This post is a follow-up to How To Find People.

Waking up your network only when you’re out of a job is all the proof you need that you’re transactional with people.

Most advice about finding work is advice about visibility: portfolio refresh, case studies language, and methodical outreach. It works occasionally, because what you’re broadcasting is general utility. If a client happens to have an open need the morning your email lands, you’re in luck. If not, you go back to hoping to be in the right place at the right time.

Timing only matters when the signal is generic. I’m available, and I do good work is useful only to someone already looking. A specific signal–this is how I think–doesn’t have to arrive during an open need, because it isn’t answering a need. It’s producing interest. And interest has its own energy.

Good work doesn’t come from talking about how you do what everyone else does.

You Are Your Own First Client

Being able to tend to and nurture the ways you think outlives any transactional engagement. If you are not curious about yourself, no one else would. Every work you get is downstream from that.

What you’re maintaining is a generative mindspace: a place of thinking that is in conversation with the world but protected from it. Somewhere you can articulate your intuition, the same intuition already driving all of your decisions, whether or not you’ve given it language.

Publish Opinions, Not Evidence

Most people publish proof of professionalism as a way to convince others of their utility. The alternative is to demonstrate bright, energized, independent thinking, and enroll people in it.

That shift matters more than it sounds. Convincing is what you do inside a transactional system, where you view yourself and others around you as products. Enrolling is what happens in a mutual worldview, where you are a living practice someone wants to be near. That means that you will have people in your orbit who can follow along when you move from graphic design to system thinking and computational linguistics.

Follow Value, Not Money

Pursue signals of value, and don’t confuse them with signals of money. Value is perceived and subjective; it exists in someone’s head. Money is a lagging, lossy readout of it, always arriving after value and never asking for innovation. Money keeps coming until it stops. It is up for the thoughtful person to sense what is coming and integrate it into their economic activity.

Keep a Consistent Routine

Be steady, rigorous, consistent, slightly dull. A practice needs a steady hand and the ability to negotiate with externalities. The ability to calibrate how expansive you can be at any given moment, based on life commitments, is the core of a long-term, living and growing practice that can nurture work-life balance and lead to doing good work with good people for good money.

The failure mode is neurotic effort: a spasm of visibility that stops the instant you get booked. Four months vanish into the project, it ends, and you resurface at zero.

That’s the cycle of forgetting yourself, and it repeats because the effort was never a practice. It was an emergency response, and emergencies end. A practice has no emergency mode.

Small actions compound, and they create ripples much further out than you can see.

You are a system that generates and broadcasts. Work is an output of that system, not an input to it. So the thing to maintain is the generative state itself.

A project doesn’t expand your possibilities. It connects to the optionality you already created. Good work comes from movement and energy.

Suggested to-dos

1. Make something meaningful nobody asked for

2. Publish an opinion, without convincing.

3. Keep a list of small actions.

4. When you’re done, begin again.

This post is a follow-up to:

The Enlightenment gave us light as an external thing. Reason was a lamp held up to a world laid out before us, a mechanism to be observed, decoded, and steered. The knower stood apart from the known. Kant’s motto for the whole age was Sapere aude, dare to know, and his definition of Enlightenment was “the …

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​Every job consists of tasks. No matter how much we would like to avoid it, habits form over time, and those habits can be structured and eventually automated.

​Taylor’s scientific management (1911) invited systematic, standardized thinking to all aspects of work, essentially making…

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Most outreach advice focuses on finding companies: make a list of targets, research them, pitch them. It rarely works because companies don’t hire you; people do. And people don’t respond to pitches; they respond to signals. If your outreach isn’t producing anything, the problem usually isn’t volume. It’s that you’re broadcasting what you think the mark…

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The systems we care about- organizations, markets, cultures, the people in the room you’re sitting in- were not designed. They emerge, becoming and responding to the openness of the world they’re connected to.

Emergence is the opposite of design, but it is not a problem to be solved; it is an opportunity to learn and sense subjectivity rather than ignore…

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An introduction limits what can happen next. A prompt expands it.

We treat introductions as neutral, even kind — a way of easing an encounter. But an introduction actually does pre-mediate. It creates furniture for conversation, an obstruction to people being themselves. Before you meet the person, you meet the description. Before you read the work, you…

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Most people treat aesthetics as a personal touch. But without literacy, aesthetics is general and never yours. Aesthetics and literacy are the same cognitive act, operating in different planes but always connected.

