🥁 Link Bouquets, Bookscapes, and a Killer Quote

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 12 things to crank up the creativity this week:

💐 A link bouquet maker! Curate a bouquet of links (videos, songs, articles) for a friend, customize its appearance, and send.

📚 Max Steven Grossman’s bookscapes: Obsessed with this series from photographer Max Steven Grossman. They’re these huge acrylic pieces that feature curated bookshelves on themes like rock music, cocktails, beaches, women in culture, and more.

🪷 A reflection on how emotionally healthy people relate to their careers: A good reminder that emotionally healthy people approach their careers with practical clarity rather than using work for recognition; and that an “average,” unpretentious work life is actually the hardest and most enviable achievement of all.

📽️ A guide to presenting your work better: I adored this practical, actionable take from Nikita Walia on how to present better at work. Treating a presentation like hosting is particularly interesting and smart.

🏴‍☠️ A new favorite game: Apple Photos treasure hunt. Type a random word into the app (“dogs,” “garden,” “pizza”) and see what you unearth. Use the results for creative inspiration, writing prompts, or an opportunity to send throwback pics to people you haven’t connected with in a while.

🚙 A fun photo collection practice from Youngna Park: Make a photo album on your phone of the best vanity license plates you encounter. She described doing this on a recent family road trip: “The kids see plates with ANCH0VY and it reminds them of their friends, whose plate says BURRIT0. There were also spottings of K0RNDAWG and IAMV1P and ONTHEEDG3.”

📒 A journal you’ll actually journal in: This beautiful Wilde House Paper journal comes with free access to the Open Journal Digital Library, a series of 7 day journaling courses with themes like Intimacy, Stress & Anxiety, Balance, Perspective and more to get you started.

💭 A reminder that “you’re only as good as the stuff you surround yourself with”: Austin Kleon has this concept he covers in his book Steal Like an Artist called “idea income”; basically the inputs you feed yourself, what you read, watch, notice, collect, the conversations you have, the rabbit holes you follow, determine the quality of what you're able to make and think.

🍝 A diagnostic for the VIPs in your life: In Laurie Woolever’s excellent restaurant industry memoir Care and Feeding, she discloses that VIP guests (business or media big shots, wealthy friends of the restaurant owners Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich, esteemed family members, celebs, neighborhood regulars) would get the “AA AD SM” treatment, a.k.a. Augment Appetizers, Augment Desserts, Send Moscato. I like this as a reflection tool for your own VIPs: are the people getting your “AA AD SM” treatment the ones who actually deserve it, or are you giving your best attention to people who are impressive rather than important?

🏁 A killer quote on imposing competition (even with yourself!) on things that were never meant to be competitive: “Winning a yoga race. It makes no sense, of course. The question this prompts is: Are there places you feel like you're falling behind where there's actually no race?” — Seth Godin

🎙️ A roundup of the objects that inspire America’s greatest songwriters: The NYT asked 30 of the greatest living American songwriters to share something that sparks their process. I’m a sucker for an inside look at how artists work.

🐦‍⬛ An app that identifies bird calls: My new favorite activity while on a walk: open the Merlin Bird ID app, hit record, and let it identify the birds around you based on their sounds. So far in Philly I’ve discovered not just the house sparrow and song sparrow, but the American robin, mourning dove, and even a gray catbird.

Go make something good this week,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to The Workroom 🔐, a bank of juicy extras like templates, resources & discounts that I update regularly. Every tool & perk in this archive is built from almost 20 years inside some of the most high-growth, fast-paced companies in the country (Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Shipt, BarkBox).

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

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