a lot of them, actually.

Some are boring. Some are obsessive. A few might be considered mildly concerning to some. But collectively, they’ve become a kind of personal operating system that allows me to make things happen.

And I suspect that operating system has contributed more to my career than any particular talent ever has.

First, a confession about hard work.

I genuinely believe I’m the hardest-working person I know.

I realise that’s an enormous statement. I don’t say it lightly, and I’m not suggesting hard work makes somebody morally superior, or that everybody should aspire to work the way I do.

But I know my own capacity.

When I decide I want something, I become almost unreasonable in my pursuit of it. I have an unusually high tolerance for work, an unusually high tolerance for stress, and a brain that can become completely consumed by whatever problem I’m trying to solve.

I’m never particularly interested in whether something is going to be difficult.

I’m interested in what it will take, and perhaps more importantly, who I will become in the process.

With Land Lab, for example, I want to build the best supplement brand in Australia. That’s the ambition. In my mind, there isn’t really a question about whether we’re going to get there. The question is what we need to do next to make it happen.

Of course, ambition isn’t a guarantee of an outcome. There are a thousand variables I can’t control. But I can control the amount of energy, attention, creativity and resourcefulness I’m willing to put behind it.

And that’s where I tend to become quite relentless.

I think some people wait until they feel certain they’ll succeed before they fully commit.

I’ve always been more inclined to commit first and work out how to succeed afterwards.

That probably explains quite a lot about the rest of this list.

1. I start at 4:40am.

This began as a practical solution to having children.

I do the school drop-offs and pick-ups on my own which means my conventional working day is relatively short. Add a couple of meetings and suddenly you’ve got four or five hours left to run multiple businesses, develop new ideas and do the actual work.

The maths wasn’t working.

So I started getting up at 4:40am.

And I bloody loved it.

There is something almost intoxicating about having two uninterrupted hours before the rest of the world starts asking things of you. My brain is on fire at that time. Nobody needs me. Nothing has gone wrong yet. My inbox hasn’t had a chance to hijack my priorities.

I can just work.

I also love the psychological advantage of having already accomplished something before the kids wake up. That early dopamine hit of crossing things off a list makes the rest of the day feel like it’s happening from a position of momentum rather than catch-up.

I know the internet loves romanticising 5am routines, and I don’t think waking up early makes you inherently more successful.

But I do think knowing when your brain does its best work, and protecting that time ferociously, is an enormous advantage.

Mine just happens to be before the sun rises.

2. I structure my week like a slightly obsessive project manager.

For someone who values freedom as much as I do, I’m extraordinarily particular about structure.

Every week, I look at what needs to happen and start grouping tasks according to the kind of thinking they require.

I might have a day dedicated to all the annoying little administrative jobs. Another for deep, uninterrupted work. Another for creative production, writing, concepts and ideas.

I don’t want to spend forty minutes immersed in something highly conceptual, stop to answer an supplier query, jump into a meeting, then expect my brain to immediately return to where it was.

That kind of context-switching is expensive.

So I batch.

And I make lists. Handwritten lists, specifically. I spent a few years trying a ridiculous array of productivity tools, but something about physically writing things down remains the only system that truly works for me.

There’s no particularly sophisticated explanation for this. I just know it works.

And I think that’s an underrated part of building an effective working life: understanding your own brain well enough to stop forcing it into systems designed for somebody else’s.

My structure isn’t there to make my life more rigid. It’s there to make my creativity less interrupted.

3. I’m ruthless about what deserves my attention.

I have an ongoing list of things I want to achieve.

Some are immediate. Some are weekly. Others live somewhere in the much bigger vision I have for my life.

But they’re always there.

And I’ve become very good at looking at an opportunity, a task or an idea and asking whether it actually moves me towards something I want.

If it doesn’t, I’m increasingly comfortable leaving it alone.

This doesn’t mean everything in my life needs to be productive. I’m talking about the way I allocate my working energy.

Because I have a lot of ideas. A lot of interests. A lot of things I could pursue.

The challenge has never been finding something to do.

It’s deciding which things deserve to be done.

I’ve come to think that prioritisation is less about managing time and more about managing ambition. If you want to do big things, you have to accept that you cannot do every interesting thing.

Every yes spends attention that could have gone somewhere else.

And attention is probably my most valuable resource.

4. I’m obsessively curious.

If I had to identify one genuine superpower, this would probably be it.

I’m interested in everything.

I read constantly, although exclusively nonfiction. I consume information, follow rabbit holes, study culture, observe people, collect references and ask an unreasonable number of questions.

I want to know why something works.

Why somebody made that decision. Why a particular business is growing. Why one brand feels magnetic and another feels completely forgettable. Why someone wants what they want. Why something that shouldn’t work somehow does.

I think curiosity has given me an enormous advantage because it means I’m constantly collecting information without necessarily knowing what I’ll use it for.

And then, six months or six years later, two seemingly unrelated things connect. (thank god for ADHD pattern recognition).

An idea emerges.

Something makes sense.

What looks like instinct in the moment is often curiosity compounded over time.

I don’t think the most interesting ideas necessarily come from knowing more about one particular subject.

Sometimes they come from knowing a little about an extraordinary number of things.

The more interested you are in the world, the more material you have to think with.

5. I collect inspiration like it’s my job.

Because, in many ways, it is.

My camera roll is ridiculous. My reference boards are enormous. I’m constantly saving images, ideas, sentences, objects, places, campaigns and things I can’t quite explain my attraction to yet.

I don’t always know what I’m looking for.

That’s part of the point.

I’ve learned not to demand that inspiration justify itself immediately. Sometimes I’ll save something simply because it makes my brain do a little somersault. I might not understand why I like it until much later.

But eventually, patterns emerge.

And I think this is one of the most practical ways I’ve trained my creative instincts.

Taste doesn’t develop through passive consumption. It develops through paying attention, interrogating what you’re seeing and noticing the relationships between things.

I’m not collecting references so I can copy them.

I’m collecting raw material for connections that haven’t happened yet.

6. I always have a mentor.

I’ve had mentors throughout my career, and I can’t imagine ever reaching a point where I decide I no longer need one.

Because no matter how capable or experienced you become, you are still trapped inside your own perspective.

And objective clarity is extraordinarily valuable.

My current mentor is the delightful, wise and just pure ‘good' human that is Leonie Faddy - CMO of Go-To Skincare, and having someone with that level of experience to help me think through Land Lab’s marketing and growth has been nothing short of phenomenal. She is my guru.

I want someone who has been where I’m trying to go.

Someone who can recognise a problem I’ve never encountered, challenge an assumption I’m overly attached to, or tell me when I’m being an idiot.

I don’t think seeking mentorship contradicts being instinct-led.

Quite the opposite.

The more confident I become in my own judgement, the more interested I am in exposing it to people who might make it better.

7. I let instinct decide what to test. Data decides what to scale.

I’m obsessed with data.

I love numbers, performance, patterns, conversion rates, growth trajectories and the little clues hidden inside a spreadsheet.

But interestingly, data is never where my decisions begin.

Instinct is.

I’ll get a feeling about an idea, a product, a campaign or a direction. Something tells me it’s worth pursuing.

So I test it.

And then the data comes in.

Was the hypothesis correct? What actually happened? Did customers respond? What surprised us? Is there enough evidence to double down? Should we invest more? Is this ready to scale?

I think this combination has served me particularly well because it allows me to move quickly without becoming reckless.

Instinct creates the experiment.

Data informs the next decision.

I don’t need to spend six months proving an idea is worth trying before I try it. But I also don’t need to keep throwing money at something simply because I liked the idea.

My instinct tells me where to look. The numbers tell me what I found.

8. I love money.

I love making money. I love talking about money. I love understanding numbers, identifying commercial opportunities and imagining what might be financially possible.

I want big things from my life, and I’m not particularly interested in pretending those things don’t require money.

For me, money represents independence.

It’s the ability to pursue creative ideas without asking permission. To take time away when I need it. To invest in something I believe in. To build the kind of life I want for my family.

For me, money provides access to creative freedom.

I wasn’t always as commercially minded as I am now. But business has a way of forcing you to develop that muscle.

You can have the most extraordinary creative ideas in the world, but if you can’t understand how money moves through a business, your ability to bring those ideas to life will always be constrained.

I also have a fairly expansive relationship with earning.

I often say that the universe is my bank.

Not because I believe money will magically appear if I think positively enough, but because I genuinely believe there are almost infinite ways to create value and generate income.

If I need to make more money, my immediate thought isn’t where am I going to find it?

It’s how am I going to make it?

Over time, I’ve developed the skills, relationships, confidence and commercial imagination to see possibilities that I might once have overlooked.

I don’t see my earning capacity as a fixed number.

I see it as something I can expand almost daily.

And that belief changes the way I behave.

9. I’m an upside girl.

I’ve always been a glass-half-full person.

Actually, I’m probably more of a there must be another glass somewhere person.

My brain naturally looks for opportunity. If something isn’t working, I want to know what else we could try. If a market looks crowded, I’m interested in where the gaps might be. If something goes wrong, I tend to move quite quickly towards what can be done about it.

I think some of this comes from my upbringing.

My parents gave me a strong sense of security and possibility. I grew up feeling that the world was something I could participate in, rather than something I needed to protect myself from.

I’m very aware that this is a privilege.

And I think it shaped my willingness to take risks.

Over the years, I’ve also spent a lot of time on self-development. A multitude of practices have given me different ways to think about identity, alignment, self-worth and possibility.

I don’t treat every idea from other people’s self-development concepts as scientific fact. I use them as frameworks for examining my own thinking.

Because I do believe our mentality shapes our reality, not necessarily through some mysterious cosmic mechanism, but through the decisions we make, the opportunities we notice, the risks we’re willing to take. the behaviours we repeat and the subconscious stories we’ve accepted as our reality.

What you believe is possible has an enormous influence on what you’re willing to attempt.

And I’m very committed to keeping that ceiling as high as possible.

10. I surround myself with expansive thinkers.

One of my favourite things about my closest friendships is that ambition doesn’t require an apology.

My best friend has enormous goals. So do I.

We egg each other on.

We talk about what we want to build, experience, earn and become without feeling the need to make those desires sound more socially acceptable.

There’s something incredibly energising about spending time with people who don’t automatically respond to an ambitious idea by explaining why it might not work.

They might challenge the strategy.

They might ask difficult questions.

But the ambition itself isn’t the problem.

I think the people around you quietly influence the size of the life you imagine for yourself.

Not because you should only spend time with people who share your goals, but because possibility is contagious.

Sometimes the most valuable thing another person gives you is permission to want more.

11. I’ve learned to draw the bow back.

Every quarter, I book in a week away from my normal working rhythm. Sometimes I go somewhere, sometimes I stay at home.

I think of it as drawing the bow back.

If you’re constantly pushing forward, producing, responding and executing, eventually you run out of the space required to see anything differently.

Sometimes my week off is a proper holiday.

Sometimes it’s painting, writing, reading or immersing myself in something creative. Sometimes it’s self-care, pottering around the house, rearranging furniture or getting lost in some low-pressure project that has absolutely nothing to do with generating revenue.

I never do nothing though.

I’ve accepted that about myself.

But there’s an enormous difference between being active because you’re curious and being active because something is a mark in your calendar or email in your inbox is demanding an outcome.

The most interesting thing is what happens afterwards.

I return with ideas.

Clarity.

Energy.

Connections I couldn’t quite see before.

I’ve stopped treating these weeks as an indulgence and started treating them as part of the creative process.

Sometimes you have to move further away from the work to see what the work needs.

12. I use AI like a team of employees.

This has become one of the most significant changes to the way I work.

I don’t think of AI simply as a tool for writing an email faster.

I think of it as access to an extraordinary range of capabilities that previously required hiring people, engaging specialists or spending hours figuring something out myself.

I use it to interrogate ideas, analyse information, challenge assumptions, develop systems, research unfamiliar territory and move projects forward.

It’s not replacing my thinking.

It’s extending what my thinking is capable of.

And I think this is an important distinction.

I’ve spent years building the judgement, taste, commercial understanding and instincts that inform my decisions. AI doesn’t magically supply those things.

But it dramatically reduces the distance between having an idea and being able to do something with it.

For someone who has always had more ideas than time, that’s an extraordinary development.

I don’t want AI to think for me. I want it to make more of my thinking possible.

13. I write. A lot.

Writing has become one of the most valuable ways I organise my thoughts.

Not because everything I write needs to be published.

But because writing forces me to work out what I actually think.

An idea can feel perfectly formed inside your head until you try to explain it to someone else. Suddenly you discover the gaps, the contradictions, the assumptions you’ve been making without noticing.

Writing exposes all of that.

And in the process of trying to articulate something clearly, I often discover an idea I didn’t realise I had.

I think this is why I’m loving this little Substack, Extra Curricular, so much.

It’s not simply an outlet for the things I’ve learned.

It’s a place to keep learning by thinking out loud.

Writing doesn’t just communicate my ideas. It helps me find them.

The part I’m still figuring out

Of course, none of this comes without a cost.

My capacity for work can make switching off difficult. My tendency to become completely consumed by an idea isn’t always particularly convenient for the people around me.

And my relentless orientation towards the future means I sometimes have to remind myself to be grateful for the present.

My children are particularly good at this.

They don’t give a flying fuck what’s on my vision board.

They don’t care about a five-year revenue target or whether I’m having an unusually productive Tuesday.

They want me to sit on the floor and build Lego.

And for someone whose brain is almost always moving towards the next thing, that can be challenging… to say the least.

But I’ve had to learn that being present is also something worth practising.

That not every moment needs to contribute to a bigger objective.

That sometimes the thing I’m working so hard to create (the freedom to spend my time however I want) is already here, right in front of me.

I think that’s one of the stranger contradictions of ambition.

You can become so good at building the future that you occasionally forget to enjoy the life you’ve already built.

And perhaps that’s the habit I most want to keep developing.

So, what are my ‘keys to success’?

Coming back to that interview question, I still don’t think there’s a particularly elegant answer.

I haven’t uncovered some revolutionary formula or productivity framework. I don’t have an extraordinary natural talent that explains everything. And I certainly don’t think my way of working is the right way for everybody.

But I do think I’ve become very good at a collection of relatively ordinary things.

I work hard. I protect my attention. I feed my curiosity. I ask questions. I seek advice. I follow my instincts, then interrogate the results. I understand and have a great relationship with money. I make room for inspiration. I surround myself with people who expand my thinking.

And I do those things over and over again.

Perhaps the real advantage isn’t any one habit.

It’s what happens when they begin reinforcing each other.

Curiosity improves my instincts. Instinct creates experiments. Data improves my judgement. Better judgement makes me more commercially effective. Commercial success creates freedom. Freedom gives me more space to be curious.

The whole thing becomes a rather beautiful feedback loop.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been building all these years.

Not just businesses.

But rather, a way of working that makes more of the life I want possible.

Which brings me back to where I started.

Success, for me, isn’t a particular revenue figure, an exit or a headline.

It’s being able to spend my Tuesday however I want.

And having built enough confidence in myself to know that, whatever I decide to do with it, I’ll probably find a way to make something happen.

Anyways,

Happy Tuesday ;)

Somewhere in the Northern Rivers, a very good party happened recently. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

It was the launch of Tropicali, a collaboration between Australian fashion label The Wolf Gang and interiors institution Fenton & Fenton. Two brands with an almost suspiciously compatible affection for colour, print, personality and the kind of objects that make sensible people behave a little irrationally.

The collection itself is delicious. Banana-print tablecloths, wonderfully eccentric ceramics, resortwear that looks like a holiday you haven’t booked yet. The sort of things that make you reconsider your entire aesthetic identity and possibly the contents of your bank account.

But it wasn’t the products that initially stopped me scrolling.

It was the party.

Specifically, the art direction of the party.

And whoever was responsible deserves a very large round of applause.

First, can we talk about the art direction?

The launch took place at Jai Bohème, the wonderfully characterful Newrybar home of artist Jai Vasicek. Which, frankly, feels like the sort of location a creative director dreams about discovering and then spends the rest of their career trying to find again.

There were long, exuberantly dressed tables, tropical cocktails, artwork, extraordinary prints and guests wearing pieces from The Wolf Gang’s limited-edition capsule. Maria’s Byron Bay provided the (very on-brand) feast, Departed Spirits joined the celebrations, and live music carried the afternoon towards sundown.

Every element appeared to belong to the same gloriously eccentric universe. Of the tropical variety.

What I love most about the art direction is its commitment. There’s no nervous attempt to temper the collection’s personality with a tasteful neutral backdrop. The prints are bold, the setting is expressive, and the entire experience embraces the visual excess that makes both brands interesting in the first place.

And yet, somehow, it doesn’t feel chaotic.

That’s the clever part.

There’s an enormous difference between putting lots of beautiful things together and creating an environment where everything feels like it belongs. The latter requires an instinct for composition, proportion, visual rhythm and, perhaps most importantly, knowing which rules are worth ignoring.

I haven’t been able to establish whether the event was art-directed in-house or by an external creative team. Either way, I’d love to know who was behind it.

Because this is what happens when an event is approached as a creative expression rather than simply a marketing obligation.

The launch didn’t just showcase the collection. It made the collection’s world inhabitable.

A collaboration that passes the chemistry test

Brand collaborations are everywhere. And while I love the idea of two creative businesses joining forces, I find a lot of the results rather underwhelming.

Sometimes it feels as though the entire strategic rationale was that both brands had a decent Instagram following and somebody knew somebody in marketing.

The result is often a perfectly adequate product with two logos on it.

Tropicali is interesting because the connection feels much more intrinsic and intimate.

The Wolf Gang has spent a decade building a recognisable fashion universe around expressive prints, colour and a sense of escapism. Fenton & Fenton has an equally confident point of view in interiors, championing eclecticism, art and the pleasure of surrounding yourself with things that have personality.

They’re operating in different categories, but they speak a remarkably similar creative language.

And that’s the sweet spot.

The most compelling collaborations aren’t necessarily between two brands that look alike. They’re between two brands that see the world in compatible ways.

Fashion and interiors are particularly fertile territory for this. Both are expressions of identity. Both are deeply emotional categories. Both offer people a way of communicating taste without having to explain it.

A print that feels fantastic on a sarong can feel equally fantastic on a tablecloth. A colour palette that belongs in a summer wardrobe might also belong in your dining room.

The collaboration gives that shared sensibility somewhere new to go.

