Entering our post-career era

Being a knowledge worker in 2026—a content marketer, a people manager, a senior leader, a designer, a creator, anyone who spends a bunch of their time thinking or typing or clicking or strategizing—can feel like:

All these harried feelings are due to the fact that modern work is going through major change, not just in how we get work done but also, crucially, how we think about our relationship with work. It’s one reason why we host in-person retreats at Bonfire, as a getaway for those at creative and career crossroads. It’s the reason our feeds are flooded with headlines and TikToks and Reels about portfolio careers. We wrote last week about taking a career pivot; we hosted an online event on Wednesday all about career success through a new lens (you can watch a replay here).

Careers are undergoing such an extreme makeover that it feels fair to ask: What if the concept of a career has irrevocably changed?

Might we be in the post-career movement?

What it means to be post-career

In the arts and culture, a “post-” movement signifies a meaningful reaction that comes after a dominant style has persisted for a very long time. Think: postmodernism in the art world or post-rock in the music scene. More than just arriving chronologically after their predecessors, these movements marked a decisive shift away from or a transcendence of the “rules” that came before them.

The rules of the standard career have been:

• Pick a lane and stick with it

• Build a resumé with an obvious arc (arcing up, of course)

• Climb the ladder whenever you can / at all costs

• Optimize for title, salary, scope, and status—whatever sounds good on a LinkedIn post

• Always say yes to the bigger job

• Always say yes to more work, if it will get you ahead

• Wear your ambition on your sleeve

• Spin elaborate stories for any gaps, pivots, or career detours

• Work-life balance can wait, if it must

• Fit your life around your career

What if the rules of the post career movement are:

• You can have more than one lane. Your career can be a road trip, rather than a monorail.

• Your work does not need to tell a perfectly linear story

• You can follow the energy, wherever it leads you

• You can say no to the bigger job and still be okay (oftentimes even better off!)

• You can be ambitious without wanting to climb the conventional ladder

• You can have your own definition of success

• It’s okay if other people do not agree with your definition of success

• What if gaps, pivots, and career detours are just a normal part of figuring stuff out?

• Work can be in service of your life

Post-career is a way of approaching work where your job is no longer the central definition of your identity, ambition, or life path.

Semantically, it has a nice ring to it, as if being post-career means “I am, like, so over having a career.” For some people this might come from a place of privilege or opportunity, where they are able to abandon a conventional career path because they had a big financial windfall or they have support systems in their life that allow them to work differently. But for the majority of folks, being post-career simply means they’re done thinking of careers in a way that has become unrewarding, unproductive, and unfulfilling. They are decentering their work in their lives.

A post-career decision can look any number of ways:

• Leaving your in-house job to start your own thing

• Taking a career break to invest in a creative pursuit

• Finding a new job that pays the same but the vibes are way better

• Turning down a manager role to remain as an individual contributor

• Learning an entirely new skillset outside of your regular job

• Putting more energy into your side project than you do your 9-to-5

• A total reimagining of work, e.g. have I mentioned that I used to dream of being an ice cream scooper?

The decisions are different, but the theme is that they are all post-career moves that we might not have felt as comfortable making (or talking about) a few years ago.

You might be post-career if …

Being post-career does not mean that you must have reached some sort of F.I.R.E. (Financial Independence; Retire Early) status and therefore never need to work another day in your life. It does not mean that you come from money and therefore work is optional. In fact, most people who are post-career are very likely the types of people who find themselves in full-time jobs or working for The Man or hustling for themselves. The biggest change is mindset, and the mindset of a post-career knowledge worker plays deeply into decision-making.

To see how far along the post-career spectrum you’ve come, check out these characteristics of how the post-career crew think, and see how many match the way you’re thinking about work these days.

The mindset

• You have separated your identity and self-worth from your job and employer

• You have built a boundaried work style that prioritizes your needs

• You fit work around your life, not the other way around

• You are less interested in climbing a ladder and more interested in designing a life

• You no longer assume that more responsibility, more visibility, or more money automatically equals a better option

• You trust that your skills are portable, even if your path is not perfectly linear

• You are willing to disappoint the imaginary audience—peers, parents, friends, etc.—that thought a career should look a certain way

• You can say, “This is a good opportunity, but it is not good for me.”

• New opportunities appeal to you when they are in alignment with your values

Thinking in this way provides a totally different lens to how you evaluate your next career move. When you’re inhabiting the post-career mindset, the possibilities open up: Your career becomes much more like a road trip and less like a monorail.

The moves

• For your next job, you’re looking for a place where you can work with people you enjoy, and you couldn’t care less about the job title

• You willingly leave your current job because it’s a hot mess, without having a clear next thing to go to because you’re prioritizing yourself

• You choose the role with less prestige because it gives you more energy

• You turn down a promotion because you know what it will cost you in the long run

• You take a sabbatical simply because it’s time for a sabbatical, with no pressure to turn it into renewed work momentum and thought leadership content

• You pursue fractional work, consulting, teaching, advising, freelancing, or creative projects because you want a more varied professional life

• You stop optimizing every hobby into a potential business

• You choose a smaller company because of the pace

• You choose a larger company because of the stability

• You get out of tech

• You let your résumé get a little weird

• You stop believing that every professional choice has to make sense to everyone else

Do any of these resonate?

Then you might be post-career.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with maintaining a conventional career mindset either. For a lot of folks, a conventional career got them very, very far, and it continues to do so for many people in traditional tech jobs and those still excited to climb the corporate ladder. Post-career is not here to dunk on mainstream careers. It’s not a moral high ground or more enlightened way to navigate one’s work. It’s simply ANOTHER way to think about work, a way that seems to be gaining momentum during a time when a lot of people are craving an alternative.

And if doing the alternative thing is your jam, we are here for you. (We’re here for all the traditional career strivers, too.) We’ve done a version of this for ourselves by leaving the in-house tech scene and starting our own thing. It’s not that post-career is any easier of a path, but it sure does feel a lot better if you’re needing a break from the norm.

P.S. Speaking of post-career decisions, why not join us for a 2027 retreat?

We’re hosting three in-person retreats in 2027 in the beautiful French countryside. You can pre-book your spot for just $100. The retreats are for anyone looking to spend more time with their creative pursuits: a book you’ve been wanting to write, a hobby you’ve been longing to restart, etc. No professional artistic or creative experience required!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

Wanna hang out in person?

We do in-person retreats! Our next batch of retreats is coming in 2027. You can pre-book your spot at our creative retreat today.

Wanna hang out online?

We’ve got a bunch of digital events on the calendar. We’d love to see you there.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Browse our calendar

My career is the direct beneficiary of people giving me some pretty big chances. My first dramaturgy gig, my first branding job, flipping from an agency into a tech company—none of those were roles I had prior experience in or a resume tailored to.

But all of them were things I already had the skills for. I knew I could do it; other people did not.

That’s a gap I bet a lot of people are trying to bridge right now.

The circumstances that led to those folks giving me a chance are, of course, a combination of things: luck, privilege, smarts, timing, etc. Let’s say all of those things are the equivalent of me reaching across the gap toward the people whose faith in me I needed. And I think a really important factor in them deciding to reach back is—despite how this is going to sound—the fact that I am “good at talking.”

I don’t necessarily mean that I’m good at bullshitting, though a career in VC-backed tech will also make you pretty well-versed in that. I mean I’m good at expressing myself with both accuracy and eloquence. I can tell a story. This is a skill, and it’s one I honed through a lot of repetition and encouragement as a theater kid who realized that what she liked more than being on stage was telling the people on stage what to do—and then went and got a whole-ass degree about that.

I’ve been thinking about how I did (and didn’t) bridge those gaps as I contemplate this post on career pivots and non-linear careers by Kristen Lowe—because she’s joining us for a free online event next Wednesday about identifying your success currencies! (If you want to hear more about creative folks making big career pivots, check out ‘s newsletter!)

The idea of success currencies—the various costs that you’re uniquely capable of bearing—comes into play when we’re talking about career pivots. Because pivoting, or just pursuing a non-linear career in general, requires you to pay a very specific price:

It requires you and your skills and accomplishments and experience to become temporarily illegible.

As Lowe explains:

In other words: The metrics that once proved your value are no longer the most important. The title that made people nod approvingly now gets a blank stare. The industry shorthand disappears. All your credentials, promotions, and other prestige markers that once served as evidence of your competence suddenly stop translating.

For example, your prospective new boss at, say, a non-profit organization might gloss right over your impressive demand generation stats (“+136% pipeline YoY”), but your ability to analyze a complex digital system and get the right eyeballs to click in the right places to get the right information for them is going to be critical to that non-profit’s mission.

You haven’t become less capable. Your skills are still there, and they’re still relevant. But in the pivot, you simply lose access to the language you used to explain your capability. So you have to return to your story, and make it a universal story, that anyone can understand.

And, paradoxically, the way you make a story universal is to make it personal.

I’ll explain. Or rather, I’ll let writer James Joyce explain:

“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

When you tell a “particular” story with personal intimacy and authenticity, people are able to recognize themselves in it. An Irish person telling a true story about being down on their luck and navigating Dublin is likely to be more legible to an American down on their luck navigating New York than if that same Irish person tried to write a story about being in New York.

Ya get me?

People connect with the feelings, not the context. So here’s a few ways to tap into the personal and particular if you’re telling the story of your pivot.

All of these principles point toward the same idea: people don’t buy your résumé; they buy your theory of yourself. When you’re making a pivot, the details of your previous context often matter less than what they reveal about who you are or your patterns of behavior.

1. STOP describing where and how you did the work. START describing what the work proves about you.

Most people tell career stories by leading with context:

“I was a Vice President of Client Success at Blah-di-Blah, Inc, managing a team of 20 people in a fast-growing SaaS company.”

But context is often the least transferable part of your experience when you’re making a pivot. It only matters to people who already understand and value that world.

Instead, ask: What does this experience prove about me?

For example: “I’ve repeatedly been the person whom organizations trust to build consensus among competing stakeholders and turn abstract ideas into something people can actually act on.”

The company, title, and industry—the context—are just set dressing. The pattern is the story.

​​Most advice about success focuses on what you’re good at. ​But what if the bigger question is: What costs are you uniquely willing to tolerate?

RSVP here

2. STOP listing achievements. START explaining what those achievements meant to you.

It’s totally natural that when we’re trying to prove ourselves, we recite accomplishments as if they speak for themselves: I launched [product], I managed [project], I grew revenue by [BIG%].

But alllll of that becomes much more interesting when you explain why it matters to you personally. (Or why some things didn’t matter to you!)

For example: “The thing I was proudest of wasn’t growing the business by 15%. It was discovering that I love collaborating with people across disciplines.”

People aren’t hiring your accomplishments—or rather, the right people aren’t. They’re hiring your motivations, your standards, your values, and your relationship to your work.

3. STOP arguing that you can do the job. START demonstrating the kind of person you are.

Again, totally natural in a pivot to try to prove we’re qualified enough. But if you don’t already have proof that you know how to do something, then the question for yourself becomes:

“How do I make them understand why I’m the kind of person who [insert critical function here]?”

Maybe you’re the kind of person who becomes obsessed with understanding the root cause of complex problems. Or you take enormous pride in producing excellent work or promoting a unified team. Maybe you have a particular tolerance to uncertainty! (More on that in our event!)

Basically, you’re trying to find statements and examples that highlight the qualities that explain why you’ve succeeded before and why you’ll succeed again.

Over to you…

We’d love to hear the stories of your pivots! What made a difference in navigating the change, and what did you think would, but didn’t? And if you liked this post, consider joining us at our event Wednesday with Kristen Lowe to identify your unique tolerances—another great starting point for telling a compelling story about yourself.

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

Wanna hang out in person?

We do in-person retreats! Our next one isn’t in the books yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when we have new ones to offer.

Wanna hang out online?

We’ve got a bunch of digital events on the calendar. We’d love to see you there.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

RSVP for our next event

Are these rules even real?

As part of our regularly-scheduled event programming, we host a values workshop—we just completed one last week—during which we guide people through an exercise to select a series of core values for their professional and/or personal life.

Before jumping into the exercise, we lay some groundwork, including a simple reflection on where your values come from: what’s inherited versus what’s chosen.

From our perspective, it’s totally fine for your values to come from either bucket. The notable part of this reflection is simply noticing why you might value the things you value, whether you were the one to choose them for yourself or whether another person, situation, environment, or culture modeled the value for you.

In cases where you identify a value that is inherited from a past person or place but is no longer true of who you are today (or who you want to become), then this exercise is freeing! You mean, I don’t have to value [fill-in-the-blank] just because that’s what everyone else around me valued when I was growing up? Phew!

It’s freeing, and it’s eye-opening. Whenever I do this exercise, I can’t help but take the question of inherited vs. chosen and run with it, exploring all the other areas of my life where I might be living one way and never questioning why. Why do I work the way that I work? Why do I choose the people I choose? Why do I gravitate toward certain art and media and activities instead of others? (I promise not every Bonfire event will send you for an existential ride like this one does me.)

Once I crack open that Pandora’s box of questioning, I feel a weight lift off my shoulders.

What else can I let go?

What can I get away with?

What rules are real, and what rules did I inherit without questioning?

We will sometimes ask ourselves a version of this question at Bonfire. Our version: “In what ways are we free and don’t even realize it?” We asked this at the start of the year, and it led us to rebalancing our work so that we could focus more on creative projects. Questions like these, from a place of curiosity and intention, can be useful across all sorts of different cross-sections of life: work, creativity, personal, and more.

Here are 3 primary areas where it could be fun to try asking yourself, “What can I get away with?”

1. The creative version

What can a creative project get away with?

Most people don’t make their most original creative work when they’re trying to obey invisible rules. The problem, of course, is that you may not know you’re following invisible rules because they are, well, invisible.

See if any of these rules sound familiar:

• A newsletter has to be useful.

• A personal essay has to have a point.

• A business has to look like other businesses.

• A bio has to sound professional.

• A landing page has to explain everything.

• A career has to make sense in retrospect.

Do these rules actually exist? Or have we just seen them repeated so many times that they started to feel like the only way to do things? This is where “What can I get away with?” becomes a creative reflection because it allows you to question the norms of what you otherwise might expect from a creative output. It allows you to think big and think differently from the get-go.

• Can I write the weird version?

• Can I make the simple version?

• Can I publish the thing that feels obvious to me but might be useful to someone else?

• Can I make something that is sincere without sanding all the edges off first?

• Can I choose taste over best practices?

Sometimes the work gets better not because we add more effort but because we remove the performance of legitimacy and best practices. Real creative constraints do exist, of course. Deadlines are real. Audiences are real. Clarity matters. But a lot of what blocks us is not real constraint but is inherited “rules” that put unnecessary guardrails around what will otherwise be really creative work.

The question is not, “Can I ignore all the rules?”

The question is, “Which rules are helping the work, and which ones are just making it more generic?”

2. The business version

What can a business get away with?

A lot of businesses are built by asking, “What should a real business do?” A lot of business-builders (raises hand) are tempted to think this way, too. Whether you’re striking out on your own freelance journey, starting a new business venture, or working in-house to grow a company, I wonder if some of these invisible rules have seeped their way into your thinking:

• A real business should scale.

• A real business should have a funnel.

• A real business should hire a team.

• A real business should always be growing.

• A real business should sound confident, polished, and certain.

Maybe! Or maybe those are just the default settings of a certain type of business and a certain flavor of ambition.What if instead you asked:

• Can we get away with staying small?

• Can we get away with being selective?

• Can we get away with a business model that protects our energy?

• Can we get away with doing fewer things?

• Can we get away with not pretending we want to build the same company everyone else is building?

That’s part of why I like the phrase “What can I get away with?” It has a rebellious quality, but sometimes the rebellion is very practical and intentional. Many, many business success stories have come because someone chose to build a business in a new way. Some of our Bonfire friends who’ve built their own freelance careers or boutique businesses are living super fulfilled lives doing things their way. Within a business context, “what can we get away with” may end up being not just a saving question but the basis for an entire business strategy.

3. The values version

What can a life get away with?

