🥁 The "Triple T" Framework, 20 Questions That Reveal Your Values, and a Tomorrow Box

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 11 things to top your creative sundae with this week:

🤳 A “taste test” application for Ramp’s Viral Creative Producer role: I love this fresh take on the recruitment process and wish more companies would try experiments like this. Before you can even access the application you have to score 9 or 10 on the Internet culture taste test.

🫂 A discovery that spending time with others may be a basic biological necessity, like our need for food or water: “A lonely human may be feeling the effects of wiring laid down long ago in our evolution.”

❄️ A handy framework called “The Triple T of Becoming Irreplaceable”: Talent, Taste, Trust. No one is actually irreplaceable. But these are the things that make you very hard to substitute.

🪄 A magic wand you can pay for stuff with: The whimsy! The “why not”-ness!

🖼️ A hobby board! I adore this idea from Bree Groff to create a visual display of hobbies: things to learn, things for play, and a backlog.

🗳️ A "Tomorrow Box”: I’m not a short story person but I picked up Curtis Sittenfeld’s Show Don’t Tell for a plane ride and swept through it. One of the stories, titled The Tomorrow Box, included a fabulous suggestion from a father to his daughter for when she couldn’t sleep: he imagines a shoebox with the word “Tomorrow” on top of it, and imagines writing each thing he’s worried about on a piece of paper and slipping it into the box. I love this idea for compartmentalizing stress during the work day.

❓A list of 20 questions that help reveal what you truly value: I’m a sucker for a values exercise, and this one from Around the Bonfire — Brand, marketing, creativity hits.

📦 A reminder from Jenna Park that you don’t need more stuff: On how “resist[ing] the tyranny of endless consumption” makes more room not just in your home but in your brain.

🐌 A meditation from Eric Markowitz on the radical act of slowing down: What if we deliberately slowed our work down?

👁️ A “soft eyes” exercise to see more deeply: To look with soft eyes is to look as though “from the back of your head.” You keep your focus about 10 feet in front of you, but you’re also actively aware of everything in your peripheral vision. It comes up in mindfulness, martial arts, hunting, and more.

🧠 A deep dive into how to rebuild your attention span: A rich conversation between Adam Grant and Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at UC Irvine who studies the impact of digital media on people’s lives.

Throwing confetti in your direction this week,

Allison

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