Rather than one brand borrowing the other’s credibility, each extends the other’s creative possibilities.

The best collaborations create something that feels both unexpected and inevitable.

The cleverness of crossing categories

I think there’s a broader lesson here about how brands grow.

When a business wants to expand, the instinct is often to look for the next logical product within its existing category. A fashion label introduces another accessory. A homewares brand develops another decorative object.

Perfectly sensible.

But some of the most interesting opportunities exist just outside the boundaries of what a brand currently sells.

The question becomes less What else could we make? and more Where else could our point of view belong?

That’s a much more expansive way to think about growth.

For The Wolf Gang, Tropicali allows its aesthetic to move beyond the body and into the home. For Fenton & Fenton, the collaboration brings its approach to colour and collecting into the world of fashion.

The result is a shared lifestyle proposition that feels entirely credible for both businesses.

And importantly, it creates new reasons for people to discover each brand.

Someone who has never considered buying from The Wolf Gang might fall in love with a banana-print tablecloth. Someone who knows Fenton & Fenton for its interiors might discover a vase they can’t stop thinking about.

That’s commercially interesting, of course. But it’s also creatively interesting.

Because the collaboration doesn’t feel engineered around audience acquisition, even though introducing each brand to the other’s customers is an obvious potential benefit.

It feels engineered around an idea.

And the commercial logic follows suit.

Why the event was the smartest part

Here’s where I think Tropicali becomes a particularly good example of contemporary brand building.

The brands could have photographed the collection beautifully, launched it online and sent a few products to influencers.

Instead, they created an occasion.

A place where the collection could be worn, used, experienced, photographed and remembered.

The tables weren’t simply styled with products. They demonstrated how those products could become part of a life. The guests weren’t merely attendees. Dressed in the collection, they became part of its visual language. The artwork and location added another layer of character that a studio campaign would have struggled to replicate.

The entire afternoon made a case for the collection without needing to explain why anybody should buy it. It made the thing come alive.

And that’s a much more interesting form of persuasion.

I’ve always believed that the strongest brands are able to communicate something beyond the functional value of what they sell.

A good brand makes you want the product.

A great brand makes you want a little piece of the world the product belongs to.

Tropicali understands that distinction beautifully.

The art of making people want in

I think we’re going to see increasingly interesting brand collaborations over the next few years, particularly as businesses look for ways to cut through an environment saturated with content.

But I hope the lesson people take from Tropicali isn’t simply that collaborations are a good marketing tactic.

Or that everyone should throw a beautifully styled lunch.

The real lesson is about creative compatibility.

When two brands have a strong enough identity, they can recognise something of themselves in another business without losing what makes them distinctive.

They can build on a shared idea, introduce new perspectives and create something with more character than either might have produced independently.

And when that thinking extends from the products into the campaign, the setting, the people and the experience, the result becomes far more interesting than a conventional launch.

It becomes a real moment.

Tropicali is a reminder that commercial creativity doesn’t always require inventing something entirely new.

Sometimes it requires recognising a connection that was hiding in plain sight.

And having the confidence to follow it all the way through.

As for me, I arrived for the art direction and stayed for the banana tee.

Which I suspect is exactly how it’s supposed to work.

The EC Edit: My Tropicali Wishlist

An entirely unnecessary number of things in my cart rn.

01. Bananarama Sarong

The sort of sarong that could convince me I’m on holiday even when I’m technically just going to the beach for an hour. I’m very susceptible to a good print, particularly one that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Shop the Bananarama Sarong

02. Bananarama T-Shirt

A novelty tee with enough personality to become a wardrobe favourite. I’d wear this with mini crochet skirt and the conviction of someone who has made a very sensible purchase.

Shop the Bananarama T-Shirt

03. Wanda Fish Vase in Rose

A fish-shaped vase is precisely the kind of object I absolutely don’t need and will think about for an unreasonable amount of time. Equal parts sculpture, humour and excellent shelf company.

Shop the Wanda Fish Vase

04. Balmy Placemats

Proof that even the most functional objects deserve a little personality. These are already on my Christmas lunch table. They just don’t know it yet.

Shop the Balmy Placemats

05. Bananarama Tablecloth

There’s something wonderfully audacious about committing an entire dining table to bananas. And somehow, it’s completely chic.

Shop the Bananarama Tablecloth

When I was a kid, my mum let me choose two colours to paint the walls of my bedroom.

The good news is that I distinctly remember insisting on beautiful, textured Porter’s Paints. The bad news is that I chose purple and yellow.

So, we’ll call that an early work in progress.

I grew up in a regional town, where the cultural ceiling - at least when it came to design, fashion and art - was relatively low. I wasn’t wandering through galleries every weekend or growing up surrounded by extraordinary architecture. But somehow I had a sense for when things just ‘clicked’ from an early age.

For a long time, I assumed taste was something you either had or you didn’t.

I don’t believe that anymore.

I think some people probably begin with greater sensitivity to it. In the same way some people naturally have an ear for music or an aptitude for numbers, some people seem more attuned to proportion, tension, colour, language, composition. But nearly two decades of working in branding has convinced me that an eye can be trained.

In fact, mine has changed enormously.

Working in a creative industry exposed me to worlds I didn’t know existed. Then I became obsessed with culture more broadly. Fashion led to interiors, interiors to architecture, architecture to art, art to photography, photography to film, restaurants, hotels, books, magazines, people, places. The more I saw, the more references I had. The more references I had, the more precisely I could understand what resonated with me.

But exposure alone doesn’t create taste.

You can spend eight hours a day on Pinterest and become incredibly familiar with what Pinterest thinks is tasteful.

That’s not the same thing.

I think developing taste requires moving from liking things to learning how to look at them.

Here is how I would train an eye.

1. Stop asking, “Do I like it?”

Instead, ask why.

This is probably the single most important thing I have learnt about taste.

When I see something I resonate with, I rarely leave it at I love that. I want to know what is making me love it.

Is it the scale? The proportion? The strange colour combination? The typography? Is there something unexpectedly funny about it? Is it the juxtaposition? Does one element stop everything else from becoming too serious? Would it still work if that one thing disappeared?

The same goes for things I don’t like.

Why don’t I like this?

When I ran my branding agency, I could instinctively recognise designers who had a great eye. It wasn’t necessarily that they were more technically accomplished. There was a certain bravery to them. They were willing to try combinations other people wouldn’t. There was clarity in what they were communicating and a strange kind of congruence in how they put things together. Things just seemed to click.

Explaining why they clicked was harder.

And perhaps that’s exactly why interrogating taste matters. Instinct might give you the initial response, but examining that response teaches you something you can use again.

Try it.

For a week, every time you save something, explain why. One sentence. And you’re not allowed to use beautiful, cool, chic, nice or interesting.

You’ll quickly realise how rarely we actually interrogate our own preferences.

2. Collect obsessively

My camera roll is ridiculous.

Screenshots. Packaging. Outfits. Chairs. Art. Colour combinations. Buildings. Typefaces. Things I’ve seen walking down the street. Things that have absolutely nothing to do with whatever I’m currently working on but have made some part of my brain light up.

I use Miro constantly too. If I’m working on a brand, project or even some weird side quest I’m interested in, I’ll build enormous boards of references.

And then I move them around.

This part feels important.

Taste, for me, is quite physical.

I need to see what happens when one reference sits beside another. Sometimes two individually brilliant things kill each other. Sometimes an image I wasn’t particularly interested in suddenly becomes essential because of what it does to everything around it.

I still love printing references out and scattering it across the floor. Moving it around. Removing things. Putting something back. Standing up and looking at the whole thing from further away.

Eventually, you start to see a world emerge.

I guess it’s called curation.

But curation isn’t simply collecting good things. It’s understanding the relationships between them.

3. Don’t demand that your taste explain itself immediately

There are things I’ve saved that I haven’t understood until months later.

Something catches my eye. I don’t know why. I save it anyway.

Then six months later, I’ll look across everything I’ve collected and realise I’ve saved the same idea fifteen times in fifteen completely different forms.

My eye knew something before I did.

I think we’re sometimes too quick to rationalise our instincts. If we can’t explain why we like something, we assume the response isn’t useful.

I’d argue the opposite.

Create a folder filled with references that could be titled ‘I don’t know why I like this’.

Put things in it without judgement.

Come back in six months.

Your taste will have been leaving you clues.

4. Go upstream

If you love someone’s taste, don’t just look at more of their work.

Find out what they look at.

Who are their references? Which artists do they talk about? What architects influenced them? What films do they return to? Which periods are they borrowing from? Who influenced those people?

When I find someone I find inspiring on Instagram, I often deep dive into who they follow. I let the rabbit hole swallow me up and often come out with not just 1 new source of inspiration, but many.

You’ve just simply got to let the rabbit hole consume you sometimes. Otherwise you end up only sourcing references after they’ve already been interpreted for you.

Don’t just study people with great taste. Study what gave them great taste.

Use the person you admire as the entrance to the rabbit hole, not the end of it.

5. Get further away from your category

One of the fastest ways to make boring work is to only look at other examples of the thing you’re trying to make.

If I’m working on a fragrance brand, I don’t want a reference board full of fragrance brands - that’s a fast train to homogeny. I might have Simon Miller sitting next to an Aritzia campaign, next to a hotel interior, a photograph I took on holiday, a piece of old packaging, an artwork, a weird outfit, a screenshot of someone’s interior and something from The Rochambeau Club that made me laugh.

I’m not necessarily interested in any of those things because I want to copy them. I’m trying to work out what each one contributes to the world I’m building.

Maybe Simon Miller brings irreverence. Aritzia brings scale and polish. Rochambeau brings wit and specificity. An old hotel lobby brings a colour combination. A photograph brings texture. Individually, they’re references. What happens between them is where it gets interesting.

This is why I love working on huge Miro boards or scattering printed references across the floor. I’m not only looking for good things. I’m looking for unlikely things that become better when they’re placed beside each other.

The further a reference sits from its eventual application, the more interpretation it requires from you. You can’t literally turn a Japanese garden into a brand identity. You have to ask what you’re responding to - is it the restraint? Rhythm? Negative space? Asymmetry? - and then translate the principle.

And perhaps that’s where originality starts to creep in.

The further an idea has to travel, the more likely it is to become yours along the way.

6. Study the things that almost work

Everyone has a Pinterest board full of things they love.

I’d suggest making another one.

Call it ALMOST.

Put things in there that, on paper you should like, but somehow don’t.

Beautiful house. Expensive furniture. Incredible photography. Great clothes. Correct references.

And yet...

Nothing. No heart signals.

I have this reaction when something feels too two-dimensional. It might be aesthetically perfect, but if there’s nothing beyond the aesthetic - no wit, cleverness, obscurity, humour, tension, challenge - it loses me.

I want to be drawn into something.

I want there to be another layer when I get closer.

The things that almost work can teach you more than the things you immediately love because they force you to identify the missing 10%.

Sometimes everything is too harmonious.

Sometimes it’s derivative. Or too polished. Sometimes it’s trying desperately to demonstrate good taste. And sometimes it simply has nothing to say.

Figuring out which is which is how discernment gets sharper.

7. Learn to create tension

This might be my favourite part of taste.

The best combinations often contain something that shouldn’t quite be there.

Old with new. Severe with playful. Ugly with beautiful. High-brow with low-brow. Masculine with feminine. Precious with ordinary. Huge with tiny.

If everything belongs together too perfectly, the result can become flat, or too predictable.

I think great creative people understand how much tension something can withstand before it loses coherence.

That’s different from adding weird shit for the sake of being weird. The unexpected element still has to communicate with everything around it.

This is what I meant when I said the best designers I worked with had a sense of congruence. They could make unexpected choices, but somehow those choices clicked.

Perhaps that’s one of the more advanced expressions of taste: Coherence without sameness.

8. Get off the internet

There is a strange paradox happening right now.

We’ve never had access to more extraordinary creative work, and we’ve never been at greater risk of all developing the same taste.

Pinterest shows you more of what you saved yesterday. Instagram learns the designers you linger on. Every aesthetic now has a name, a moodboard, seventeen TikToks explaining it and an algorithm ready to deliver an infinite supply.

So if you want to develop an interesting eye, I think you have to deliberately introduce inputs your algorithm wouldn’t choose for you.

Go somewhere. Look around.

The supermarket. A hardware store. A gallery. A hotel lobby. An old person’s house. A suburban shopping centre. Another country, if you’re lucky enough to travel.

Pick up the weird book. Watch something outside your normal genre. Pay attention to what people are wearing. Photograph a handwritten sign because the lettering is strangely perfect.

I’ve spent my career becoming increasingly obsessed with culture, and I don’t think that means exclusively consuming more high culture.

It means being interested.

Your eye needs nutritional diversity.

9. Then, start removing things

This is the part of taste I find most interesting now.

Because eventually, you have enough references.

The problem stops being What do I like?

It becomes:

What belongs?

When I’m working physically with references - particularly when I’ve printed them and they’re scattered across the floor - the most important stage is the cull.

Take one away.

Better?

Another.

Better?

Eventually you find the smallest collection of references capable of communicating the richest possible world.

And I think that’s the difference between taste and curation.

You can have excellent taste and recognise a hundred brilliant things.

Curation asks you to choose five.

It asks you to understand context. Something can be objectively brilliant and completely wrong here.

The same applies well beyond design.

Your wardrobe. Your house. Your business. Your product range. The people you invite to dinner. The ideas you pursue. The things you allow to take up your attention.

A big part of becoming more discerning is being able to say:

I love that.

And yet, it isn’t for me.

The masterclass is in the why

If I had a 25-year-old creative sitting in front of me and one year to dramatically improve their taste, I don’t think I’d give them a list of galleries to visit or books to read.

I’d show them things.

And I’d ask:

Do you like it?

Then:

Why?

I’d show them something else.

Why don’t you like this?

Again.

Again.

And again, maybe another 80 times.

Because the why is the training.

You can borrow other people’s references. You can learn the rules of composition. You can immerse yourself in extraordinary culture. You can fill your camera roll with beautiful things.

But eventually you have to form a relationship with your own judgement.

Apparently giving away five business ideas did not stop me having business ideas.

Unfortunate.

So here are another five from the increasingly overcrowded Notes folder in my brain.

Same disclaimer: these are not investment recommendations or polished startup theses. Some probably contain enormous structural problems I haven’t considered. That’s almost beside the point.

I’m interested in the observation underneath them.

One thing I know to be true, is that good business ideas often begin with noticing something slightly ridiculous that everyone else has agreed to treat as normal.

1. Unused Capacity

Businesses own an extraordinary amount of expensive stuff that spends large portions of its life doing absolutely nothing.

Commercial kitchens. Warehouse space. Manufacturing lines. Machinery. Studios. Vehicles. Specialist equipment.

Even skilled staff capacity.

Meanwhile, another business desperately needs exactly that resource but can’t justify buying or building it.

There has to be something enormous hiding in that mismatch.

I wouldn’t build a giant marketplace for “business stuff”. I’d pick one vertical where unused capacity is common, expensive and relatively easy to standardise.

Manufacturing capacity particularly interests me.

A factory unexpectedly has three days open next month. A smaller brand desperately needs a short production run. Could those two things find each other?

It’s basically Airbnb for an underutilised B2B asset class.

The question I’d be hunting:

Where are businesses paying enormous amounts to own something that sits empty?

Find the right answer and the marketplace almost writes itself.

2. Kids' Circular Commerce

If you’re a parent, you know what sort of drain children are on your bank account. And I’m not talking about sports, daycare or nannies. I’m talking about the shit that seems to fill your house exponentially from the moment you pee on the stick.

They grow constantly. Change interests constantly. Need different equipment constantly.

And yet we keep buying them brand-new bikes, sporting equipment, toys, clothes and gear that might be useful for approximately fourteen minutes.

Resale solves part of this, but then I have to become a reseller.

Photograph it. List it. Answer “is this available?” seventeen times. Negotiate with someone called Bec. Arrange collection. Discover Bec has disintegrated into thin air..

No.

I want…

(Four more ideas I have absolutely no business pursuing below…)

Read more

I have a confession to make before I write approximately 2,500 words about a fragrance brand.

I have never smelled Lore.

I don’t own a bottle. I haven’t sprayed it on my wrist at Sephora. I couldn’t tell you whether Somewhere but nowhere dries down beautifully on skin or whether Sublimity deserves a permanent position on my bathroom shelf.

For the record, I’m currently a Tulita girl. Specifically, Divya. Natural fragrance, less synthetic, very much my lane.

And yet, here I am writing about Lore.

Which might actually be the most compelling evidence of its power.

I didn’t discover Lore through fragrance. I discovered it through Instagram. It appeared, as the best things on the internet sometimes do, without enough explanation. Strange images. Beautiful objects. Film stills. Fragments of language. A bottle that looked less like packaging and more like something excavated from another civilisation.

I didn’t immediately understand what I was looking at.

I just knew I wanted to keep looking.

And, I might add, that is increasingly rare.

We are living through an era of extraordinary over-explanation. New brands arrive with their positioning statement, founder story, ingredient superiority, three reasons to believe, five points of difference and a carousel explaining exactly why you should care before you’ve had a chance to become curious.

Lore did something else.

It left the door slightly open.

And curiosity did the rest.

The new brand problem

There are more beautiful brands than ever.

This should be exciting. Instead, I sometimes think it has created a strange flattening.

The tools are better, the references are more accessible, the agencies are excellent. The founder has a Pinterest board. Everyone has discovered art direction.

So the baseline has risen enormously.

And yet, walk through enough beauty brands and something odd happens: they begin to blur.

Beautiful typography, tasteful photography, lovely packaging… A very considered sans serif. Something about ritual. Something about intentionality. A founder in a beautifully lit bathroom telling you why she couldn’t find the product she wanted, so she made it herself.

(yawn).

Everything is good.

Very little is strange.

This is why Lore caught my attention.

It didn’t simply look good. It appeared to possess an internal logic of its own.

There is a difference.

Good branding makes a product attractive.

A world makes a product feel like evidence of something larger.

And Lore arrived with the larger thing already there.

Lore before Lore

Once you understand who is behind the brand, some of this starts making sense.

Lore was founded by Melanie Bender alongside Greg Gonzalez and Joe Cloyes, formerly of Youth To The People. Bender’s résumé reads like someone deliberately trying to make herself interesting to me: she studied aerospace engineering before moving into fashion and beauty, then she helped build Versed and Merit, and later became CEO of Rhode.

