🥁 Regency Balls, Your B+ Life, and Plork

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

“I have excerpts of your newsletter written on post-its, plastered over my screens at my desk.” — Kat, subscriber

Happy Sunday,

Here are 11 things to stock your creative work life pantry with this week:

⚡ A look at four ways to protect your creative spark in corporate life: , NYT content strategist, zine creator, and newsletter scribe, gives great practical advice on resisting “the all-or-nothing mindset that says you’re either capital C Creative or Corporate.” My favorite rec = finding your creative neighbors: building friendships, opportunities, and projects by looking up local creatives on Substack and LinkedIn.

👗 A Regency-era ball in a Rust Belt town: A bookshop owner in Steubenville, Ohio, , started throwing Jane Austen balls and 500 young people showed up in costume to dance with strangers. So many takeaways from this, but primarily: Stop waiting for the thing you want to exist. We’re all craving community, interactivity, physicality, connection, right? So take the initiative and plan something. (Need pointers? I love ’s Group Hug newsletter on community craft.)

🖊️ A discovery that Claude can turn your handwriting into a font: Oh, the irony that schools don’t teach penmanship anymore so the generations for whom LLMs are interwoven into daily life won’t even find this use case fun. BUT, living in the moment: excited to play with this.

🔍 A frank excavation of today’s “career crisis”: breaks down our “society-wide career funk” into six factors. I agree with all of them, unfortunately.

👩‍🔬 A challenge to take the Tuesday Morning Test: As writes, “Tuesday morning at 10am tells you everything.” It’s the best opportunity during your work week to tune into what you’re doing, how you’re feeling about it, and what to make of that data.

⏲️ A Pomodoro timer, but make it whimsical: A free online Pomeranian-themed Pomodoro timer (it’s a time management method that boosts focus by breaking work into 25-minute intervals separated by 5-minute breaks) brought to you by the kooky creative community and digital trade school ILoveCreatives.

📫 A 25-year-old got a job by mailing in her resume: Everything old is new again. Camille K. Manaois got her job as a social media account exec at a communications agency by snail-mailing her application. Along with her resume and a recommendation letter, she included a note that said: “Some applicants rely on algorithms. I’d rather rely on a more reliable route: your desk. Thank you for your time in reading my materials.” It’s wild that her move was effective at, as the piece puts it, “breaking through a sea of sameness,” but that’s the state of things. I remember several radical acts of application from my own 20s, including dropping off a carrot cake accompanied by my resume in Nutrition Facts form at an agency called Carrot Creative. (They did not respond 🫠.)

🌶️ The 4P’s of Spicy Thinking: In a world soaked with AI-generated content and beautifully formatted nothing-burgers, truly fresh thought is what not only stands out but is required for go-forward professional success. I love everything the former Publicis Groupe Chief Growth Officer writes, but this piece was especially useful.

⚖️ A new metric for measuring your success: In his interview with his close friend restaurateur Will Guidara, Simon Sinek argues we should measure success in school, work, and life as the level of accomplishment (A, B, C, D) divided by the hours invested. The point is to measure the efficiency of achieving a result rather than just the outcome. The extra you squeeze out of yourself past a certain point has diminishing returns, and the real cost is what you don't invest elsewhere (relationships, rest, creative thought, etc.). We all define our own denominator. Sinek said,

“I was always very stressed out with people who were my peers, who are making bigger deals, they’re making more money, their social media following is bigger than mine. I was always intimidated by it. And I beat myself up. I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, I don’t have the work ethic they have.

And that’s when it occurred to me, hold on, that their A is over 50, and I’m a B plus over three. I’m very happy with my B plus in the world.”

🤸 of blends work and play to get plork!: Plork, coined by artist Corita Kent, is a more joyful, resourceful way to actually get things done. Adding play to work can be as simple as giving your meetings unusual names or color-coding your spreadsheets.

Is this my new life motto? ⤵

🎁 A few of my go-to working mom gift recommendations, all things I have and love or have gleefully gifted:

• BaubleBar custom birthstone ring (just got this, with my birthstone, my husband’s, and my two sons’)

• Slip silk eye mask (I have one at home and in my carry-on suitcase for work travel)

• French enameled locket (so sweet with a family photo tucked inside)

• Puffy initial necklace (I love wearing jewelry featuring my kids’ initials especially when I’m on the road for work)

• Bath & shower oil pebbles (my friend Amanda Goetz takes a “commute bath” at the end of each WFH day to transition from work to family time)

• Ember mug (for constant caffeination; I drink about 4X the amount of coffee since before having kids, whoops)

• Cuyana leather backpack (I feel like a pigtailed 10-year-old when I wear a backpack but this one has now traveled the world with me for work and I highly recommend)

Rooting for you this week,

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?

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