Archive of posts from April 2026

When a company you like buying from does something you don’t like, what do you do about it?

We have two choices.

I use the computer I use because of what I want to make with it, not because of what I believe.
Same is true of my notebooks, pens, books, all of it.
Because I value my ability to create over my ability to agree with everything who make those tools.

The alternative would be to look for another provider each time they make a public misstep.
Trading mastery and familiarity for tangential philosophical alignment with those who manufacture my machines and bind my notebooks.

There are many who believe jumping ship regularly in this way is a great idea.

But I’m not sure making the velocity of my creativity the casualty of their missteps is a success to me.

If most people publish average ideas…
Run average campaigns…
In average businesses…
With average levels of care…

…And that’s what AI is trained on currently…

What should you expect to receive if you ask it for ideas or production support?

Worth thinking about.

There’s a subtle difference between perfectionism and growth:

Perfectionism: Make, see how it could have been better based on your thoughts, scrap what you did to make that instead, repeat.

Growth: Make, ship, see how it could have been better based on feedback, make that next, repeat.

Which are you doing?

When you have a product to sell, you can either:

One: Photoshop the packaging to make it look more desireable than it actually is.

Two: Improve the product so you need not photoshop a thing.

Fast food companies are renowned for being in the former category.

And you’re welcome to join them, if you’d prefer to make a many sale today in exchange for many disappointed customers.

Or you can be the second kind, disappointing yourself today in exchange for making many happy sales tomorrow.

Both types exist. You can choose which you’d like to be.

There are two types of notebook users.

One: People who love reading about notebooks, buying notebooks, comparing paper quality, deliberating about the brands that make them.

Two: People who write and sketch liberally into their notebooks.

The first kind loves the thing. The second kind loves what they make with the thing.

No right or wrong. But it’s worth noticing which you’re being.

“Wedding photographers outraged by amateur who offered to pay couples to shoot their big day.”

Some see this as “A race to the bottom gone wild.” I get it.

But I see this as “A keen photographer committed to starting their portfolio and photographer career, in a climate where such jobs are far from guaranteed, so are thinking outside the box to make it happen.”

I fully support that kind of mindset.

Nevermind the naysayers. Go get it, bud.

A lot of folks are talking about ‘software brain’ again.

Data. Databases. Everything is data, in databases. Methodical, organized, controllable.. Who controls the database controls everything. Yada-yada.

But software brain is a choice. Organizing things that way is a choice. A popular choice, but a choice.

On the flip side, you could (for instance):

• Think on paper, not in apps. It’s messy, unstructured, hard to recall. The mess is the point.
• Plan less. It’s counterintuitive, unproductive. The spontaneity is the point.
• Have fewer opinions. The discourse is friendlier, and algorithms have less power over your heartstrings.
• Make your coffee differently every time. The randomness is the point.
• Enjoy wrong turns or getting lost. GPS databases are based on the opposite.
• Act on feeling, not just on logic. We do anyway, logic is often just a story we tell ourselves.

The list could go on and on.

The point is this: if we live in ways that wouldn’t suit a database, we don’t get software brain, and tech doesn’t consume our world, or our worldview.

That’s rare. A place where new, unexpected ideas show up. We need more of that: ChatGPT already covered the rest.

We’re at a crossroads.

When AI can generate an image that looks like what’s in your head…
Like what you’ve seen before and want to see again…

We get a choice:

1. Choose to engage a creative who will bring a new perspective, a new idea, a new take on an old theme
2. Just take the generated image, advance nothing, and not care one bit

But it’s not so simple.

Creatives will worry about people choosing Option 2…
But the problem isn’t necessarily Option 2.

The problem is that fewer and fewer creatives want to show up fully to Option 1.

Many creatives are phoning in their creativity to inspiration galleries or prompting-in-secret.

The solution isn’t to whine about Option 2…
The solution is to show what Option 1 is capable of.

Now’s not the time to be fearful, nor lazy.
Now’s the time to be more creative than ever before.

Between 2005 and 2019, the number of words we speak out loud to another human reportedly fell by nearly 28 percent.

The pandemic likely made it even worse.

More connected than ever.
Less connected than ever.

We think smartphones keep us connected.
What if they’re keeping us apart?

Why are shiny new-and-improved things exciting?

Whatever the reason, I don’t share it.

We’re told we’re supposed to want new-and-improved.

But there are a few issues with that:

• new-and-improved may not be better than what you do now
• new-and-improved may not be more reliable than what you do now
• new-and-improved may not be more proven than what you do now
• new-and-improved may not justify the switching costs
• new-and-improved may be change for the sake of change
• new-and-improved is just a story sold as a fact

Sometimes, new-and-improved has a place.