Quite the dream ride.

But surprisingly to me, no art school.

Instead, aerospace engineering(!!).

Which I love.

I think there’s an assumption that highly aesthetic people must have travelled towards creativity through an appropriately creative door. Design school, fashion, art direction, photography or something similar.

But some of the most interesting creative minds seem to arrive sideways.

And perhaps that sidewaysness matters?

Bender’s career has given her something more interesting than a conventional creative pedigree: pattern recognition across disciplines. Systems and aesthetics. Commercial scale and cultural instinct. Precision and feeling.

In short: Science and art.

That combination interests me because I’ve always thought the best brand thinking lives somewhere between those things. You need the data. You need to understand the market, customer, distribution and commercial reality. But then there is the other part; the part that notices something before there’s enough evidence to explain why it matters.

Lore feels like a company built in that overlap.

Bender had spent years inside some of the defining beauty businesses of the last decade before finally making something that was hers. She told Business of Fashion that she’d been comfortable bringing her thinking to other people’s visions; people like Hailey Bieber and Katherine Power, but Lore felt more personal.

And interestingly, she hasn’t responded to that personalness by putting herself at the centre of the brand.

She’s there. She does the interviews. She speaks thoughtfully about the decisions. Her letter appears on Lore’s website. She talks to the designers and perfumers behind the work. But, at least so far, she isn’t the product.

I like that.

It reminds me a little of Dianna Cohen at Crown Affair. Not aesthetically, necessarily, but in posture.

I’m a big fan of the founder as author rather than protagonist.

There’s a subtle difference.

The founder-as-protagonist says: enter my world because you want to be like me.

The founder-as-author says: I made a world. Come and see what you find inside it.

The second leaves considerably more room for the customer.

I wonder whether Bender will stay there as Lore grows. Founder-led media has become such an effective growth engine that the gravitational pull towards front-facing founder content must be enormous.

But right now, I think her restraint is part of the magic.

You can feel a very particular person behind Lore without needing to constantly see her face.

The authorship is visible. But importantly, the author doesn’t have to be.

They started with curiosity

Before Lore properly launched, it created an Instagram broadcast channel called Everything possible.

Not Lore VIPs. Not Join the waitlist. Not Be the first to shop.

“Everything possible”.

More than 1,100 early followers joined a strange little pre-launch universe in which Bender and the community exchanged questions and prompts; including, wonderfully, favourite forms of potato. When asked to describe Lore as a film, Bender’s answer was essentially the universe of Spirited Away wearing the wardrobe of Spice World. Early references moved between Hawaiian cliffs and water, Marlon Brando in Western wear and Surrealist art.

That tells you almost everything.

Not about the perfume.

About the mind making the perfume.

This is one of the things I think modern brands have forgotten.

We have become so obsessed with communicating clearly that we’ve started confusing clarity with completeness.

They’re not the same.

A brand needs to be legible enough to enter, but that doesn’t mean you need to turn every light on.

Sometimes intrigue lives in the rooms you can’t quite see yet.

Lore understood that before people knew the notes, the price or perhaps even exactly what was being launched, they could begin understanding its sensibility.

The references did the positioning before the positioning was explained.

Curiosity became a form of customer acquisition.

And maybe that’s the first thing Lore gets so right.

Most brands launch by asking: How quickly can we make people understand us?

Lore seems to have asked: How do we make people want to understand more?

Those are very different creative briefs.

Selling the invisible

Fragrance presents a particularly interesting branding problem because the actual product is invisible.

Bender has described the challenge herself: she’s effectively selling an invisible product through predominantly visual mediums.

Think about how strange that is.

If you’re selling a chair, I can see the chair.

If you’re selling a dress, I can imagine myself wearing it.

If you’re selling chocolate, you can show me the inside breaking open and make me hungry.

But scent?

You somehow have to make me smell something through a screen.

Which means fragrance has always required metaphor. Story. Memory. Suggestion. You aren’t only describing ingredients; you’re trying to activate somebody’s sensory imagination strongly enough that their brain begins constructing the missing sense.

Lore is exceptionally good at this.

Somewhere but nowhere doesn’t simply give you cedarwood, black tea, cardamom, vanilla cream and worn-in leather. Lovely and a little twisted moves from rose milk and candied pistachio to amber resin, patchouli and, perfectly, “lucid dreams.”

Lucid dreams are obviously not an ingredient.

That’s precisely the point.

The language isn’t there only to tell you what you’ll smell.

It’s there to tell you where to go.

Lore’s own line is Scents that take you somewhere. Its website describes the collection as “a wardrobe of realities both familiar and new.”

And suddenly the perfumes aren’t four SKUs.

They’re portals.

And that distinction is everything.

Build the world first

I keep coming back to an idea I wrote about recently while trying to understand what makes something iconic.

An icon becomes bigger than the thing itself.

Nike isn’t shoes. Chateau Marmont isn’t accommodation. Miu Miu isn’t simply clothing. The product becomes an entry point into a larger collection of associations, codes, characters, stories and meanings.

Lore seems to understand this unusually early.

Its own language makes the ambition explicit: “Each scent is a galaxy and we’re the night sky.”

What an enormous idea for a 12-month-old company with a handful of SKUs.

But that scale of imagination is exactly what makes the brand feel bigger than its current footprint.

Lore hasn’t built four products and then asked marketing to invent a story for each one.

It has built a universe capable of producing stories indefinitely.

This is an important distinction because world-building is not storytelling.

Storytelling asks: What story can we tell about this product?

World-building asks: What are the rules of the reality this product belongs to?

What does it look like there?
How does it speak?
What objects exist?
What is beautiful?
What is strange?
What is funny?
What does this world believe?
Who belongs inside it?
What would feel completely wrong?

A story has an ending.

A world can keep generating stories.

And that’s where Lore starts feeling less like a fragrance launch and more like cultural infrastructure.

The bottle knows what it’s doing

Then there is the bottle.

Lore worked with designer Jérôme Laurendeau through somewhere around 40 to 50 versions of the form and 150 colour versions before arriving at the final object. At one stage, Bender was asking for saturation changes of 1%.

I adore this kind of insanity.

Because it demonstrates something that gets flattened in conversations about taste: sometimes the difference between nearly right and right is almost imperceptible.

But you feel it.

The bottle draws from experimental blown glass, including the work of André Thuret, as well as sea glass and worn European steps. Its shape sits somewhere between manufactured object and something found in nature. The bottle is refillable; even the cap gets a second life as a candleholder.

Nothing about it feels like someone opened a packaging trend report and selected organic form.

It feels specific.

And specificity is becoming increasingly valuable.

We are entering an era where almost anyone can produce something aesthetically competent. AI can generate an identity system. Pinterest can supply a visual universe in ten minutes. Manufacturers can give you the same beautiful component as thirty other brands.

Technical beauty is becoming abundant.

But specificity is still scarce.

The Lore bottle is useful here because it isn’t merely beautiful. It carries the logic of the brand.

Fluid but substantial. Strange but familiar. Polished but imperfect. New but somehow archaeological.

It has tension.

And tension is so often the difference between something tasteful and something memorable.

Bender has said that every touchpoint is an opportunity to make someone feel something.

You can see the evidence.

The bottle doesn’t simply contain the fragrance.

It continues the argument.

A brand with lore

Even the name is annoyingly good.

Lore.

Knowledge passed between people. Stories accumulated over time. The mythology surrounding a person, place or thing. The details that make a fictional universe feel as though it existed before you arrived.

It’s almost suspiciously perfect.

Because lore cannot really be manufactured in one campaign.

It accumulates.

A strange bottle. A founder detail. A scent someone wore on a particular night. A phrase. An object. A collaboration. A customer story. A cultural moment. A reference you only understand if you’ve been paying attention.

Eventually, enough fragments collect around the name that the name begins carrying meaning by itself.

That’s brand.

Meaning accumulating until a word becomes shorthand for a world.

Which makes Lore less a name than an instruction.

Keep adding to the mythology.

It arrived already knowing itself

Lore launched in 2025 and moved into roughly 250 Sephora doors within months. Its initial collection of four fragrances was developed with perfumer Jérôme Epinette, and the brand quickly generated enough attention to be described in beauty media as one of fragrance’s buzziest new arrivals.

That’s objectively impressive.

But scale isn’t really the thing I find most interesting.

It’s the speed of meaning.

New brands usually look new.

They’re still figuring out their angles. Testing their voice. Discovering what customers respond to. Gradually accumulating visual codes and cultural associations. You can almost watch them becoming themselves in public.

Lore didn’t feel like that to me.

It arrived with the confidence of something that had existed for years.

Not because it had manufactured heritage. Quite the opposite.

It simply seemed to know itself.

And perhaps that’s what we’re responding to when we call a brand cool.

Not trendiness.

Not aesthetics.

But rather, self-possession.

The ability to participate in culture without constantly asking culture who it should be.

Lore has a strong enough internal world that it can be playful without becoming random. Beautiful without becoming generic. Strange without becoming inaccessible. Premium without adopting all the usual luxury codes.

It doesn’t feel like it’s looking sideways.

And to me, that creates gravity.

Is Lore the fragrance brand of this era?

This is obviously my thesis, not an objective fact. Though I’ll argue it.

Fragrance is having an extraordinary cultural moment, and Lore is entering a landscape already populated by formidable brands: Byredo, Le Labo, Phlur, DedCool, D.S. & Durga, Glossier, Diptyque, Maison Francis Kurkdjian, and a growing number of smaller houses with highly specific points of view.

Lore has also only existed since 2025.

Iconicity can’t be declared at launch.

Culture has to give it back to you.

But I think Lore has claimed something unusually quickly.

It feels like a fragrance brand made for this precise cultural moment without feeling like a product of this precise cultural moment.

That’s hard.

It understands that consumers want objects again after years of aesthetic minimalism. It understands that luxury doesn’t necessarily mean seriousness. It understands internet language without appearing terminally online. It understands the value of community without turning every customer into a “bestie”. It understands storytelling without explaining every metaphor. It understands that people don’t only want products anymore.

They want worlds worth entering.

And importantly, Lore seems to understand that a world needs some mystery to remain a world.

You shouldn’t be able to see its edges.

The best worlds don’t explain themselves completely. They make you want to explore them.

Lore did that to me before I’d smelled a single thing.

Which is why, despite being a Tulita girl, I now know about Melanie Bender’s aerospace engineering degree. I’ve looked at André Thuret glass. I’ve thought about Spirited Away and Spice World. I’ve studied a perfume cap that becomes a candleholder. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time staring at their imagery on the internet.

And now I’ve written an entire essay about it.

I still don’t know what Lore smells like.

But I know exactly how its world feels.

Maybe that’s the magic.

-
PS. If this is your kind of rabbit hole, I recently wrote a 40-page Guide to Brand Strategy. It covers positioning, customers, storytelling, voice, taste, instinct and the art of knowing what actually matters. It’s included with a paid Extra Curricular subscription, you can unlock it here:

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I’ve always thought one of the most useful things a creative person can do is borrow ideas from places they don’t belong.

Not copy them, but rather, translate them.

A collectible can teach you something about human behaviour. Selling a company can teach you something about identity. ADHD can teach you something about alignment. A manifestation practice can completely change the way you think about self-worth. And sometimes a book about dying can teach you more about living than a hundred books about life.

Here are five things I’ve been thinking about lately.

01. How Collectibles Taught me that Rationality is overrated

I am fascinated by collectibles, (and incredibly done with Ooshies. IYKYK)

Not necessarily by the objects themselves, but by the completely irrational behaviour they inspire.

A tiny plastic figurine becomes impossible to get and suddenly grown adults are hunting it across cities. A trading card is worth thousands of dollars. Someone owns 47 versions of essentially the same thing and is still deeply invested in finding number 48.

From a purely functional perspective, this makes absolutely no sense.

Which is precisely why I think it’s so interesting.

Most businesses are built around a very sensible question: What problem does this solve?

Collectibles often solve almost nothing.

Instead, they create desire through identity, scarcity, discovery, completion, belonging, story and play.

You don’t need the next one. You simply want it because you don’t have it.

Or because you want the whole set. Or because everyone in your strange little corner of the world is talking about it. Or because finding the rare one feels like winning something.

Or, most interestingly, because owning it says something about you.

I think businesses sometimes overestimate utility and underestimate irrationality.

Humans don’t only buy things because they’re useful. We buy because we’re nostalgic. Because we’re bored. Because something makes us laugh. Because we want to belong. Because we want to signal taste. Because the packaging is bloody great. Because there’s a tiny chance we’ll get the rare pink one and apparently that’s enough to make a perfectly sensible adult buy 12 boxes.

There’s a lesson in that.

The best product idea might not solve a bigger problem. It might create a stronger feeling.

I’ve started asking a different question when I see businesses people seem irrationally obsessed with: What emotional mechanism is actually operating here?

Because what I know to be true is that “people like the product” is rarely the whole answer.

Sometimes the irrational bit is the business model.

02. What selling my business taught me about identity

At the start of the year, I sold the business I’d spent most of my adult life building.

And one of the strangest parts wasn’t letting go of the company. It was letting go of the person I had become inside it.

For years, if someone asked what I did, the answer was incredibly easy: I founded a branding agency.

It explained my work, obviously, but it also explained a surprising amount about me. Creative director. Founder. Agency owner. Brand strategist. Employer. The person people came to for a particular kind of thinking.

There is enormous comfort in having a well-rehearsed answer to who are you?

Then you sell the thing.

And suddenly the answer isn’t quite as neat.

I think we talk a lot about building identities and not nearly enough about knowing when to loosen our grip on them.

Because identity is useful. It helps us make decisions. It gives us purpose. It creates coherence.

But eventually it can start making decisions for us.

I’m this kind of person, therefore I should want this.

This is what someone like me does next.

The weird thing is that by the time I sold Smack Bang, I’d already outgrown parts of the identity attached to it. I just hadn’t completely separated the two.

And perhaps that’s one of the reasons selling it has felt less like losing myself and more like meeting myself without the job title.

There are parts I absolutely want to keep.

The eye. The ideas. The instinct. The ability to build worlds. The obsession with brands and culture and why people want what they want.

Those were never Smack Bang.

They were mine.

The company was simply one place I put them.

Maybe the goal isn’t to build an identity so strong you never lose it. Maybe it’s to know yourself well enough that your identity can keep changing without you disappearing with it.

03. What To Be Magnetic taught me about self worth

I’ve been in the To Be Magnetic world for around seven years now, and one of the ideas I’ve found most provocative is its emphasis on self-worth.

TBM’s philosophy is that what we believe we’re worthy of plays a significant role in what we allow ourselves to call in, pursue and accept. Their process centres heavily on identifying subconscious beliefs around worthiness, expanding what feels possible, setting boundaries and taking action accordingly.

I don’t need every metaphysical part of manifestation to be objectively provable to find this idea incredibly useful.

There’s a very practical version of it that I see everywhere.

What do you tolerate? What do you charge? Who do you date? What opportunities do you put yourself forward for? How do you allow people to speak to you? How much space do you take up? What do you believe is available to someone like you?

At some point, those tiny decisions accumulate into something that looks suspiciously like a life.

Which raises a slightly confronting thought:

What if parts of your life are a physical expression of what you’ve decided you’re worth?

Not all of it, obviously. Terrible things still happen to people who know their worth. Privilege, circumstance, health, economics and sheer chance shape lives in ways no manifestation practice can explain away, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise.

I’m talking about the places where we do have agency.

I’ve noticed in my own life that the more I’ve worked on self-worth, the less interested I’ve become in convincing, chasing, proving or tolerating things that feel fundamentally wrong for me.

And perhaps that’s the bit I find most useful about this whole world.

Not believe you’re worthy and a Range Rover will appear in your driveway.

More: Believe you’re worthy and notice what you stop agreeing to.

That can change a life, too.

04. How ADHD taught me that alignment might be more useful than discipline

Realising I had ADHD as an adult was quite funny to me for one particular reason.

I had always thought my ability to focus was one of my superpowers.

I can become so absorbed in something that hours disappear. Food becomes irrelevant. Messages cease to exist. The rest of the world could potentially catch fire and I’d be sitting there moving something three pixels to the left.

So naturally, I thought: Excellent focus. Definitely nothing to investigate here.

The irony, of course, is hyperfocus.

And learning more about ADHD has made me reconsider something I accidentally did very well in my twenties: I designed my working life around being interested.

I started my own company young. 22 in fact. One of the enormous privileges of that was gradually being able to engineer my job around the things my brain naturally wanted to do.

Ideas. Creative direction. Strategy. Solving problems. Starting new things. Following curiosities. Making something better.

If something became unbearably dull, I would either just not do it, or eventually I could hire someone who was inexplicably less bored by it than I was.

For most of my life I interpreted my ability to work intensely as discipline. Or work ethic.

Now I wonder how much of it was alignment.

I happened to build an environment where the things I needed to focus on were very often the things capable of capturing my attention.

And when that happens, my brain is powerful.

The counterfactual is interesting to me.

What if I’d spent my adult life in a job where someone else decided what deserved eight hours of my attention each day? What if most of my work felt repetitive or meaningless to me? What if I couldn’t follow the thread when my brain suddenly became intensely interested in something?

I think I would have found that life enormously difficult.

This doesn’t mean people with ADHD should simply refuse to do boring things. I remain sadly aware that BAS statements exist.

And alignment can’t remove every executive-function challenge.

But it has made me wonder whether we sometimes reach for discipline when the more useful question is design.

Instead of: How do I force myself to focus on this?

Maybe sometimes: Why is my brain fighting this so hard, and can I change the conditions?

Different environment. Different time of day. Different role. More autonomy. More novelty. More urgency. More meaning. A different way of doing the work entirely.

I spent years thinking I’d become exceptionally good at making myself focus. It turns out I may have become exceptionally good at building a life I wanted to focus on.

Maybe alignment isn’t the reward for getting your life right. Maybe, for some brains, it’s infrastructure.

05. What death taught me about living

My sister-in-law, Emily, died in 2024. She was only 37.

There are experiences that give you a new perspective on life. And then there are experiences that split your understanding of it into before and after.

Her death did that for me.

Around that time I read Frank Ostaseski’s The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, and I don’t use this word lightly: it was transformational.

Ostaseski co-founded the Zen Hospice Project and spent decades accompanying people who were dying. The book distils what that proximity to death taught him into five invitations: Don’t Wait; Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing; Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience; Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things; and Cultivate Don’t Know Mind.

