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.
Love this!! Such great thoughts.