So much of my day now moves through screens. Emails, feeds, Slack pings, breaking news alerts. Even when I think I’m resting, my nervous system is still activated. The input never really stops.

That constant stimulation keeps me in a mild state of stress. Cortisol stays elevated. My brain stays in reaction mode.

Maybe that’s part of why I’ve been drifting back toward analog hobbies—and why I see so many others doing the same.

Woodworking. Knitting. Gardening. Puzzles. Pottery.

Activities where the pace slows down and the outcome isn’t the point. Places where I can experiment, make a mess, and follow curiosity instead of a project brief.

Working with my hands gives my brain something it can actually feel. Texture, resistance, temperature, rhythm. It’s feedback that pulls me out of the abstract (i.e my head) and back feeling grounded in my environment.

It’s one of the reasons why I took up pottery. Why others are learning to bake bread, or tend gardens.

Is it really because we need more bowls or loaves or tomatoes?

No, it’s because we need our brains back.

Pottery isn’t something you can “hack.” You can’t rush clay. It moves at its own pace, and if you want to get better, you have to move with it.

When I chose “creativity” as my word of the year in 2025, I joined the Savage Mill Studio for a 10-week intro class on wheel throwing.

I’d done some hand building with clay in high school, and had admired pottery studios and shops on trips to Asheville with Shane and the dogs. But when it came to actually working with clay on the wheel? I was a complete beginner.

So the first time I tried to center clay, I failed. Miserably.

I watched as my classmates’ dishes spun pleasantly while mine nearly shook with a wet lump of unbalanced clay. The left wall teetered high over the right. Was this a bowl, a vase, or some avant-garde art piece?

The instructor came over.

“One of the things I love about pottery is you always start with a practice throw,” she said. “You need to warm your hands back up to remember the sensation, the feeling, the flow. It gives you time to adjust. To find center.”

She showed me how you lob a lump of clay at the middle of the wheel. You can tell if you’ve centered correctly by watching if the piece wobbles as it turns—from a ball of clay to the piece you’re trying to make. Most people get it wrong on the first try, she said. The practice throw is just that: a throwaway, a chance to warm back up.

The practice lowered the stakes.

Find center first. Then build.

I loved that failure wasn’t just expected. It was built into the plan. The practice throw is a key part of the creative process.

Here’s what she didn’t tell me: you can skip centering.

You can pull up walls on off-center clay. Shape a rim. Make your piece look good for a while, at least from one angle.

But the inevitable always happens.

I ignored the centering rule when I felt impatient. After a stressful work week or a disagreement with a friend, I’d sit at the wheel, music blasting, needing to let off steam. I’d just … go.

Each iteration came out … wrong. Thin, wobbly, too far left, too close to the right. I could spend entire, stubborn sessions that way—with nothing to show for it. I ended up feeling friction, frustration, stuck-ness. That familiar feeling of imposter syndrome welled back up.

You’re no good at this, so why even bother?

But every time I started with centering the clay, I’d have a better time at the wheel. I could actually make things, enjoy the process. Eventually I kiln-fired a ring dish. A gnome for my father-in-law.

But to make anything in that class, I had to loosen my grip, be open to where the clay wanted to go that day.

When you center first, you start in a better place. You know what you want to build to, and you have a strong foundation to guide you.

After a few weeks at the wheel, I noticed I was bringing its lessons on centering before building into my professional work.

I tried the centering approach on a creative campaign—the rollout of a documentary. Something I had not done before, bringing together different team members with various ideas, skill levels, and contributions. Our goal: orchestrate a global media rollout that felt connection-focused, resonant, impactful.

So I thought, why not start with centering?

We got in alignment early, clear on the plan. When it was time to shape the bowl (so to speak), we built it with integrity.

Here’s the thing: everyone’s process looks different.

My friend does yoga before her D.C. commute and arrives at work with ideas fresh, ready for pitch meetings. Our local cafe owner bikes downtown to get his thoughts brewing before serving the morning crowd.

For me, I need my hands busy. Clay, camera, pen on paper. That’s when my brain shifts into the mode where ideas flow.

It happens on nature walks too, watching light filter through leaves, taking out my camera. Anything that lets me focus on environment, color, light, beauty. My best ideas don’t come at my desk. They come after an afternoon in the garden. When I’ve run a bath and am looking through design moodboards. Reading a novel. Walking the dogs. In the shower. At the wheel.

Those are the areas where I slip into a meditative state, relaxed enough to brainstorm, to create without pressure of building something grand.

