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!

Want to reconnect with your innate creativity?

Join us in France in April for our next retreat—just 3 rooms left!

Book your room

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…

Wanna hang out in person?

New retreat dates are up! Head to our experiences page to join our next one in April 2026.

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!

Want to explore what creative work means to you?

Join us in France in April for our next retreat!

Book your room

The freelance flowchart

At some point, almost everyone who works in marketing, design, content, product, or any creative or knowledge field asks the same question:

Should I go freelance?

Should I leave the in-house or agency grind and go do my own thing?

Will my own thing be any less grind-y?

Will it ever be as lucrative?

As you can see—and as you may know from personal experience—the original question of “should I go freelance” begets additional questions, which beget questions of their own. Going freelance is seldom an exercise taken lightly. But it is a path chosen by more and more of our peers, especially as the marketing and creative workforce changes so dramatically at modern businesses with their budget cuts, efficiency mandates, and AI everything.

(I’m using “going freelance” as a placeholder for any sort of new adventure you might take beyond a traditional, salaried role. For instance, we aren’t technically freelancers at Bonfire; we run our own business. But a lot of the same freelance ethos applies.)

Going freelance is a tempting thought.

It is also a complicated decision.

We don’t purport to have all the right answers, especially not all your right answers since every freelance path is unique. But having weighed these decisions over the years for ourselves and in talking with many, many startup friends, we have some ideas about what goes into the decision-making process.

So here is one way to think about the freelance decision. You can use these questions as a flowchart, giving you a little nudge down your path of deciding.

Step 1: Do you actually want to be freelance, or do you just want your current job to be better?

This is the first fork, and it is huge. Are you running from something or toward something? Sometimes the desire to freelance is really a desire for one of these things:

• More control over your work

• More flexible hours

• Fair compensation

• Less bureaucracy

• Fewer meetings

Those are real desires and worth prioritizing if they’re important to you. Freelancing is but one way to get them. Before you quit anything, ask yourself: If my current job suddenly removed the one or two things that frustrate me most, would I still want to leave?

If the answer is no, then the move might be a role change, a team change, or a negotiation, not freelancing.

If the answer is yes, keep going.

Step 2: Do you already have proof that people will pay you?

The easiest freelance careers usually start like this:

• Someone asks you to do a small project on the side.

• That project goes well, so you do more projects.

• Word gets around, and more people ask you to do projects.

• You realize you have more demand for your skills than you have time in the day.

We had a couple potential projects before we made the full-time leap into Bonfire, and it helped ease our transition immensely. A good rule of thumb: Have at least one paying client or project before you decide anything dramatic.

Step 3: Do you like doing the work, or do you like having done the work?

Freelancing is not just you spending all day doing exactly the thing you love. Unless you also love bookkeeping and tool hygiene! Certainly there are some instances where freelancing gets you out of onerous meeting bloat, but there remains at least some slog on the other side of freelancing. You have to do your own admin, scoping, invoicing, follow-ups, payroll, HR, and deal with the low-grade uncertainty of not knowing whether you’ve done it all correctly.

Some people (me included, most days) love the feeling of independence more than the daily reality of running a small business.

When you’re thinking through this stage, there are two parts:

1. Process

2. Pipeline

Re: process, you the freelancer will be responsible for all admin tasks. Is that a complete nonstarter for you? It is for some people, and that’s totally fine. Realistically, you can expect admin work to take up to 20 percent of your time and energy. We’ve found it to be such a big hurdle for wannabe freelancers that we’ve considered building out part of our business to support just those who want to make the freelance jump. (If this is you, drop us an email!)

For pipeline, you also have the sole responsibility of bringing in new clients. You are CEO, Chief Revenue Officer, Sales Manager, and Account Executive. You are an outbound rep, as needed. You are the company spokesperson, when required. In our experience, the amount of time you spend on pipeline is very dependent on how you price your services and how much you want to be earning and working. In general, you can count on pipeline-building as another 30 percent of your time.

Twenty percent admin plus 30 percent pipeline means you have 50 percent left over for the craftwork you love to do.

If admin and pipeline don’t turn you off completely, then keep going.

Step 4: Do you have a runway?

Runway, in terms of this freelance flowchart, means the amount of time you can live without new income.

Freelancing income is rarely smooth at the beginning, and it definitely is not enough to replace your current salary right away (if ever!). Most new freelancers aim to have three to six months of living expenses saved away before they go solo, but this number varies from person to person.

Runway, of course, does not remove risk altogether. But it does take some pressure off of those first few months of freelancing.

Step 5: Are you comfortable being known for something specific?

