🥁 Pebbling, a Dream Job Exercise, and Creativity as Care

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 make your work week a little more delightful:

🏀 A “Shoot Your Shot Wednesday” ritual from : Anna writes, “I’ve been shooting my shot ever since I quit my job in 2019 and decided to take charge of my life. Some people look at the connections I’ve made - the artists, the founders, the editors, the collaborators - and assume there’s an excessive strategy or system behind it all. When someone wants to know how I’ve connected with such fantastic people, my answer is almost always ‘I asked’.” P.S. 22 more creative rituals for your perusal right this way.

🐧 A heart-warming practice called “pebbling”: A year after PepsiCo Chief Creative Officer Chris Bellinger shared this on LinkedIn, I still think about it. There’s a name for sending small, seemingly random things like memes, funny videos, and links to people online: “pebbling.” It’s inspired by the behavior of penguins, who present pebbles to their loved ones as tokens.

🦉 A definition of a “believable person”: In Drew Taylor’s book LifeWork (I can’t find evidence of it online any longer, but this little paperback has been a self-discovery goldmine for me for years), he defines a believable person as someone who has done something successfully three times or more. Look to these people when you choose books to read, talks to watch, podcasts to listen to, theories to consider.

🛏️ A thing to do when your feet first hit the floor when you step out of bed in the morning: A sports psychologist for the Seahawks taught Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella this: “[W]hen you step out of bed, the first thing you know, you put your feet down and just say, what are you thankful for? That's another daily ritual of mine and it's just grounding. It gives you the ability to get up in the morning and orient yourself for the day.”

💭 A dream job exercise from The Hello Monday podcast: talks through the detailed dream job imagination prompt she’s done for years at the behest of her executive coach. She credits it with landing the very role she’s in now!

⛸️ A discovery that the area where ice skaters go to hear their competition results is called a “kiss & cry”: Somehow after years of watching the Olympics, I learned this only this week from Layne Fargo’s The Favorites (which I adored!), a novel about Olympic ice dancers.

🐕🐈 A reminder that creativity can be a form of care: Chicago Animal Care & Control, a shelter that took in nearly 19,000 animals last year!, just started bringing in volunteer musicians to perform for the dogs and cats. They’re calling it Sound Sessions. The idea is that live music reduces stress for everyone in the building: the animals, the staff, the visitors. I adore this example of creative input as a form of care.

🌴 A perfect way to turn 8 days of PTO into 12 days of real rest: I love this tactical breakdown of the optimal way to take summer vacation. It’s so easy to guilt ourselves about not taking enough time off, but not so easy to make an actual plan to do so in a way that doesn’t leave us even more wiped.

🤖 A handy acronym for prompting Claude properly: CRISP: The quality of what you get from any LLM is directly proportional to the quality of what you put in. I love this clear, approachable explanation from on how to prompt properly.

📅 A brilliant idea for keeping things interesting; communications strategist Ant Harris sets himself yearly challenges based on his age: He saw 22 gigs when he was 22, ate 23 foods he'd never tried when he was 23, visited 24 museums when he turned 24, and so on.

🧶 A lovely year-long craft project idea: Have you heard of a temperature blanket? You knit or crochet with a set of colors that have a temperature range allocated to each (e.g. cobalt blue is 30-40 degrees). Each day at a certain time, note the temperature and knit or crochet a row in a color that corresponds. At the end of the year, you have a beautiful blanket charting the changing of the seasons.

🧴 A new favorite hand soap and lotion: I discovered Element Brooklyn’s Kiso Forest hand soap and lotion at a restaurant here in Philly (Good King Tavern; the restaurant’s fine, the wine bar Le Caveau upstairs is a DREAM) and couldn’t stop thinking about the scent, so much so that I called the next day and asked for the brand name 😂 As someone who works from home I wash my hands and use hand lotion so often throughout the day that having an amazing scent for both makes the workday feel more sensorily satisfying.

See you out there,

Allison

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?

Subscribe now

🎧 Listen to The Creativity of Work playlist

🔗 Hang out with me on LinkedIn for more creative takes on leadership and marketing

☎️ Book an Office Hours session with me for a fun, fresh-eyed 1-on-1 on Leadership & Career or Marketing