I know I’m off-center when I’m crabby. When I spent the day glued to screens, back arched (“shrimp mode”, as my friend Emily calls it), obsessing and looping on work meetings.

This is fight-or-flight. Your prefrontal cortex—the part responsible for creative thinking—goes offline. Your brain is too busy scanning for threats to think of creative possibilities.

When we’re relaxed, our brains produce alpha waves—the frequency associated with creative thinking. Stress shuts this down. Your best ideas come when your nervous system feels safe.

To find your creative center, ask:

1. What puts your brain in a different operating mode? When do ideas come easiest? What makes time disappear? Notice what you're drawn to when you procrastinate. Do you pick up objects and turn them over? Rearrange furniture? Hum while working? Pace while thinking? These are clues.

2. What kind of feedback does your brain need? Not what you should need. What actually works:

• 🧶 Tactile - Hands busy (pottery, baking, gardening)

• 🏃🏻‍♀️ Kinesthetic - Body moving (walking, yoga, biking)

• 📸 Visual - Seeing, arranging, photographing

• 🎶 Auditory - Music, conversation, silence

• 📲 Social - Collaboration, thinking out loud

3. What conditions help you stay centered? Is it a time of day? Environment? Ritual? Morning quiet or evening wind-down? A cleared desk or cozy maximalism? Daily journaling or weekly nature walks? The answers tell you how to design your creative foundation.

Working with clay, you can add, take away, edit and refine. It’s almost completely focused on feeling.

Notice it cracking? Add water. Want it narrower? Increase pressure. Wider? Tug the edges, gently.

As a Georgia native, it’s no mystery why the studio, thick with the smell of fresh, wet clay, earthy and deep, instantly made me feel at home.

I finished those 10 weeks with so much more than practical experience. It taught me about foundation-building.

We’ve since moved to North Carolina. Now that our boxes are unpacked and it’s starting to feel like home, I’m ready to start again.

Notice what you’re drawn to. When you procrastinate, where does your attention go? What makes you lose track of time? Those aren’t distractions—they’re clues.

Add one analog practice. Something that gets your hands busy and your mind quiet. Pottery, baking, gardening, drawing, walking without your phone. Pick one. Try it once this week.

Start your next project by centering first. Before you jump into action, ask: What do I want this to feel like? What foundation do I need? Set your intention, then build.

Don’t force your way to creativity. Feel your way there.

Start with center, every time.

🎨 If you’re trying to find your creative center again, find more Creative Code essays here.

Every Monday, I send a new letter exploring environment design, cultural trends, creative practice, and building creative work that makes a difference.

P.S. Next week: How your media diet shapes your creative environment—and a 3-question audit for a digital detox.

P.P.S. If this resonated, forward it to someone who’s been grinding themselves into the ground trying to “be more creative.” Sometimes we all need permission to enjoy the process instead.

Rolling Stone reported she’s likely entirely AI-generated. I recognized her album cover while scrolling Instagram—sandwiched between memes and vacation photos.

It made me pause.

Is a love song still moving if you’re not sure the artist ever actually felt what they’re describing?

Here’s what really got me: I’d been listening to this artist for weeks by the time I saw that headline. I’d connected to her music. Those lilting R&B notes, the runs, the phrasing.

But the moment I read “AI-generated,” something broke. I felt, honestly, a little betrayed.

And that’s exactly the point.

We don’t just want good work. We want to feel connected to the person behind it.

The Real Problem With How We Think About Creativity

When asked how they’d feel if their favorite podcasts featured AI hosts, 47 percent of listeners surveyed by Sounds Profitable said they’d be less likely to keep listening. Including 28 percent who said they’d be much less likely.

We care deeply about the person behind the work.

What separates work that truly resonates from work that’s just fine? A unique perspective. The ability to notice patterns others miss. To see where two lines intersect.

But here’s what almost everyone gets wrong: they think creativity is about working harder, being more disciplined, or finding the right hack.

Actually, creativity lives in your environment.

And most of us are trying to create in environments designed for everything except creativity.

What Happens When You Stop Demanding More From Yourself

There’s a quote I love: when a plant starts to wilt, you don’t demand more effort from it.

You change its environment instead.

Think about the last time you had your best creative idea. I’m willing to bet it didn’t happen during your scheduled “creative time” at your desk.

It happened in the shower. On a walk. While making dinner.

Your brain needs specific conditions to do creative work, consistently. And “trying harder” actually makes those conditions harder to get to.

Offline hobbies are on the rise for a reason.

Gardening. Baking. Pottery. Running clubs. Book clubs.