I think before experiencing death closely, you can intellectually understand that life is short.

Of course it is.

We’ve all heard it a thousand times.

Life is short. You only live once. Tell people you love them.

They become phrases you agree with without necessarily allowing them to rearrange anything.

Then someone very important to you dies. And suddenly mortality stops being philosophical.

It becomes logistical. There was a person here. Now there isn’t.

There were ordinary Tuesdays they didn’t know were finite. Plans they assumed they’d get to. People who thought there would be another dinner, another Christmas, another completely unremarkable phone call.

That does something to your relationship with later.

I think this is why Ostaseski’s first invitation - Don’t Wait - will stick with me forever.

Not live every day like it’s your last. I’ve always found that vaguely exhausting. If today were genuinely my last day, I’d make wildly irresponsible decisions and be no use to anybody.

It’s subtler than that.

Don’t wait to become yourself. Don’t wait to say the thing. Don’t wait for some imaginary future version of your life before you start inhabiting it properly. Don’t keep the good plates for people more important than your family. Don’t postpone joy because you haven’t earned it yet. Don’t assume the people you love know. Don’t treat daily life as the waiting room for the important bit.

I don’t think being conscious of death has made me morbid.

I think it has made me less patient with not living.

Less interested in staying somewhere simply because leaving would be inconvenient.

Less willing to build a life around other people’s expectations.

More aware of the ridiculous privilege of an ordinary day.

More likely to ask: If this is my actual life - not the rehearsal for it - do I like how I’m spending it?

Death is still awful.

I wouldn’t insult grief by trying to turn it into some neat little gift.

I would undo what happened to Emily (and those who miss her deeply).

But what I know to be true is that grief and gratitude seem to be capable of occupying the same body.

And one of the things grief gave me, whether I wanted it or not, was an acute understanding that later is an assumption.

I still make five-year plans. I still worry about stupid shit. I still occasionally spend an hour on the lounge doom-scrolling

Knowing you’re going to die does not magically make you enlightened.

But every now and then, it cuts through the noise.

You’re here.

They’re here.

This is it.

Don’t wait.

There’s a feeling I get when I encounter something truly iconic.

It’s a kind of mind-smile. A tiny internal ‘Ohhh. Of course.’

I’ll see an interior and know it’s Kelly Wearstler before I’ve checked the credit. Pamela Anderson will collaborate with Flamingo Estate and I’ll think, of course she did. Jonathan Anderson can turn a tomato into a clutch bag and somehow make the whole thing feel intellectually inevitable.

There’s something deeply satisfying about that level of clarity.

But also something I truly envy.

Imagine knowing who you are so completely that everything you touch carries a level of your DNA that even strangers on separate continents can feel your essence.

I’ve spent almost two decades thinking about brands, identity and what makes things distinctive, so theoretically I should understand what’s happening here. But lately I’ve found myself becoming slightly obsessed with a bigger question:

What does it actually take to become iconic?

Not successful. Not famous. Not cool.

Iconic.

(Because they’re clearly not the same thing.)

There are enormously successful companies with almost no cultural gravity. There are famous people whose names everyone knows but who don’t really stand for anything. There are beautifully designed restaurants, hotels, products and brands that I admire but could swap for another beautifully designed thing tomorrow without feeling any particular sense of loss.

Icons are different.

They seem to shine like their own star in the sky. You know them when you see them.

So naturally, I’ve been trying to work out why.

My current research pool is admittedly chaotic.

Pamela Anderson in midlife.

Gwyneth Paltrow.

Jimmy Butler.

Martha Stewart.

Kelly Wearstler.

Miley Cyrus.

Wes Anderson.

Then there are the brands and places: Rhode, Nike, Lore, Erewhon, Miu Miu, Chateau Marmont.

On the surface, these things have almost nothing in common.

A basketball player and an interior designer. A supermarket and a hotel. A filmmaker and a skincare brand.

And yet I feel the same gravitational pull towards all of them.

There is a world there.

That word keeps coming up for me: World.

Because I don’t think iconic people and brands simply make things.

They create worlds.

And eventually those worlds become so well resolved that you can recognise them from the tiniest fragment.

A colour, silhouette, sentence. An interior. A photograph. An attitude.

Or dare I say it, a smoothie.

You don’t need the logo anymore.

You just know.

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This is perhaps why Kelly Wearstler fascinates me so much.

Her work is obviously beautiful, but beautiful feels like an almost useless word for describing what makes it special. Plenty of interior designers make beautiful rooms.

Kelly’s rooms feel Kelly.

There’s an incredible amount happening in them - shape, material, scale, colour, pattern, art, objects - and yet somehow none of it feels indecisive.

Quite the opposite. It feels extraordinarily resolved.

That’s probably the quality I admire most: Self-resolution.

Confidence doesn’t quite describe it.

Confidence can be loud. Confidence can be performed. Confidence can also be completely unjustified.

Self-resolution feels different.

It’s the sense that someone knows what belongs in their world and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t.

There are no apologetic edges. No softening for anyone else’s sake.

You get the same feeling from Gwyneth Paltrow. She has spent years building a world that plenty of people have found ridiculous, elitist, brilliant, fascinating, aspirational or some combination of all five. But you always know when something belongs in the Goop universe.

Wes Anderson has it to an almost absurd degree. His creative language has become so distinct that his name is effectively an adjective. People don’t merely reference Wes Anderson films. They describe hotels, photographs, outfits, advertisements and entire TikTok trends as Wes Anderson-esque.

Imagine becoming so distinctive that culture starts using your name to describe things you had absolutely nothing to do with.

Surely that is one of the great markers of iconicity.

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The more I looked, the more I started noticing patterns.

The first is that icons own something.

Like, culturally.

Nike owns a particular version of athletic ambition.

Robert owns a particular kind of joyful Australian earnestness, the same way that Martha owns power in domesticity.

Erewhon has somehow managed to own a very specific version of aspirational wellness despite, when you really think about it, being a grocery store.

Kelly owns a visual universe.

Pamela increasingly owns something more abstract: a particular kind of midlife freedom and self-possession.

None of them are the only people doing those things.

That’s important.

There are thousands of sports brands. Thousands of homemakers. Thousands of interior designers. And Los Angeles is hardly short of places selling expensive green juice.

But at some point, these people or companies became disproportionately associated with a particular idea.

They planted a flag.

And stayed there long enough for the rest of us to notice.

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The second thing is that icons are compressible.

This might be my favourite part of the whole theory.

You can take an enormous, complicated creative universe and reduce it to a remarkably small number of signals without losing its DNA.

The recent H&M collaborations are a perfect example.

What makes a collaboration with someone like Kelly Wearstler so satisfying isn’t simply that she has designed some nice things at a more accessible price point. It’s that the pieces somehow contain her entire world.

A red trench coat and you think: Kelly.

A handful of objects and you understand the room they came from.

WARDROBE.NYC has achieved something similar through its H&M collaboration. Take a highly specific fashion language - shape, proportion, restraint, attitude - translate it into another company and price point, and somehow the DNA survives.

That feels significant.

Perhaps one of the tests of a truly iconic idea is whether it can survive translation.

Change the medium, change the category, change the scale or even change the price.

Does it still feel like you?

If the answer is yes, your DNA might be stronger than your aesthetic.

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This also made me reconsider what we mean when we talk about consistency.

Branding has historically been obsessed with consistency.

Same colours, fonts, photographic treatment. Same visual codes repeated over and over again until recognition is achieved through sheer force.

But some of the most iconic people and brands aren’t particularly consistent in that sense.

Pamela Anderson today looks almost nothing like the Pamela Anderson embedded in our collective memory from the 1990s.

And yet somehow her current incarnation has made her more compelling, not less.

The transformation itself belongs to her story.

Lore shape-shift visually on the daily and still feels like Lore.

Jimmy Butler is another version of this. His world somehow stretches from an incredibly grand, design-led home to a bold coffee brand, a playful NBA persona and a beautifully polished eyewear campaign. On paper, those things shouldn’t necessarily belong together. Through Jimmy, they do.

Maybe iconicity isn’t consistency.

Maybe it’s coherence without sameness.

You can change dramatically if the thing underneath the change remains intact.

The DNA is unbreakable.

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Then there’s something else.

Icons are incredibly difficult to substitute.

This is where the difference between excellence and iconicity becomes particularly obvious to me.

There are hotels more luxurious than Chateau Marmont.

There are skincare products clinically more validated than Rhode.

There are designers with extraordinary taste who aren’t Kelly Wearstler.

There are fragrance brands larger than Lore.

But replacing one of these things with its technically superior competitor doesn’t necessarily preserve the meaning. Because perhaps iconicity isn’t about being the best.

Perhaps it’s about being the least interchangeable.

I keep coming back to that.

In business we’re taught to find competitive advantages. Better product. Better price. Better distribution. Better customer experience.

All important.

But iconic things seem to compete on a stranger dimension.

They have become so specifically themselves that comparison starts becoming slightly irrelevant.

What is the competitor to Chateau Marmont?

Technically, hundreds of hotels.

Culturally?

That’s a much harder question.

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Which leads me to lore (note the lowercase, I’m not referring to the brand this time).

Every icon seems to accumulate stories.

Not brand storytelling in the slightly painful marketing sense.

Actual mythology.

Chateau Marmont has decades of Hollywood stories embedded in its walls.

Martha Stewart has built a cultural mythology so strange and contradictory that no brand strategist could have invented it: domestic perfection, business empire, prison, Snoop Dogg, reinvention, sex symbol.

Jimmy Butler isn’t simply an elite basketball player. There’s BIGFACE coffee, the hair, the competitiveness, the personality, the stories that follow him around the league.

Pamela’s current chapter means something because we remember the previous ones. Her bare face contains more cultural information because we remember the makeup. The white shirt means something because we remember the red swimsuit. Her reinvention has context.

And maybe that’s why mythology is impossible to manufacture quickly.

You need events. Contradictions. Time?

Other people telling stories about you. Moments that become part of collective memory.

You can’t renovate your way into mythology.

You can create a beautiful hotel tomorrow.

But you cannot create the Chateau Marmont tomorrow.

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Icons also generate imitation.

This feels like one of the clearest signals that something has crossed over from successful into culturally significant.

Other people start borrowing the codes.

Suddenly campaigns look Rhode-ish.

Health stores become more Erewhon-y.

Filmmakers borrow Wes Anderson’s visual language.

Brands adopt the aesthetic cues of Miu Miu.

Designers start referencing Kelly.

Eventually the influence becomes so widespread that we almost forget where it came from.

Which is an interesting paradox.

Imitation should theoretically dilute the original, but instead, it often strengthens it.

Because every imitation quietly points backwards.

The copies become evidence of the original’s influence.

Maybe an icon is something culture doesn’t simply consume.

Culture starts metabolising it.

Its ideas escape the original container and begin showing up elsewhere.

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At this point in my investigation, I started wondering whether originality was the answer.

Maybe icons are simply unusually original.

Except that doesn’t quite work.

There are wildly original artists nobody knows.

Perhaps it’s taste.

But there are people with exquisite taste who never become culturally significant.

Confidence?

The world has no shortage of confident mediocrity.

Authenticity?

Closer. But there are billions of people authentically being themselves every day without becoming icons.

Obsession feels important.

I can’t imagine someone developing a creative language as recognisable as Kelly Wearstler’s without going extraordinarily deep into their particular thing. Or Gwyneth making work that controversial without an almost ridiculous level of participation.

Icons seem to have gone further into themselves than most people are willing to go.

They hone. Refine. Notice. Edit. Repeat. Protect.

Which perhaps explains another quality I see in almost all of them:

restraint.

Not aesthetic restraint.

Kelly Wearstler has conclusively disproved that theory.

Editorial restraint: Knowing what gets admitted into your world. And more importantly, knowing what doesn’t.

Having enough conviction to leave something out even when the market, algorithm or person holding the cheque is asking you to put it in.

That takes taste.

But it also takes nerve.

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Interestingly, I don’t think icons necessarily need to be polarising.

I initially wondered whether they did.

Distinctive things often create strong reactions, after all.

But then there’s Robert Irwin.

It’s difficult to argue that his appeal comes from division. His cultural power seems to come from almost the opposite: an extraordinary earnestness that feels increasingly unusual in a culture soaked in irony.

Rhode isn’t particularly confrontational either.

So perhaps polarisation isn’t the requirement.

Edge is.

There needs to be something that couldn’t have emerged from consensus.

Something new. A different behaviour. A new lane.

A redefinition of something we thought we understood.

Playing it safe might make you broadly appealing. But I’m not convinced it can make you iconic.

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Which brings me to a slightly uncomfortable observation.

Perhaps the greatest threat to iconicity is not failure.

It’s dilution.

We all receive enormous amounts of information about how we should behave.

What’s trending.

What performs.

What customers want.

What competitors are doing.

What the algorithm rewards.

What everyone else in our industry seems to have agreed good looks like.

And if you’re not careful, becoming more commercially sophisticated can gradually make you less distinct.

The edges soften. The weird thing becomes slightly less weird. The language becomes more familiar. The product becomes easier to categorise.

You start looking around instead of looking inward.

Until eventually you become extremely competent and completely interchangeable.

Icons seem to resist that process.

Not necessarily because they ignore culture… Quite the opposite. I suspect most of them are exceptionally culturally fluent.

But somehow they absorb culture without being flattened by it.

They remain themselves.

Maybe that’s what I mean by self-resolution.

The ability to participate in culture without asking culture who you should be.

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So after spending far too much time thinking about this, I thought I might have cracked it.

There seem to be six behaviours that keep appearing.

Icons own something.

They’re compressible.

They’re difficult to confuse with anyone else.

They generate imitation.

They accumulate lore.

And eventually, they represent something beyond themselves.

Underneath all of that seems to sit obsession, self-resolution and restraint.

You could almost turn it into an equation.

Difference.

Conviction.

Coherence.

Cultural fluency.

Repetition.

Time.

Surely if we can identify the ingredients, we can manufacture the outcome?

And this is where the whole theory falls apart.

Because we can’t.

H&M is a useful example. It is enormously successful, globally recognised and commercially powerful.

And yet I don’t personally feel much cultural gravity towards H&M itself.

What it does extraordinarily well is borrow cultural gravity.

Kelly Wearstler enters H&M and suddenly I’m interested.

WARDROBE.NYC enters H&M and suddenly a mass retailer becomes an access point into a highly specific world.

The collaboration works precisely because one party possesses something the other can’t manufacture through scale alone.

Meaning.

Which makes me think iconicity requires one final ingredient that doesn’t belong to the person or company at all.

Culture has to give it back to you.

You can build the world, develop the codes and hone your taste. You can protect your difference, become obsessive and rinse and repeat until your point of view is unmistakable.

You can create something so resolved that it survives translation. You can do every single thing right.

And still, the culture has to care.

That’s the part you can’t put into a strategy deck.

The audience has to attach meaning. People have to imitate you. Stories have to accumulate.

Your work has to intersect with something the culture is feeling at precisely the right moment.

And eventually, if you’re extraordinarily good, unusually resolved and perhaps just a little fortunate, the thing you created stops belonging entirely to you.

It becomes shorthand for something. An era, an attitude or a way of seeing.

Maybe that’s what an icon actually is.

Not someone who has successfully convinced the world to look at them. But rather someone who has created something so unmistakably their own that, eventually, the world starts seeing other things through them.

And perhaps that’s why iconicity remains so fascinating.

We can reverse engineer almost all of it.

We can identify the ingredients.

We can create the conditions.

We can get tantalisingly close to a formula.

But the final 10% refuses to be manufactured.

You can build the world.

But culture decides whether it wants to move in.

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I have a theory that one of the most valuable things you can develop over the next decade is an opinion.

Not an audience. Not a personal brand. Not even expertise, necessarily.

An well-informed opinion.

I don’t mean becoming the person at dinner who has a hot take on absolutely everything. Nor do I mean forming strong views on things you know nothing about and broadcasting them with inexplicable confidence. I think we can all agree the internet has enough of that already.

I mean developing the ability to encounter something - a business, an idea, a piece of design, a cultural shift, a way of working - and decide what you think about it. Not what so-and-so told you they think about it. Or what your favourite podcaster thinks about it.

Increasingly, I think that’s a rarer skill than it sounds.

We have access to more information than any generation before us. We can Google the history of an idea, read seventeen expert perspectives on it, find a Reddit thread arguing both sides, listen to a three-hour podcast and now, of course, ask AI to synthesise the whole thing into a perfectly reasonable position before we’ve even had the chance to form one ourselves.

Information is abundant.

Analysis is becoming abundant.

Reasonable answers are becoming very, very abundant.

Which makes me wonder whether the valuable bit is moving somewhere else.

Perhaps the question is no longer simply What do you know?

It’s What do you make of it?

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I was paid to have opinions

I don’t think I fully appreciated this until I looked back at my career in branding.

On the surface, clients hired us to make things. Strategies, identities, websites, campaigns, packaging.

But the further I got into it, the more I realised that making the thing wasn’t always the most valuable part of the job.

Clients came to us because they needed someone to look at a sea of possibilities and say:

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I increasingly think the prerequisites for becoming a founder would look mildly alarming on a psychological assessment.

Obsession. Delusion. Stubbornness. An unusually high tolerance for rejection. The ability to talk about the same idea for five years without becoming bored. A willingness to risk public humiliation in pursuit of something that may not work.

In almost any other setting, we’d stage an intervention.

In business, we call it entrepreneurship.

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I’ve been thinking about this because so much of what gets written about founders focuses on the respectable traits. Resilience. Leadership. Vision. Adaptability. All true, I’m sure. But since building businesses from the age of 22, I think some of the more useful prerequisites are considerably stranger.

They’re traits that can be liabilities in one context and enormous advantages in another. Useful dysfunctions, I like to call them.

So, in no particular order, here are my 24 unofficial prerequisites for becoming a founder.

1. Thick skin. Not because criticism stops hurting, but because you need to recover quickly enough that somebody else’s opinion doesn’t become your new operating system.

2. A slightly delusional relationship with probability. You need enough rationality to understand the odds and enough irrationality to believe you might be the exception.

3. An unusually high tolerance for embarrassment. Selling before you’re established. Posting to nobody. Asking for money. Following up again. Launching something people might ignore. Being publicly enthusiastic about something that currently exists mainly in a Google Doc. Entrepreneurship requires an extraordinary willingness to be seen trying.