But oftentimes, it’s a distraction.

There are already enough distractions.

When the camera happened, artists were supposed to be doomed.

Yet there are still many artists. More, even.

When the smartphone happened, photographers were supposed to be doomed.

Yet there are still many photographers. More, even.

In the moment, when a new thing happens, things are supposed to be doomed.

Yet they continue, often with expansion.

Remember that when things feel catastrophic.

Some want to pay less, to get less, while demanding more, and leave for a cheaper option when it comes along.

Some want to pay a little more, to get more than they paid for, while demanding less than they got.

We get to choose what type of people we want to surround ourselves with, when we put our work into the market.

Your message isn’t what it says on your website.

Your message is what those who know you, tell the others.

Those are words you may not have chosen. You can’t wordsmith or A/B test that. You can’t un-say what you’ve said. You can’t pretend you’ve done what you haven’t.

And that’s part of why those words are so important.

Maybe we should focus less on the simple prose we can control, and more on words that spread.

Sometimes, you can get more ideas to explore by prompting an LLM for them.

Sometimes, you can get more ideas to explore by sitting with a cup of tea and watching the clouds roll by.

The second is less efficient yet, often, more effective.

If, that is, you’d like ideas different to those everyone else is having.

Is it pointless, or the point?

Some see to street photography as a futile — and often unpredictable — record of banality.

Others see it as capturing life itself, an unfiltered record of existence, a mirror to an imperfect world.

Some see writing emails by hand as a waste of mental energy and time.

Others see it as staying sharp, showing up with care, preferring it over machines talking to other machines all day until we all run out of water.

It’s a good reminder that the point isn’t objective. It’s entirely, empirically subjective.

Changes how we look at so many decisions we make day to day.

I don’t mind if your email isn’t perfectly formatted. It shows me you cared to write it yourself.

I don’t mind if your website copy has a typo in it. It shows me you cared to keep tweaking it to suit those in your care.

I don’t mind if your newsletter is slightly inconsistent. It shows me it’s a response to your desire to share great things, rather than merely spewing out slop on a schedule.

I don’t mind if your artwork is rough in places. It shows me you’re doing it yourself, committing to growth, and shipping along the way.

I don’t mind if your business model is flawed in the eyes of conventional strategists or economists. It shows me you’re doing it for love, not money.

Please don’t be in a rush to make things perfect, sterile, automatic, the same.

We humans don’t want that. We never wanted that. We thought we did, until we had it, then we realized what we really want is for things to be… human.

Moleskine have been a staple of the creative world for decades.

They claim to have been for hundreds of years but, tales aside… decades.

Writers. Artists. People who want to disconnect from tech and explore their ideas themselves.

So it perhaps comes as no surprise when Moleskine announce their latest LOTR collab is, in part, AI generated, that creatives got upset.

And I don’t blame them. I also thought it was a strangely tone-deaf take on what most of their customer base want from them.

Just because it’s “cool” to some, doesn’t mean it’s “cool” for those in your care.

It’s worth remembering: if you make things that a specific group of people like… don’t forget that you make things that a specific group of people like.

For a long time, people pursued convenience.

“1,000 songs in your pocket” was a hugely desireable idea.

More GBs on a smaller SD card. Thinner and thinner laptops, more power. Headphones that don’t even have wires. AI that generates your words. The list goes on.

Everything is so, so convenient, if you want it to be. And yet?

Physical media sales are up. DVDs, vinyl records, physical books, people are returning to the inconvenient.

Because they want to feel something.

The smell of the book, maybe a little post-in note inside from the founder.

The ownership and curation of a music collection that’s uniquely theirs, with the ceremony of listening.

The toil toward words they can be truly proud of having written all on their own, warts and all.

We’re not computers. We’re not wired for efficiency.

If you keep a notebook or pen in your hand, you’ll write or draw.

If you keep a book or magazine in your hand, you’ll read.

If you keep a phone in your hand, you’ll waste time.

The future is in your hands.

My team was celebrated by a client because of the energy it brought to an emergency.

Not the fact that they dived into someone else’s emergency and fixed it for them…

Not the fact that it was done very quickly and economically…

The energy they brought.

Chill, calm, organized, happy, kind.

Sometimes your competitive advantage is simply being a really nice person.

Our gardeners don’t touch the neighbours gardens.

They used to. That’s how we connected with them in the first place.

But they’re good gardeners. They’re in-demand. So when our neighbor wrote scornful emails about their performance, they simply walked away.