We’re craving “analog” practices because we’re trying to reintroduce something we’ve lost: texture, experimentation, play. The ability to think without a deliverable attached.

When so much of our time is filtered through screens and metrics, working with our hands offers something different.

It’s feedback you can feel.

If you’re tired of forcing creative work and want to redesign how it happens, subscribe to Creative Code - I send essays like this every week.

The Science Behind Why This Works

As more AI tools enter our lives, what defines a “creative” is shifting. It’s becoming less about the final product and more about how that creative thinks.

From a scientific perspective, creativity is shaped by neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to form new neural connections in real time.

Novelty nudges our brains out of autopilot and into active problem-solving. That’s where creativity lives.

So when you’re stuck, you might need unfamiliarity more than inspiration.

Taking a different route home. Trying a nail polish color you wouldn’t normally choose. Ordering a different pastry at your local café.

Learning a new skill—pottery, a language, sourdough—creates measurable changes in how the brain communicates with itself. Imaginative practices strengthen divergent thinking: the ability to generate multiple possibilities instead of default answers.

To think in color, rather than black and white.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I’ve never felt more creative than when I started taking pottery classes in 2025.

The way some people clock off and head to the gym, I did the same thing. But instead, I sat at the pottery wheel.

No deliverable or audience metrics in sight. Just my hands, the clay, and trying my best to make a bowl that would either hold water or collapse.

And here’s what surprised me: the creativity I was building at the pottery wheel started showing up everywhere else.

Better ideas at work. Clearer writing. More interesting solutions to problems I’d been stuck on for months.

Because I’d changed my environment. I’d given my brain permission to play, to fail, to notice things without immediately needing to productize them.

I love the process part of creativity. Brainstorming. Testing. Adjusting. The middle—the stretch of time where nothing is finished yet, everything is in flux.

Most people skip this part. They go straight from idea to execution, then wonder why the work feels forced.

Your Environment Is Everything

Lately, I’ve been returning to photography. Something I loved in college.

Our woods are shifting with this icy winter season, and I’ve been paying attention to how winter light moves through bare branches.

When our hands are busy—framing a shot, kneading dough, shaping clay—the mind can soften a little. Physical, analog activities expose our brains to texture, resistance, and rhythm.

There’s a phrase I keep coming back to: be stubborn with the vision, flexible with the plan.

Soon, I’m heading to Kennedy Space Center for the Artemis II launch. It’s my first time working launch operations. That mix of familiar and unfamiliar—I know the venue, but not this vantage point. I’ll see old friends but build something new together.

That edge between known and unknown? That’s where I want to stay.

What Makes Your Work Irreplaceable

In a world where AI can generate a love song, a podcast, a piece of art—what makes your work irreplaceable is that you’ve lived it.

You’ve failed at something and had to start over. You’ve been surprised by what worked. You’ve had a conversation that changed how you see a problem. You’ve tasted something that reminded you of childhood. You’ve felt the weight of a decision. You’ve stayed up too late working on something that didn’t matter to anyone but you.

Only humans can do that.

But you can’t access that creative depth when you’re grinding, forcing, demanding more from yourself. You access it by changing your environment.

Here’s What You Can Do This Week

Three small changes that create big shifts:

1. Add one analog practice to your week
Something that gets your hands busy and your mind quiet. Baking. Gardening. Drawing. Walking without your phone.

2. Change one small routine
Take a different route. Order something new. Sit in a different spot. Your brain needs novelty to break patterns.

3. Protect one block of “middle time”
Not productive time. Time to brainstorm, wander, notice. No deliverable required.

Stop trying to force creativity through willpower. Start designing an environment where it can actually emerge.

What Comes Next

Creative Code is my weekly letter for people who want to build creative work that actually matters.

Work that comes from living, noticing, being stubborn with your vision and flexible with your plan.

Every week (usually Tuesday), I send an essay exploring creativity as a practice—backed by science, grounded in real experience, designed to help you build work that feels natural instead of forced.

What you’ll get:

• Weekly essays on creativity, environment design, and work that matters

• Practical frameworks like the “plant” principle

• Real examples from digital media, pottery, photography, and launch operations

• Science-backed insights on neuroplasticity and creative problem-solving

• A community of 60+ makers, writers, and creators choosing depth over hustle

What you won’t get:

• Productivity hacks or “10 tips to unlock your creativity”

• Generic advice about discipline and motivation

• Content designed to go viral instead of create real change

If you’re tired of forcing creative work and ready to redesign how it happens, you’re in the right place.

P.S. Next week, I’m going deeper on what I learned at the pottery wheel—including the moment everything collapsed and what that taught me about creative problem-solving. Subscribe now and it’ll be in your inbox Monday morning.