4. Obsession. Interest gets you started. Obsession is what makes you notice the tiny things nobody else thinks are worth noticing, and continue caring long after the novelty has disappeared.

5. Selective deafness. You need to listen extraordinarily closely while simultaneously developing the ability to completely ignore certain opinions.

6. A weird relationship with rejection. You don’t need to become immune to it. You need to metabolise it quickly enough that a no becomes data rather than identity.

7. Comfort with being misunderstood. Particularly at the beginning, when your ideas make perfect sense inside your head and sound mildly insane once released into the atmosphere.

8. An inability to leave things alone. I think this might be one of the great founder tells: encountering something perfectly adequate and being disproportionately irritated by how much better it could be.

9. The ability to manufacture momentum from nothing. There will be periods when nobody is emailing, buying, funding, inviting or validating you. Nothing is happening unless you make something happen. So you do.

10. A short memory for pain. Cash-flow crises. Manufacturing disasters. Hiring mistakes. Launches that nearly kill you. Six months later: Anyway, I have another idea.

11. The ability to hold contradictory truths. This is absolutely going to work and I could be completely wrong need to occupy the same brain without cancelling each other out.

12. Resourcefulness bordering on audacity. Not I know how to do this, but I have absolutely no idea how to do this, but give me until 3pm.

13. A high tolerance for unfinishedness. Something is always broken, late, underperforming, being rebuilt or approximately 70% as good as you want it to be. The fantasy of eventually getting everything sorted is one I personally remain very fond of.

14. A strange appetite for responsibility. Eventually you realise that almost every problem can be traced back to a decision you made, didn’t make, hired someone to make or should have noticed sooner. Fun!

15. The ability to care deeply without becoming precious. Your company can be deeply personal to you while the product, campaign, hire, strategy or idea still needs to die when the evidence says it isn’t working.

16. A willingness to repeat yourself. By the time you’re painfully bored of saying something, the market may have heard it twice. You need to resist confusing your own over-exposure with everyone else’s.

17. A high tolerance for looking stupid before looking smart. Most interesting ideas become obvious retrospectively. Before that, they often look questionable, unnecessary or weird.

18. The ability to create certainty for other people while carrying uncertainty yourself. Not false certainty. Conviction. The ability to say this is where we’re going while privately knowing there are seventeen things you haven’t figured out yet.

19. A fascination with problems. The best founders I know don’t simply tolerate problems; there’s often a tiny part of them that becomes energised by one. Interesting. Why is that happening? A problem is irritating, yes. But it’s also something to solve.

20. The ability to regenerate your own energy. Nobody is coming every Monday morning to make the founder interested again. You need to know how to find your way back to curiosity, conviction and momentum after they’ve temporarily left the building.

21. Comfort with asymmetry. You can spend three years pushing something uphill and then have one conversation change the trajectory of the entire company. Founder life has a terrible relationship between effort and reward in the short term. You need to keep playing anyway.

22. The instinct to know when to be stubborn and when to change your mind. Possibly the hardest one. Persistence and delusion can look remarkably similar from the inside. So can adaptability and giving up too early. There is no framework that completely solves this. Eventually you have to develop judgement.

23. A tiny chip on your shoulder. Not enough to build your entire life around proving somebody wrong. Just enough I’ll show you to pull out of the emergency cupboard when intrinsic motivation is having the day off.

And finally:

24. You need to enjoy the game more than the trophy.

I think this might be the prerequisite that overrides all the others.

Because the trophies are incredibly brief.

The launch lasts a day. The revenue milestone becomes the new baseline almost immediately. The article gets published, the award goes on the shelf, the investment lands in the bank, the business sells… and then, eventually, it’s Tuesday again.

Most of entrepreneurship is just a very ordinary Tuesday.

It’s figuring out why conversion dropped. Finding yet another new manufacturer. Rewriting the email. Having the uncomfortable conversation. Moving money around. Looking at the same problem from a seventeenth angle. Getting excited because you found a 4% improvement nobody else on earth could possibly care about.

If you need the trophy to make all of that worthwhile, entrepreneurship will be a painful experience.

The founders who seem happiest doing it are often the ones who genuinely enjoy the peculiar intellectual sport of building something. They like the puzzle. The movement. The possibility. The constant requirement to figure shit out.

Maybe that’s why so many founders sell one company and, despite knowing exactly what they’re signing themselves up for, eventually start another.

They miss the game.

The trophy is the moment everyone sees. The game is the life you actually have to enjoy.

I’ve worked in branding for the better part of two decades, which means I’ve consumed an almost embarrassing amount of content about brands.

Books, podcasts, talks. Courses and case studies. Awards and annuals. Trend reports. Strategy decks. Interviews with founders. Interviews with strategists. Interviews with founders interviewing strategists.

Some of it fundamentally changed the way I think.

A lot of it could have been a LinkedIn post.

If someone came to me today and said, I want to get stunningly good at brand strategy. Where do I start? (which tbh happens almost every week), I wouldn’t send them off to do a $20,000 course.

I’d give them my compulsory reading list below.

Then I’d tell them to get out of the branding section.

Because one of the biggest things I’ve learnt about brand is that you cannot become exceptional at it by only studying brands.

Brand sits somewhere between business, psychology, culture, language, design and human behaviour. You need to understand positioning and distinctiveness, yes. But you also need to understand why people want things. Why something becomes culturally relevant. Why one idea sticks while another disappears. Why a sentence makes you feel something. Why everyone suddenly starts wearing the same shoe. Why one restaurant is booked for three months and the equally good one next door isn’t.

The branding books give you frameworks.

Everything else gives you an eye.

So this isn’t an exhaustive list of the Best Branding Resources Ever™. Although, it kinda is.

It’s my unofficial curriculum: the things I’d point you towards if you wanted to learn how I think about brands.

Start with what a brand actually is

The first branding book I’d probably hand someone is Marty Neumeier’s The Brand Gap.

Partly because you can read it in an afternoon.

And partly because it does something surprisingly few branding books manage to do: makes the whole thing feel simple without making it simplistic.

Neumeier’s premise is essentially about bridging the gap between strategy and creative execution. His five disciplines: differentiate, collaborate, innovate, validate and cultivate, give you a way of understanding brand as something much bigger than an identity system.

I think that’s an important place to start because one of the most persistent misunderstandings about branding is still that brand = how something looks.

It isn’t.

The visual identity is an expression of the brand.

Brand is the bigger thing underneath it.
It’s the idea. It’s the position. The reputation. The expectation.
The entire feeling, or dare Is ay it - the AURA of the entity.
The collection of associations someone has accumulated about you before you’ve even entered the room.

Once you understand that, everything else gets considerably more interesting.

Then learn positioning

If I could force founders to understand one thing before they brief a branding agency, (or brand specialists learning the ropes), it would probably be positioning.

No amount of beautiful typography can rescue a business that hasn’t figured out why anyone should choose it.

April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome is one of the clearest practical resources I’ve found for this. Her methodology breaks positioning down into components including competitive alternatives, differentiated capabilities, customer value and the market context that makes that value obvious. The updated 2026 edition expands the process further, but the core idea remains wonderfully useful: positioning isn’t a sentence you fill in at the end of a workshop. It’s the context that helps someone understand why your thing matters.

And this is where I’d probably interrupt the curriculum with my first piece of advice:
Don’t memorise the frameworks. Instead, learn to see the problem they’re solving.
Because eventually you want to be able to walk into a business and instinctively think: Oh. You’re talking about the wrong thing.

That’s strategy.

A little something extra for paid subscribers

I’ve written a 40-page brand strategy ebook to go with this article: the frameworks, questions and thinking I’d use to interrogate or build a brand from the ground up.

Think of this article as the compulsory reading list.
And the ebook as my guide to becoming a great brand strategist.

Paid subscribers can download it below, along with the rest of my unofficial brand curriculum.

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I’ve always thought one of the most useful things a creative person can do is borrow ideas from places they don’t belong.

Not copy them, but rather, translate them.

A lesson about creativity from a record producer might change how you run a business. A manifestation practice might change how you make decisions. An investing app might make you rethink product strategy.

I noticed X over here. It made me understand Y over there.

That’s Borrowed Thinking. A semi-regular collection of ideas I’ve picked up in one corner of my life and carried into another.

Here’s what I’m borrowing this week.

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01. What Rick Rubin taught me about the danger of becoming too good at your job

Rick Rubin is one of the most influential music producers of the past forty years. He co-founded Def Jam and has worked with everyone from the Beastie Boys and Johnny Cash to Adele, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jay-Z. And yet, when Anderson Cooper asked him on 60 Minutes whether he could play instruments, Rubin answered: “Barely.” Could he work a soundboard? No. “I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music.”

Which prompted the obvious question: So what are you being paid for?

Rubin’s answer was essentially taste. More specifically, his confidence in his taste and his ability to articulate what he feels. Elsewhere he has described himself as a “reducer” rather than a producer; his job isn’t necessarily to know how to make the thing, but to recognise what belongs, what doesn’t, and what might be getting in the way. (His book on creativity is one of my favourites)

I find this fascinating because I started a branding agency without ever having stepped foot inside one.

I had no idea WTF I was doing.

For years I thought that was a deficit. Looking back, I think it was one of the keys to my success.

I didn’t know how agencies were supposed to price. How meetings were supposed to run. How clients were supposed to be managed. What the process was supposed to look like. So I made it up. I built an agency based on what made sense to me rather than unconsciously reproducing a model I’d inherited from somewhere else.

Of course, expertise is enormously valuable. The problem is that the longer you spend inside an industry, the more you learn how things are supposed to be done. Expertise gives you pattern recognition, but it also gives you rules. And eventually those rules become so familiar that you stop noticing they’re there.

Maybe one of the hardest things about becoming an expert is learning everything you can without losing the ignorance that once made you interesting.

I still want to become exceptionally good at what I do.

I just never want to become so good at it that I forget to ask:

Why the fuck do we do it this way?

02. What Joe Dispenza taught me about letting your future self make present-day decisions

Joes Dispenza’s book How to Break the Habit of Becoming Yourself is up there in the Top 3 books that changed my life. His central idea is one that I always return to: mentally rehearsing the future before it exists.

You imagine the person you want to become so vividly that you begin practising being them now.

I know this sits somewhere on the spectrum between neuroscience and woo-woo, depending on your worldview.

I’m entirely comfortable there. Because I find the idea incredibly useful.

When I’m making a difficult decision, I sometimes mentally skip forward.

What would the version of me who has already built the thing do here?

What would she say no to?

What would she no longer tolerate?

Where would she put her energy?

How would she behave if the outcome I wanted already felt normal rather than intimidating?

Suddenly the decision often becomes much clearer.

Maybe visualisation isn’t about sending your shopping list to the universe and waiting for it to deliver.

Maybe it’s about making your future less surprising to yourself.

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03. What Hot Smart Rich taught me about saying the quiet part out loud

I love the podcast Hot Smart Rich. In fact, those three words are something even my kids repeat (with a lot of sass mind you).

Almost as much as the podcast itself, I love the audacity of the name.

HOT. SMART. RICH.

There’s no tasteful euphemism. No stepping into your highest potential. No creating a life of abundance.

It just names three things plenty of women would quite like to be, thank you very much.

I think about this a lot in branding.

We have an extraordinary ability to take something people desperately want and bury it beneath language that makes the desire sound more respectable.

Make more money becomes create financial freedom.

Look better becomes feel like your most confident self.

Become successful becomes unlock your potential.

Sometimes sophistication makes language weaker.

There’s something radical about simply just saying the thing.

Maybe the strongest positioning is the desire everyone has but nobody else in the category has been brave enough to name.

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04. What Pearler taught me about the power of the gateway product

I invest through Pearler.

Before that, investing always felt like one of those worlds where everyone else had received an instruction manual I’d somehow missed.

ETFs. Markets. Portfolios. Brokerage. Acronyms everywhere.

Pearler made the whole thing feel weirdly casual.

It didn’t make investing itself less sophisticated. It simply made the entrance less intimidating.

That distinction has stayed with me.

Businesses spend enormous amounts of time thinking about how to make a better product for people already participating in their category.

But what about everyone standing outside it?

Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t another advanced product. It’s a gateway product.

Something that says: start here.

Canva did it for design. Duolingo did it for languages. Pearler did it for investing, for me.

They designed the door, not just the room.

And now I can’t stop wondering:

What other enormous categories still feel unnecessarily intimidating, complicated or inaccessible, and are simply waiting for someone to build the gateway in?

05. What AG1 taught me about what happens when knowledge becomes cheap

I used to be a sucker for AG1.

Great brand. Great marketing. Seemingly everywhere. A very long list of impressive-sounding ingredients.

Then I started building a supplement company myself.

And the more I learnt about formulation, dosage and evidence, the more questions I started asking, not just of AG1, but of the entire industry.

Something else has happened at exactly the same time: AI.

Until very recently, there was an enormous information asymmetry between brands and their customers.

A company could give you a complicated ingredient list, proprietary complexes, scientific terminology and an impressive marketing story, and most consumers had neither the expertise nor the four spare hours required to interrogate it.

Now you can photograph the label and ask:

What does this actually contain? Are the doses disclosed? How do they compare with quantities used in research? Which parts of this formulation are compelling and which deserve more scrutiny?

The barrier to asking better questions has collapsed.

And I think that’s going to radically change brands built in categories where complexity has historically worked in the seller’s favour.

AI is collapsing the advantage of being difficult to understand. Which means a beautiful brand will still matter. Storytelling will still matter. Trust will still matter.

But increasingly, the thing underneath all of it will need to stand up to scrutiny too.

The brands of the future won’t just need a good story.

They’ll need a product that survives interrogation.

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What I’m borrowing next:

The irrational genius of collectibles. What selling my business taught me about identity. What To Be Magnetic is teaching me about the relationship between self-worth and what our lives look like. What ADHD is teaching me about alignment. And, inspired by Frank Ostaseski’s The Five Invitations, what death taught me about living.

Basically, I’m looking everywhere, because some of the best ideas I’ve found have come from places they had absolutely no business being.

I don’t really believe in luck.

Or perhaps I should qualify that.

I believe in the birth lottery. I was born in Australia, into a family that valued education and gave me opportunities. I’m a white woman. There are privileges baked into the starting position of my life that I had absolutely nothing to do with, and I think it would be both naive and obnoxious to attribute every good thing that’s happened to me to hard work alone.

That part is luck.

But when I look at the trajectory of my career, the businesses I’ve built, the opportunities I’ve had, the people I’ve met and the things that have eventually worked out, I don’t feel particularly comfortable calling those things lucky.

I know how much work went into creating the conditions for them to happen.

There’s a great tendency to look at somebody else’s success and identify the moment everything changed.

She met the right person.

They got that huge client.

That post went viral.

An investor happened to see their pitch.

They were in the right place at the right time.

Maybe.

But I’m increasingly interested in everything that happened before the right place and the right time.

How did they get themselves into that room?

And, perhaps more importantly:

Were they ready when they got there?

There’s a phrase I’ve heard used in business that I love: increase your surface area for success.

The basic idea is that while you can’t control exactly when or where an opportunity will appear, you can increase the number of places where opportunity has a chance of finding you.

Publish the thing.

Send the email.

Meet more people.

Ask the question.

Learn the skill.

Make the introduction.

Try the idea.

Be useful.

Show up.

Every one of those actions creates another possible point of contact between you and something that could change your trajectory.

I think of it like casting a net. The wider the net, the more opportunities you give yourself to catch something.

But I’ve realised there’s another side to this that interests me even more.

Increasing your surface area isn’t only about creating more opportunities for success to find you. It’s also about becoming increasingly capable of doing something with those opportunities when they arrive.

Become easier for opportunity to find. Become harder for opportunity to waste.

That’s where I think the work really begins.

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I played a lot of basketball growing up, and there’s a saying from sport that has stayed with me for most of my life:

Be ready when your number is called.

Imagine you’re sitting on the bench.

You’re not getting many minutes. Maybe you’re not getting any.

You could mentally check out. Decide you’re not playing tonight anyway. Stop watching closely. Skip the extra shooting session. Take your foot off the gas.

Or you could stay ready.

You practise.

You watch the film.

You know the plays.

You train as though you’re in the starting five, even when you’re not.

Then something happens.

Someone gets injured. The coach changes the rotation. The match-up changes.

Your number gets called.

There’s an element of chance in that moment. You couldn’t control exactly when the opportunity would appear. But what happens when you step onto the court has very little to do with luck.

You either did the reps or you didn’t.

I think about this constantly in business.

We tend to notice people at the moment their number gets called.

What we don’t see are the years they spent getting ready.

The work. The failures. The relationships. The reputation. The confidence. The skill. The taste. The financial runway. The thousands of hours spent becoming someone capable of capitalising on the opportunity when it finally arrived.

Luck gets credited for the moment. Preparation deserves credit for everything that made the moment useful.

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This was essentially how I built Smack Bang in the early years.

I had absolutely no idea which marketing activities were eventually going to drive the business.

So we did everything. And I mean everything.

We showed up across every channel we could think of. We created content. Built relationships. Tried different marketing activities. Put ourselves in conversations. Tested ideas. Stayed visible.

It was fairly indiscriminate. A machine-gun approach to marketing, if you will.

Part of that was probably youthful energy. But there was a philosophy underneath it that I still believe in now:

I didn’t know enough yet to know what would work.

So rather than sitting in a room trying to perfectly predict the answer, I wanted to increase the number of opportunities we had to discover it.

Throw shit at the wall. Pay attention. See what sticks.

Eventually, two channels emerged that were driving a disproportionate amount of our growth.

Great. Then we could pull everything else back and focus our energy there.

The strategy became much more sophisticated over time, but we couldn’t have narrowed effectively without first going broad enough to gather the information.

I still tend to operate this way.

Expand. Observe. Find traction. Concentrate.

There’s a time for focus. Absolutely. But sometimes we become so obsessed with doing the right thing that we dramatically reduce the number of things that could possibly go right.

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This is where I think volume gets unfairly dismissed.

We’re told to work smarter, not harder. Quality over quantity. Focus on the few things that matter.

All good advice.

Once you know what matters.

But what if you don’t yet?

Your first guess isn’t always your best guess. The first pitch might not land. The first business model might be wrong. The person you assumed would change everything might lead nowhere, while the seemingly inconsequential conversation you nearly cancelled introduces you to someone who becomes enormously important five years later.