Some people ask “What can I get away with?” and mean: How close can I get to the line without consequences? That is not the interpretation we’re talking about here. Instead, the question is: What can I stop spending my energy on, without fear of repercussions (that don’t actually exist)?

• Can I get away with saying no faster?

• Can I get away with choosing a quieter life?

• Can I get away with disappointing people?

• Can I get away with wanting what I actually want?

• Can I get away with no longer valuing something just because I used to?

Maybe you inherited the belief that being dependable means being constantly available. Maybe you inherited the belief that success has to look impressive from the outside. Maybe you inherited the belief that rest has to be earned, or that ease is suspicious, or that changing your mind means you were wrong before. These beliefs can become so familiar that we mistake them for core values and consume them into our identity.

But values are not meant to be a museum of old obligations. They are meant to help us live more truthfully now. And in this way the question of “what can I get away with” can be translated to say “what can I release.”

Conclusion

Not everything you can get away with is worth doing. But some of what you’re carrying may not actually be required.

Let us know anything that comes to mind in the comments!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

Wanna hang out in person?

We do in-person retreats! Our next ones will be announced soon. In the meantime, you can sign up for the mailing list to stay in the know.

Wanna hang out online?

We’ve got a bunch of digital events on the calendar. We’d love to see you there.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Browse event calendar

Most of us think we know what matters to us. We say we value creativity, freedom, family, adventure, growth, contribution, authenticity—etc., etc. But, when push comes to shove, how many of the decisions we’re making (or avoiding) every day are telling a different story about what’s most important?

The problem isn’t that we’re lying to ourselves or even necessarily acting in opposition to our values. It’s more like…modern life conspires, pretty efficiently, to keep us stuck in patterns, dynamics, and straight-up needs that mean our priorities are necessarily elsewhere.

We can also, understandably, mistake our goals for values, our obligations for values, and sometimes even our anxieties for values. We may also inherit values that aren’t authentically ours, or absorb them from our social group, colleagues, or the culture at large.

We’ve found, in talking to mid-career coaching clients and in sessions at our retreats, that a sneaky cause of feeling stuck, restless, burned out, or unsure what comes next is simply: your values and your actions have drifted apart.

If that’s relatable, we have some resources! What can be helpful is to take stock of what your values actually are, whether or not you’re able to live them or if they feel aspirational, and consider ways to incorporate them or realign yourself with them.

One way to do that is to come to our free event on June 24th, all about discovering and defining your values. This is a tried-and-tested exercise we’ve used for years, and you’ll come away with a succinct list of your authentic values and personal definitions for each. It’s quite fun! (And we’ve even made it into an app for you! 🎉)

Another resource? The 20 slightly spicy, maybe-uncomfortable questions below, designed to poke you about the things you say you care about...and where your choices may not align. No need to answer all of them! But give the list a scan and notice which ones elicit a little “Oof…”

Those are usually the interesting ones. :)

20 questions that help reveal what you truly value

1. What do you keep complaining about but never change?

2. What part of your life would completely fall apart if you stopped trying so hard?

3. What do you spend money on without hesitation?

4. What do you secretly judge other people for?

5. Whose approval are you still trying to earn?

6. If someone followed you around for a month, what would they conclude you value most?

7. What do you envy that you don’t admit that you want?

8. What are you willing to disappoint people in order to protect?

9. What dream have you abandoned not because you wanted to, but because you “had” to?

10. If nobody could ever know you were doing it, what would you still choose to spend your time on?

11. What are you optimizing for that you don’t even enjoy?

12. What’s something true about you that you keep discovering over and over again?

13. What do you consistently make time for, no matter how busy you are?

14. What do you say you want, but repeatedly avoid when it gets close or feels unsatisfying once you have it?

15. What kind of pain are you most willing to tolerate?

16. What part of yourself comes alive when nobody is watching?

17. What would the people closest to you say you value more than you admit?

18. If your current life continued unchanged for the next 10 years, what would you regret most?

19. If your current life continued unchanged for the next 10 years, what would you be most proud of?

20. What is one thing you know matters deeply to you that isn’t getting enough space in your life right now?

These questions aren’t going to give you a list of your values, but the choices, tradeoffs, frustrations, envies, and how you spend your time and dedicate your attention will surface some commonalities and patterns that can point you in the right direction!

If you do want to dive deeper into this topic and define your own list of values, join us for The Hidden Rules Running Your Life: Discover and Define Your Values on June 24th!

Register here

Because when your values become clearer, decisions become easier. And sometimes the fastest way forward is understanding what really matters to you.

Over to you…

What moments in your life—either one-off or recurring—cause you to confront your values? Are there any situations in which you have to repeatedly reaffirm them?

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

Wanna hang out in person?

We do in-person retreats! Our next one isn’t in the books yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when we have new ones to offer.

Wanna hang out online?

We’ve got a bunch of digital events on the calendar. We’d love to see you there.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

On originality

Does the world really need more content?

The question seems rhetorical—of course, practically-speaking, the answer is “no,” as evidenced by the ocean of content we’re already drowning in and have been drowning in since the 2010s. AI, with its longwinded answers, is certainly not helping either. The world needs a lot of things right now, but more blogs and TikToks and Substacks are not top of the list.

Besides, hasn’t everyone already said all there is to say about [fill-in-the-blank topic]?

These two questions—one about volume and one about sameness—stop an astounding number of would-be creators in their tracks.

We talk often with folks who are interested in making something new only to be discouraged by the volume and sameness of what’s already out there. And it’s frustrating and sad because the people we talk to have so many interesting things to say!

It doesn’t need to be this way.

Most meaningful ideas are not waiting for one person to say them once. They need to be said many times, in many ways, by many people, in front of many different audiences. The goal is not always to discover untouched territory. Sometimes the goal can be to bring your taste, context, and care to territory that already exists.

There is room for your original voice, and there is power in creating what you wish existed—whether you’re doing so for public consumption or creating something only for you.

You can erase so much of the friction of starting something new by embracing a new perspective. That’s what we’ll try to do in this newsletter, give you some new ways of looking at what you previously felt as “stop” energy. Ironically, in doing so, we’ll be creating more content and plumbing a topic that others have plumbed before—including ourselves!

Let’s jump in.

The originality paradox

1 - Originality is not about being first

A lot of people avoid creating because they feel like someone else has already made the thing or said the thing or written the thing. But originality is rarely about being first. Originality comes from:

• Angle

• Voice

• Taste

• Evidence

• Examples

• Timing

• Format

• Audience

• Personal experience

So many things!

The question is not whether the topic is untouched. The question is what you want to bring to the topic.

No doubt you can think of countless examples of things that you enjoy that were not the very first of their kind. Probably even things you yourself have made in the past. A very obvious one for me is this newsletter: People have been making newsletters for a very long time, many of which are about marketing and branding and career and creativity. Nevertheless, here we are! Another newsletter, but this one is all about what WE want to bring to the topic.

2 - You’ll be in good company. Everyone steals.

Austin Kleon wrote an entire book—truly built his entire personal brand—on the idea that great artists steal. All artists steal.

And would you believe he’s not the first person to make that observation? Artists and creators have been talking about stealing inspiration for years.

— Voltaire

— T. S. Eliot

— Einstein

— the Bible

Originality is not about being first, and it’s not about being wholly new. The act of creativity is one of connecting the dots of disparate ideas, which by their very nature need to exist in order for you to create them. It’s hard (impossible?) to be a creative person without drawing from the world around you and being inspired, motivated, and encouraged by the work of others.

3 - The problem isn’t repetition; it’s shallow imitation

The problem is not that someone else has already explored your topic. This doesn’t need to stop you from doing your thing. It gets problematic, at the intersection of creativity and content glut, when creators merely repeat a topic without adding anything to it.

How do you avoid shallow imitation?

Iterative work always adds something:

• A sharper frame

• A better example

• A lived story

• A clearer explanation

• A new audience

• A more honest tone

• A more timely context

Shallow imitation, on the other hand, does the opposite. It borrows the surface of an idea without the substance underneath. It repeats the headline, the structure, the vocabulary, or the aesthetic, but it does not make the thing more useful, more specific, more generous, more true, or more alive.

Here’s one way to think about it:

Not: Has this been done before?

But: Do I need/want my version of this to exist?

That question can be much more useful because it moves you away from comparison and toward contribution. Maybe the world does not need another essay about creativity in general. But it might need your essay about a specific creative block you keep seeing in your work. Maybe the world does not need another art project, but you do — because of what you have to say, what you want to explore, or simply because you like making things and you feel joy in doing so.

4 - Create the version YOU wish existed

5 - You have what it takes!

These last two points are deeply intertwined. We have our intellectual knowing: It’s one thing to understand the true definition of originality, to not fear adding to the content pile, to believe that it’s valuable for your new creative work to exist, whether for an audience or just for you. It’s a whole ‘nother thing to then do something about it!

It’s easy to make art. It’s hard to express yourself.

Some of this comes down to confidence: Sometimes when people tell us they fear the trap of sameness, what they’re really wondering is how well they’ll be able to translate the authentic voice and POV into something IRL. I can relate. (And I have plenty of examples of times when I did not succeed in my translation.)

But if we can leave you with one word of encouragement, it’s this: You are creative! You can figure it out.

Sometimes it just takes repetition to get you closer and closer to the thing you actually want to be saying with your creative work.

Sometimes it takes permission (please feel free to use this substack as your permission slip).

But once you get creating, you’ll see that the work you come up with is unique and valuable on whatever terms you want it to be: public-facing, personal-to-you, and everything in between.

What will you make?

No need to worry about volume or sameness. With a new perspective on originality, what will you create next?

We’d love to hear what you’re up to. Drop us a note in the comments or by email anytime.

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But wait! There’s more…

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

Wanna hang out online?

We’ve got a bunch of digital events on the calendar. We’d love to see you there.

Wanna hang out in person?

We do in-person retreats! Our next one isn’t in the books yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when we have new ones to offer.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Wishing you a great week!

“No plan for your life survives first contact with reality.”

That’s a tenet of the Stanford Design Lab’s Odyssey Plan, conceived by professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I ran across it in a video, which is part of this larger series on designing your life.

The whole thing is an interesting glimpse into design thinking applied at a personal/professional level. And while it’s definitely created with college students in mind, I recommend it as food for thought! The method breaks life down into 6 common transition points, one of which they’re calling the “Odyssey Years,” which seems to be the time after college graduation.

But this Odyssey Plan can seemingly apply to any moment of transition, including what Burnett and Evans call an Encore Career: a second, later career that’s for meaning rather than money.

And if that doesn’t sound like a lot of what we’re unpacking week in and out in this newsletter, I don’t know what does!

I’m not going to go through all the different aspects of the Odyssey Plan, but there’s a key brainstorm/thought experiment at the center of it that I want to highlight as particularly valuable/insightful: the 5-Year Timelines.

The premise is simple: instead of trying to figure out the single best path forward, you design three completely different versions of your future into the next 5 years. Not three versions of the same life—“I could work for tech company X, tech company Y, or tech company Z!”—but three genuinely different lives.

When most of us think about the future, we only imagine one scenario: The life that happens if we keep doing what we’re already doing, but, like, better. With a promotion. Plus money and a partner. Add in some achievements. But that’s still the same basic trajectory. The Odyssey Plan asks you to imagine two more radically different timelines that could still be yours, even if only for the sake of pushing mental boundaries.

The Odyssey Plan calls them timelines, but you could think of them as directions or paths. I also think that if you’re just doing this as a thought experiment, you don’t even need to consider only the next five years. Could be short term, could be even longer term. Pick a time horizon that’s meaningful to you now!

Here are the three paths the Odyssey Plan entails:

Path 1: What happens if I succeed at what I’m doing right now?

This might seem obvious or simplistic, but I think it’s actually sneaky-complex. Especially when we’re full-on in the middle of our plans and goals, we can get a little myopic, losing the forest for the trees.

So this first path asks you to extrapolate your life as it is today into the future.

The set up: If you keep doing what you’re doing, what will your life look like, personally and professionally? Or if you achieve what it is you’re working towards right now, what will it look like then?

Paint a picture: Imagine where you live. Picture what you do for work and how much time you’re working. Who are you spending time with? Who are your primary relationships? How much free time do you have and what do you do with it? What responsibilities and possibilities come with succeeding at what you’re currently working toward?

Now: Staying in this same future, how do you feel on a daily basis? Is it where you want to be, what you want to do, how you want to feel, or are you going somewhere on autopilot? If your current ambitions are fully realized, what has changed and what stays the same from your life now? What problems do you have that you don’t have today?

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Path 2: What if I did something completely different?

This question sometimes feels irresponsible or irrelevant to ask. Because you’ve (perhaps) invested years into your current path, built expertise, credibility, identity, maybe even momentum.

And yet!

This is just a thought experiment, so…What if none of that existed? What would you do, realistically, if you weren’t trying to maximize the return on your previous decisions?

You’re going to repeat the questions in the first path, only you can’t keep doing what you’re currently doing. That option no longer exists. If you’re currently a social media manager, pretend like the whole idea of social media was obliterated from existence. If you’re living in City A—guess what? You can’t anymore. You must do something different. Now…what is it?

The set up: If you had to do something completely different with your life, what would it look like, personally and professionally? If you couldn’t do/have/be what you are now, what is the next most appealing option?

Paint a picture: Imagine where you live in this alternate reality. Picture what you do for work and how much time you’re working. Who are you spending time with? Who are your primary relationships? How much free time do you have and what do you do with it? What responsibilities and possibilities do you have now that you’ve done something completely different?

Now: Staying in this same upside-down future, how do you feel on a daily basis? Is it where you want to be, what you want to do, how you want to feel? Does it feel significantly more or less aligned than your current reality? If these “alternative” ambitions are fully realized, what has changed and what stays the same from your life now? What problems do you have that you don’t have today?

Path 3: What would I do if money didn’t matter and nobody was watching?

The first two questions are about your current life and near alternatives. This one is about pure desire.

On this path, you do not need money. And no one is watching you. No LinkedIn announcement. No family questions. No audience.

The idea here is that in those conditions, the answer to the quest of what you spend your time on is a set of activities that feel intrinsically meaningful to you.

The set up: All your material needs are taken care of, and everything you spend your time doing is done privately. Not exactly in secret, but free from judgement, commentary, and feedback. So what does your life look like now?

Paint a picture: Imagine where you live without the barrier of cost or input from others. Are you still working? If so, what work are you doing? Who are you spending time with? Who are your primary relationships? How much free time do you have and what do you do with it? What possibilities do you have now that you’re untethered from resources and other people’s regard?

Now: How do you feel on a daily basis? Is it where you want to be, what you want to do, how you want to feel? Does it feel significantly more or less aligned than your current reality? If you didn’t need to earn money and wouldn’t or couldn’t be observed by others, what has changed and what stays the same from your life now? What problems do you have that you don’t have today?

The power is in the comparison

In the actual Odyssey Plan exercise from Stanford, you pick your “preferred” timeline and then you blow it out into a 10-year vision and you give it a symbol and the whole nine yards. But they do encourage you to look at all three paths side by side, and I think this is where the real power of this exercise comes in.

When Path 1 and Path 3 are radically different

If your current path leads to becoming a VP, founder, partner, or executive, but your money-doesn’t-matter-and-nobody’s-watching life involves gardening, writing poetry, teaching, restoring old houses, or spending afternoons with friends, there’s a question worth asking:

How much of my current ambition is mine, and how much of it is borrowed from other people?

That doesn’t mean you should quit your job and become a shepherd. But it may mean you’ve been optimizing for status, security, or external validation while neglecting something(s) important.

When Path 1 and Path 2 are radically different…on the surface

Consider whether your differences in Path 1 and Path 2 are superficial or not.

Let’s say today’s version of your future might involve running a company, and your alternate reality version is becoming a therapist. Those feel (and are) meaningfully different paths, but I challenge you to find the similarities. In this example, maybe they both involve:

• Deep, one-on-one relationships

• Teaching/guiding

• Helping people navigate change

• Independence

• Building things from scratch

You might discover that you’re attached to a particular vehicle (build a company!) instead of the thing you actually want (build something from scratch!).