P.P.S. If this resonated, share it with someone who’s been grinding themselves into the ground trying to “be more creative.” Sometimes we all need permission to try something different.

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Great Creative Work Starts with Giving People More Than They Expect

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what holds a creative team together when the ground feels like it’s shifting. When deadlines are condensed, stakes are high, and everyone is running off of fumes.

I’ve been reading Unreasonable Hospitality as part of a leadership circle on navigating change in creative environments. The book is by Will Guidara, former co-owner of NYC Fine Dining Restaurant Eleven Madison Park and executive producer of The Bear.

On the surface, the book is about training a team to run one of the best restaurants in the world.

But really, it’s about something deeper: pursuing excellence, by ingraining one small core tenant: here, we go above and beyond … but in the smallest ways.

One line has stayed with me:

“Being hospitable means giving people more than they expect — more than they even knew they wanted — not for the sake of elegance or extravagance, but because you’re paying attention.”

Hospitality 101 🍴

I never learned more about hospitality than I did as a college hostess.

I spent hours at the stand greeting people, reading their mood the second they walked in, and making them feel seen and taken care of, even when there was a 45-minute wait. I got very good at it — and was often on call for the brunch rush, trusted to be able to find a way to creatively smooth out the chaos, and set the tone for a room full of hangry strangers.

Turns out, those same skills are just as useful now.

Directing a room, keeping people calm, and paying close attention are some of the most valuable tools I have as a creative director.

How Hospitality Shapes Creative Work 🎥

You can bring hospitality into your creative work when you think intentionally about the experience you want someone to have while engaging with it.

I have this theory that you only need three pillars to plan any creative campaign. I asked a friend about it recently while we were brainstorming her bachelorette weekend. She wanted it to be a surprise, so I didn’t ask about dream locations or Pinterest themes. Instead, I asked:

“What do you want the weekend to feel like?”

That one question is the best compass I know for designing anything — a campaign, a dinner party, even a launch event.

When we rolled out a new documentary earlier this summer, we kept coming back to this question. We wanted people to feel connected and inspired.

So we didn’t just release the film. We brought it to local theaters, partnered with community groups, and built a distribution plan that reached people where they already were.

It wasn’t about doing more for the sake of it — it was about noticing what would make the experience meaningful and creating space for audiences to feel like they were part of something bigger.

When Someone Remembers

A friend of mine from journalism school once shared this story with me:

Her newspaper crew was interviewing a student-athlete they had profiled months earlier, right after the school’s championship win.

This was a follow-up interview, a chance to go deeper.

The athlete was tired. His day had been packed with media stops and questions. When he walked into the room, he asked for a glass of water.

Someone on the crew quietly slipped away.

A few minutes later, they returned — not just with water but with his favorite drink, a green tea soda, the one he’d brought during his first visit to the studio.

He smiled when he saw it. The weight of the day seemed to lift.

And just like that, the whole room shifted. The conversation flowed and the interview turned warm and open.

It wasn’t the drink that changed everything.

It was the care.

The reminder that this moment was more than another appointment on a busy schedule.

Setting the Room 🍽️

That story gave me language for something I use in my own work as a producer: setting the room.

Setting the room is about creating an atmosphere where people feel seen before they even start speaking. It’s the quiet work of preparing the space (physical or emotional) so others can bring their best selves forward.

I’ve heard of some podcast teams that take it to the max. They don’t just research a guest’s background before an interview — they’ll try to find out all their favorites, including their favorite scent and fill the room with it before the conversation begins!

Can you imagine?

I think that might be a little over the top — but the principle is the same. The right setting can change everything.

And here’s the best part: giving people more than what they expect isn’t just something VC backed podcasts or Michelin-starred restaurants can pull off.

When we set the room, we shift the energy.

We make it safe for people to open up, and be in the experience.

And that changes the work that follows — whether it’s an interview, a team meeting, or a creative brainstorm.

Three Creative Takeaways 🖋

• Attention is the most generous thing you can give.
  Most of the time, people don’t need you to dazzle them — they need you to notice them.

• Small gestures create big openings.
  Whether it’s a hot dog in a fine dining restaurant or a favorite drink in a studio, the smallest acts of care can change the whole outcome.

• Feeling safe changes the work.
  When people feel cared for, they take risks. They share more. They bring more of themselves to the process — and that shapes the work—making it truly one of a kind.

Conversations That Matter 🎧

In a time when the internet can feel noisy, depressing, and unkind, I’m grateful for spaces that bring us back to what really matters: our connections with each other.