Volume creates information.

Ten attempts teach you things one perfectly considered attempt can’t.

Ten conversations create ten different networks of possibility.

Ten pieces of writing teach you what you actually think.

Ten pitches make you considerably better at the eleventh.

Not everything needs to work.

That’s the point.

Volume doesn’t guarantee success. It gives success more places to land.

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I think visibility works in much the same way.

There is enormous value in simply reminding the world that you exist.

Not obnoxiously. Not by turning every moment of your life into content or treating every person you meet like a networking opportunity.

Just by participating.

Do good work and talk about it.

Share what you’re learning.

Publish your thinking.

Stay in touch.

Help people.

Have conversations.

Develop expertise in something and become known for it.

Because you never know when someone is going to need exactly what you know.

And when that moment arrives, you want your name to have a reasonable chance of entering their mind.

So much opportunity moves through networks in ways we’ll never be able to properly trace.

Someone mentions your name over dinner.

A former client forwards something you wrote.

A friend introduces you to someone because they vaguely remember you talking about a problem six months earlier.

Which is why I’ve always believed that your reputation has its own return on investment.

I’m generous with relationships because I genuinely like being useful to people. I’ll share what I know, make the introduction, offer an idea, give someone access when I can.

I don’t keep a mental ledger of what should come back.

But I absolutely believe it comes back.

Maybe not from that person. Maybe not next week. Maybe not in any way you could draw neatly into a funnel and attribute in Google Analytics.

But integrity compounds. Generosity compounds. Reputation compounds.

And all of them increase the number of places from which opportunity can eventually return.

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I’m also a huge believer in asking.

I think a lot of people unnecessarily shrink their surface area because they’re afraid of hearing no.

They don’t send the cold email because it feels presumptuous.

They don’t ask for the introduction because they don’t want to impose.

They don’t put themselves forward because they’re not quite qualified enough.

They don’t pitch the collaboration because why would that person want to work with me?

So the opportunity never gets the chance to say yes.

I’m very comfortable asking.

But I think that’s partly because I rarely think of an ask as one-directional.

I’m usually thinking: What can I bring to this equation? What can I offer them? Why might this be useful, interesting or valuable for both of us?

An ask should be an exchange.

Anna Mack is a Substack writer I follow who has a ritual I love: once a week, she “shoots her shot.”

A cold email. An introduction. An opportunity slightly outside her current reach. Something that has a meaningful chance of receiving a no.

I love the practice because it makes opportunity creation habitual.

Imagine doing that every Wednesday for a year. Fifty-two shots you otherwise wouldn’t have taken.

Most might go nowhere. A few might be mildly useful.

And one could change everything.

You don’t need every shot to go in.

You just need to take enough shots to give yourself a chance of scoring.

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There is, however, an obvious problem with all of this.

More can very quickly become too much.

More meetings. More projects. More opportunities. More channels. More people. More asks. More yeses. At some point, increasing your surface area starts diluting your energy rather than expanding your possibilities.

Which is why I think alignment belongs in the equation.

I’ve started thinking about success as some combination of preparation, opportunity and alignment.

Preparation is doing the reps.

Opportunity is putting yourself in the arena.

Alignment is knowing which game you actually want to play.

Because every opportunity has a cost.

Every yes is simultaneously a no to something else. Walk through one door and, at least temporarily, you are choosing not to walk through another.

So increasing your surface area doesn’t mean grabbing everything that comes towards you.

Quite the opposite.

Cast widely. Choose narrowly.

Create possibilities.

Then know yourself well enough to recognise which possibilities actually belong to you.

The more I think about this, the more I realise that increasing your surface area for success is really about participation.

It’s hard to get lucky from the sidelines.

You need to be in conversation with the world.

Creating things.

Learning things.

Helping people.

Asking questions.

Developing skills.

Building relationships.

Trying things that might not work.

Occasionally embarrassing yourself.

Putting your hand up before you’re entirely certain you’re ready.

And then, behind all of that visible participation, doing the deeply unglamorous work of becoming someone capable of delivering when something finally does work.

I think that’s the part that gets lost when we call someone lucky.

We saw the opportunity land. We didn’t see the readiness.

And maybe that’s why I’ve never particularly liked attributing my own success to luck.

I’ve had advantages. I’ve had good timing. I’ve met wonderful people. I’ve had opportunities arrive that I couldn’t possibly have engineered exactly as they happened.

I’m grateful for all of it.

But I’ve also worked my ass off.

I’ve persevered through things I could very easily have walked away from. I’ve built expertise. Taken risks. Created things before I knew whether anybody wanted them. Asked. Learned. Changed direction. Stayed visible. Kept showing up.

I’ve spent a lot of time increasing the odds.

And perhaps that’s the version of luck I believe in.

You can’t control when your number gets called.

You can’t control every opportunity that enters the game, who else is playing or all the circumstances that put you in the stadium in the first place.

But you can do the reps.

You can stay warm.

You can know the plays.

You can make sure the coach knows your name.

You can be paying attention when the moment comes.

And when someone finally turns towards the bench and points at you,

you’d better be ready to play.

Share Extra Curricular

I should probably start by admitting that I’m not curious about everything.

My son walked past a public bin recently and wanted to know how the bin fit inside the little enclosure around it. How did they get it out? Where was the door? How did the garbage truck empty it?

I realised I had walked past probably ten thousand versions of that bin in my life and never once wondered.

I also don’t particularly need to understand how a plane stays in the sky. I’m very happy to get on one, order a coffee and trust that someone much more interested in aerodynamics has taken care of it.

So when I say that curiosity has been one of the greatest competitive advantages of my life, I don’t mean that I’m endlessly fascinated by everything.

My curiosity has always been more directed than that.

There are two questions, in particular, that seem to follow me everywhere.

How far could I take this?

And:

How did they do that?

The first has shaped a lot of my life. I’m endlessly curious about my own capacity. Could I build that? Could I learn that? What would happen if I tried this? Where is my ceiling? Is that actually my ceiling, or have I just decided it is? Why did I react like that? What’s underneath that feeling? What would happen if I changed it?

The second is how I tend to look at the world.

When I see something win, I immediately need to figure out why.

A brand blows up. A cultural phenomenon seems to appear from nowhere. A person builds an extraordinary business. A product develops an almost irrational emotional hold over people.

My brain immediately starts pulling at it.

And I think that instinct - to pull at things - has unlocked more for me than almost anything else.

I don’t take winning at face value.

Take Rhode for example.

It’s very easy to look at its success and say: Hailey Bieber.

And, obviously, Hailey Bieber matters enormously.

But my brain immediately goes somewhere else.

Sure. But what else?

Why did that celebrity brand become culturally significant when countless others didn’t? Why did the products resonate? Why did the phone case become a phenomenon? Why did the visual world spread so effectively? What did they understand about their customer? What happened at exactly the right cultural moment? Which decisions compounded into the outcome we’re now summarising with a single explanation?

Or take Labubu…

You can say TikTok. Scarcity. Collectibles. Celebrity adoption. All probably true.

But why that slightly strange little monster?

Why now?

Why did grown adults suddenly want one hanging from a $10,000 handbag?

That’s the bit I find interesting.

I think we have a tendency to explain success retrospectively in ways that make it seem much simpler than it was. Once something has won, the story of why it won becomes neat.

But winning is rarely neat.

It’s usually a strange combination of timing, decisions, cultural forces, positioning, instinct, luck, execution and a dozen other things that are much harder to fit into a headline.

Curious people don’t necessarily reject the obvious explanation.

They just don’t assume it’s the whole explanation.

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This became particularly useful to me when I was running Smack Bang.

One of my favourite parts of the job was running brand strategy workshops. They were usually my first meaningful interaction with a client and, perhaps controversially, I never prepared for them.

I didn’t want to enter the room already knowing where we were going.

Of course there were things we needed to uncover, but I found that the most useful conversations almost never happened because I’d asked the perfect question from a beautifully prepared workshop template.

They happened because somebody said something interesting.

And I followed it, like Alice down the rabbit hole.

One question would become another. We’d disappear down a tangent that appeared to have absolutely nothing to do with the brief. Someone would tell me a story about why they’d started the business, or something their customer had said once, or an opinion they held about their industry that had never made it onto their website.

And there it was.

The thing.

The little pot of gold we’d probably never have found if I’d been more interested in getting through my agenda than responding to what was actually in front of me.

Those tangents became positioning ideas. Brand stories. Campaigns. Sometimes entire strategic directions.

What I know to be true is that the shortest route to the answer isn’t always the most interesting route to the answer.

Over time, I realised that curiosity was doing something else in those rooms too.

It made people feel understood.

I wasn’t simply extracting information from them so I could go away and do my job. I was participating in their problem. I wanted to understand it with them. And genuine curiosity has an energy to it; people can tell when you’re actually interested.

I think that’s one of the less discussed advantages of curiosity.

It’s relational.

Being deeply interested in another person is one of the most generous forms of attention you can give them.

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Curiosity has also made me unusually comfortable with being wrong.

At Land Lab, this happens to me constantly.

I’ll become convinced that a particular marketing angle will work, or that customers will respond to something in a certain way. We’ll test it.

And sometimes...

Nothing.

Meanwhile, the thing I was considerably less excited about performs brilliantly.

I’ve been humbled enough times now to find this quite exciting. Because the point isn’t to prove that my original theory was right. The point is to figure out what is right.

There’s an important distinction there.

If you’re deeply attached to a particular outcome, every piece of information becomes evidence to either defend or attack your position.

If you’re curious, information is simply information.

Oh. Interesting.

Why did that happen?

What does that tell us?

What should we try next?

I think this is why curiosity and humility are so innately connected.

To remain curious, you have to remain open to the possibility that you just don’t know.

That your first idea likely isn’t the best one.

That the market knows something you don’t.

That someone younger, less experienced or completely outside your field might see something you’ve missed.

That the route you were certain would take you there might not be the route at all.

Certainty closes the loop. Curiosity keeps it open.

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I’ve realised that my favourite place in life is probably the bottom of a mountain.

Not literally. Although I’m partial to a solid hike.

I mean that moment when I can see something I want to understand, build or become, but I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to get there yet.

That feeling lights me up.

Could I do that?

How the fuck would I do that?

Who already has?

What do they know that I don’t?

There’s a humility in being a rookie that I find incredibly freeing. Nobody expects you to know everything yet. You get to ask stupid questions. Experiment. Change direction. Learn quickly. Everything feels expansive because almost everything is still ahead of you.

I think this was part of why I eventually sold Smack Bang.

After building the business for so many years, I no longer felt like the rookie.

There were obviously still things I could have improved and places I could have taken it, but I understood the mountain. I knew the terrain. I knew the problems. I could roughly predict what was around the next corner.

And I’ve learned something important about myself:

I need another mountain.

Not because I need endless achievement, but because I need somewhere for my curiosity to go.

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I think this is also why I’d hire an extraordinarily curious person over an extraordinarily intelligent one almost every time.

Intelligence is incredibly useful.

But curiosity is hunger. And hunger is a force to be reckoned with.

A curious person will find the thing they don’t know and go after it. They’ll ask another question. Look somewhere unexpected. Challenge the assumption everyone else accepted. They’ll learn beyond the boundaries of their job because they actually want to understand how the pieces fit together.

And eventually, all of that curiosity starts to compound.

One question introduces you to an idea.

That idea leads you into another field.

That field gives you a reference.

Years later, you’re sitting with a completely unrelated problem and suddenly the reference returns.

You make a connection.

Everyone else calls it instinct.

But instinct rarely arrives from nowhere.

What looks like intuition in the moment may simply be curiosity compounded over time.

Perhaps that’s why curious people often become more interesting thinkers as they get older. They’re not simply accumulating information, they’re building an increasingly dense web of connections between things.

The more dots you collect, the more unusual the lines you can draw between them.

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Of course, curiosity has a shadow side.

Mine certainly does.

The same voice that asks how far could I take this? can become very interested in finding out how far I could take something else.

And something else.

And - oh, that looks interesting - maybe that too.

Curiosity without direction can quickly become distraction.

Which is why I’ve realised mine is relatively pragmatic. I’m not particularly interested in collecting knowledge for the sake of knowing things. I tend to want to understand how the information relates to somewhere I’m trying to go.

That might be a business problem.

A creative idea.

My own psychology.

Something I want to become better at.

I like curiosity with a destination.

But I don’t want to become so attached to the destination that I stop noticing other routes. Because that’s the paradox. You need enough direction to know what you’re looking for.

And enough openness to discover something you weren’t.

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I think we lose some of this as we get older.

Children seem to live almost entirely inside questions.

Why? Why? Why?

Then slowly we accumulate answers. We develop expertise. Opinions. Routines. Responsibilities. Calendars that don’t leave much room for following an interesting thought for an hour.

We become busy. We become certain. And sometimes we become very invested in appearing knowledgeable.

And curiosity starts disappearing underneath all that competence.

I think that’s a shame.

The moment we stop leaning towards the world and decide we understand enough of it already, is a kind of death I hope to never experience.

Curiosity keeps us participating in the world.

It keeps us testing ourselves against what might be possible. It keeps us open to changing our minds. It keeps us interested in other people. It gives us permission to be beginners again and again and again.

And yes, I think that makes us better at business.

Better strategists.

Better creatives.

Better problem solvers.

Probably more intelligent over time.

But I’m not sure that’s its greatest advantage.

I think curiosity makes life bigger.

There is always another question. Another connection. Another thing you haven’t understood yet. Another version of yourself you haven’t met. Another path you hadn’t considered.

Another mountain.

And perhaps that’s the real competitive advantage.

While everyone else is busy proving what they already know, the curious person is still looking for what everyone might have missed.

Stay interested. There’s always another door.

My theme of the year is FLOW STATE.

Which, depending on your tolerance for astrology, Human Design and conversations involving the phrase “the universe is giving me feedback”, may require some explaining.

Apparently, Taureans have just emerged from a particularly sticky seven-year astrological chapter. I won’t pretend to understand the planetary mechanics of it all, but the basic premise is that us Taureans have been going through a period of fairly significant upheaval, change and disruption.

Whether you believe in astrology or not, I can tell you this much: it tracks.

The last seven years of my life have contained an extraordinary amount of change. Not necessarily bad change. Some of it has been wonderful. But there has been a feeling, at times, of pushing shit up a hill.

There have been roadblocks, challenges, endings and deaths. Some literal, some metaphysical. Many yeses that should have been noes. Overextending myself in directions that weren’t necessarily giving anything back. Trying to make certain things work because I’d decided they should work. A general sense that I was expending enormous amounts of energy without always feeling like that energy was moving me forward.

Then, earlier this year, something shifted.

Again, perhaps the planets moved. Perhaps I moved. Perhaps I’ve simply done enough work on myself over the past seven years to finally recognise what I want.

Probably a combination of the latter two, if we’re being sensible.

But I could feel it.

Things started moving again.

Fittingly, 2026 is also the Year of the Horse: movement, freedom, energy, forward momentum. If the universe is laying the metaphor on that thick, I’m happy to take it.

And when I thought about what I wanted the year ahead to feel like, the theme that kept returning was flow state.

Not ease, exactly.

I’m not particularly interested in an easy life. I love challenge. I like having slightly too much on my plate. I like looking at something that feels enormous and wondering whether I’m capable of pulling it off.

I didn’t want less challenge or ambition.

I wanted less friction.

I wanted that feeling of steady water: energy, optimism, connectedness, momentum. Presence, but not in a still or idle way. Presence in motion. Being completely connected to where I’m going without feeling like I’m dragging myself there.

Focused, but not forcing.

That’s what flow state means to me.

I’ve been reading Optimal by Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss, and their discussion of flow made me realise there was actually language for a lot of what I’d been feeling.

The original research into flow looked at moments when people performed at their absolute best. Different disciplines, same internal experience. The researchers identified a handful of recurring conditions: the challenge and the person’s skills were well matched, self-consciousness disappeared, their perception of time changed, the experience felt good and, perhaps most interestingly, something incredibly difficult could feel almost effortless.

I know that feeling intimately.

When I’m deeply immersed in something creative, ‘Tess’ disappears from the equation entirely.

I’m not wondering whether I’m doing a good job. I’m not particularly aware of myself at all. Ideas seem to arrive faster than I can execute them. There is this strange combination of calm and speed - an energised clarity - where I know what to do next without having to labour over the decision.

Time becomes completely elastic.

Most days when I’m working on Land Lab, I’ll eventually look at the clock and think, shit, it’s 3pm, before racing out the door for school pick-up.

Hours have passed, but they haven’t really felt like hours.

I’ve always imagined creativity in those moments as an energetic channel. Something coming through the top of my head and moving through me. I’m obviously doing the work, but there is very little sensation of pushing.

It spills.

And reading Optimal made me wonder about something.

If we know what flow feels like, why do we treat it as a happy accident?

What if, instead of waiting for those moments to appear, we became much more deliberate about creating the conditions that allow them to happen?

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Human Design has given me another lens for understanding this. Specifically, this book by Jenna Zoe.

I’m a Generator, which essentially means I have an enormous capacity for sustained energy when that energy is directed towards things I genuinely want to be doing.

The very simplified version is: if it’s not a fuck yes, it’s a fuck no.

Again, you don’t have to believe in Human Design for this to be useful. What interested me when I discovered it was that it gave language to something I’d already experienced repeatedly in myself.

I have a lot of energy.

The problem has never really been how to conserve it.

It’s where I point it.

Give me something I care deeply about and I can work on it obsessively. I’ll think about it in the shower. At the gym. Driving the car. I’ll work for hours without noticing I’m working. The energy seems to regenerate through the doing.

Point that same energy towards something that feels fundamentally wrong for me and it behaves completely differently.

Everything feels heavier.

I procrastinate. I become distracted. Small tasks feel disproportionately difficult. I can still force myself through them - I have, many times - but the energy feels like it’s leaking rather than multiplying.

This has changed the way I think about protecting my energy.

Maybe protecting your energy isn’t about conserving it. Maybe it’s about directing it toward something genuinely meaningful to you.

-

This year, I’ve become quite ruthless about that direction.

I’ve been joking that I’m creating my own mini utopia.

Not in a private-island-and-never-answer-an-email-again kind of way. More that I’ve deliberately created enough space in my life to ask a question I hadn’t been able to ask properly for a long time:

What do I actually want to fill this with?

