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 meaning. They take general language and locate the specific claim inside it. They know what something is saying beneath what it appears to be saying. Literacy is the capacity to make the abstract particular, and the particular legible.

All aesthetics must be alive; when it is not, it becomes general utility. When you’re connecting to a living aesthetic, you’re individuating. You’re noticing yourself in relation to others and to value. You’re building the perceptual infrastructure to distinguish signal from convention.

An aesthetic is not a preference. It’s perpetual movement toward specificity.

Craft lives in this same space. Craft is what happens when skill becomes deliberate — when choices accumulate into something that could only have come from you. It’s not mastery in the technical sense. It’s knowing why you made this choice rather than another and being able to look for the intention inside the action. Craft is groundedness and the evidence that someone was present in the making.

This is why utility without aesthetics stays utility. You can be competent, efficient, and correct, but produce nothing that matters. Because if it doesn’t matter to you, it won’t matter to anyone else. What converts a function to meaning is the degree to which your choices are yours; not original in the novelty sense, but individuated in the perceptual sense.

When you consistently seek specificity and insist on knowing what something actually is, aesthetically, conceptually, technically, you build the capacity to communicate in the general without losing yourself in it. You get better at finding the right language for broad audiences without flattening what you’re actually saying. The specific self and the general economics cease to be in tension. They become the same project.

This is the real reason literacy is the most important skill. Not because it gets you jobs or status, though it does. Because it’s the only mechanism by which an individual connects their perception and meaning to shared language. Literacy makes the interior legible without making it generic.

Craft does the same thing in material. A crafted piece of writing, a product, or an image holds its intention in form. In its implicit and synchronous communication, you feel it without being told. The work says what you mean, as meaning emerges. Like the inseparable, continuous decision-making an artist makes as they are morphing the clay spins on a wheel.

If this resonated, I’m running an AI Literacy masterclass on meaning — how to stay specific, individuated, and present in how you work with AI. Join here.

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.

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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

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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, disembo…

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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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I recently met myself. Or something that was supposed to be me. Delphi had been trained on my content. ElevenLabs had been trained on my voice. By any reasonable technical standard, the result was impressive. The cadence was right. The vocabulary was plausible. And yet the moment I heard it, I knew something was off. Not broken. Off. The simulatio…

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Week 6 of 10 – Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week

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The act of writing and rewriting is creativity. Total clarity is production.

Articulation is the second movement: putting language on what you have discovered. If discovery is about paying attention, articulation is about giving form. It is the bridge between the internal and the external, between the intuition and the conversation, between the surplus and the world.

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In the early 2000s, researchers studying epilepsy patients identified a single neuron in one patient’s brain that fired only when she encountered Jennifer Aniston. Her photograph, her name in text, even a stylized cartoon drawing — the same cell, every time. That is how human cognition organizes meaning: symbolically.

Large language models work dif…

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AI has inverted the economic logic of the twentieth century. For a hundred years, the market rewarded conformity. Standardization. The ability to fit into systems, follow protocols, and produce consistent output that matched specifications. The person who could subordinate their particularity to organizational demands thrived.

That era is ending.

AI…

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Week 5 of 10 – Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week

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In abundance, all we have is philosophy.

Discovery is the first movement of creative surplus: paying attention to what is already present but unacknowledged. It sounds simple. It is not.

We are trained to look outward – at the market, at competitors, at trends, at data. The entire apparatus of professional life is oriented toward external signals. What does the customer want? What is the industry doing? Where is the opportunity? These are important questions. But they are not the questions that lead to creative surplus. They are the questions that lead to optimization.

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Not literally. Metaphorically. A project that's quietly over. A role you've outgrown. A relationship that's already changed but hasn't been named. A version of yourself that's still hanging around, taking up space. A belief you stopped believing months ago but haven't gotten around to burying.

Endings are everywhere. We're just avoiding meeting them. We treat them as failures instead of thresholds. We rush past them, or pretend they aren't happening, or quietly grieve them alone in the middle of a Tuesday. We almost never give them the attention they're actually asking for.

That cost is an opportunity. Unfinished endings have a way of crowding out whatever wants to come next. You can't make room for a new thing while you're still secretly hosting the old one.

That’s the premise of A Little Death, a new elective at Critical Business School, hosted by The voice notes above are from an exchange Danya and I had while building this.

Over four Thursdays in May, we'll move through pleasure, avoidance, ritual, and action. We'll tell stories. We'll make things. We'll sit with what's unfinished.

What if an ending were a climax rather than a collapse?

Why don't we prepare for the end — personally, institutionally, at all?

What's dying in or around you right now, and what might that be making room for?

Some of it will be uncomfortable. A lot of it will feel surprisingly alive. You won't be doing it alone, which turns out to matter more than you'd think.

Electives seek movement. You won't leave fixed. You'll leave a little more open — and a little more ready for whatever's been waiting on the other side of the thing you haven't let go of yet.

Four sessions. May 1, 8, 15, 22. 1 pm ET. 60 minutes. On Zoom. $200 for the whole arc.

If something in you just nodded, that's the part to listen to.

Sign up: https://luma.com/a-little-death

You can listen to Danya and Alma in conversation on episode 7 of the podcast.