When Path 1 and Path 3 are easy to see, but you struggle to imagine Path 2 at all

This is also data! What it could mean is that you aren’t choosing your current path because you love it; you’re choosing it because it’s too difficult to imagine a realistic alternative.

A lack of options is different from a genuine preference, and this exercise helps distinguish between the two.

When Path 3 looks suspiciously simple

You might expect that if money didn’t matter, you’d be living some extravagant fantasy.

Instead, you might discover you just want things like:

• Lots of time with friends or family

• Time to read, make art, or pursue a hobby

• Being in nature

• A small community

• To only work on something that makes an impact

The gap between that simplicity and the complexity of your current life can be…revealing. And it’s not because simplicity is inherently better, but rather because it forces the question: If these are the things I say matter most, and they’re so simple, why are they receiving so little of my time now?

When you find similarities in all three paths

Commonalities between the paths tell you something important! Maybe all three involve creativity. Maybe all three involve community. Maybe all three involve autonomy. So while the specifics change, the themes don’t. That’s a major signal of what’s at the heart of your life, dreams, and desires.

I suppose for students, this Odyssey Plan exercise can help them concretely plan for a specific future. But for the rest of us, it’s just helpful to unpack the assumptions that have perhaps been secretly designing our lives!

Over to you…

Did you try this exercise? What about any of your imagined paths surprised you?

Actually enjoyable online events

Browse our full calendar

Our events are designed to bring thoughtful, ambitious people into the same room to exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, and build meaningful relationships.

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

Wanna hang out online?

We’ve got a bunch of digital events on the calendar. We’d love to see you there.

Wanna hang out in person?

We do in-person retreats! Our next one isn’t in the books yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when we have new ones to offer.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Wishing you a great week!

Rick Rubin is one of the most influential music producers of the last 40 years, having worked with everyone from Jay-Z and the Beastie Boys to Red Hot Chili Peppers and Johnny Cash. He co-founded Def Jam. He helped shape the sound of multiple genres. He has a reputation not just as a producer, but as a kind of creative philosopher. A creative philosopher with a big gnarly white beard. He literally wrote the book on creativity: The Creative Act.

So when Rick Rubin talks about creativity and influence, people listen.

And sometimes, like in this exchange from a 60 Minutes interview, the reaction is, “Huh??”

Rick Rubin: “The audience comes last.”

Anderson Cooper, confused: “How can that be?”

Rick Rubin: “The audience doesn’t know what they want. The audience only knows what has come before.”

@60minutesNo matter what artist he’s working with, Rick Rubin insists making music is a deeply emotional pursuit. “We’re trying to tap into a feeling,” Rubin said. “We’re trying to tap into something that makes you wanna lean forward and pay more attention.”

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Thank you to Anderson Cooper for asking the question we were all thinking. The audience comes last? For real?

For marketers, this is close to heresy. The audience is supposed to come first. We build personas. We interview customers. We read reviews. We analyze search behavior. We test and test and test until there’s no testing left to do.

And yet Rubin’s point is hard to dismiss because it also feels obviously true.

The audience does not always know what it wants before it exists. Case in point: the oft-attributed Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” In Rick Rubin’s experience with music, the audience could not have asked for hip-hop to cross into the mainstream in exactly the way Def Jam helped make possible. They could not have asked for Johnny Cash to become a late-career icon through covers of songs by Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden. They could not have asked for the next new thing because, by definition, the next new thing is not yet available to request.

In good times, audience-first thinking can make work clearer, more useful, and more relatable.

In bad times, audience-first thinking can also make work predictable, overfit, and dead.

Rick Rubin is right. Sometimes.

But the audience debate is quite a bit more nuanced. No, the audience should not always come last. But the audience probably should not come first in the way we tend to lionize it.

Here’s a different way to think about audience in relation to your creative work. I hope that Rick Rubin would agree!

“Audience” contains multitudes

One reason the “audience comes last” idea feels both right and wrong is that we use the word “audience” too broadly.

There are dozens of different contexts in which audience gets used as a catchall. Here are the top three contexts that I’ve most often experienced in my creative work, whether on the job or in a project:

1. The imagined audience: The voices in your head judging everything before it exists.

2. The real audience: Actual people with actual needs, fears, hopes, habits, and context.

3. The future audience: People who will only understand the work after it exists.

Most watered-down creative thinking comes from obeying the imagined audience.

Most good marketing comes from understanding the real audience.

Most great creative work is made for the future audience.

The imagined audience is usually the most dangerous. This is the audience that makes you hedge on your creative output in order to appease these imagined others. It is the invisible committee in your head saying, “People will think this is too much,” or “Someone has already said this,” or “What if this makes us look (gasp!) weird?”

A lot of bad audience thinking comes from obeying this group.

The real audience is different. The real audience is made of actual people. They have problems, preferences, objections, timelines, anxieties, and jobs to be done. In marketing, ignoring the real audience isn’t really an option if you want to be effective with your work. Good marketing comes from understanding the real audience.

Then there is the future audience. This is the audience that Rick Rubin is talking about, the audience that does not know what it wants because it has only seen what has come before. The future audience is the group that will understand the thing once someone has made it. They cannot brief you on the work, but they can recognize it when it arrives.

A lot of great creative work is made for the future audience.

So the real question is not, “Does the audience matter?”

The better question is, “Which audience are you listening to, and what power are you giving them?”

Do they want it, or does it resonate?

We often ask questions that sound audience-centered but are actually too literal.

• Would you want this?

• Would you click this?

• Would you buy this?

• Would you share this?

• Which concept do you prefer?

These questions can be useful in the right context, but they can also flatten the work. People are not always good at predicting their own future behavior. They may prefer the safest option in a test and then ignore it in real life. They may clamor for a product in an interview and then not pay for the thing when it’s available.

This is why “What do you want?” is often less useful than “What resonates?”

Resonance is different from preference. Preference is often conscious and comparative. Resonance is deeper. Something resonates when it makes a person feel seen or challenged or relieved or delighted.

A simple audience-resonance matrix

One way to make this practical is to separate two questions that often get collapsed into one.

1. Does the audience matter?

2. Does resonance matter?

Though the questions may sound similar, they contain distinct qualities and they can steer you in different directions. It’s perhaps easiest to see in the form of a matrix.

High resonance and audience both matter for …

Strategic work: campaigns, launches, positioning, sales pages, public talks. The work needs to land with specific people and move them somewhere.

Low resonance and audience both matter for …

Service work: onboarding docs, FAQs, support content, internal comms. The work needs to be clear, useful, and easy to act on.

Audience matters less, but high resonance still matters for …

Personal creative work with public potential: essays, art, category POVs, founder thinking. Make it from your own taste, then shape it so others can feel it.

Audience matters less, and low resonance matters for …

Private work: journaling, sketching, notes, experiments, practice. No need to optimize for anyone yet.

Each of these quadrants you may find relevant at different points in time in your creative work or your work-work.

The Rick Rubin quadrant, the one he’s referring to when he says the audience comes last, is the bottom left: audience matters less, resonance matters more. That is where a lot of creative work lives.

Audience should matter more when the work is asking something of people.

If you want someone to buy, sign up, donate, attend, reply, trust you, change behavior, or make a decision, you owe them consideration. The audience is not an inconvenience to your expression. They are the people the work is trying to reach.

Audience should also matter more when the stakes are high or the work is functional. Healthcare, finance, legal, safety, security, onboarding, documentation, pricing, product UX: these are not the places to be coy. If someone has low context, the job is to build the bridge.

But audience should matter less when the idea is still forming.

Audience should matter less when you are building taste, developing a point of view, or trying to say something true. The audience can help you find friction, but it cannot always give you vision.

Conclusion: 4 questions to ask yourself

When you’re evaluating audience’s role in your next creative project or your day-to-day work, here’s a short list of four questions that should help you decide where to start:

1. Who is this for? Not “what do they want?” But rather: who needs to be able to receive this?

2. What do they already believe? This tells you where the work begins.

3. What do you believe that they may not believe yet? This is the point of view for your work.

4. What must be preserved, even if it costs you some approval? This is the soul of the work.

Hopefully these questions can get you on track for how to get started with your project and how to make sense of the Rick Rubin voices in your head.

Wishing you a great week!

I recently came across this TikTok by , which led me to this post on her Substack. And I just had to talk about it!

(Note: You can now come to our free event about this topic with Kristen!)

Lowe outlines a paradigm-shifting way to think about the cost of success—success meaning achieving a stated goal at a high level, not just making a lot of money or sitting at the top of the career ladder. Generally speaking, we believe that success “costs” time and effort, right? We understand that it could also cost money, like an upfront or continued investment in a business or in education (which is also time and effort!).

We get mad when we see people succeeding without spending these obvious “currencies,” because that means they (supposedly) didn’t earn or deserve them. Lowe highlights influencers as an obvious example of this: They’re getting lucrative brand sponsorships and podcasts and book deals, walking red carpets…and for what? Sitting in their rooms, posting on social media?

But as Lowe beautifully states:

Every dream costs some combination of currencies, but only some of them are time and effort and cold hard cash. That combination differs from dream to dream. If you are only willing to shell out the traditional currencies but aren’t willing to pay the necessary, say, physical risk, public exposure, rejection, criticism, instability, etc. that your goal truly costs, then you will just fundamentally never have enough “money” to “buy” the success. Or you’ll buy it, but the sacrifices will bankrupt you!

Quite simply, you have an exchange rate problem.

She goes on to advise that rather than think about our careers, ambitions, and dreams only in terms of what we’re uniquely good at or love doing, we instead think about what costs we’re uniquely tolerant of paying. That’s our real competitive edge. Because in those currencies, we’re already rich.

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The real question: What’s cheap for you?

Anyway, I could not stop thinking about this. I wondered how I might go about discovering what sacrifices I, personally, am uniquely tolerant of and whether my dreams were “affordable” to me now, or if I needed to work on exchanging the currencies I have for others I need. (Or reevaluating if the costs are worth it!)

So, using Lowe’s posts as a starting point, I made a “checklist” of different currencies folks might already have in their bank accounts.

If you want to try this evaluation, you’re looking for statements that feel “cheap and easy to bear” to you—that’s how you know which currencies you’re rich in.

Still not sure? Try asking the following questions about each item:

• Do I mind paying this cost?

• Am I willing to pay this cost?

• Does sacrificing this come easier to me than to other people?

• What is energetically cheap for me, but seems expensive for others?

• What costs can I pay sustainably over time?

Success currency checklist:

Time & effort currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

• Give up my leisure time

• Give up time with my loved ones

• Restrict my ability to be spontaneous

• Follow a very strict schedule

• Put in long or grueling hours

• Deal with bureaucracy/administrative overhead

• Delay gratification for very long periods

• Rely on intrinsic motivation to get things done (rather than external accountability)

• Obsess deeply over one thing/practice dedicatedly without getting distracted

Financial & security currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

• “Grind it out” with the promise of later payoff

• Spend the money I have

• Take big financial risks

• Endure financial instability/inconsistency

• Live with a lower standard of living than those around me

• Bet on myself financially with no guarantees

• Ask for money and/or negotiate aggressively

Relational currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

• Miss important moments with loved ones

• Accept outgrowing existing relationships

• Give up or delay having a family

• Lose proximity to family/community

• Be lonely

• Be emotionally available even when exhausted

• Endure the vulnerability of being known by others

• Survive without my support system

• Network even when tired or introverted

• Navigate conflict with those I love

• Handle relational ambiguity or instability

• Have to rely on others to get something done

Reputational currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

• Accept public exposure/lack of privacy

• Be unable to fully separate my work from my identity

• Have my work/output criticized

• Be publicly attacked or scrutinized

• Be disliked or misunderstood

• Be perceived as cringe, uncool, naive, or try-hard

• Experiment publicly

• Finish/launch something instead of making it “perfect”

• Risk failure in public

• Attach my name to unfinished ideas

• Be visibly ambitious

Emotional & psychological currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

• Endure emotional discomfort

• Maintain emotional regulation in the face of strain

• Practice mental discipline

• Accept living with uncertainty

• Navigate a new/foreign situation

• Maintain conviction despite negative feedback

• Be patient with slow progress

• Tolerate a lack of structure

• Tolerate an extremely strict structure

• Wait or pause for indefinite periods

• Sit with boredom

• Stay optimistic through repeated setbacks

• Have to rely only on myself to get something done

Identity & ego currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

• Have a low status/unprestigious job

• Have a boring or unstimulating job

• Experience rejection

• Express my true point of view

• Not express my true point of view

• Not have autonomy/creative autonomy

• Be a beginner again

• Repeatedly start over

• Not be the smartest or most competent person in the room

• Follow direction even when I disagree

• Be the one ultimately responsible in high stakes situations

• Change identities repeatedly across my life

(I’m sure there are many more—this is just the list/categories I came up with in 30 minutes!)

Bonus: Now repeat the exercise, this time asking yourself all the things you believe you can’t tolerate as well as others, or can’t tolerate—period.

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Aligning goals and tolerances

Some people will gladly work 80-hour weeks, but cannot tolerate public criticism. Others will risk financial instability, but lose their ever-loving shit when they have to deal with bureaucratic processes. And you might find some people happy to toil away in obscurity forever if it means they get to have creative autonomy.

None of those people are “wrong” for their (in)tolerances. We’re all wired differently. And I think it’s less about saying what you can or can’t achieve and more about will you actually be happy, fulfilled, and able to sustain it when you get there.

The person who can’t tolerate public criticism can’t 80-hour-a-week-hustle their way to being happy about being a popular online content creator, because public criticism is inherent in the success condition. Similarly, someone who finds it unacceptable to give up their leisure time is going to find it really hard to power through the decade it’ll take to go back to medical school and become a surgeon. Not that they can’t, but will it simply be too expensive for them, the cost-benefits all out of whack?

Now, I don’t think Lowe is saying that your tolerances are your destiny. More like if you are able to be aware of them explicitly, this self-knowledge will help you make better decisions for yourself and work on the right things. (And we are all about self-knowledge for the sake of making better decisions!)

So then the question becomes: What are the things you absolutely must tolerate well in order to/once you become successful at [insert goal here]?

While some tolerances may come naturally to you, you can absolutely build tolerances over time.

For example: I’ve always been comfortable navigating new situations/environments—I think my brain is just wired to find unfamiliarity stimulating rather than intimidating. This has given me an edge in all kinds of situations, and made me more likely to succeed in them vs. someone who is made persistently uncomfortable with new things.

On the other hand, I went to a conservatory arts program, and I learned to tolerate public criticism of my creative work without making it an indictment of myself, because the environment was specifically designed to make that possible.

I’m sure you can look at your list above and roughly determine what tolerances are natural vs. learned, too.

So the real question isn’t: “What do I want, and what am I good at?” It’s more like: “What kind of pain, tradeoff, or uncertainty can I—and uniquely I—sustainably endure?”

That’s your differentiator, and, as Lowe might say, a surprising ticket to your success.

Over to you…

Forget your star sign…tell me your unique tolerances! What are you especially inured to, and what just wears you down? Are your current goals aligned with your tolerances? I wanna hear about it!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

Wanna hang out in person?

We do in-person retreats! Our next one isn’t in the books yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when we have new ones to offer.

Wanna hang out online?

We’ve got a bunch of digital events on the calendar. We’d love to see you there.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

~ Kevan & Shannon

Remedies for feeling alone on a team

Back in the day, when I was leading startup marketing teams, one of my favorite workplace surveys was the Gallup Q12 engagement survey, often referred to as the Strength of the Workplace survey. I would either run the survey as an every-six-months pulse check, or I would cherrypick questions to ask in 1:1s.

No other survey gave me the same at-a-glance insight into my team’s engagement.

Or lack thereof.

Mostly, my teams were engaged (if any former teammates are reading, feel free to agree/disagree in the comments). Nevertheless, the survey did a great job of identifying anyone who felt under-supported on the team. Honestly, if I were to have given the survey to myself back then, I probably would have been one of those who felt under-supported, too.

How would you do on the survey, today?

Here are the 12 questions:

1. Do you know what is expected of you at work?

2. Do you have the materials and equipment to do your work right?

3. At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?

4. In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?

5. Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?