Literacy is not what you produce. It’s how you move through knowledge. A literate person doesn’t just decode words; they individuate me…

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It’s possible to be curious about someone’s work without being curious about them. To study the output, craft, the thing, and never reach the person who built it; how they think, their intuition, and who they are when they do what they do.

Most personal development treats people the same way. The weekend workshop, the offsite, and the annual intens…

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Movement is not something you can hand to another person. You can only transmit a motion you already carry.

We talk about leaders who “move” people, about ideas that are “moving,” about being “moved” by a piece of work — and we treat it as a metaphor. It isn’t, quite. Look at the words we reach for — emotion, motivation. Both are built around the s…

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Machines are architectures of correlation. We are architectures of care.

This is the final installment. We have spent nine weeks moving through the foundations, the three steps, and the forces that shape creative life. This week, I want to close with two things: a clear-eyed look at AI and creativity, and then the full collection of prompts developed over five years of weekly practice in circles and the Critical Business School.

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Aesthetics can’t be general, because then it would be a utility1.

Useful things are, by their nature, swappable. A hammer is a hammer for whoever picks it up. A kilowatt does the same work in any wire. A dollar is a dollar in any hand. That’s the whole point of a tool. It doesn’t care who’s holding it, and you ca…

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Week 9 of 10. Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week.

This post is for paid subscribers.

No technology makes a meaningful exchange any better than it already is.

This week covers the most ground in the book. Three chapters on communication, marketing, and the tools we think with. They belong together because they share one question: what happens to creative surplus when it meets mediation, optimization, and scale?

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Thought leadership is a media business. It runs on the economics of attention: a post, a talk, a byline, a quote in someone else’s deck. The currency is reach, the unit of exchange is the impression, and the relationship with the audience is transactional by design — you publish, they consume, the loop closes. At its best, it’s editorial work. It …

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Creative surplus isn’t something you build toward or earn through years of grinding in a job you dislike. It’s the baseline condition of being a thinking, feeling, sense-making creature. The only question is whether you’re curious enough about yourself to recognize it and articulate it into the world.

Most economic thinking about creative work star…

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Week 8 of 10. Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week

This post is for paid subscribers.

A circle is a band practice for solo artists.

In 2019, I set out to build an intentional co-creation space: a place where people could show up with their creative surplus and use it. Not a networking group or a community in the LinkedIn sense. Not a mastermind or an accountability circle, but a space where communication and discourse come before roles and transactions, where people arrive as persons rather than personas.

I called it Circles, distinctly not a community.

That space has been running continuously since 2019, through a pandemic, through the rise of remote work, through the arrival of generative AI, through the slow disillusionment with online community that has defined the last half-decade of the internet. What we learned in that time changed how I think about gathering, belonging, and creative collaboration.

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Some follow-up thoughts from the discussion at the second AI Literacy salon that took place at Index Chinatown on May 13th1.

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Integration is not monetization. It is alignment.

Integration is the third movement: folding what you have discovered and articulated back into your life and work. It is the most difficult of the three, because it asks you to change. Not just what you think, but how you show up.

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Self-leadership begins when we learn to draw a frame without drawing a picture. Every other mode of communication is, in effect, telling people what to do rather than enabling them to be themselves.

Frame and picture

All mental frames are constellations of ideas, interpretive tools that create a way to see the world. A picture is a snapshot, disembodied and transacted.

It is the picture of a living forest, rather than the forest itself.

They are both forms of communication; both can be done in earnest, but they are materially different.

When we draw the picture, we create an artifact. We hand someone a finished thing. We say: here is the answer, here is the model, here is what good looks like. It feels generous because it is concrete and transferable. It feels like leadership, because we are pointing them to a specific destination.

But when we draw the frame, we hand someone a place to stand. We say: here is the question, here is the distinction, here is what to attend to. It feels less generous because nothing is finished. We aren’t delivering a destination; we are giving them the orientation from which they can find their own.

Picture-drawing is the default form for almost everyone who is trying to help. Instructions, examples, templates, best practices, “here’s how I did it,” with real generosity. The dependence it creates is also real. The picture works while we are in the room. When we leave, the picture goes with us, and the person who receives it is left holding the memory of its value rather than the value itself.