Freelancers grow faster when their positioning is clear and unique. Specializing in “marketing,” is not really specializing. Instead, you might consider specializing in:

• Lifecycle email for SaaS

• Brand strategy for early-stage startups

• Conversion copy for landing pages

As someone who loves doing all sorts of different things, specializing has been hard for me. Having a specialty means focusing and narrowing. It means building a personal brand around a particular topic and being comfortable going super deep on that topic over and over and over again.

Will you be comfortable with that?

If so, what might your specialty be? Here’s a good test: Ask yourself: If someone introduced me at a meetup, what would they say I am great at?

Step 6: What are you optimizing for right now?

We saved the best for last. This might be the most important question in the entire flowchart.

At different moments in life, different things matter most:

• Stability

• Learning

• Freedom

• Income

• Time with family

• Building something of your own

Freelancing is excellent for some of these and weaker for others.

Freelancing excels at:

• Freedom

• Time with family

• Building something of your own

Full-time, salaried work tends to be better with:

• Stability

• Income

What’s most important to you right now?

Conclusion: Should you go freelance?

The good news: There is no wrong decision here.

As you can see, there are SO many factors that go into the freelance choice, and almost all of them will be unique to you and your situation. There is no wrong answer, and there is no hurry. Sometimes, going freelance can feel like you must act now or you must capture this once-in-a-lifetime moment, but turns out, the option to go freelance will always remain. If the conditions aren’t proper now, they might be in a few months or a few years.

If you do decide to go, let us know! We’d love to support you or answer any questions.

If you decide to stay at your current full-time gig, we’re big fans of that, too, and we’re here for any tricky questions or conversations you might need to have about creating the best possible workplace where you can thrive.

(See? No wrong answers. We’re here either way.)

If you’d like to spend time with some like-minded folks who are thinking through big questions just like these, we’d love to have you join our Campout community, our little online space where people navigate careers together.

Wanna hang out in person?

New retreat dates are up! Head to our experiences page to join our next one in April 2026.

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!

A few months ago, I wrote a post called “Wherever you go, there you are.” It was about how we don’t actually want things—achievements, money, milestones, goods, relationships—but rather the feelings that we (often mistakenly) believe accompany those things.

This is the spiritual corollary of that post.

Rather than examine whether or not we’re chasing an inherently ephemeral feeling, I want to talk about how often our frustration with our inability to pursue what we want is maaaaaybe not really a lack of discipline, motivation, skill, dedication, or talent.

It’s not that we’re “unequipped” for the promotion, the relationship, the artistic achievement. It could just be that, deep down, we don’t actually want that thing at all.

Our resistance and inaction aren’t always failings; they could be powerful signs from our minds and bodies that we’re not being authentic in our desires.

(And if you want some gentle practice tapping into that authenticity, join us for our next retreat in April!)

Our default story about inaction

Pick a goal, any goal that you’re struggling to take action on. Could be getting in shape, waking up earlier, being more organized at work, advancing on a creative project… Whatever! When we fail to make meaningful progress or our efforts and interventions don’t stick, we have some culturally dictated scripts for how we interpret what’s happening. We tell ourselves one or all of the following:

• I’m lazy.

• I lack discipline.

• I’m afraid.

• I’m not good enough.

• I’m self-sabotaging.

These stories are sticky because those of us operating in Westernized business norms are steeped in Productivity Culture and its dear, even-more-toxic friends, Moralization of Effort, Effort = Success, and Capitalism Is a Meritocracy. Put differently, we believe that we should be productive, that working hard toward something is inherently morally “good” behavior, that how successful we are will be a direct result of how hard we try, and that the system rewards excellence so if we are not rewarded, we are not excellent.

At best, this reasoning is incomplete. At worst, it’s dangerous for your mental health.

What happens when we believe those stories about ourselves, when we let Mr. Productivity Culture and his gang of thugs push us around? The shame we feel about not succeeding replaces any curiosity we might have about why we’re not succeeding. And then we double down instead of reassessing.

Inaction is information

We’ve talked before about how anger is great information, letting you know that one of your values has been violated. Jealousy is also incredible insight, because it points you toward what you really want.

Inaction is also information worth paying attention to.

Yes, of course, sometimes inaction does boil down to a temporary friction you can overcome, like a gap in skills you can learn, uncertainty or discomfort that wears off as you become more familiar, or a stutter-start habit you can encode with more reps. But the kind of inaction I’m talking about is chronic resistance to something, no matter how many different ways you keep trying, no matter how much time you give it.

Chronic resistance to something you say you desire might actually be signaling:

1. This is misaligned with my values. Something about the process or outcome actually violates ideals you hold dear.

2. This goal is “borrowed” from someone else. A parent, a boss, a spouse, or a status script (“Successful people do [X]!”) has told you that you want this. Basically, a goal from anyone other than you!