6. Is there someone at work who encourages your development?

7. At work, do your opinions seem to count?

8. Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?

9. Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?

10. Do you have a best friend at work?

11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?

12. In the last year, have you had opportunities to learn and grow?

In a perfect world, you would be able to answer “yes” to as many questions as possible, ideally all 12. How many are a “yes” for you right now?

In times like these, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more “no” answers than “yes” answers. Work is hard. Jobs are tough. To be a knowledge worker in 2026 is to be a cog in a machine with no off switch. On the macro level, this Gallup survey is checking to see how resilient a workplace really is. But on the personal level, I think this survey reveals something more meaningful to us individual people on the team:

Who is looking out for me? Where can I turn for support?

If this sounds like you, keep reading for some ideas.

Alone on a team, aka what every job feels like in 2026

Work has become more distributed, more tool-mediated, more asynchronous, and more efficient-at-all-costs. People are “connected” all day, but not necessarily supported. In fact, Gallup’s latest workplace report says we’ve reached pandemic-period levels of disengagement: only 20% of the global workforce reported feeling engaged at work, the lowest rate since 2020. One in five employees experience loneliness “a lot.”

This leads, of course, to disillusionment, to “shields down” moments, and to major job fatigue. SHRM, the world’s largest HR association, found that 44% of U.S. employees feel burned out, 45% feel emotionally drained, and 51% feel used up at the end of the workday.

It’s strange to hear these stats and then to notice all the effort that workplace products and systems place on collaboration and togetherness. What’s happening is that a lot of modern work has the texture of support without the substance of it. There are Slack channels, all-hands meetings, values decks, async updates, dashboards, rituals, check-ins, etc. But they end up feeling like a mirage when what people really crave is clarity, safety, and support.

Quite literally, this is how Gallup positions its Q12 survey questions, placing them into a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs chart, assigning questions to areas of basic needs, contribution, teamwork, and growth.

Modern work has become very good at creating the appearance of togetherness. It is way less good at making people feel genuinely supported. (In fact, the not-so-secret message of the AI-optimized workplace is that modern work may not even need you, a human being, at all.)

And unsupported work is hard no matter what kind of worker you are. Whether you are ambitious and striving, tired and detached, brand new and overwhelmed, senior and supposedly self-sufficient, or somewhere in between, it is deeply difficult to do good work when you are also responsible for creating all the conditions that make good work possible.

Who is actually paying attention to whether you are clear, equipped, valued, known, challenged, protected, and growing?

The archetypes of under-support

Under-support often shows up at transition points. The work changes (hello, AI systems!), the expectations rise, the context gets thinner, and suddenly you are expected to know how to operate in a role that no one has actually helped you inhabit.

You might recognize yourself here:

• You were promoted from individual contributor to people manager, but no one taught you how to manage.

• You report to a CEO or executive who is too busy to give you real direction.

• You report to a boss who does not fully understand what you do, so you have to define, defend, and evaluate the work yourself.

• You are brand new to leadership and quietly wondering whether everyone else got a manual you missed.

• You are brand new to an industry, a market, or a company culture where everyone else seems to know the unwritten rules.

• You are senior enough that people assume you are fine, even when what you really need is context, feedback, or someone to help you think.

In each case, the problem is not that you are incapable. It is that you are being asked to perform capability without enough support around you.

You are people-managing yourself

People-managing yourself is when you have to be your own:

• manager

• coach

• career sponsor

• therapist

• strategist

• advocate

• motivator

• feedback loop

• recognition system

• boundary setter

• chief of staff

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from having to people-manage yourself. Sure, everyone needs to advocate for themselves at various points of their career, but … all the time? In all the ways? Nothankyou. This is where the exhaustion sets in. It is not just doing the work. It is creating the conditions that make the work possible, while also doing the work, while also convincing yourself that this is maturity, resilience, or leadership. (Hello, negative self-talk.)

No one gets a perfectly supportive workplace, but there is a difference between healthy self-leadership and chronic self-rescue. The answer is not to become even more self-sufficient. The answer is to notice which kind of support is missing, then look for the closest available source.

Where to find support

1. Manager support

Manager support is the most obvious form of support, and often the one that’s most clearly missing. A good manager helps create the conditions for good work. A bad manager—or an absentee manager—does the exact opposite.

If you do not have good manager support right now, start by making the invisible parts of your work visible. For instance, you can send a short weekly update with three sections: what I’m focused on, where I’m blocked, and what decisions I need. This gives your manager a low-friction way to help, but it also creates a record of your priorities, workload, and judgment.

You can also ask for support in smaller, more specific ways. Instead of “I need more feedback,” try: “Can you tell me which of these three priorities matters most this week?” or “Can you review this before Friday so I know whether I’m on the right track?” If your manager still does not engage, look for a second source of managerial support: a skip-level leader, a trusted cross-functional partner, or someone who has context on the work.

2. Peer support

If you can’t find support with your manager, then peers can help you sense-check what is happening and what to do about it. Find one or two people who can help you answer practical questions like: “Does this priority make sense?” “Am I reading this situation correctly?” “What would you do next?”

A simple way to build peer support is to create a tiny recurring ritual like a 20-minute weekly check-in with someone in a similar role. There is real power in having someone who can empathize and relate to what you’re going through—and help you out of your tough times.

3. Sponsor support

Sponsorship often starts with someone in your orbit who understands not only your strengths, but also your goals. Think of your sponsor like an advocate. A cheerleader with influence.

You can build sponsor support by identifying one or two senior people who already benefit from, depend on, or respect your work. Then give them useful context on what you’re up to and what you need. For example: “I wanted to share the outcome of this project because it connects to the goals you mentioned in the last planning meeting.” Or: “I’m interested in growing toward more strategic work this year. If you see opportunities where I could be useful, I’d love to be considered.”

4. Craft support

Here you have the more traditional external support roles like coaching and mentoring. (We provide coaching at Bonfire if you or anyone you know might be interested.) These will be the people who can help you feel more grounded and confident in your role by helping you get the necessary context you need about how the role works and how to be the best version of you in whatever environment you’re put into. Oftentimes, this form of support can either look like general mentorship or specific coaching about your craft. Either way works, and you may find that one is more valuable than the other at different points of your career.

5. Self-support

Self-support is not the same as self-rescue. Self-rescue says, “I guess I have to carry this alone.” Self-support says, “I am noticing the pattern early enough to ask for the right kind of help.”

A useful weekly check-in is: What am I carrying that should be shared? What decision am I making alone that needs input? What support have I been wishing for but not requesting clearly? Then you can turn one answer into a specific ask. Not “I need help,” but “I need 30 minutes to sort priorities,” or “I need someone to review this before it goes out,” or “I need clarity on what can drop.”

6. Community support

Community support comes from being around people who understand the broader shape of what you are experiencing, even if they are not inside your exact workplace. These might be professional communities, founder groups, leadership circles, alumni networks (school alumni or colleagues from previous jobs), creative communities, or even a few people you gather intentionally because you are all navigating similar questions.

The gift of community support is that it helps you stop over-personalizing your experience. When you are under-supported, it is easy to assume the problem is you: you are not resilient enough, not strategic enough, not clear enough, not senior enough, not good enough at managing up. You’re pretty great, actually, and it helps to have a community that can reinforce this and externalize that under-supported is more about systems than it is about you.

Getting the support you need

When you take the Gallup Q12 survey—either right now or in the future—you’ll likely end up with a mix of yes and no answers. For every “no,” ask yourself:

• Who could be helping me with this?

• Have I clearly asked for what I need?

• Is this a temporary gap, or a structural reality?

• What would change if this were supported?

• What am I currently normalizing because I’m good at surviving it?

This practice can help you gain some insight on which type of support you need, how to get it, and what work might feel like when you do.

We’ll be cheering for you on this journey! Consider us a part of your community support system, or even a coach support if you need it (feel free to reach out).

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

Wanna hang out in person?

We do in-person retreats! Our next one isn’t in the books yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when we have new ones to offer.

Wanna hang out online?

We’ve got a bunch of digital events on the calendar. We’d love to see you there.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

In one of our group sessions at our recent retreat, we ran an exercise on jealousy. But not how to eliminate it, rise above it, or be grateful instead. (That’s all fine and dandy—it just wasn’t the point.)

Instead, we did something a little more uncomfortable and a lot more fun: We leaned into it! We didn’t reject the feeling or try to pretty it up. We let it speak. And it turns out, jealousy is a good teacher—if you have a framework for hearing what it’s actually saying.

This isn’t a tacit endorsement to go full Talented Mr. Ripley on the people you envy! It’s not about becoming obsessive or unhinged. Rather, it’s about taking the signal seriously, because jealousy is meaningful.

No, it doesn’t mean you’re a petty loser. Jealousy is a signal that means you really want something—but maybe not what you think. It also means you believe, correctly or not, that that thing is out of reach for you.

The exercise we walked people through in the session breaks all of this open: what you’re really reacting to, what you actually want, and where the gap truly is (or maybe isn’t!).

Afterward, several participants told us it was one of the most unexpectedly impactful parts of the week. So we’re taking it outside the retreat!

This week, we’ll unpack a bit more what we’ve taken to calling “productive jealousy.” Plus, we’re running a free workshop later this month to explore this idea more deeply and walk you through the same exercise we led at the retreat.

Register here

The thing vs. the feeling

We’ve talked before about the distinction between wanting a thing vs. wanting the feeling that we believe comes with the thing. In that post, we were talking more about desires and goals in general, and examining whether we would still want to pursue them if we could just snap our fingers and have the feelings underneath:

A relevant thought experiment: Let’s say you feel unworthy today, and you’re given the following choice:

• Work for the next 10 years on an incredibly ambitious and risky project that will consume your free time and cause immense stress and personal struggle, but you believe at the end of it, you’ll have solved your unworthiness problem

• Take a pill that erases all feelings of unworthiness for the rest of your life

I think most of us would choose the pill, no?

When we operate from this understanding that what we’re really chasing are feelings, it opens up a whole new way to see jealousy—one that allows us to examine it without shame and to take direction from it without it consuming us.

Most of the time, when we feel envious or jealous, we focus on the object or outcome and assume that’s the thing that we want, like:

• Job title

• Income

• Lifestyle

• Material goods

• Appearance

• Relationship

• Influence

• Creative output

• Awards

• Etc.

The problem isn’t that we want those things; it’s that most of us stop the analysis there and then do one of two things:

1. We try to get the exact thing we’re jealous of, or

2. We squash down the jealousy and live in resentful envy because we have a story about how it’s not realistic to get what we want

Let’s break down the mistakes of each.

Mistake 1: Just trying to get the thing

In the first case, when we run after getting the house, the job, the raise, the girlfriend—whatever it is—we might end up tilting at windmills. (Or I guess acquiring windmills.) We risk wasting time, energy, and other resources on grabbing a brass ring that, once we get it, ends up being exactly as satisfying as holding a big-ass heavy brass ring.

The step we skip? Defining the feelings that we believe the object or situation will provide us.

For example, we might want a house, but what we really want is to feel secure. We want a promotion, but what we really want is to feel appreciated at work. More money? We probably want freedom. To get in physical shape? We want self-confidence.

Suddenly, it’s a lot easier to see how maybe the Thing = Feeling equation isn’t so simple. We all know physically attractive people who have crippling self-image issues. Or the cliché stories of those who chase fortunes and are still unhappy when they have all the money they could ever need and more.

Above, of course, a certain level of our basic needs being met and rights being honored, humans overestimate the impact of our external circumstances on our internal states. This means we don’t really understand why we don’t feel [insert desired feeling] in the first place. It’s like looking at a leaky pipe and being like “Hmm, let me go fix this with peanut butter!”

Mistake 2: Believing we can’t get the thing

In the second case, where instead of pursuing the thing, we have a story about why we simply can’t have the thing we’re jealous of, we rarely stop to ask ourselves whether or not that story is true.

Where did we develop that story? Why do we believe it? What do we believe other people either are or have that allows them to get the thing we want? What do we believe other people can do that we can’t? Sometimes just asking that question will shake loose a big ol‘ limiting belief you didn’t know you had!

And again, if we drill down into the feeling that undergirds the thing we want, we might realize we have waaay more expansive and permissive stories about how to get those feelings!

I can only imagine a few ways to get a car; I can imagine many ways to feel like I have more agency. I might be limited in my ability to have time only to myself, but I can imagine many ways to practice self-care. You get the idea.

Sometimes, you really can’t get the thing; limitations, constraints, obligations, and restrictions are real! But other times, the story really just is that—a story. If we get stuck in the story, we get stuck on the lack, envy, and resentment that comes from ignoring what we really want.

How to listen to your jealousy instead

Well, first thing is you can come to our free event! We’ll be leading folks through a framework for unpacking all of the above.

Barring that, we’ll give you a couple key questions to ponder the next time you feel a pang of jealousy before you go about racing to obtain it:

1. What feeling(s) do you believe you would have if you got the thing you were jealous of?

2. If you could have the thing, but not the feeling, would you still want the thing?

And just remember: There are no “bad” emotions! Even when they’re uncomfortable and unpleasant, they’ve giving us valuable direction.

Over to you…

Was it easy to answer the two questions above? Let us know if your answers surprise you!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

We do in-person retreats! Our next one isn’t in the books yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when we have new ones to offer.

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Wishing you a great week!

Yes, Bonfire is a brand and marketing agency for startups. (And we’d love to work with you!)

But if you’ve been reading and following our story, you also know that agency work is one of many things we want to be doing. The beauty of running your own business is that you can turn the business into anything you want it to be. And we’re really excited about what Bonfire will become.

One of our dreams involves retreats.

We just completed our second in-person retreat, an incredible experience with 10 incredible people at a beautiful chateau in the French countryside. We plan on doing more—and we’d love to have you at the next one (you can join the interest list here).

We are also, as you can imagine, learning tons as we go. We are career creatives and marketers and writers and managers; we are not hospitality experts or retreat savants. We have a lot to learn. And we want to do so in public, with you, so you can see how we’re bringing together a new part of our business dream and trying to wrap our heads around what this could look like moving forward.

So here are a few of our reflections after Retreat #2 about what we’ve learned, what’s working, and what we hope to do next.

First off, what exactly is a Bonfire retreat?

We got asked this question a lot when we were promoting the retreat. (Another very popular question: “Do I have to pay for it?” Um…yes? Please?)

Simply put: A Bonfire retreat is a place to reconnect with yourself, connect with others, and think deeply about how to further align with your values: at work, in life, and everything in between.

Practically speaking, we host people at a chateau in France for six days. We have a couple hours of programming each day, where we lead people through values and visioning exercises or do creative activities together. Afternoons and evenings are very laid back, hanging out by the pool, biking into town, and enjoying amazing meals cooked by our on-site chef. There’s lots of time to rest, relax, connect with like-minded people, and (re)connect with yourself.

It’s not exactly a creative retreat. (Though we use that phrase sometimes.)

It’s not exactly professional development either. (This has made it difficult to pin down.)

We see it as a mini sabbatical for people at a career crossroads, looking to find more meaning and purpose in their work-life and more connection with their values and their authentic desires. This second retreat in particular proved to be a great followup test to see if the magic from our first retreat carried through and that the impact on attendees was just as powerful. Turns out: yes! It was!

4 takeaways from Bonfire Retreat #2

1 - Transformation isn’t demographic-dependent.

Our attendee group was even more varied than the group at our first retreat: different careers, different stages of life, different geographies and experiences. Nevertheless, we were so pleased to see people connect, again and again, over similar feelings or shared values:

• How do I make the most of the next season of my work/life?

• How do I reconnect with the things that really light me up?

• How do I show myself that new things are possible for me?

It was just more confirmation that you don’t have to be a senior marketing manager to get real value from this retreat.

When we took stock of the participants who had signed up, it was a question mark of how well the content would land with such a diverse group. Turns out, the people who self-select into Bonfire retreats have a certain interest in common already, even if their backgrounds aren’t the same.

By the end of the six days, people were truly rested and restored…and not wanting to go home! We wish we could have let everyone stay there forever.

2 - Everybody needs somebody.

