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.