Selling Smack Bang created an enormous amount of space.

Selling our house created another kind.

Both were significant endings, but they’ve given me something incredibly valuable in return: freedom to make empowered choices about what comes next.

And I’ve resisted the instinct to immediately fill every available gap.

I’ve said no to jobs. No to consulting work that I could absolutely do but don’t particularly want to. No to little obligations that individually seem harmless but collectively start eating away at the edges of your life.

I’ve become much more interested in the fuck yes.

Not because I expect every day to be filled exclusively with things I adore. I still have emails and accounting and school admin and all the deeply unsexy infrastructure required to be a functioning entrepreneur.

I outsource a lot.

I batch a lot.

I try to do the hard thing first.

But I’m becoming far more protective of the large blocks of energy underneath all of that. Because I’ve realised I don’t need another opportunity simply because there is space for one.

Sometimes you don’t need another opportunity. You need enough empty space to recognise the right one.

-

I’ve also started paying much closer attention to the physical conditions in which I work best.

Autonomy is enormous for me.

So is uninterrupted time.

Creativity.

A beautiful environment.

The ability to move at my own pace.

Human Design apparently describes my ideal environment as a “cave”, which is both ridiculous and extremely accurate. Give me an enclosed room, by myself, with nobody moving around me or asking me questions, and I’m very happy.

This is one of the biggest differences I’ve noticed between running Smack Bang and building Land Lab.

At Smack Bang, my time was inherently connected to other people’s time. Clients were waiting. My team needed decisions. Meetings were booked. Deadlines were immovable. Even when I loved the work, there was an external rhythm I had to operate within.

At Land Lab, my days are much more self-directed.

I can sit down in the morning and ask: What’s the most important problem to solve today? What am I most energised by? Where can I create the most traction?

Then I go there.

Some days that’s brand. Some days it’s product. Some days it’s growth or practitioners or some obscure business problem I suddenly become determined to solve.

I’m still working towards very clear objectives.

I’m just giving myself more freedom over the route.

That distinction has been enormous for me.

Even my mornings have become part of it. I have ADHD, and my brain can be a noisy place to live. This year I’ve committed to going to the gym every morning, partly because I’ve realised how dramatically it changes the state I bring to my desk.

The noise settles.

My mind feels more spacious.

I can operate with clarity.

None of these things guarantee flow. But together, they create much better conditions for it.

What I know to be true is that flow isn’t the absence of structure. Sometimes structure is what makes flow possible.

-

There’s another part of this philosophy that is probably slightly harder to explain without sounding like I’ve started tarot cards (I have, by the way).

I think flow is information.

I often describe myself as being in conversation with the universe.

Something opens.

Interesting.

A person appears at exactly the right moment. A decision becomes unexpectedly easy. Something moves faster than anticipated. One thing leads naturally to another and you can feel momentum building underneath you.

Green light.

Then there are the other experiences.

The door closes. Then another one. The person disappears. The timeline blows out. The thing you keep trying to make happen somehow becomes more complicated every time you touch it.

I’ve had both.

Years ago, we were renovating our first house in Coledale, and the entire process felt like friction. Everything took longer than it should. Mistakes happened. Routes closed. Problems seemed to create more problems. We kept pushing and pushing and pushing.

We ended up giving up half way through.

We pivoted and brought a block of land in Lennox Head. And the experience was almost comically different.

Building a house was still hard. There were still thousands of decisions and an enormous amount of work involved.

But it moved with ease.

The right people appeared. Decisions felt easy. Timelines shortened rather than stretched. Things seemed to resolve themselves instead of multiplying.

It felt like one enormous green light.

You could explain that as luck. Better planning. Different people. Timing. The universe. All of the above.

I’m less interested in proving why than I am in noticing the difference.

Because I’ve stopped assuming every obstacle is something I’m supposed to overcome.

Sometimes an obstacle is information.

That doesn’t mean the second something becomes difficult I abandon it and declare the universe has spoken.

In fact, all of the best things I’ve done in my life have been incredibly hard.

Challenge and friction aren’t the same thing.

Challenge stretches you. It asks more of you. Sometimes it scares the shit out of you. But somewhere underneath the difficulty there is still movement. Energy. A sense that the work is asking you to become bigger.

Friction feels different.

Friction is repeatedly pouring energy into something that refuses to move and never stopping long enough to ask whether the direction itself might be the problem.

I’m trying to get better at knowing the difference.

I think this is where my relationship with ambition has changed most.

For a long time, I assumed success required some degree of constant grind.

Push harder. Do more. Take the meeting. Accept the opportunity. Figure it out. Keep going.

And there is obviously enormous value in persistence. I don’t suddenly believe we should all abandon discipline and spend our lives waiting for inspiration to strike.

But I no longer think the highest-performing version of me is necessarily the one exerting the most effort.

Increasingly, I think success is about intentionality.

Making smart, tactical decisions about where your energy is going and why.

What deserves your effort?

Where does your attention create the greatest return?

Which hard thing is worth doing?

Which apparently impressive opportunity is actually going to take you further away from yourself?

Where are you pushing because the challenge is meaningful, and where are you pushing because you haven’t stopped to question the direction?

Those questions feel much more useful to me now than simply asking how much more I can fit in.

I haven’t become less ambitious.

If anything, I think I’m more ambitious than I’ve ever been.

I’m just less willing to waste ambition.

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I have ideas constantly.

This would be useful if I had unlimited time, money and attention. I do not. I already have enough businesses, projects and half-finished thoughts competing for space in my brain, and I am trying very hard to practise the increasingly important skill of not turning every good idea into a job for myself.

So I’m giving them away instead.

These aren’t fully formed business plans. I haven’t built the financial models, spoken to 50 customers or discovered the fatal regulatory hurdle lurking on page 73 of some government website.

They’re observations. Little pockets of friction or whitespace that make me think: why hasn’t someone properly solved this yet?

Please steal them. And if you build the next billion-dollar company from one, at least send me some merch.

1. Off-Market

I recently bought a house, which reminded me how strange the property market is.

At any given moment, there are houses people desperately want to buy that aren’t for sale, and homeowners who aren’t actively looking to move but absolutely have a number at which things might get interesting.

I want a marketplace for that middle ground.

As an owner, I could quietly indicate: I’m not selling, but above $X, I’ll have a conversation.

As a buyer, I could create an incredibly specific brief: these streets, this many bedrooms, north-facing backyard, pool, architectural style, budget.

Then the platform looks for matches between latent supply and explicit demand.

Perhaps the owner’s number isn’t even visible. The platform simply knows their fuck-it price and only wakes them up when genuine demand reaches it.

The marketplace dynamics would be horrendous. Trust, privacy, liquidity, circumvention, agents, stale listings. All the fun stuff.

But property transactions are enormously valuable, and I can’t shake the feeling that there is a gigantic invisible property market sitting behind the visible one.

Someone please unlock it.

2. The Collaboration Company

Some of the most interesting products happen when two completely different worlds collide. Pamela Anderson × Flamingo Estate. Kelly Wearstler × H&M. The kind of pairing that makes you think: Oh. Of course.

But collaborations are much easier when both parties already know how to make the thing.

(Four more ideas I have absolutely no business pursuing below…)

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Martha Stewart was recently asked what she still wants from life.

At 85, after building one of the most recognisable lifestyle empires in the world, becoming America’s first self-made female billionaire, going to prison, rebuilding her career, becoming a Sports Illustrated cover star and generally refusing to become less interesting with age, her answer was surprisingly simple.

She wants to be comfortable. She wants her family to be comfortable. She wants a roof over her head.

And she wants a yacht.

“A big yacht.”

Lol.

I love this so much.

Partly because it is just so magnificently Martha. Of course the woman who taught generations of people how to fold a fitted sheet doesn’t merely want peace and security in her twilight years. She would also quite like to be drinking something cold off the coast of Capri on a very large boat.

But mostly I love the complete absence of apology in it.

We’ve become very good at dressing our desires up as more respectable things.

We don’t want money, we want financial freedom.

We don’t want a beautiful house, we want a sanctuary for our family.

We don’t want success, we want impact and purpose.

We don’t want to be hot, we want to feel our best.

We don’t want to be famous, we want a platform to amplify meaningful ideas.

And look, sometimes those things are completely true.

But sometimes you just want the fucking yacht.

There’s something incredibly refreshing about someone - particularly a woman - being able to hold both kinds of desire at once.

I want my family to be safe.

I want a roof over my head.

I want the people I love to be comfortable.

And while we’re here, I’d also like something wildly unnecessary and fabulous, please.

I don’t think wanting more automatically makes you ungrateful for what you already have. I don’t think every desire needs to be translated into something virtuous before we’re allowed to admit to it.

Some things can simply be wanted because they’d be fun.

Or beautiful. Or luxurious.

Like a big-ass yacht.

If Martha wants the yacht, boy do I hope she gets it.

We’re about to have more ideas than we know what to do with.

For most of history, making was the hard part: You could have a brilliant idea for a business without knowing how to build it. Imagine an incredible photograph without having the technical ability to shoot it. Know exactly how you wanted your home to look without being able to render it. Have a book sitting in your head for twenty years without possessing the skill, or perhaps the confidence, to write it.

Making was hard.

So naturally, we built enormous value around the people who knew how to make.

AI will collapse that gap.

Which creates a strange new problem.

When everything can be made, what deserves to be?

I think this is the question that will define creativity in the AI age.

And I suspect the people best equipped to answer it are about to become extremely valuable.

I think creativity (and access to creatives) is about to get very expensive.

Which sounds ridiculous when we’re entering an era where anyone can generate an image, write an essay, build a website, compose music or develop a business idea in seconds.

But that’s exactly why.

Whenever something becomes abundant, value moves somewhere else.

AI is making execution abundant.

So the value moves upstream: to ideas, judgement, taste, curiosity and the ability to see what everyone else missed.

The cheaper it becomes to make, the more valuable it becomes to know what and how it should be made.

When execution becomes abundant, judgement becomes the advantage.

Prediction #1. Execution will become abundant. Judgement will become expensive.

As execution becomes easier, we’re going to find ourselves with an entirely new problem: too much possibility.

Twenty campaign ideas. Fifty logo directions. One hundred headlines. A thousand images.

Who’s going to make the cull? Which idea has life in it? Which one feels derivative? Which is strategically right but creatively boring? Which is culturally interesting? Which could become much bigger than it first appears? Which needs another week? Which should be deleted immediately?

I think we’re moving from an execution economy to a judgement economy.

Taste. Discernment. Editing. Cultural instinct. The ability to recognise something good before everybody else agrees that it’s good.

These skills are notoriously difficult to measure, which is perhaps why we’ve spent so long undervaluing them.

AI might change that.

The more capable our tools become, the less impressive capability becomes.

Prediction #2. Having something to say will matter more than expressing it.

There’s something slightly confronting about being able to make something look finished before you’ve decided whether it’s worth starting.

AI is already very good at this.

It can make an average idea sound intelligent. An obvious idea look beautiful. A derivative idea feel polished.

And I think that’s going to make the thought underneath the work increasingly important.

What do you actually really believe? What have you noticed that I haven’t? What’s your point of view? What do you believe that isn’t already sitting neatly inside the cultural consensus?

For years, I’ve believed that creativity is less about making things and more about seeing things. AI has only strengthened that conviction.

Because increasingly, the machine can help us make.

But seeing is another matter entirely.

Prediction #3. Your weirdest interests will become your competitive advantage.

I collect inspiration compulsively.

My Pinterest boards are chaotic. My camera roll is full of things that would mean absolutely nothing to anybody else: the inscription of a tyre rim, packaging, someone’s kitchen, an unusual colour combination, a screenshot of half a sentence, a shopfront I walked past once, a chair I love but simultaneously have no intention of buying.

Sometimes I save something without even knowing why.

I just know there’s something there.

Months later, it might collide with another completely unrelated reference and suddenly become useful.

I’ve come to think this is how a lot of originality works.

Original people aren’t necessarily inventing things from nothing.

They’re combining from somewhere different.

And I think this becomes important in an AI world.

If we’re all using broadly the same technology, trained on broadly the same body of knowledge, to create broadly similar things, then our advantage lies in the inputs that aren’t shared.

The obscure book you read. The town you visited that nobody talks about. The hobby you’ve had since you were twelve. Your grandmother’s house. The failed business. The person you sat beside at a dinner party. Something your kid said in the car. The rabbit hole you disappeared down at 11pm last night for no commercially useful reason whatsoever.

These things become part of your creative vocabulary.

Perhaps we don’t need to consume more information.

Perhaps we need to consume stranger information?

A rich, peculiar, highly personal bank of references might become one of the most valuable creative assets you can have.

Prediction #4. The people who outsource their thinking will become less creative.

This is the part that makes me slightly uncomfortable.

I use AI constantly. I think it’s extraordinary. It has expanded what I’m capable of doing and dramatically accelerated certain parts of my work.

But I’ve also started noticing a temptation in myself.

The temptation to ask too early.

Why struggle with the opening paragraph when I can generate ten? Why sit with a half-formed idea when I can ask AI to finish it? Why decide what I think before asking what it thinks?

The biggest creative threat of AI may not be replacement.

It may be atrophy.

Creativity is a faculty. And like any faculty, it strengthens through use.

There’s a reason the blank page is frustrating. Sitting with an idea you can’t quite articulate is uncomfortable. Trying something, hating it, starting again, getting distracted, coming back two days later and finally seeing the thing you couldn’t see before is wildly inefficient.

But I wonder if some of that friction does more for us than we realise.

AI can remove the friction from making. We should be careful it doesn’t remove the friction that makes ideas good.

So I’ve started thinking more deliberately about the order in which I use it.

Think first. Ask second.

Arrive with the hunch, the observation, the strange reference, the opinion, the thing I can’t stop thinking about.

Then use my ai friend to help push it further.

I really do believe, the greatest creative risk of the AI age might be becoming extraordinarily capable while slowly losing the ability to think originally.

Prediction #5. Asking great questions will become a superpower.

We’ve spent most of our lives being rewarded for knowing answers.

School taught us that particularly well. Memorise the information. Recall it correctly. Put your hand up. Ahhh, yes: “Good girl”.

Then the internet made answers easier to find.

Now, AI has made them almost instantaneous.

Which makes me wonder if the intellectual advantage is shifting somewhere else entirely.

Towards the question.

Ask AI to “give me ten marketing ideas” and you’ll probably get ten perfectly reasonable marketing ideas.

I like asking questions that are more subversive, and that might the tension points where things get interesting. eg:

What does everyone in this category believe about the customer that might not actually be true?

Or:

What would we do if the convention of this industry didn’t exist?

Or:

What’s the most interesting contradiction inside this problem?

Suddenly you’re somewhere else. Someplace more interesting.

The quality of the output is constrained by the imagination of the question.

And in an age of infinite answers, I think the people capable of asking interesting questions will become disproportionately valuable.

Maybe knowing more isn’t the advantage it once was.

Maybe the advantage is wondering better.

Prediction #6. The most creative people will become insanely more powerful.

For all the anxiety around AI and creative work, this is the prediction I’m most excited about.

I think AI raises the floor. But for genuinely creative people, it also raises the ceiling.

Someone with exceptional taste, curiosity, judgement, cultural instinct and a strong point of view suddenly has access to capabilities that once required significant money, technical expertise or an entire team.

AI can give someone the ability to explore far more possibilities. Prototype faster. Research deeper. Build things they previously couldn’t. Move between disciplines that once required entirely different technical skill sets.

That’s extraordinary leverage.

Which is why I don’t think the interesting divide will be between people who use AI and people who don’t. Soon enough, almost everyone will.

I think the divide will be between people who use AI to replace their thinking and people who use AI to extend it.

The first arrives at the machine empty and asks it what to think.

The second arrives with something of substance.

A hunch. An observation. A strange conviction. A point of view. A question they can’t stop thinking about.

Then they use the machine to interrogate it, stretch it, challenge it and take it somewhere they couldn’t have taken it alone.

One uses AI as a substitute.

The other uses it as leverage.

I suspect the second person is going to become formidable.

We spend a lot of time talking about preparing for the AI age by learning new tools, and of course we should. I’ll absolutely be learning them too.

But I’m equally interested in what we need to protect.

Our curiosity. Our attention. Our taste. Our strange interests. Our willingness to wander. Our ability to sit with an unfinished thought. Our instinct to form an opinion before asking a machine for one.

Perhaps the more artificial intelligence becomes embedded in our lives, the more valuable these distinctly human faculties become.

The thing is, creativity has never really been about how much you can make.

It’s about what you notice. What you connect. What you question. What you choose.

And, increasingly, knowing what deserves to exist in the first place.

The future won’t belong to the people who can make the most. It will belong to the people who can see what is worth making.

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I’ve never really liked the word authenticity.

It’s become one of those words that the culture’s used so often that it’s almost collapsed under the weight of its own meaning. Brands are authentic. Influencers are authentic. Leaders are authentic. Everyone is being encouraged to “show up authentically”, which usually seems to involve talking to a front-facing camera about being vulnerable.

The fascinating part for me lies in not who is or isn’t authentic, but what happens when we actually are authentic.

Not performatively authentic, or strategically vulnerable. Not “being yourself” because someone on Instagram told you that’s the secret to personal branding.

I mean the deeper kind. The feeling of being so congruent with who you are, what you want and the life you’re living that there is very little friction between your internal and external worlds.

In my 37 years on this weird planet of ours, I’ve experienced enough periods of both alignment and misalignment in my life to become convinced that something strange happens when those two worlds match.

Things open.

Ideas arrive. People appear. Opportunities seem to find you. Decisions become easier. You have more energy. You’re less preoccupied with how you’re being perceived because you’re not constantly negotiating with yourself.

I’ve always described the feeling as the universe handing me a set of keys and suddenly there are doors everywhere.

It’s magnetic.

For a long time, one of my biggest ambitions was to build a big agency.

I wanted the NYC-style warehouse. Loads of staff. Desks everywhere. People coming and going. Energy and ideas bouncing around the room. I wanted to walk into this thing I’d built and feel the scale of it.

And for a while, that desire was completely real.

Then I had my kids.

Something changed in me, but it took me years to admit that my ambition had changed with it.

I’m an incredibly giving parent. When I’m with my kids, I’m with them, and that requires a lot of energy from me. But then I’d arrive at work and step straight into another role that required me to give. I had a team that needed leadership, direction, decisions, feedback, encouragement, management, nourishment.