This retreat felt timely for a lot of reasons: the career hamster wheel has never spun faster, the world’s dumpster fire has never burned brighter. And people are really craving in-person experiences around people (community) they enjoy and respect.

This desire for community came through loud and clear in this retreat, and it took many forms.

For some, it just felt nice to have someone listen to their career fears.

Or to have a stand-in “people manager” or “colleague” to bounce around ideas with.

Or to have a group where you could be yourself.

Or to have a group where you didn’t have to be only one particular version of yourself for a change.

It seemed like each attendee had a different degree of relief at finding a space and a community where they could access part of themselves that they might not get to access as often back in the real world. Of course, we know that retreat week is fleeting; but at least for our six days together, there was space for people to fill a gap they can’t always fill back in the day-to-day, and encouragement and ideas for how to do some gap-filling when they’re home.

3 - Nature was the real MVP.

We could not have imagined nicer weather in a more beautiful part of the country. (The view from the chateau didn’t hurt!) Every day was like living in a Disney set design, where you wanted to pinch and push the rolling hills to make sure they weren’t cardboard cutouts.

Our first retreat also took place at a beautiful chateau in Burgundy, France, but the local area wasn’t as verdant, the buildings weren’t as elevated, and the weather wasn’t as well coordinated as Retreat #2.

And what a synergistic effect it had on the week! We would go from sessions about value orientation and crafting a vision of your future to afternoons spent strolling through fields of happy cows and lounging in the spring sunshine. It underscored how many of us don’t have regular access to nature, or at least how often we forget and let it fade into the background when we’re in the bustle of daily life. When there’s nothing else screaming for your attention, it’s easier to sit down in a field of flowers for an hour and watch the bugs.

We’ll never be able to control the weather for future retreats, but now that we know how great it feels to couple our programming with the perfect environment for rejuvenation, we may want to invest in some weather machines.

4 - Logistics get easier the more you do logistics.

There is SO MUCH to take into consideration when you are planning and hosting a retreat. Yet the jump from “goodness gracious” overwhelm at Retreat #1 to “we got this” confidence of Retreat #2 was real.

Logistics we got better with at Retreat #2:

• We knew what supplies to buy and didn’t overspend at the store (too badly).

• We hired someone to help with day-to-day setup and errands.

• We had a relatively smooth train pick up and drop off.

• We didn’t get lost driving around the French countryside this time.

As we think about scaling retreats, the logistics time and energy is a significant factor. What are we actually signing ourselves up for with multiple retreats per year? Like with anything new, the more you do the thing, the more you understand about the thing. And our “thing”—running a smooth retreat from start to finish—isn’t as onerous as we might have thought after Retreat #1. (Although it still ain’t easy. It’ll always be a little onerous!)

Wanna come to the next one?

We can’t wait to do this again! If you’re intrigued and would like to come, or you’d just like more information, you can join our interest list here and be the first to receive emails on our next retreat dates and other ways to stay connected.

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

We do in-person retreats! Our next one isn’t in the books yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when we have new ones to offer.

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Wishing you a great week!

“We’re a data-driven company.”

“I use just the facts to make decisions.”

“It’s important to compartmentalize your feelings and think rationally about problems.”

Somewhere along the way, statements like these became the ultimate signal of seriousness, intelligence, and strategic rigor. They suggest something comforting: that if we just have enough data, the “right” answer will reveal itself, and we’ll have escaped the confusing cloud of pesky emotions pulling us this way and that.

Yeah. It doesn’t work like that.

No one makes data-driven decisions—at least, not how they think they do, and not using the data they think they’re using.

And newsflash: Emotions are data.

As we already covered recently, engaging in rigorous, drawn out decision-making processes gives us better outcomes that are less satisfying, and now here I am telling you that all that logic-based hemming and hawing isn’t even the data-driven process that we think it is.

Let’s get into it.

You can’t decide without emotion

Kevan always tells our clients that most RFP and sales processes are “logical” exercises to justify the emotional decisions that buyers have already made. (Which is why a strong, emotionally resonant brand that creates customer affinity is important!)

While marketing provides a convenient, clear cut example of this phenomenon, the idea of seeking out information that backs up our inherent or unconscious preference for something is widely applicable for any decision-making process.

And we couldn’t decide without emotions even if we tried!

This sounds philosophical, but it’s neurological. Antonio Damasio (whom I just learned about from Michael Pollan’s new book on consciousness) studied patients with damage to their brains’ emotional centers. Their IQ and reasoning were intact, but they would get stuck analyzing options endlessly. They couldn’t choose. Even trivial decisions—what to eat, when to schedule something—became impossible.

Because without emotion, they lost access to an extremely critical piece of subconscious data: a prediction about how they would feel given one choice or another.

When you think about it like that, it makes sense, doesn’t it? To build off the example that Damasio gives in the video linked above, a patient asked to decide where to eat might weigh a less popular and therefore calmer restaurant over a new, popular, but likely crowded alternative. Without the brain’s ability to take into account information like “I’ll feel left out if I skip the new hotspot” or “I feel overwhelmed in crowded/unfamiliar areas,” the brain stops short of being able to actually pull the trigger.

Without emotions, it’s harder to say one choice is better or more important than another. How can we really act in our own interest if we’re ignoring the possibility of being miserable with the most data-backed choice?

Emotions aren’t a “bug” in the decision-making process; they’re kind of the final, tie-breaking vote!

Data doesn’t decide. People do.

If decisions were truly data-driven, the same dataset would produce the same conclusion across people, businesses, governments—you name it.

It obviously doesn’t.

Data requires interpretation, and interpretation is human. Someone’s lived experiences, biases, beliefs, and emotions are filtering:

• Which metrics even matter here?

• What timeframe or other constraint is relevant?

• What’s the definition of a successful outcome?

• Which troublesome anomalies or outliers are “noise” and which are assumption-breaking?

^^^ These layers are never neutral!

And we’re not even talking about human fallibility yet: Even when data is clear, we routinely misinterpret probabilities and risk. In other words, we make mistakes or just do a bad job! So while data might feel objective, the way we use it in practice almost never is.

Data-driven decisions vs. motivated reasoning

One of the main ways we “corrupt” the purity of our data-driven decisions is by engaging in something called motivated reasoning.

According to researcher Ziva Kunda:

“…motivation may affect reasoning through reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes—that is, strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs. The motivation to be accurate enhances use of those beliefs and strategies that are considered most appropriate, whereas the motivation to arrive at particular conclusions enhances use of those that are considered most likely to yield the desired conclusion.”

In other words, our process looks like this:

1. We have a preference for a certain decision or outcome, maybe even unconsciously.

2. We go about looking for data to help us make that decision.

3. We find some data that supports our already desired decision/outcome. We like that!

4. We preferentially believe or prioritize that data while dismissing or delegitimizing conflicting data.

5. We call our decision-making process “data-driven” and feel very smart.

It’s not that there’s no data there, but maybe it’s more like…data-backed or data-informed than truly data-driven. It’s maybe not even the worst approach, depending on how trustworthy your sources are! After all, there is rarely a “right” answer, rarely a “best” way to do something, so as long as our sources aren’t exclusively TikTok charlatans and companies trying to sell us the solution to the problem we have, we’re probably learning something valuable.

Real decisions are imperfect. Bummer.

There’s a fantasy version of decision-making where all variables are known (and can be discovered by us), outcomes are predictable rather than dependent on a million contingencies, and tradeoffs are quantifiable. In that world, I guess data could make decisions.

But this is the real world. Context and circumstances and markets move. People behave irrationally. Tradeoffs or opportunity costs are invisible until we have to pay them. And urgency limits how long we can spend in the pondering soup before taking action.

This is where our emotions step in, and I would say they’re stepping in by design to end the torture of uncertainty. Listening to our emotions gives us judgement, conviction, and taste. Relying on our intuition and gut is the internalized result of accumulated experience and expertise.

Data can surface patterns we’d miss, challenge assumptions, reduce uncertainty, and highlight previously unknown risks. But only we can decide what matters, how much risk we can or can’t tolerate, and make peace (or not) with competing priorities.

The real skill isn’t eliminating emotion from decision-making; it’s noticing it and then asking ourselves:

• What do I want to be true?

• What am I afraid of?

• Which metrics am I privileging—and why?

• What story am I trying to justify?

Data is just one input among many, and it can never actually “drive.” Only we can do that.

Over to you…

What’s your relationship to your emotions when weighing options? Do you listen to your gut, try to be “objective,” or end up conflicted? We’d love to hear about your experiences!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

We do in-person retreats! Our next one isn’t in the books yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when we have new ones to offer.

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Wishing you a great week!

AI’s impact on the way we create

When I sat down to write this newsletter, my thoughts fell onto a somewhat new and dangerous track:

• Ooh, I have a newsletter idea!

• Hmm, the idea is only a headline.

• Ah, I think this is where I want to take it.

• Writing is hard.

• What if I had ChatGPT do it?

Rest assured, I did not capitulate.

I wrote the whole thing myself, as I do every time.

But the temptation was there.

This was not always my approach to writing, wanting someone else to do it for me. Though writing may be hard, writing is also really fun. It is one of my favorite things! When I was working in-house as a content marketer, I used to write four 1,500-word blog posts per week about how to build your business’s social media strategy for Facebook Pages, Twitter, and Google Plus (imagine telling my grandkids that!), and I could not have imagined a more luxurious role. The job was dreamy.

Of course, that job is a relic now. No human person is writing four 1,500-word blog posts per week, from scratch, all by themselves. Many people are not even writing their own emails anymore.

Today, writing is a joint exercise between the AIs and us.

Are we, as writers, better off because of it?

Are you, as readers, destined to consume slop?

How has it changed our habits as writers and readers and creators?

The topic has been on my mind lately as I’ve noticed my own media habits evolving quickly, my tastes getting more refined, and my workday habits—writing and reading included—teetering on the edge of AI transformation.

Where do you draw the line with AI’s involvement in content? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Here are some of mine.

We are savvier readers because of AI

Marketing has a long history of people developing an aversion to marketing. Consumers developed “banner blindness” by no longer noticing or clicking on digital ad banners. Communities can sniff out an insincere promotional message in seconds.

We’ve reached the same high alert to AI nonsense.

There’s even a term for it: ai;dr, which stands for AI-written, so I didn’t read it, a version of the popular tl;dr abbreviation that stands for too long, didn’t read.

Someone shares a quote with you that’s riddled with em-dashes?

That’s ai;dr.

Some email or blog post goes viral with the weirdest, most unnatural sentence style imaginable?

Instant ai;dr.

The origins of ai;dr come from social media, where an AI safety researcher’s resignation letter went viral on Threads for being suspiciously cringe, as if written by a bot and not the researcher. Here’s what Carmen Vicente at Scroll Sick found:

In the comments a developer named David Minnigerode replied, “Sorry, that is definitely tl;dr. But also kinda ai;dr. Some of those sentences…yeesh.” In layman’s terms, this is AI slop and I don’t wanna read it.

Scroll Sick

#2: Unexpected Tears, and The Good Kind of Quitting

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4 months ago · 29 likes · 6 comments · Carmen

Carmen goes on to say:

I’d rather read a poorly written, poorly structured essay from a real person, than polished genAI.

What’s implied here is that much of AI-created content is noticeably bland—the same tropes and devices used over and over again, like em-dashes and imperative sentences—or distractingly bizarre—off-topic asides or prompts taken to an extreme. Of course, some AI content creators are really great at building effective prompts and GPTs of their own, but the majority of people aren’t operating as sophisticatedly and it shows in the large volume of inauthentic content, particularly published in the business world either by brands or by influencers.

I’ve noticed this for myself when I’m reading longer-form work like:

• Blog posts

• LinkedIn content

• Newsletters

• Strategic docs and memos

• Emails

It more easily escapes my notice on short-form content like:

• Lists

• Headlines

• Subject lines

As AI has proliferated, our AI radar has improved where we’re able to sense when something feels “off” with content. How long will this last before the AI improves or the prompting gets better? Hard to say. What does this mean for content creators? There’s a big chance to stand out by being you … and sounding like you.

We need to be savvier writers, working with AI

AI is very good at certain layers of writing:

• Structuring

• Summarizing

• Pattern-matching

• Filling in gaps

• Generating options

But those were never the hard parts.

The hard parts are:

• Having a point of view

• Noticing something others haven’t articulated yet

• Deciding what matters

• Choosing what not to say

Of course, the hard parts are the exact parts people are most tempted to outsource, which leads to a weird inversion: We keep the easy work (editing, polishing, tweaking tone), and hand off the hard work (thinking).

This is why we end up with bland, bizarre, and unoriginal AI content that human readers can smell a mile away.

AI should be helping us be more productive (in theory), so the question for writers and creators and content marketers becomes how and where to integrate AI into the writing process.

To reflect back on my days of writing four 1,500-word blog posts per week, my non-AI process was a three-day, staggered workflow where in a single day I’d write a first draft of a new story, do a final edit of a draft written the day before, and publish the draft from two days before. Then the following day, I’d move everything up one stage: write a new draft, edit a second one, and publish and promote a third one.

If I had the luxury of generative AI back then, I could have applied it to the easier work of

• Revising my outline for structure

• Summarizing my research

• Pattern-matching with other ideas I’d explored before

• Filling in gaps in my reasoning

• Generating options for headlines and keywords

Rather than prompting AI with:

I need 25 ideas for blog posts about Facebook marketing. Come up with this list, and write me a first draft of the best idea.

I could have used:

Read the following draft and identify any gaps in reasoning or opportunities to support my arguments with more research

We’re still finding our ideal AI workflow at Bonfire. (Any tips you all have would be much appreciated!) But it’s not too far off from what I’ve described above: We are starting our work with human perspective, using AI to further refine, and then ending with a final human edit before anything goes live. It’s a human-AI-human sandwich.

We start with an idea, a direction, a concept, or a draft, conceived by us humans.

Then we hand off to AI to give us an outline, riff on more options, or propose a basic draft.

Then we human-edit the AI content so that it is accurate, authentic, and true to our original vision.

How to move forward

With the promise of AI productivity more tempting than ever, it’s no wonder that bad AI content is on the rise. More people are using AI for more things, and the quality has not caught up. And people notice the divide between AI-created and human-created content.

As a writer and creator both for pleasure and for work, I’ve felt tugged in all sorts of directions when it comes to how I use AI, how I write, and how I create. I try to use AI in a way that preserves the parts of writing stories and making content that actually feel meaningful.

Here’s my latest shortlist of rules and reminders, which I’m sure will continue to evolve:

• Use AI after the thinking is done, not before.

• AI is great at helping shape something. It is not great at deciding what the something should be.

• I ask it to give me options, poke holes, suggest structures. I won’t ask it to “write the thing.”

• For speed, not substance

• Tightening, summarizing, reformatting, repurposing: the mechanical parts of research and writing that take me longer than they should.

• Sometimes I just want to see my idea reflected back in a different way so I can react to it and agree or disagree or refine.

What rules and reminders have you put in place?

It’d be great to hear from you in the comments or replies!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

Our next retreat this month (happening right now, actually) is SOLD OUT! However, you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when the next one is happening.

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities.

Wishing you a great week!

Look, I hate LinkedIn as much as the next non-sales-pilled person, but there are some smart folks sharing interesting stuff on there, and one of them is Jay Acunzo, a public speaking coach.

This video of his was the first thing I saw today when I opened the curséd app. In it, he talks about bucking the traditional advice of trying to appeal first and foremost to his clients’ financial interests when promoting himself, rather than lead with the things he truly cares about: creativity, craft, generosity, and—as I surmised from the rest of his video—a way of working that prioritizes enjoyable and fulfilling interactions with people he actually likes working with.

To drive home his point, he paraphrases comedian Mike Paramore as saying:

“Because I’m a comedian, people think that it’s my job to make you laugh. No—my job is to find the people who think I’m funny.”

Honestly, I could have cried. That sounds like a dramatic reaction to a LinkedIn video of a guy quoting a comedian, but it just perfectly skewered something that has been really getting me down lately, which is that I know our people—Bonfire people, like you!—are out there and that there are a lot of them, but we’re hidden from them. Or they’re hidden from us.

If our job is to find our people…why is it so hard right now?