Generative value

The test for whether a thought is a picture or a frame is simple. Does it stay once we leave the room? A generative frame is what people remember when they have already forgotten what we said. This is the reason “enabling people” and “telling people what to do” feel close but are not close at all.

Telling people what to do produces motion in the room. Enabling people produces motion after the room is empty.

Recreational and transformational value

Value can be recreational or transformational. The most obvious example is information — in a book, a talk, an email.

If a communication signal is no longer helpful when the speaker leaves the room, we can think of it as a limited experience. It is recreational. Whereas if a piece of communication opens space in our thinking, through high-context confusion1, through deconstruction, through a frame that does not immediately resolve, our intuition uses that space, that slack, to travel and integrate into our ways of being. That is transformational.

When communication is transformational, we take it for its frame rather than a picture. It leaves us with a new way of seeing the world and being ourselves. We can feel the choreography of recreational communication, like the expected rhythm of a non-fiction book or the satisfying click of a well-told story. Transformational communication has no choreography; it is embodied and travels differently for everyone in the room.

Storytelling is recreational, not transformational.

This is where storytelling reveals its limit.

Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in recreational communication. A good story is a closed picture: beginning, middle, end, all of it pre-drawn. It moves you, but it moves you across an arc the storyteller has already finished. When the story ends, you have the picture. You do not have the frame.

A story describes an experience, but not its meaning. For the meaning to land, either the storyteller has to reveal it, or the receiver has to decipher it on their own. Both seldom happen, which is why most stories end as entertainment2, no matter how serious they were meant to be.

You can love it, quote it, recommend it, even live by it for a while. But you cannot reproduce the internal change it made on your own, because the change came packaged inside someone else’s world. The frame was held by the storyteller, not given to you.

This is why storytelling, for all its beauty, is closer to entertainment than to change. It is excellent for recreational value. It is rarely sufficient for transformational value. The arc that makes a story satisfying is the same arc that prevents it from becoming yours.

Editorial, pedagogical, transformational

Three forms of communication name three stations on that gradient.

Editorial communication is answers. Facts, claims, conclusions. Its job is to convince — to move someone to agree, to buy, to act. Its value is efficiency: the shortest path from the question someone is holding to the answer we already have. The reader leaves with information, and the information is useful for as long as it remains accurate.

Pedagogical communication is questions and answers. It teaches a skill. It promises a steady future: if you adopt this method, under these conditions, this will reliably happen. Its value is expertise — “I have walked this terrain, here is the map and how to read it”. The reader leaves with a capacity, but a capacity that is still organized by my map (pre-packaged).

Transformational communication is a form of mind, questions, and answers. It does not just teach a skill; it changes the shape of the mind that holds the skill. Its value is individuated meaning. It does not enroll the reader into my way of seeing; it enrolls them into their own. The reader leaves as a self-author.

The three forms differ in how much they leave behind once the speaker is gone. Editorial leaves the answer, and only while the answer remains relevant. Pedagogy leaves the method, and the method depends on the conditions the expert observed, still holding. Transformational leaves a form of mind, which keeps producing answers and methods of its own, in conditions the original author never saw.

Editorial is the clearest and easiest to understand, and travel; it is necessary. Pedagogical is what we might call the processing layer, the university course, the HR mandated offsite: useful, and easy to mistake for the growth. Transformational is where people become and integrate their creative surplus. It creates motion and establishes practices that far outlive any minutes in a room or off-site. It shifts and grows, as ideas come and go. It is the only one that draws a frame and lets the picture become the reader’s.

This is why the frame matters more than the picture, why the nutgraf matters more than the lede, and why a story, however well-told, cannot be transformative.

Invitation

This week, I invite you to seek and cherish transformational communication. Notice which signals stop working when the sender disappears, and which ones keep producing inside you long after the conversation ends. Those second ones are the frames. Those are the ones worth keeping.

Integration is not monetization. It is the act grounded in one’s creativity.

Integration is the third movement: folding what you have discovered and articulated back into your life and work. It is the most difficult of the three, because it asks you to change. Not just what you think, but how you show up.

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CBS is opening an AI Literacy school in Brooklyn. Learn more →

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