Humans are hard-wired for connection, after all.

This week, I joined my good friend Mark Stencel (fellow Mercer University board member!) and host Caroline Schor-MacDicken on Words Work Lab, a podcast and community dedicated to helping communicators connect, share stories, and move the craft forward.

Caroline and I talked about connecting with people through curiosity, tapping into your inner child, and building science and space storytelling with the goal of getting audiences to light up with wonder.

One moment that stayed with me:

“As human beings we’re hard-wired for connection… Curiosity is so core and essential to my work. Curious Universe is a podcast all about instilling curiosity and wonder about the universe that we all share… It’s not always ‘hey, there’s this amazing science result’, it’s often taking listeners on the journey of a scientific breakthrough… telling a full, resonant story, in context… and it’s just wonderful.”

If you need a dose of optimism — and a reminder that good conversation still has a place online — give this episode a listen.

Mark is doing beautiful work in building a community that reminds us that communication is about care.

🎙️ Listen to the episode preview here

More Than Expected ✨

Giving people “more than they expect” doesn’t have to mean you need to be more elaborate, or operate outside your budget.

It means listening, remembering the small stuff, and acting with presence.

Whether you’re leading a team, running a shoot, or launching a story into the world, people remember how you made them feel.

And that feeling shapes the work.

Oh! And here’s another post I wrote recently, exploring some similar ideas about how hospitality and creativity go hand in hand:

I can still hear Elvis playing over the jukebox as I wiped down the metallic walls at closing time. We’d use coffee filters to polish the surface without leaving any streaks, preparing the space so it would shine for the breakfast crowd the next morning.

The kitchen was quiet by that time. Just a few of us remained. Cleaning in near silence, it was always a surprisingly beautiful and retrospective way to wind down the evening shift.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that job taught me a lot about leadership. The kind that shows up in how you move, how you listen, and how you set a room.

As the unofficial air traffic controller for the dine-in crowd, I had to learn quickly how to manage chaos with grace. To anticipate needs. To greet regulars with genuine warmth even when my feet ached. As a lifeline, I could always take a minute in the walk-in freezer when it got to be too much.

Working in hospitality isn’t easy. But it stays with you.

And lately, I’ve noticed just how much of it has shaped the way I approach creative work now.

A New Way to Gather

Last year, I joined a book club at my neighborhood co-op. Our first read was The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, which bills itself as a thoughtful guide to how we meet and why it matters.

This book, and it’s experience-centered approach to life, has reframed nearly everything for me:
Creative strategy sessions. Story development. Backyard dinners.

Since reading it, I’ve started asking two questions before bringing people together—whether for a meeting, a brainstorm, or a meal:

• Why this particular group?

• How do I want people to feel when they arrive, and by the time they leave?

Those questions have quietly become part of my creative foundation. And I’ve found that they do help me design more intentional space—physically, emotionally, and strategically.

A few months ago, I was leading a brainstorm for a kids’ media project. And the energy in the room felt a little tense. The guided questions were introspective in nature, but because many of the participants hadn’t met yet, they weren’t exactly landing.

So I pulled a few containers of Play-Doh out of my bag.

It may sound gimmicky, but it was actually an invitation.

I passed them around and asked everyone to pick a color. Within minutes, something shifted.

People were laughing, sharing stories from their childhood. As the participants began relaxing into the moment, ideas began to emerge from a softer, more curious place.

And I truly believe the project we were brainstorming is all the better for it.

Sometimes, the smallest gestures are what unlock the biggest ideas.

“Don’t just host. Host with a bold, sharp purpose.”
—Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering

Hospitality, I’ve learned, is more about presence than it is about perfection.

When we bring intention into the spaces we create (whether a project pitch, production day, or a dinner party) we shape how people show up. And we shape what becomes possible in the room.

This mindset carried into the Cosmic Dawn documentary rollout, too. One of our anchor rollout events for the project was a community screening at a historic neighborhood theater—just a few miles from where the James Webb Space Telescope was built.

We could have gone big and glossy. But starting local felt more aligned.

And because the event was tailored with the attendees in mind, the feedback on the event was glowing. People felt seen, and in addition to learning something more about our universe, they really, genuinely enjoyed themselves.

Because how we invite people into a story matters … just as much as the story itself.

And that feeling shapes the work.

🗞️ Red Letter Day: Building a life (and career!) that feels good. If this made you think of someone you work with, forward this along.

Oh! And here’s another post I wrote recently, exploring some similar ideas about how hospitality and creativity go hand in hand:

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