When I put it like that, I realize it sounds like I believe in a personal conspiracy against our little company, but that’s not it at all. What I mean is that the most obvious channel for discoverability in 2026—aka the internet—has become a maze of pay-to-play gates designed to maximize profit for the gatekeepers and ensure that the barrier to entry can’t be surmounted through effort, quality, or value alone. Now, you also need cold hard cash.

You don’t have enough money to pay to open the gates, or money to pay someone else to dabble in the arcane and shifting arts of razzle-dazzling the gates open? Then you forfeit the ability to find customers, community, and connection.

This wasn’t something that happened overnight, but now, it feels overt and obvious that the market is no longer optimized to connect people to each other and/or the ideas, products, or services they’re looking for. It’s optimized to extract maximum value from the attempt to connect.

surfaces great examples of this in her latest video and Substack. It’s not enough to make a good product that millions of people are excited to pay for; today’s corporate ideals dictate that you have to get people addicted to the product, or you have to suck up all your competitors to have a monopoly on the product, and then you must squeeze your customers to the painful edge of their willingness to pay in order to earn a pat on the head from your shareholders or board or VC firm to prove you’re being as sadistic as the market will tolerate. (See also: enshittification.)

A lot of people will say, “Well, that’s capitalism. That’s just good business. Are these companies supposed to provide you all these services—search, social media, hosting—for free?”

No. No one is asking for free.

But ‘good business’ isn’t creating a system so extractive and unstable that it lasts only long enough to make relatively few people very rich—or just richer—before the pressure it exerts on the folks propping it up collapses it. Or just makes the business vulnerable to the next disruptor who gets the cRaZy idea to just make a solid product that’s priced fairly. (Though good luck to them getting the word out!)

I mean, I’m 38 years old, and the internet as we know it was invented in my lifetime. Like damn, did we get here quickly!

I’m being quite general, so let’s dig in to what I mean exactly:

1. Social media: Algorithmic throttling and paid amplification

The myth of meritocracy is alive and well on social networks. It used to be true that you could just kinda be yourself (or your company’s self) and the people who needed what you did could find you—in other words, there was a mechanism called organic reach. (‘Organic’ meaning you didn’t pay for it, and ‘reach’ meaning it found the eyeballs of new and/or relevant folks.)

But organic reach is in decline across platforms. And it didn’t just decline organically! It was intentionally deprioritized as platforms matured their ad businesses.

Facebook publicly acknowledged major feed changes in 2018 to prioritize “meaningful interactions,” which reduced reach for brands and creators publishing on their platform. According to a more recent study from Hootsuite:

Back in 2012, Facebook’s average organic reach was at a healthy 16%. In 2025, it hovered between 1–2%. Instagram’s organic reach also dropped 12% from 2024 to 2025, and LinkedIn saw an even more dramatic 34% slide.

Keep in mind, that percentage isn’t calculating 1-2% of the market or your potential customers; that’s 1-2% of people who have already chosen to follow you. This is a deliberate structure change, platforms optimizing for time-on-platform (addictive mechanisms) and ad revenue (just give us money or else), not relevance or creator–audience matching. The result is that you can have the right audience and still not reach them without paying.

2. Search, SEO, and LLMO: From “effort moat” to “capital + scale moat”

SEO used to be the “earn it with effort” channel—meaning it took consistency, volume, time, and intentional creation of relevance through keyword research.

But today, competitive keywords are dominated by “high-authority domains” (think Amazon, HubSpot, etc.) and sites with massive backlink profiles, which are often built via PR budgets and more nefarious content goosing strategies which cost money money money.

Like, please 😫: ~90% of pages get zero organic traffic from Google.

And that’s before you factor in search ads occupying top-of-results real estate, Google’s own native products (maps, shopping, etc.) and their (sometimes dangerously stupid) AI Overviews, bumping organic links down the page. Plus, there’s everybody’s favorite new layer of gatekeeping: LLMO or GEO, or manipulating how you show up in AI search results like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which people are now using instead of search.

Optimizing for those LLMs means rethinking how content is structured, where you’re mentioned, and who mentions you across the web, because models preferentially surface already well-cited sources, reinforcing existing hierarchies (and inequalities).

The best answer does not win. The best-resourced content ecosystem wins.

I’m depressed to say that we offer a playbook about running LLMO optimization if you’d like to try it for yourself. Or just get in touch and we can do it for you.

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3. Marketplaces & platforms: The rent is too damn high

Sadly, it’s not just content channels. Amazon sellers increasingly rely on “sponsored listings” to rank products highly in customer search results. Etsy prioritizes paid/boosted listings, too. You’ve probably noticed the same pattern on food delivery sites, eBay, and clothing resellers like Vinted.

We’ve experienced the same thing attempting to sell our retreats on aggregator sites: not only do we have to spend a long time formatting our listings to their specific site requirements, but we also agree to give up 15-20% of the retreat fee just to be listed, and 25-30% if we’d like to be preferentially listed instead of just buried on page 18 of the search results. (This is anecdotal, but we’ve never paid the extra and we’ve never had even a single inquiry from any of these sites.)

“Open marketplaces” are actually dungeons with limited spots to rent in the castle above—and at a premium at that.

The 4 phases of The Great Gating

Like I said, this isn’t a new idea—people like Cory Doctorow and Ben Thompson have written about how platforms “decay” over time—but what feels new is how systematically every channel is becoming gated in the same shitty way.

And it seems to follow this pattern of phases:

1. Openness: Brands and creators win with creativity, effort, consistency, quality.

2. Optimization: Platforms gobble up data to figure out what “works” and in what ways user behavior is exploitable.

3. Monetization: Platforms introduce paid amplification, upgrades, and premium experiences.

4. Enclosure & Extraction: Reach is throttled, black-box algorithms dictate visibility and engagement, leaving brands and creators reactive and scrambling, pay-to-play mechanisms dominate, and platforms “enshittify” the status quo to squeeze users to pay.

If you disagree about certain platform or channels, I’d love to know which, but it feels like we’re deep in the Enclosure & Extraction phase everywhere and there isn’t a way to clamber back out. What’s the fifth phase, even? Collapse? Disruption? Revolution? Running Away to the Wilderness? (Friends, let us pray…)

🎙️ Healthy Business Paradigms of Aliveness? What a compliment to get from The Joel Bein Show, which gave our podcast interview that glowing title. You can listen to me and Shannon tell Joel all our biggest business feelings, in a conversation that definitely felt healthy and alive. Thank you, Joel!

Ok, it all sucks. Now what?

I wish I knew.

First, I think the answer to “Now what?” is individual. And the reason it’s individual is that I think it has to do with your tolerance or even excitement for ::waves hands:: all this. There are a significant number of marketers, entrepreneurs, creators, creatives, and other folks trying to hack their way through the online jungle, and who view all this as a kind of game. Or if not a game, then at least a problem to solve. And solving problems can be very satisfying and meaningful and interesting! I can absolutely see how the shifting goalposts and neverending changes keep this aspect of your job or your creative life dynamic and interesting.

If that’s you, that’s great!

That’s not me.

My honest feeling when I think about beating the algos and winning attention and going viral and breaking through the noise is:

Holy shit, I just wanna touch grass so bad.

When I think about it, I become the total burnt-out Millennial stereotype: I want a job that doesn’t involve a screen. I want to write and make art. I want to be outside. I want to grow and cook my own food and do weird little DIY projects around the house. I want to run screaming into a massively more analog life that probably can’t bear the cost of living today.

And, right or wrong, scapegoating or not, it’s easy for me to loop back around to: “If only we could find our people and our people could find us.” Which makes me realize that actually, if the internet and social media platforms really were the democratic, connective, open marketplaces they were supposedly built to be, I wouldn’t feel so compelled to run into the countryside. I’m still giving these platforms a lot of power to shape my life, online and off.

Because the tragedy isn’t that the internet is crowded, but that it’s filtered—by systems that are financially incentivized to not show you your people unless someone pays for the privilege.

I’m proud of the brand strategy work we do with Bonfire—and it’s our bread and butter. I’m scared of investing more in the work we really want to do with Bonfire, because we need more of our people in order to really do it: that’s content, community, retreats and experiences, and eventually supporting artists and creatives with free residencies once we can afford it.

It feels like pursuing my professional goals has become not about making the best, coolest, most transformational [insert offering here] for the people who want and need it, but rather about finding ways around, over, or under gates. One of the reasons I wanted to be an entrepreneur is because I believed it gave me more control over my professional life. While that’s still largely (largely!) true, it feels like that control is being eroded away a little more every day.

Over to you…

I acknowledge this feeling is pessimistic, and my view of the landscape is incomplete. If you’ve got a glass-half-full POV on all this, I really want to hear it! Reply, comment, reach out on LinkedIn. If you do, you’re probably the people I’m looking for.

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

Our next retreat in April 2026 is SOLD OUT! However, you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when the next one is happening.

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Wishing you a great week!

Healthy Business Paradigms of Aliveness? What a compliment to get from The Joel Bein Show, which gave our podcast interview that glowing title. You can listen to me and Shannon tell Joel all our biggest business feelings, in a conversation that definitely felt healthy and alive. Thank you, Joel!

The collaboration spectrum

The other day, having just completed a very pleasant exchange with one of our clients, I thought to myself, “Boy, I am a pleasure to work with!”

This thought was immediately followed by the realization that I had completely caved in to the client’s demands and did exactly what they wanted me to, with nary a second thought.

Does this make me a good collaborator or a pliable pushover?

Truth is, my identity as a “joy to work with” dates back to my in-house days as a content marketer and a startup executive. People liked working with me (any former colleagues or bosses or clients, feel free to weigh in with a comment to disprove this!). Was it because I very frequently compromised in order to maintain harmony, contributing to a pattern of me not getting what I want so that I could preserve the peace and ensure that others got what they wanted? Does my self-sacrificing and people pleasing know no bounds?

To be fair, a certain amount of compromise exists in any solid collaboration. And building harmonious teams where everyone likes working with each other is a wonderful skill, especially in notoriously unharmonious startup environments.

But these reflections nevertheless have me thinking about the hidden costs of collaboration—or should I say collaboration at the extremes. And how to be more mindful of the tradeoffs.

Good collaboration is a spectrum… with some spiky ends

Like most things in life, collaboration exists on a spectrum.

There is no single right way to collaborate, which means that “good” collaboration can look a number of different ways. The spectrum for good collaboration is wide. But as you move toward either end of the spectrum, you start to notice two pretty clear archetypes of harmful collaborators: one harshes the vibe of the room and the other treats themself rather harshly.

Bossy McBosspants is the person who collaborates on their own terms and must have everything their way.

Pliable Pushovers are those who give in all the time and never really advocate for their way of doing things, even if they have a good idea.

Good collaborators are somewhere in the middle.

Of course, these descriptions are not immutable labels on you. You are never always a good collaborator or only a pushover or McBosspants. You may sometimes be any of those three things...depending on who you’re collaborating with, where, and how.

Where it gets tricky is when you find yourself believing you are a strong collaborator but are actually operating at an unhealthy end of the spectrum.

Why we confuse good collaboration for something else

What does successful collaboration look like?

The work gets done.

The project is awesome.

The deadline gets met.

These measures are all outputs of what the group has produced, and they say nothing about how the work actually gets done. Instead, what if we turn collaboration around? Process proud, outcome agnostic, as we like to say. Because the process matters, especially when you’re grading whether a collaboration went well.

Successful collaboration can sometimes be measured by an ROI actuary, but I believe success in the realm of collaborating is far more closely tied to process, teamwork, and belonging.

If you get your new product launched on time to a lot of fanfare, but everyone on the team hates each other and never wants to do another project again, was the collaboration a success?

(Specifically for marketing teams this can be disastrous because it will have trickle-down effects on team culture that will harm future projects and long-term results.)

What good collaboration actually feels like and looks like

If you aren’t sure whether your current state of collaboration is healthy or unhealthy, take a minute to reflect on how the collaborative work feels to you and your collaborators.

Good collaboration …

Feels like

• You feel safe saying what you actually think

• Tension is present but productive, not draining

• You feel part of something shared, not territorial

• There’s momentum and forward progress

• You leave conversations with clarity, not confusion

• You feel trusted and trusting

• You feel both adaptable and grounded

Looks like

• People share opinions early and clearly

• Disagreement happens, but stays respectful

• Ideas build on each other, not compete

• Decisions get made without endless looping

• Feedback is direct and specific

• Ownership is shared, not hoarded

• People can flex without losing themselves

If you can recognize the feelings above, then you’re probably in a good spot!

On the contrary, here’s how it feels and looks to be on the extreme ends of the collaboration spectrum.

Bossy McBosspants …

Feels like

• You feel certain you’re right (or at least most right)

• You feel responsible for the outcome and want to control it

• You feel impatient when things slow down or get debated

• You feel frustrated when others don’t “see it” yet

• You feel like you’re helping by being decisive

• You feel energized by momentum and forward motion

• You feel uncomfortable relying too much on others’ input

Looks like

• You push your ideas through quickly

• You steer decisions toward your preferred direction

• You interrupt or redirect conversations to stay on track

• You offer strong opinions early and often

• You move ahead before full alignment is reached

• You default to your own judgment over group input

• You close loops quickly, sometimes before others are ready

Pliable Pushover …

Feels like

• You feel unclear about your own stance

• You second-guess yourself mid-sentence

• You feel invisible in outcomes

• Tension goes underground instead of being addressed

• Things feel slower than they should be

• You carry private frustration

• You feel drained instead of energized

• RESENTMENT for everyone and everything

Looks like

• Constant agreement, even when there are doubts

• Ideas are softened or hedged excessively

• Decisions default to others’ preferences

• Feedback is indirect or withheld

• Extra rounds of revision and rework

• Quiet course-correcting after decisions

• Harmony is preserved at all costs

How to collaborate better + what you’ll gain

There’s no perfect middle point on the spectrum, nor is the goal to land in one exact spot and stay there. It’s to move more fluidly depending on what the moment calls for.

A few practical ways to do that:

Know what you want and how important it is to you.

Being clear about your contribution and the conviction behind it can help you avoid situations where you’re failing to speak up for yourself (pushover) or being overly demanding (McBosspants). Reflecting beforehand will reveal the aspects of the collab where you can compromise more deeply and where you want to advocate more diplomatically.

Also, in the course of collaboration, you’ll find that different people will care about different things, too, and when you know where you stand and where others stand, it’ll be easier to compromise on what you and others deem less important.

Say what you think, then stay open.

Start with a clear point of view (see above). Then invite response. Stay open to whatever you hear, knowing that the beauty of collaboration is bringing in other people’s perspectives besides your own.

Name disagreement early.

If something feels off, surface it while it’s still small. Early tension is easier, cleaner, and far less costly than late-stage friction.

Decide what actually matters. Together.

This can (should) often happen at the start of the project when you outline the exact scope of the work and what success looks like. You’d be surprised just how much grief you’ll save yourself by getting on the same page early.

(Note: It’s also one of our top tips for giving useful feedback on creative work.)

Stay in the room after you speak

Good collaboration isn’t just saying your piece. It’s staying engaged as the idea evolves, even when it shifts away from your original take. Potential pushovers can stay in the room to avoid going off and resentfully doing the work of others, and McBosspants can stay in order to keep in collaboration rather than leave the work to everyone else.

Following steps like these and being more aware of when you’re sliding into the extreme ends of collaboration will be a huge boon to future collaborative projects. You lose a lot—emotionally, energetically, not to mention outcomes—when collaboration goes sideways. But when it’s working well, look at all you can gain:

• Clarity: People know where you stand. You know where you stand.

• Speed: Fewer loops, fewer rewrites, fewer “we’ll fix it later” moments.

• Trust: Not just likability, but reliability. People can count on your perspective.

• Better work, and more creative work. Your ideas actually make it into the outcome, not just into your head. And the group’s shared ideas build to a better product than it would have been alone.

• Energy: Collaboration feels generative instead of draining.

At its best, collaboration isn’t about being easy to work with; it’s about being real to work with.