I was giving at home.

And I was giving at work.

And somewhere in between the two, I had designed myself almost entirely out of my own life.

The strange part was that, from the outside, nothing was particularly wrong. I had built the thing I said I wanted. The agency was successful. I loved the people. I loved the work.

But the dream had expired before I was willing to let go of it.

I spent probably six or seven years trying to make myself fit inside an ambition that belonged to an earlier version of me.

Eventually, I read Jenna Zoe’s book on Human Design. Whatever you think about Human Design, and I don’t think you need to believe in any particular system for this to be useful, it gave me language for something I already knew.

I wasn’t in alignment.

So I did something that probably looked, from the outside, like I was moving backwards.

I restructured the entire business. I let go of the model I’d spent years building. We moved away from full-time staff and towards a much more flexible contractor model, and suddenly I could work alone again. I could disappear into an idea. I could spend uninterrupted time in the parts of the business where I was actually good.

The effect was almost immediate.

I felt lighter, more creative, more energetic and more decisive. Things started moving again.

I felt like myself.

And that’s when I started to understand something I wish I’d understood much earlier:

Sometimes the most inauthentic version of yourself is simply an authentic version you’ve outgrown.

I think we misunderstand authenticity because we imagine there is some fixed, true version of ourselves buried underneath everything else, waiting to be uncovered.

Find her and you’re done.

I don’t think it works like that.

I don’t want to be the person I was three years ago. I certainly don’t want to be the person I was ten years ago. I want to continue becoming. I want to shed what no longer serves me, bring in what does, change my mind, follow new curiosities and occasionally blow up perfectly functional things because I can feel that my relationship with them has run its course.

Moving forward requires change.

And sometimes remaining “true to yourself” requires betraying an old version of yourself.

This is where I think authenticity becomes much more interesting than simply knowing who you are.

It’s knowing who you are now.

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I’ve experienced the opposite sensation too.

I once had a very close friendship that, over time, began to feel different. We’d begun to evolve in different directions, and somewhere along the way, the ease we’d once had was replaced by something that felt more like friction.

I began to feel judged for parts of who I was and the choices I was making. Whether that judgement was actually there almost doesn’t matter. What mattered was what started happening to me in her presence.

I became insecure. And I’m not an insecure person.

I noticed myself explaining things I wouldn’t ordinarily explain. Softening opinions. Becoming more conscious of how I was being perceived. I suspect there was some version of that happening in both directions: we’d both changed, but perhaps neither of us felt entirely safe enough to let the other person change.

Eventually, the friendship fell apart.

I’ve thought about it since because there was something almost physical about the shift. A person I’d once felt naturally drawn towards began to feel difficult to be around.

Like we’d gone from opposite poles of a magnet to matching ones.

What I learned is that relationships don’t always end when staying connected requires one or both of them to become less of themselves.

And any relationship that requires you to edit yourself eventually becomes exhausting.

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Most people talk about magnetism as though it’s a quality certain people possess.

She’s magnetic.

He’s charismatic.

They’ve just got something.

But the most magnetic people I’ve met aren’t trying particularly hard to be interesting.

They’re not performing themselves at you.

They have an undeniable sense of self, and there’s something incredibly energising about being around that kind of clarity.

You know what you’re getting.

Their opinions are their opinions. Their clothes look like their clothes. Their house feels like their house. Their choices make sense in the context of who they are. Even when their taste, life or worldview is completely different from mine, I find that kind of self-possession magnetic.

Their energy isn’t being spent second-guessing itself.

It’s available.

Maybe that’s what we’re sensing when we call someone magnetic.

Not charisma.

Congruence.

-

I’ve been doing the To Be Magnetic work for around eleven years now, and one of the things I like most about its approach to manifestation is that it doesn’t really allow you to sit around waiting for the universe to deliver the Range Rover straight from your vision board to your driveway.

The basic premise is that you expand your sense of what’s possible by finding evidence of people who already have or have done what you desire. You examine the subconscious beliefs and patterns that might be keeping you stuck. You work on your sense of self-worth. And then you take aligned action towards the thing you say you want.

I’ve used that framework in different forms for more than a decade, and I can honestly say I’ve manifested an extraordinary amount of what I’ve wanted in my life.

Whether you believe there is something energetic happening in manifestation or something entirely psychological, I think the mechanism is interesting either way.

When you believe something is possible, you behave differently.

When your self-worth expands, your standards change.

When you’re clear about what you actually want, you notice opportunities that are relevant to it.

When you’re no longer contorting yourself around other people’s expectations, you have considerably more energy available to pursue your own.

And when you take action, things happen.

-

Maybe that’s why authenticity feels energetic to me.

Inauthenticity requires an extraordinary amount of maintenance.

You have to remember who you’re supposed to be. Monitor how you’re being perceived. Suppress the thing you actually want. Continue pursuing the goal you’ve outgrown. Stay inside the friendship where you can’t quite relax. Make the sensible decision when every part of you wants the strange one.

All of that creates friction.

Authenticity removes it.

The energy that was being used to hold yourself in place becomes available for something else.

Creativity.

Connection.

Ambition.

Curiosity.

Action.

Life.

Magnetism might simply be what happens when your energy is finally moving in one direction.

Which is why I don’t think becoming magnetic is about becoming more charismatic, interesting or impressive.

It’s probably the opposite.

Stop trying to be interesting.

Get interested in yourself.

Pay attention to what makes you feel expanded and what makes you contract. Notice the people around whom you become more yourself, and the ones around whom you start editing. Question the goals you’ve been carrying for years. Look closely at your jealousy. Follow the weird desire that keeps resurfacing. Deal with the beliefs that tell you you’re not the kind of person who gets to have the thing you want.

And then move towards it.

Not recklessly. Not because every impulse is divine guidance. But thoughtfully, deliberately and with enough self-knowledge to distinguish between something you genuinely desire and something you’ve simply been taught to want.

If my daughter, Dylan, came to me at 25 and asked how to become one of those people who seems to have that inexplicable pull, I don’t think I’d tell her to work on her confidence.

I’d tell her to get to know herself.

Find out what makes you feel alive. Look at the beliefs that make you smaller. Work out where they came from. Decide which ones you’re ready to stop carrying. Pay attention to what you desire before the world tells you whether it’s sensible, impressive or appropriate.

Then don’t sit around waiting for it.

Go towards it.

Because maybe the universe isn’t handing us keys at all.

The doors are always there.

We just become much better at seeing them when we’re finally walking in our own direction.

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I was recently asked where I think taste comes from. Hard question for someone who’s not normally that deep. But it got me thinking.

Taste is a weird, hard-to-grasp concept. Is it subjective, or is there such a thing as objectively good taste? Is it something we're born with, or something we build over time?

I’m not talking about the kind of taste that’s confined to fashion, interiors or graphic design. I’m talking about the broader kind. The kind that quietly shapes almost every decision we make without us even noticing.

The restaurant you choose over the one next door.

The books that end up on your bedside table.

The people you’re drawn towards.

The brands you build.

The homes you create.

The life you slowly assemble through thousands of seemingly insignificant decisions.

Most tend to think of taste as something aesthetic. I think it’s much bigger than that.

In many ways, taste is simply judgement: the ability to recognise what belongs.

What feels coherent. What feels inevitable. What deserves to exist, and what doesn’t.

It’s one of those things that’s incredibly difficult to define, but instantly recognisable when you encounter it. We’ve all walked into a home that feels considered. Read a sentence that couldn’t have been written any other way. Seen a brand identity that feels so aligned with the business behind it that it’s impossible to imagine an alternative.

It’s as though everything just clicks, naturally.

Not because it’s objectively beautiful, but because it belongs.

I’ve realised that’s the feeling I’ve been chasing for as long as I can remember.

When I was little, I rearranged my bedroom almost every weekend. I’d move furniture from one side of the room to the other, swap posters around, reorganise shelves and endlessly edit my environment until something inside me settled.

I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. (My 10-yr old mates didn’t give a sh*t!)

I just knew when it felt right.

Looking back, I don’t think I was simply decorating my room.

I think I was training my eye.

At the time, I couldn’t have explained what I was doing. I didn’t have words like composition, proportion or visual hierarchy. I simply followed a feeling that something could be better than it currently was. That there was another arrangement, another combination, another version of the room that felt more like itself. And I guess, helped me feel more like myself.

That instinct has never really left me.

These days it shows up differently. It’s brands instead of bedrooms. Writing instead of posters. Moodboards instead of magazine clippings. But the process feels remarkably similar. I’m still moving pieces around, bringing bits in and chucking stuff out until something clicks.

The difference is that now I’m fascinated by why it clicks.

Because I don’t think taste is something we accidentally stumble into.

I think we build it.

Not through expensive furniture or European holidays or knowing which chair Charles and Ray Eames designed.

We build it by paying attention.

I’ve always been a participant in culture. I’m endlessly fascinated by what’s emerging. New brands, hotels, fashion, architecture, products. I collect references almost compulsively, not because I’m looking for things to copy, but because I’m trying to understand why certain things resonate while others don’t.

Why does this campaign stay with me?

Why do I feel closer to this creator over that one?

Why does this lounge feel timeless while another feels dated after six months?

Why does one sentence make me stop reading, while another makes me want to dive deeper?

Those questions have become far more valuable to me than the answers themselves.

Most people consume culture. I think creative people interrogate it.

Every observation becomes another distinction. Another tiny calibration of your internal compass. Over time, you begin recognising patterns that other people simply haven’t spent enough time noticing.

I reckon that’s what taste is.

Accumulated attention.

But attention, on its own, isn’t enough.

Because eventually there comes a moment where you have to choose.

This. Not that. Again. And again.

Which is where I believe taste becomes something much deeper than aesthetics.

It becomes identity.

One of the biggest lessons of my career came during the early years of Smack Bang. At the time, we didn’t offer brand strategy. We were designing identities without first helping our clients understand who they were trying to become.

The result was predictable.

I’d present work that, deep down, I believed was right. The client would ask for changes. We’d discuss colours, logos, layouts and typography as though they were simply matters of personal preference. And because I didn’t yet have a framework to support my thinking, I’d often compromise.

I knew it was a mistake.

I just didn’t have enough reasoning-ammunition to explain why.

Everything changed when we introduced strategy.

Suddenly there was a shared understanding of the customer, the positioning, the role the brand needed to play adn the white space we were gunning for. Design stopped becoming a conversation about personal preference and started becoming an expression of strategic intent.

The work didn’t improve because our taste suddenly became better.

It improved because we finally trusted it enough to defend it.

I’ve thought about that lesson a lot over the years.

I no longer think it was about branding.

I think it was about self-trust.

Which leads me to something I’ve come to believe quite deeply.

Taste requires self-trust.

Self-trust requires self-possession.

And self-possession requires doing the work.

Not design work… Inner work.

Because the clearer I’ve become about who I am, the clearer my taste has become.

Not because I’ve become more cultured. And definitely not because I’ve become more sophisticated.

But because I’ve become less interested in borrowing somebody else’s judgement.

I wonder if that’s what we often mistake for “bad taste”?!

Not a lack of aesthetic ability, but rather a lack of identity.

I really do believe that people who don’t yet know what they think inevitably end up outsourcing their thinking. To trends, algorithms, influencers. To the consensus. They spend so much time looking outward that they lose the ability to recognise what genuinely resonates inwardly.

Taste can’t exist without identity.

One informs the other.

Your taste is simply one of the ways your identity makes itself visible.

Which also explains why I think taste and instinct are inseparable.

People often ask me how I know when something is right.

The truth is, I usually feel it long before I can explain it.

Something just... belongs.

It feels internally consistent. Cohesive. Like every decision is reinforcing the same idea. I can sense the logic before I’ve found the language.

Only later does analysis catch up.

(Sometimes I’ll save a image to Pinterest and have absolutely no idea why. Six months later, I’ll stumble across it again and suddenly understand exactly what I was seeing. I’ve stopped expecting my taste to explain itself immediately.)

Maybe that’s all instinct really is: Pattern recognition that hasn’t yet become conscious.

And maybe taste is what happens when you’ve spent years training that instinct through observation, curiosity and relentless attention.

So, how do you develop better taste?

Read widely.

Travel when you can.

Visit galleries.

Notice details.

Study brands.

Build moodboards.

Collect references.

All of those things matter.

But they’re only inputs.

The real work begins when you start paying equal attention to yourself.

To your reactions.

Your instincts.

Your curiosities.

The things you return to over and over again for reasons you can’t quite explain.

I don’t think taste is about becoming more like the people you admire. I think it’s about becoming more unmistakably yourself.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve stopped thinking of taste as an aesthetic skill altogether.

I think it’s a human one.

And like any muscle, the more deliberately you use it, the stronger it becomes.

There’s a particular kind of silence happening on Instagram right now. If you’re a brand posting organically on Instagram, you’ll know what I mean.
It’s not the peaceful kind of silence, but the eerie, post-apocalyptic kind.

Instagram is now a digital wasteland where even great content goes to die; posts that would’ve soared two years ago now land with all the grace of a dropped brick. Content crafted with precision, intention, and the same magic that once guaranteed lift. Now? It hits the feed like a ghost signal. No boost. No spark. Just tumbleweeds rolling over content that deserved a crowd.

Stare at your engagement (or lack thereof) long enough and you start to wonder:

Is anyone… actually still on here?
Are we performing theatre to an empty room?
Desperation sets in as brands begin wandering the platform with little bundles of content, hoping someone, somewhere, still sees us?

Instagram wasn’t always like this. It used to feel like the centre of culture. A living, breathing city where brands could build worlds, architect desire, and be rewarded for originality and, let’s face it, simply just showing up.
Now, it feels like trying to broadcast poetry from inside an airport food court. Loud. Chaotic. Everyone numb.

For me, the question isn’t “Is Instagram dead?” That part feels quite certain.
It’s “What does a brand do when the main stage goes dark?”

From where I stand, today’s brands are digital refugees; unable to remain on a platform that wrings them dry, forcing them to churn out content that adds nothing to their equity or their cultural weight. They can’t stay… but where exactly are they meant to go?

The Algorithm Ate the Audience

Let’s name the villain. Engagement isn’t low by accident, it’s structural.

Instagram didn’t just move the goalposts; it replaced the sport.
We trained for community, craft, narrative.
And then, with what felt like the click of a finger, it gave us roulette.

Brands are now competing with:

• People’s group chats

• AI-generated faces

• Rage-bait commentary

• Micro-celebrity therapists

• The release of the Epstein files (or lack thereof)

• Dancing cats with better retention rates than global skincare brands

How does a brand, any brand, cut through a feed optimised for chaos, virality, and emotional whiplash?

Are we meant to out-shock shock culture? Out-dance Reels? Out-spam creators who spend 14 hours a day reverse-engineering watch-time metrics?

And the deeper question:
Should we even try?

The Myth of “If You Post More, It Will Come”

We’ve entered the era of desperation posting.

Brands have become the corporate equivalent of a situationship sending “???” at 2am.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

No one ever scaled a cult brand by appeasing an algorithm.
The algorithm has no taste, no ethics, no vision.
It does not care about your brand story, your craftsmanship, your nuance, or your thousand-person waitlist.

So why do brands keep feeding it like it’s a god?

Could it be that we’ve confused distribution with meaning?
Frequency with resonance?
Attention with affection?

What if engagement wasn’t the KPI we think it is anymore?

If Instagram Is a Wasteland, What’s the New Homeland?

Let’s sit in the refugee metaphor for a second:
If Instagram is a scorched-earth city, where do brands migrate?

What terrain allows for depth, nuance, memorability?
Where do we build culture now?

Some emerging answers:

1. Private Feeds > Public Feeds

Communities are going underground.
Discord servers, Close Friends, SMS clubs, Substack threads.
Places where intimacy can be earned, not algorithmically rationed.

Is the future not “audiences” but inner circles?
Not reach, but relationship density?

2. Personality-Led Media

If brands can’t win as brands, do they need a face?
Not an influencer (I personally feel like that ship has sailed).

They need a thinker.
A founder with a POV.
A head of brand who writes essays.
A practitioner who speaks in ideas, not slogans.

Are brands becoming media companies, whether they want to or not?

3. Search, Not Scroll

Instagram invented the infinite feed; TikTok perfected it.
But consumers are getting tired.
Fatigue creates a new opportunity: intent-led discovery.
Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok Search; platforms where people arrive with curiosity, perhaps a little more intention than they do on Instagram.

Do brands need to show up where the audience is actively looking, not numbly scrolling?

4. IRL as the Last Frontier of Cut-Through

Events. Salons. Pop-ups.
Actual human energy.
The one thing the algorithm cannot throttle.

If everyone is invisible online, does offline become the new visibility?

5. Depth Content > Snackable Content

The pendulum always swings.
After a decade of digital junk food, the appetite for intellectual nourishment is rising.

Articles. Essays. Long-form conversation.
Aesthetic intelligence paired with cognitive substance.

Are the smartest brands about to win in the most old-fashioned way possible, by having something worth saying? This is why we turned to Substack. It doesn’t feel like another doom-scroll of a platform; it feels like a long-form supper club for the intellectually hungry. A home-cooked meal in a world addicted to digital snacks.

Maybe the Real Question Isn’t About Instagram at All

Maybe Instagram’s decline is simply revealing something bigger:
We’ve mistaken platforms for power.
We’ve outsourced brand building to places that were never built for us.

Instagram was never designed to make brands iconic, it was designed to make users scroll.
When that incentive misaligns, the brand dies first.

So instead of asking:
“Where should brands go?”
Maybe we should ask:
“What kind of brands are worth following anywhere?”

Brands with:

• A thesis

• A worldview

• A cultural edge

• A point of intellectual heat

• A creative signature no algorithm can erase

Brands that don’t need the feed to validate them, because they build gravity, not content calendars.

Instagram may be a wasteland, but wastelands create new worlds

When the old city collapses, pioneers emerge.
Culture simply finds a new host.
Power reshapes itself into many hands.
Community drifts toward the places that feel alive enough to hold it..

So here’s the provocation:

What if Instagram dying is the best thing to happen to branding in a decade?
What if this is the permission slip we needed to stop optimising and start imagining again?
What if the next era of brand building revolves around resonance; the kind that lingers long after the scroll? The kind built on substance. The kind defined by intellectual and emotional gravity.

Instagram is a wasteland.
Good.
Wastelands are where the most interesting revolutions begin.