🥁 A 100 Day Project, Zebra Desk Decor, and A One-Liner I Can't Stop Thinking About

I’m Allison Stadd, drummer turned CMO, and I write for people who want to put the crackle back in their careers ⚡

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 10 things to toss into your creative sandbox this week:

❓ A single question that will change how you use your phone: Former Buddhist monk Michael Becka argues that we obsess over our physical diet while ignoring our "attention diet." Most people consume dozens of headlines, crises, and other people's highlight reels before breakfast. His fix: treat your digital environment as deliberately as a sacred space. The question to ask of every social account you follow: Does this expand me or shrink me?

🥕 A simple coaching model you can use in your 1-1s: The GROW framework is a practical four-step approach to coaching conversations. Establish what the person’s working toward, honestly assess where they’re at, explore what’s getting in the way, and then create a clear action plan:

📈 A useful X-Y graph to sort out potential career plans: created an easy, helpful visual aid to map out jobs that would help her optimize stability and fulfillment. Your two variables may be different: Earning Potential x Adventure Potential, Learning Curve Steepness x Speed to Income, etc.

🔥 A revelation that burnout isn’t new: 18th‑century farm records show workers describing the same exhaustion. This quote says it all: “Burnout is built into capitalism, not a problem capitalism is motivated to solve.”

🪞 A one-liner I cannot stop thinking about: In Viola Davis’s episode of Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang, she shares that her definition of hell is when the person you became meets the person you could have become. Is that not a total brain grenade? Crazy motivation for pursuing your fullest potential with your remaining years.

🏃 A guide to escaping the algorithm: A fascinating take from on “engaging with [social media] platforms as if close reading a work of literature.” His point is instead of deleting your Instagram profile or reducing the hours you spend scrolling, resist the algorithm by purposefully using each platform in an alternative way. For example, seek out the Wikipedia pages with the least views or fill your Amazon cart with the 5 most expensive items you can find.

📅 An idea for a 100 Day Project (from Suleika Jaouad’s beautiful memoir Between Two Kingdoms): Carve out a few minutes to work on a creative project every day for 100 days. Jaouad used it as “a way of organizing our lives around one small act of imagination” during her battle with leukemia. Her boyfriend’s 100 Day Project was daily video dispatches from the outside which he shared with her in her hospital room; her mother’s was painting one small handmade ceramic tile each morning, which she combined into a mosaic for Suleika. Her father’s was writing down 100 childhood memories that he printed and bound into a booklet for her as a Christmas present. Suleika’s was writing in her journal every day for 100 days which she eventually turned into this book.

🦓 A just-for-fun goodie bag of zebra-themed office/desk things: My husband and I made the zebra our unofficial “family animal.” I love bringing themes like this into my home office decor for creative inspiration and a reminder of what I’m working for:

• This ceramic zebra pencil pot adorns my desk

• This peel & stick zebra wallpaper would be awesome behind a bookshelf or inside your desk drawers

• Just got this (faux, I’m not a sociopath) zebra skin rug and it is 🤌 in person

• This personalizable zebra print notebook would be fun with this zebra gel pen

• This little brass zebra figurine could hang out on a stack of books

• Look at these nice abstract zebra-inspired prints

✍️ A cool idea from to make a “darlings document”: Instead of killing your darlings (i.e. deleting phrases and sentences from your writing), make a darlings document. Whenever he’s working on something and has to cut words he loves, he dumps them in the darlings document. Even if he never goes back to it, it eases the act of cutting. This would work for ideas at work, creative projects, so many things!

🤖 A frank take on the good and the ugly of life as a heavy AI user: shares how AI is changing her focus, memory, patience, and articulation as someone who spends almost every working hour with AI.

FRIEND OF THE CREATIVITY OF WORK

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Have a sensational week,

Allison

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