Over to you

When have you experienced awesome collaboration as part of a group? When have you slid onto either end of the collaboration spectrum? We’d love to hear!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

Our next retreat in April 2026 is SOLD OUT! However, you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when the next one is happening.

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Wishing you a great week!

If you consider yourself a conscientious, Type-A person who does research and prepares before making a decision, are you ready to be slightly ←→ very bummed out?

The people who try hardest to make the best decisions are often the least happy with what they choose.

Wait, so are these people, known in decision science as “maximizers,” actually making worse decisions by trying so hard?

Oh no no no, friends. They are, in fact, making better decisions.

But they are less happy with them.

Oh.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably asking yourself why. Because that seems patently unfair, doesn’t it?

The maximizing alternative—coined by researcher and scholar Herbert A. Simon—is “satisficing”: choosing something relatively quickly that meets your basic criteria. Those folks aren’t making objectively better decisions, but something about their psychology allows them to make the decision and then move the hell on with their lives, content. (Like psychos, we agree?)

But people with strong maximizing tendencies report lower life satisfaction, less happiness, and more regret despite objectively better outcomes because they’ve explored a high number of possibilities which, effectively, haunt them and their better outcomes forever.

Exorcizing your decision ghosts

More choices = more chances that the one you chose was “wrong,” see? More choices = more tradeoffs, more explicit knowledge of the things you gave up by picking what you did. (And we’ve already covered the cognitive bias of loss aversion, wherein our brains hate perceived loss more than they appreciate actual gain.)

Even if we can see the logical fallacy there—that there may not actually be a “right” decision—we still fall victim to comparison, the famous thief of joy. Except we’re not even comparing ourselves to others; we’re comparing ourselves to other versions of ourselves that we nipped in the bud, all our unlived lives that spiral away into unknown possibilities. We’re left with the Ghost of Roads Untraveled (oddly cut from Dickens’s classic tale).

So if you’ve ever invested a lot in making a good decision and it doesn’t bring you the satisfaction you thought it would, know that it’s just the weight of all that unrealized potential following you home.

There’s a whole body of research on this “But what if…” style of rumination called counterfactual thinking. Humans are remarkably good at imagining torturing themselves with alternate versions of reality:

• What if I’d picked the other apartment?

• What if I hadn’t quit my job?

• What if I kept dating instead of settling down?

Maximizers do more of this hypothetical, decision-tree, flow-chart thinking than those with satisficing tendencies. Which kinda means the decision never really ends. Over time, this creates a strange inversion: The more effort you put into making the right choice, the harder it becomes to feel settled in it.

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How to satisfice

To be clear, the takeaway here is not to stop caring about your decisions or to lower your standards. There’s a version of this conversation that veers into complacency, carelessness, and anti-ambition, which I don’t find particularly useful. Plus, some decisions—like those with super objective, maximizable outcomes—benefit from rigor.

But we tend to think that a lot more things fall into that category than actually do.

We turn low-risk, reversible choices into miniature existential crises. We spend disproportionate energy on decisions that don’t meaningfully benefit from it. And then we lug around the psychological cost of all of them, less happy, statistically, than if we had simply made a checklist and jumped on the first thing that met it.

So rather than swinging from one extreme to the other, it can be helpful to think explicitly and in advance about which choices actually benefit from maximizing—choices with objectively optimizable outcomes—and which you’re better off satisficing.

Satisficing, in this light, is not about settling. It’s about deciding what matters before you start choosing. It’s committing to:

1. These are my criteria.

2. This is what “good enough” looks like.

3. When I find it, I’m done.

The uncomfortable part is that satisfaction, it turns out, is not a property of the option. It’s a property of the decision. Meaning: Your happiness is more dependent on how you choose than what you choose.

Happy list-making, everybody! 🫡

Over to you…

Are you a maximizer, or a satisficer? Do you have decision-making strategies that help you feel satisfied? Let us know!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

Our next retreat in April 2026 is SOLD OUT! However, you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when the next one is happening.

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Wishing you a great week!

Calling all writers! If you love to write and want to invest more in your writing, we’d love to hear from you. We’re in the early stages of planning a writing retreat 🍿🍿🍿 All the details are still TBD, so your feedback would be incredibly helpful in this short survey.

Writers Retreat Survey →

How to change your life

When I was working as the VP Marketing at Buffer, I did a handful of coaching sessions with an amazing leadership coach, Sehaam Cyrene (highly recommended, btw: both to get yourself coaching, if you want it, and to look into folks like Sehaam—or us at Bonfire).

To start off our first session, Sehaam asked me a simple question:

“What do you want to be doing?”

And I instinctually blurted out my answer, “I just want to write.”

Which I followed with: “But obviously I can’t do that.”

VPs of Marketing don’t just quit and start writing! And yet it felt very true that the thing I wanted to do (write) was different from the thing I spent 40+ hours of my week doing. I’d never really said it so plainly before, to another human being. It was a no-filter response, with zero pretense, both the thing I wanted and the rationale that I obviously couldn’t have it.

Why couldn’t I just write all day every day? Well, according to my fearful lizard brain:

• Writing doesn’t pay the bills.

• I don’t know if I’ll be successful.

• I already have a well-paying job.

• I’ve spent time and effort building a VP Marketing career.

• I don’t really know where to start with writing.

• No one else I know is doing what they love.

• I don’t want to be a starving artist.

• What will my parents think?

• What will LinkedIn think?

• Writing is something you do on the side; it’s not the main thing.

I told Sehaam this. We had one or two more coaching sessions, and then I slowly backed away, like Homer Simpson into the hedge, because she helped me discover how to be the best version of myself and I wasn’t able to be that version right then. (If you’re reading this, Sehaam, sorry for disappearing on you!)

So how do people turn the page toward the things they want and the life they crave?

How did I (eventually) find the courage to do so, the support to go for it, and the resources to feel safe?

I’ve since changed a lot of things about my situation and am much closer to spending my time the way I want to be spending it. There’s still work to do—I’m no expert on following your dreams (see above)—but, I have found a few tricks that work for me and I have picked up many tips from others who I admire.

Here are a handful of ways to change your life, little by little: ideal for anyone stuck in a job they don’t like, eager to bet on themselves, or longing for a way to live a little differently.

1 - Do one task every day that gets you closer to your dream

I don’t mean to get all James Clear on you. I’ve actually never read a James Clear book front to back, so I couldn’t say how closely my one-thing-a-day mentality lines up with his 1% better mentality. Mine involves zero math, so that’s a plus!

One of the hardest parts of making a big shift in my life was the inertia of having a job that took so much time and energy from me. By the end of a workweek, I had nothing left to give to any creative projects or new adventures. The mere thought of tackling a non-work project seemed too much.

Relief finally came when I stopped thinking about things on a monthly/yearly timeline, and I got much more micro: What one thing can I do today that will get me closer to my goal?

One day is manageable. One task is manageable. For instance, when I really wanted a new job, I made a daily rule for myself: Every day, I had to do one thing that moved me forward. Just one, big or small.

• Applying for a new job

• Taking a call with a recruiter

• Publishing something publicly

• Sending a LinkedIn message to a new contact

• Editing my social media profile

• Updating my resume

• Researching a company I admired

The key wasn’t the size of the action. The key was consistency.

1b - Do the one task first thing

Remember how I had no time or energy to think about new adventures while on the job? Well, adding even one new to-do each day was daunting at first until I decided to do the new to-do first thing in my day, before the chaos settled in.

Especially for those of you who are drowning in work, putting a dedicated amount of time for yourself on the calendar is one of the best ways you can slowly move the needle toward your new reality. My “me time” made the most sense early in my day, before the meetings and Slacks and projects overwhelmed me.

It’s not all that different from scheduling time for creativity. Schedule time for you!

2 – Showing up (consistently) is enough

Another reason people avoid the things they want is because they get discouraged or defeated when they can’t give their all to the new thing they want. We put pressure on ourselves to go all-in with new adventures and to attach success to big goals or binary outcomes.

What if success was just showing up every day?

It reminds me of Shannon’s advice about redefining creative success. Rather than an all-or-nothing mentality, it can be effective to simply return to the work and give whatever you have to give:

Rewarding myself for the act of returning became a virtuous cycle. My brain got a little dopamine hit every time I sat down to work—not only when I finished a chapter or hit another 10,000 words—which kept me coming back and back and back. And when I continuously put myself in the position of returning to the work, go figure that it was more likely that I did the work!

I tried this when I was trying to break into the startup marketing world. My goal was a job that I dreamed of, but my day-to-day reality was simply showing up consistently and giving whatever I could give. As I mentioned above, it helps to carve out time to do at least one thing a day toward your goal. It also helps to be kind to yourself and not feel like you have to give your all, all the time.

“If you have 50 percent to give, and you give 50 percent, then you gave 100 percent.”

~ Meghan Lawson

3 - You don’t have to succeed right away

And you probably won’t!

Nevertheless, the fear of delayed success is often enough to prevent us from pushing forward. Stop me if any of these sound familiar:

• If you’re starting a newsletter, it has to be brilliant from Day One.

• If you’re starting a new company, it has to immediately replace your income.

• If you’re making a career switch, it has to sound impressive on social media.

That pressure makes it easy to do nothing.

But the reality is much less glamorous. Most of the people who eventually build something meaningful or do something new or change their situation are simply the ones who kept showing up long enough and got comfortable with the imperfect: writing meh newsletters that no one reads, twiddling their thumbs while no new business comes their way, picking a work situation that’s good-for-them not good-for-LinkedIn.

And slowly, quietly, the work compounds.

We did this with Bonfire, slowly succeeding our way into something that felt viable to do full-time. We were fortunate to get some early clients that helped us build a bank balance which helped us make the jump into full-time entrepreneurship. That early traction helps a lot when you’re betting on yourself. And don’t expect everything to line up perfectly right from the start!

4 – Design your life so the right thing is easier

The biggest change I made over the past few years wasn’t some heroic leap toward my dream. It was a series of small environmental changes.

• I started showing up every day to do one thing toward my dream.

• I blocked this time on my calendar so I wouldn’t miss it.

• I followed people (newsletters, blogs, socials) I could learn from.

• I surrounded myself with people who encouraged me and/or inspired me.

Notice a similar theme to these moves? They all helped re-shape my environment.

Instead of relying on motivation, which can come and go, I tried to design conditions that made the right behavior more likely.

For you, this might look like:

• Scheduling time for the thing you care about

• Joining a community of people doing the same thing (we’d love to welcome you to our Campout community)

• Blocking distractions during your creative time

• Setting smaller, repeatable goals instead of big ones

When the environment supports the behavior, you don’t have to rely on willpower. Thank goodness, especially when willpower is at a premium these days.

You can do it

I hope you’ll find some encouragement and strategies here that can help you get a little closer to what it is you truly want. We’d love to hear what you’re chasing and to support you however we can!

What are you interested in doing for yourself?

What’s getting in the way?

Leave us a comment or reply.

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

Our next retreat in April 2026 is SOLD OUT! However, you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when the next one is happening.

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities. We’ll also feature insights from our digital community of super smart folks (which you’re welcome to join).

Wishing you a great week!

I drive Kevan up a wall sometimes frequently with how allergic I am to committing to Just Doing A Business. That doesn’t mean I’m not committed to Bonfire or to our partnership. But it does mean that I’m the obnoxious person ready and willing to burn it all down and start over (and over) until we find the configuration of commercial activities that sits at the optimal crossroads of:

What We Actually Like Doing × What Is Financially Successful × What Is Sustainable

Which basically means I treat everything like an experiment. (This also applies to my personal life, so at least I’m consistent.)

The upside of this experimental attitude is that “failure” barely exists to me. It’s just more information I can use to do better next time. I’ve also worked hard to cultivate the self-trust that I will be ok no matter what happens to me, which softens the stings of all the things that inevitably don’t work out the way I want them to. I like all that. The downside of viewing everything as an experiment is that I have a heaping helping of skepticism of the power of simply powering through a pre-set plan, which is, admittedly, sometimes what is actually called for. Oops.

Relatedly, one of my biggest professional fears is ongoing sacrifice in service of some uncertain far-future payoff—a permutation of the classic trope of working a job you hate for forty years only to drop dead the day before you retire. If you are giving up enjoyment of your Now for your Later, without a clear boundary for when that sacrifice ends, I tend to believe that you’re making a bad bet.

Kevan says his greatest professional fear is being stuck on a treadmill. And in a really important way, that means our fears are aligned: neither of us want to grind away at the soul-crushing monotony of repetitive work with no end in sight. But I’m just now realizing how much I over-indexed on understanding the “running” part of his metaphor at the expense of the other key part: The fact that when you run on a treadmill, you don’t actually go anywhere.

Kevan doesn’t love running, but he hates not moving.

Me? I hate running. And we’ll get there when we get there.

To him, being experimental can feel like starting over, or like the preamble to the real thing. Like ok, we’re experimenting to find The Thing, then we stop experimenting and go do The Thing!

But to me, experiments can feel like The Thing! They make my Now rich and full, even when they don’t “go” anywhere. We’re learning! We’re changing! We’re not making the same mistakes twice! (Mm…we’ll get back to you on that one.)

For a long time, I assumed this was just about personality or workstyle differences. But lately I’ve been wondering, if for me at least, it goes back much further than that. All the way back to childhood.

Experimentation: An origin story

Left turn: I’ve been thinking lately about my relationship to “heroes.”

Maybe things have changed since the ’80s and ’90s, but I remember there being a lot of talk about heroes when I was growing up. Not the comic-book or movie-franchise superhero kind. I mean real people, more in the sense of role models.

Having a hero or a role model seemed to be a recurring theme in kids shows. And I swear Oprah had multiple episodes about meeting your heroes, or celebrating unsung heroes, things like that. Teachers and adults were always asking who our heroes and role models were. Sometimes it was even a school assignment: draw them, research them, write about them, write letters to them. Most kids picked famous people—both contemporary and historical—but plenty chose someone in their family, especially a parent.

Even among us kids, there was a lot of conversation about athletes, actors, artists, and other public figures—scientists, activists, innovators—people who were treated as beacons of inspiration and objects of admiration. It was, and I assume still is, totally normal for kids to plaster their bedroom walls with posters of their role models, and—though it was much harder to do so in the ’90s—eagerly look up all the stats and trivia about them. (Why anyone needed to know Steve Jobs’s or Michelle Kwan’s birthday, I couldn’t tell you.)

There was just a lot of childhood real estate dedicated to this idea, right?!

And I always had this quiet feeling that something was wrong with me, because…I didn’t really have any heroes.

It’s not that there weren’t people I thought were cool, or things people created or achieved that I found admirable and important. And I certainly loved my parents and family. But nobody ever got elevated to mythic status or even role-model level in my mind, and the only poster I ever put up was a print of The Accolade by Edmund Leighton. (Interpret that as you will. 🤷‍♀️)

This not-having-a-hero-thing wasn’t some kind of conscious resistance. I truly drew a blank whenever I was asked, and still do! Part of it was probably a little-kid defense mechanism along the lines of Hmph, what’s so special about them?! But another part was just a general skepticism of the concept of someone being a hero/role model, which often seemed contingent on inhuman perfection that felt performative and fake to me—even as a kid. Like, no need to go around fawning over fellow colleagues in humanity, you know?

What I’ve realized is that when someone did something impressive or admirable, my reaction was never: I want to be like them. It was always something closer to: I want to try doing something like that. The focus wasn’t the person; it was the action.

Admiring acts > Admiring people

If you admire people, the inspiration can feel distant. Heroes and role models often seem exceptional or singular. If you admire actions, the inspiration becomes more accessible. If someone did it, then it’s a thing that can be done vs. that person did it because they are extraordinary (and I am not).

All this, I suspect, has changed how I move through the world.

Role models are models. They seem to offer a template for how a life is supposed to unfold: Follow this path, make these decisions, emulate this trajectory, and bing bang boom—success! fulfillment! greatness! But if you never really adopt a role model, you don’t inherit a template. So instead of following a set path, you experiment. (See! It all connects!)

The older I get, the more experience I have in business and especially the startup world where everybody blabs on about playbooks and case studies, the more I suspect modeling either your life or your business after your heroes comes with a major hidden pitfall: survivorship bias.