When bad gardeners get bad reviews, they have to scrape around looking for work, and will continue working with bad customers.

When good gardeners get bad reviews, they get to walk away. They’re good, and they have plenty of other options available.

When great gardeners get bad reviews, they get to walk away, or remediate the issue with excellent service, because their communication skills are as good as their gardening skills.

Great gardeners are exceptionally rare. We’ve yet to meet one in our area. We settled for good. Our neighbours settled for bad.

It shows where the opportunities lie, for gardeners, and for us in our own lines of work.

When web authors don’t care enough to put readers above themselves, websites are a chore.

When websites are a chore, people prefer talking to AI and risk the hallucinations.

When people prefer talking to AI, the websites die anyway, because people don’t need to talk to other people.

When people don’t need to talk to other people, the fabric of the Internet as we used to know it, goes away.

It just becomes a bunch of lonely people, interacting with their terminal, alone, wondering if the Internet could somehow be more than that.

Welcome back to the late-90s.

When you write good documentation, you’re really writing a book.

Something with chapters. Something that takes people on a journey. Something that leaves people better than it found them. Something worth reading.

It can transform a business.

When you write bad documentation, you’re done none of those things.

You’re simply making things harder. Worse than a 1:1 tutorial. Worse than a disorganized back-n-forth email thread. Worse than no documentation at all.

Write good documentation.

Your brand is a character.

Those it serves are the protaginists in a story.

Your brand’s role in their story is up to them, and how well it elects to show up and help them on their journey.

It’s always been this way.

Most just lack the imagination to see it for what it really is: characters, in a story.

If you try to ‘generate’ a shortcut to creating your magic, you’ll lose the magic.

And probably, create a lot of frustration and wasted time along the way.

If you try to focus your mind on doing your best work, somehow, the magic shows up.

And probably, when you forgot all about shortcuts and just danced with the magic itself.

Don’t try to phone it in. Don’t look for shortcuts. The fastest way to producing great work is to not look for the fastest way at all.

Whenever I go to the park with my son, I’m struck:

Every other parent is on their smartphone, most of the time.

Pushing their kids on a swing, while scrolling.

Walking down the stairs, while scrolling.

Sitting in coffee shops, while scrolling.

Sitting on park benches, while scrolling.

Everyone is so eager to give away their attention, their focus, their mind, their opportunity to build memories.

We don’t have to join them.

As of last year, 51–53% of global internet traffic was bots, surpassing human activity for the first time.

Social media isn’t social anymore. The timeline is just sensational media, the social fell back to DMs.

Google search isn’t for search anymore. The results are modified and/or replaced with AI, so you never really see the real thing.

The web was social, now it’s just trying to be so clever it’s becoming “dumb pipes”, full of the echoes of voices long gone.

Maybe it’s time to stop playing the same old games.

Maybe it’s time to make remarkable, unusual, special things, and attract the right real people to you.

Maybe it’s time to focus on the quality of your craft: it could be the most social thing you’ve got.

When the Gorillaz team were waiting in LA to hear whether or not their movie would happen,

They could have sat around, waiting, sipping coffee, doomscrolling, stressing.

Instead, they made a song, on an iPad, while waiting.

Released as “Cracker Island”, released February 2023.

Not the first time they did that, either.

“The Fall” was an entire album, created in 32 days, on an iPad, while on tour with “Plastic Beach”.

The takeaway?

You’ve got time.

You just need to love what you’re doing enough to want to do it in the small moments.

Everyone’s sending cold emails.

There are unquantifiable numbers of them flying around right now.

And the number seems only to be increasing.

What’s the chance anyone will respond to yours?

Very good, if:

• You commit to understanding them
• You commit to sending them things they want
• You commit to doing so without asking for anything in return
• You commit to making it more fun for them than what they were already doing
• You commit to iterating on that until it works, because it’ll take time
• You commit to re-learning how to make it work when it stops working, and it will

Most don’t do any of these things.

They just generate pithy pitches and hope it works out.

You’re not them.

So you’re fine.

Some people optimize email for speedier replies, hitting more people with less care, shorter ping-pong replies powered by AI.

Other people optimize email for fewer messages in the first place, choosing to be thoughtful with people who will thank them for caring.

Some people optimize their copy or designs for speed, templating and generating quickly to get it done and move on.

Other people optmize their copy or designs for depth, taking the time to do fewer things but better, knowing the results will be far better… eventually.

There are people who argue for either side in both scenarios.

I have my opinion on which is better. I live and work accordingly.

You don’t have to agree. But your work benefits if you choose.