🥁 A Hilarious Icebreaker, a Monthly 10 List, and Skill Nostalgia

I’m Allison Stadd, drummer turned CMO, and I write for people who want the way we work to work for us.

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 10 things to chew on this week:

🧱 A fun way to make meetings interactive, via LEGO: Rudi Anggono, LEGO’s Director of Creative Innovation, shared in an interview with Creative Factor that every meeting room at LEGO has a pile of bricks in it. “Instead of fidgeting, we actually build. The assignment is to use whatever you have in front of you to build a car or something. Then hand it over to the next person and change their design. Turn it into a duck. And of course, the end result is ridiculous, but that’s the whole point. We don’t always build to create something, we build just to be silly or to let go of whatever inhibitions we have. It’s a form of singing in public, I guess.”

🛒 A hilarious icebreaker from : “You have 30 minutes. Everything is free. What store are you going to?”. Some favorite responses: Tiffany’s (“Grab a lot of diamonds with high resale value”), a car dealership, Sephora, Barnes & Noble.

🎭 A useful mental device to roll with the punches: From Maria Semple’s Go Gentle: "Epictetus says to think of ourselves as actors in a play. We can't choose our roles, and they can be switched at any time without warning. Once we're recast, our job isn't to question or complain, but to accept and shine.”

🍫 A reminder to “always bring the chocolate”: A design principle from Robin Noguier: “When someone asks you for a coffee, bring the best one you can, but always add a piece of chocolate.” The idea is to not just do what people ask for; to go beyond that, and do something that they didn’t even know they wanted.

🧐 Encouragement to do some introspection on WHY your life is so complicated: In this Tim Ferriss podcast episode, Claire Hughes Johnson (former Stripe COO) discovered that saying yes to too many things was about an intrinsic desire to be liked.

📋 A fun idea from to make a monthly “10 list”: 10 things you’d like to do each month with absolutely no consequences if you don’t. I’ve been making seasonal bucket lists for a few years but I like the idea of approaching it monthly.

🍷 A “good wine rule”: Don’t wait for the good night to open the good wine! Make any night a good night by opening the good wine.

⚒️ A reflection on “skill nostalgia”: Our craving for handmade things (sourdough, pottery, workwear, beekeeping) is a modern version of an old nostalgia for skilled work, one that traces back to Plato and the Victorians. Could it be the start of a radically human approach to work?

🔮 How to “remember the future”: A thought-provoking exercise for tuning into the future you really want and imagining it into reality. (credit to !)

🤫 A reminder you can listen to nothing at all: Next walk you take, put down the Airpods.

Go make some good trouble this week,

Allison

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