When we look at famous innovators, artists, founders, athletes, etc., we’re looking at the tiny fraction of people whose stories happened to work out. Their trajectories look coherent in retrospect, like a formula you could follow if you just made the same choices. But for every person whose path worked out, there are thousands who made the same moves and disappeared into obscurity.

Role models make life look like a script, a repeatable process that places the onus on you to follow it closely enough, disregarding the random or luck-based or flat-out-biased factors that contributed to it. And we’re encouraged to think about it this way! At least in the U.S., we lean waaay into the propaganda of meritocracy and exceptionalism. (As a successful actress once said to me: “You can’t listen to statistics—they’re about other people!”)

For me, prioritizing being experimental in my work and life is an acknowledgement that life is less like a script and more like a lab. But you can’t just do whatever the hell you want in the lab! You need to carefully select the right chemical components, you need to design the procedure thoughtfully, do your research, and, importantly, invest a lot of time and energy into testing and learning.

In my last post, I talked about increasing your luck surface, the idea that luck is an essential component to success and while you can’t control it, you can juice your chances that it finds you. While being experimental maybe opens 10 doors instead of actually walking through just 1, you’ve increased your odds of finding The Thing—whatever that is for you—behind one of them.

Over to you…

What’s your relationship like with role models and heroes? Has it changed over time? Has a role model ever steered you wrong or led you to the exact right place? Let us know!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

Our next retreat in April 2026 is SOLD OUT! However, you can sign up for the mailing list to find out when the next one is happening.

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Wishing you a great week!

The uncomfortable truth about leadership

During my days as a startup marketer, I was guilty of self-appointed omniscience at work. I thought I knew what was best. I had the privilege of working for some really wonderful CEOs who taught me so much about business and marketing and leadership, and I guess I built a rather strong filter for what I perceived as good CEO behavior and what I saw as toxic CEO behavior, the type that tanked morale and performance.

Leaving the roost of in-house work, I resolved to only ever do the good CEO behavior.

And I have failed, more times than I would have liked and in more ways than I could have imagined.

Turns out, leadership is hard! Co-running a business ain’t easy. And while I would have hoped to avoid any of my toxic traits bubbling to the surface—especially the traits that are reminiscent of the exact ones I sought to leave behind in Startup World—here they are. Back again.

• I have secret plans and agendas known only to me, and I hope that others are able to figure them out.

• I fail to give clear feedback when necessary and instead just re-do things myself.

• I do not let others help me, which erodes trust and togetherness.

But lately I’ve been trying to take these “misses” of mine and reframe them into something positive. And I’d love to share with you some of the tools I’m using to think differently about the habits and behaviors I’m noticing.

In our Campout community, we began the year with events and programming about values, which included sessions on the light and shadow of the traits we are drawn towards. For example, if I value autonomy, I may excel at independence (light) and also push people away to preserve my autonomy (shadow).

And so I wondered: Might these toxic leadership traits work the same way? If the toxic traits are the shadow, then where is the light?

6 of the most common toxic CEO traits

I’ve been in many leadership rooms, both physical and Zoom, and have seen all sorts of different leadership traits gone awry. They often start from a place of well-meaning, but they spiral in a way that can be demoralizing, destabilizing, or just plain ineffective for the team. I call them toxic CEO traits, but really any leader can exhibit them and startup leadership in particular seems to be a grow lamp for these traits in particular.

Do any of these sound familiar to you?

1. I do not trust the people around me as much as I could.

This one rarely shows up as outright distrust. It shows up as double-checking everything, sitting in on meetings you don’t need to attend, rewriting work that was already good enough. Sometimes it even shows up as building systems and dashboards to “make things transparent,” when what you really want is control. Oof.

The root of this trait is usually care, which can tip into excellence or perfectionism. You want things to be good. You want the company to succeed. You feel responsible.

But you’ve probably seen where this trait leads: Over time, a lack of trust becomes visible, people stop taking ownership, everyone waits for approval, and nothing gets done.

A good test: When something goes wrong, is your first instinct to ask what happened, or to ask who touched it?

2. I change my mind too often.

There is a version of this trait that looks like adaptability. Markets change, and context changes. Strategy should change, too.

But there is another version that feels very different on the receiving end. You’ve probably felt this before: Priorities shift every week. Projects start and stop. Teams learn not to fully commit because they are quietly betting that this direction won’t last either. Momentum dies not because people are lazy, but because they are gun-shy about completing something, anything, since it may need rebuilding at any point.

Most leaders who struggle with this are idea-driven and see possibilities everywhere, which is an extremely positive and useful perspective as a leader.

A good test: How many active and simultaneous projects right now were once “the top priority”?

3. I wait too long to make hard decisions.

You tell yourself you are giving someone more time or waiting for more data. And sometimes that is exactly what you are doing. But sometimes you already know the answer and just don’t want to be the person who says it out loud.

The cost of waiting is rarely obvious in the moment. But it accumulates quietly in morale, clarity, and focus, especially in a fast-moving world like business. There are times when the “light” side of this trait—carefulness, consideration, preparedness—can save you from problems, but the shadow side of indecision can prove costly.

A good test: Are you looking forward to the result of the decision but not the making of the decision?

4. I rely too much on my own instincts.

Instinct is pattern recognition built from experience, which can be a great thing! Many companies would not exist without someone trusting a gut feeling that didn’t yet have data behind it.

But instinct can crowd out other voices, especially those less senior (and when you’re running your own business, everyone is less senior). It can make disagreement and productive debate feel unnecessary. If we’re just going to go with the CEO’s gut, then what difference does it make to speak up?

A good test: When was the last time someone changed your mind?

5. I confuse activity with progress.

Overworked marketers may recognize this one immediately (and feel it viscerally!). Celebrating busy-ness can easily become a substitute for celebrating progress. We love talking about being process proud and outcome agnostic, but to confuse activity with progress is to put hustling on a pedestal, free from direction, strategy, or purpose.

Effort and progress are not the same thing.

Sometimes the hardest, most valuable work is slow, uncertain, and uncomfortable. It does not produce a visible artifact every day, and it cannot be optimized into neat weekly updates.

A good test: If you paused everything for a week, which activities would actually matter?

6. I hold on too tightly to things that should change.

In the writing world, you may have heard the phrase “kill your darlings,” which means you shouldn’t get too attached to your favorites turns of phrase if they don’t serve the broader purpose of your piece. Same can be true with leadership. We leaders feel beholden to products we built, strategies we championed, or hires we believed in. Letting go of these things can feel like admitting failure. So instead, we rationalize ways to give it more time.

But leadership often means letting go earlier than feels comfortable.

A good test: Is there something you are defending mostly because it was once your idea?

Which trait might you have? Here’s a small test.

If you want to know which of the above traits might be yours, think about the last decision that you made.

What was your main source of stress or difficulty?

• Did you want more certainty?

• Did you hesitate to disappoint someone?

• Did you keep revisiting the decision instead of committing?

• Did you trust your own view more than anyone else’s?

This should give you a clue into what might be happening in your habits and behaviors.

The good news? It can all be reframed. Here’s how.

As you may have noticed, every one of these six traits is just the shadow of a strength.

1. Caring deeply can turn into overcontrol.

2. Curiosity can turn into constant change.

3. Empathy can turn into avoidance.

4. Confidence can turn into certainty.

5. Energy can turn into busy-ness.

6. Conviction can turn into stubbornness.

The work is not to eliminate the strength. It is to keep it from running unchecked.

The useful shift for me has been to stop thinking of these traits as things to eliminate and start thinking of them as things to steer. If the shadow exists because a strength exists, then my goal shouldn’t be to erase the instinct. My goal should be to build guardrails around it. If you know you tend to overcontrol, you can intentionally give ownership away. If you know you chase new ideas, you can build systems that protect focus. If you know you hesitate on difficult decisions, you can create moments where the decision must be made.

This is where good teams help, too (and good co-founders). Leadership gets dangerous when no one can reflect your behavior back to you. The leaders I respect the most are the ones who make it safe for their team to say, gently but honestly, “Hey, this might be one of those moments.” It maybe only happened once or twice across my career where someone on my team gave me feedback like this (it’s a big, scary thing to give your boss or your boss’s boss feedback). But boy was it eye opening!

Over to you

The presence of a toxic trait isn’t really the problem. The problem is when it operates invisibly. Once you can see it and name it, it loses a lot of its power. And if leadership is anything, it’s a long process of noticing your own patterns, adjusting them slightly, and trying again the next week.

What leadership traits have you noticed among the leaders you love? What are you working on for yourself these days? We’d love to hear from you!

Upcoming events

Join our amazing Campout community lead for a free event this week, Thursday, March 12, all about nurturing and supporting your creative projects. Bring something you’re working on to workshop it as a group!

You can RSVP here.

The session is a sample of what Kristen will be doing on a weekly basis as part of her upcoming Residency program, a 6-week virtual studio that kicks off March 26. Come get a feel for what the full residency experience will be like, have your project reflected, and leave with clarity. You can check out the full Residency program if you’re curious to learn more.

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

Head to our experiences page to join our next retreat in April 2026. Only one spot remaining!

Wanna work with us?

If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.

As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities. We’ll also feature insights from our digital community of super smart folks (which you’re welcome to join).

Wishing you a great week!

At our last retreat, one of our participants talked about his approach to making moves in his career and advancing on his personal projects. According to him, it all had to do with increasing what he called his “luck surface”—the number of opportunities he had available to him to experience luck at any given time. People nodded along enthusiastically when he said this, and I know I’m not the only one who adopted his framing that day!

Truly, I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

If we normally define luck as “random good fortune,” we can define luck surface as the target upon which that good fortune can strike. And it’s way easier for an arrow to hit a billboard than a playing card.

Tending and growing your personal “luck surface” like a garden can be a big paradigm shift, and I’ll explain how you can harness it.

Reimagining the luck narrative

We think we like the more traditional narratives about luck, because if luck = random fortuitous chance, then a good thing is just as likely to happen to us as it is to someone else! But actually, this idea is incredibly disempowering. Random fortuitous chance is still random, meaning it’s disconnected from who we are or what we do.

So yay; maybe we’ll get lucky! But boo; maybe we’ll get lucky…

The concept of creating your own luck, or luck being the “combination of preparation and opportunity,” is not exactly new. But the idea of investing in expanding your personal “luck surface” shifts all the narratives around luck, because:

1. It recognizes the key role that luck plays in success. It’s not an incidental shortcut; it’s a necessary ingredient. You need luck, all the time, and the larger and more unconventional the things are that you’re trying to do, the more luck you’re likely to need.

2. It positions luck not as something ephemeral, but as a resource you can mine. While luck isn’t within your control, per se, you can concretely increase the odds you’ll find it or it will find you. You won’t stumble across gold sitting in your living room; you have to dig. And you do control how much and where you dig!

3. It implies that there are many ways to get lucky. Not to be facile, but a surface is, definitionally, something shallow and broad. It’s not a “channel.” It’s not a “vector.” It’s also not an ever-deepening hole that you dig, waiting to be maximally prepared for when your luck comes along. Your luck surface is a wide, open field, meaning you can experience luck from all 360 degrees, not just the pinpoint of “right place, right time.”

Luck is important. Luck is not random. And it’s everywhere.

The different types of luck

Not that I want to make a habit of quoting VCs, but Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList, has broken down luck into four categories that I think are quite relevant and revealing:

1. Dumb luck - Random! Think: winning the lottery, finding $100 in a thrifted jacket, etc.
   
   (Note: I’d also put all kinds of advantageous associations and privileges here, too. Like who your family is, how wealthy they are, and who they know, where you live, your native tongue, your racial or gender identity, etc.)

2. Luck through motion - The more times you try, the more chances you have to get lucky. Luck favors action.

3. Luck through awareness - This is about pattern recognition and social or situational awareness. You see things other people aren’t noticing.

4. Luck through reputation - On the merit of how you’re known, opportunities find you.

As you can see, only the first of Ravikant’s types is entirely out of your control. That’s great news! But it’s also important to note that even the kinds of luck you can impact are not immediate, get-lucky-quick schemes. Trying repeatedly takes time. Developing pattern recognition takes time. Building your reputation takes time.

In other words: Luck will always feel sudden, but growing your luck surface to a size that can be hit takes time!

Now, some more good news: I don’t think Ravikant’s luck types are complete.

Here are some other types of luck I’ve been noodling on that might productively shake up your definition and which you can grow over time:

Luck through exposure

Maybe related to motion/action, but exposure can mean putting yourself in as many and as varied situations as possible. Think: travel, networking, contests, putting yourself on more platforms, making new personal connections, and prioritizing new experiences.

Luck through probability

If the chances of achieving [X] without a lot of luck are discouragingly small, then what things related to [X] do you have a better probability of succeeding at? Likely, succeeding at those relevant “surer bets” will make [X] more probable over time!

Luck through reciprocity

This is my favorite, and I’m gonna spend some time here. You could also think of this as luck through generosity.

There’s a creator I like on TikTok who talks about the thrill of being someone else’s luck on a small scale—like leaving coins in the vending machine for the next person to find. But there are a lot of ways to be luck for someone else, if you’re just paying attention to all the value you have to offer!

Think about one of Ravikant’s types of luck above: luck through awareness. We might imagine that’s referring to our awareness of opportunities we can seize, but what if we were also trying to be aware of moments where we could be the luck for other people?

Maybe that’s overhearing someone at a party say they’re looking for a new dentist, and you go out of your way to recommend yours. Maybe it’s paying attention when a friend says their colleague just got relocated to Seattle, and your brother lives in Seattle, so you ask a few questions deeper than usual and discover they both play rec basketball so you put them in touch. Or a recent real example: I was leaving a foreign city I’m unlikely to return to soon with a public transit card that still had a ride or two on it. I saw a bunch of confused people trying to buy one as I arrived at the airport, so I just gave them mine.

How lucky for those folks that someone was in the right place, right time, was situationally aware, and generous with their resources! It feels great to be someone else’s luck, and while there is no guarantee that the luck will be reciprocal, you’ve still increased your luck surface, which is the whole idea of investing in all these different kinds of luck!

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Some concrete tips for increasing your luck surface

We’ve got a handle on the different kinds of luck you can cultivate, so let’s talk about how. You probably already have some ideas just based on what might fall into each type, but here are some specific tactics to get you started:

1. Do things in public. Girl, we know. This one is scary and it sucks sometimes, because it opens you up to criticism, ridicule, and public failure. But it’s also the only way people and opportunities can find you! Build a platform. Post on social. Put yourself out there. Talk to people! You think your luck surface expands by fostering your secret wishes deep in the most private chamber of your heart? NO! The surface expands around you!

2. Ask for things explicitly. People are not mind readers. They don’t know what you want, need, wish, are striving for. Tell them (publicly)! Ask for things (specifically)! The likelihood of sushi being dropped in your lap < just ordering freaking sushi.

3. Go wide, not just deep. Invest in skills, experiences, and connections adjacent to where you want to succeed, not just your interest. These oblique connections unfurl your luck surface across new territory.

4. Leave space for serendipity. If you only do the same things all the time, or you plan everything ahead, luck doesn’t even have room to find you. You have to leave room for chance encounters, unexpected turns, and spontaneous ideas.

5. Collect rejections. You might have heard of people making it their goal to get rejected 100 times in a year, or at least once a week, stuff like that. Not only is this great desensitization training for rejection, but it also shows you that some of the time, you’re the one saying no to you first by not even trying!

6. Document your lucky conditions. You wanna juice your pattern recognition and situational awareness to get better at identifying luck? Try keeping a “luck journal” for a bit and seeing if you can pull out common threads. Maybe you’ll notice that it’s something as simple being very present whenever you get lucky, or maybe it’s always when you step out of your comfort zone socially or try a new thing. Whatever it is, once you recognize it, you can replicate it.

Remember: Luck isn’t magic; it’s chance. (And chance is just math or something, but please don’t ask me about that.)

If you switch your mindset from “I hope I get lucky!” to “I’m increasing my luck surface!” you’ll be less frustrated when the luck doesn’t hit, maintaining your motivation to keep being the luck you wish to see in the world.

But wait! There’s more…

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