3. I’ve outgrown the identity that wanted this. Maybe this achievement is what 20-year-old you wanted. Maybe it’s something you-before-therapy wanted. Maybe it’s the result of a survival strategy that has outlived its usefulness. It used to be authentic or necessary, but now it’s just a leftover.

4. There’s an invisible tradeoff that I’m unwilling to pay. You could have [goal]…but there’s a cost. You’ll achieve it, but lose something you subconsciously value more. And our sneaky little brains just won‘t let us do that!

5. I just want the feeling I believe comes with the goal. See this post! You’re looking in the wrong place if what you really want are feelings.

No matter the underlying reason for your chronic resistance, your nervous system is casting its vote on what motivates you or not. You might procrastinate endlessly or be unable to focus. It might show up as feelings of dread, fatigue, numbness, or self-imposed isolation. Motivation isn’t rational, and until you make the unconscious conscious, you’ll be working against your nervous system, which is a battle you don’t want!

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Turn self-judgment into self-inquiry

Instead of self-flagellating and asking “Why can’t I just get it together?,” try asking the following questions and being as honest as you can:

1. What do I believe this goal will give me?

2. What is more important to me than this? What wouldn’t I sacrifice to get it?

3. Who would I disappoint if I admitted I don’t want this anymore?

4. If no one were watching, would I still choose this?

5. If I were to start my [career, relationship, education, etc.] over again from scratch, would I still choose this?

You might be less attached to your goals than you think!

But resistance doesn’t always mean stop

I want to avoid the oversimplification that resistance automatically means that something isn’t an “authentic desire.” There are lots of “legit” challenges and barriers inherent in almost any pursuit. Those types of challenges can build resilience and teach us how to be people who thrive in achievement, rather than viewing achievement as the end in and of itself. Don’t wish all friction away!

Some signs that your toughest goals are still worth pursuing:

• Your curiosity and enthusiasm survive, even when confidence flags or progress wanes.

• Engaging in effort toward the goal is energizing, not draining. Effort might feel heavy before, but elating after.

• The resistance lessens with clarity or support.

• The resistance changes; it’s not just the same roadblock again and again and again.

The relief of letting go

We have utterly pathologized quitting—as if everything in your life is supposed to just go on forever, despite internal and external context changes. That’s (relatable) lunacy.

Anecdotally, some of the very best things in my life only had the room to be there because I’d quit something else—jobs, relationships, locations, sports, majors, you name it! I’m willing to bet that you could think of times in your own life, too, where quitting or letting go of something ushered in something better.

That doesn’t mean that letting go of a goal just feels like all rainbows and sunshine, spaciousness and relief. Likely, when you admit you don’t really want something anymore, you’ll also feel a great deal of fear, uncertainty, and grief.

But needing to mourn a road not taken doesn’t mean that you’ve missed your “true” path.

Quitting, in these cases, is an act of discernment, not a weakness of character. Letting go frees energy for more authentic desires. Inaction and lack of discipline aren’t the problem if the desire is misaligned in the first place. So take your inaction as an invitation to renegotiate your goals, update your identity, and choose differently—on purpose.

Want to explore your authentic desires with a creative twist?

Join us in France in April for our next retreat!

Book your room

Wanna hang out in person?

New retreat dates are up! Head to our experiences page to join our next one in April 2026.

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!

When everything is urgent, nothing is strategic

In a past startup job, when VC money was tight and hyper-growth was mandatory (isn’t that all startup jobs?), I received a homework assignment from the C-suite in which I was asked to label all my team expenses and my teammates as providing short-term impact or long-term impact.

This exercise might have merit in a utopian business setting, where capitalism doesn’t crush a thoughtful timeline and where marketing teams are lauded for balancing their resources. But in the VC business setting? In this economy? The homework was a test, and I was doomed to fail.

Turns out—and maybe you saw this coming a mile away—the resources and colleagues I labeled as long-term impact were deemed expendable. The short-term ones got to stay. As the ruse dawned on me mid-homework assignment, I did my best to creatively label as many items as I could as “short-term” and to advocate to the CFO for our marketing mix to include something, anything, long-term.

Alas, my team and I were once again waylaid by short-term versus long-term thinking.

Why short-term versus long-term is such a fraught topic, especially for marketing and creative work

The situation I described above may be familiar to a lot of you, even if the exact homework assignment differs. Short-term vs. long-term framing shows up everywhere because it maps cleanly to how human brains and modern businesses are wired.

A few forces collide here:

• Human psychology favors immediacy. We overweight near-term rewards and undervalue delayed ones. A win this quarter feels real. A payoff in eighteen months feels hypothetical.

• Business systems reinforce the bias. Quarterly planning, monthly reporting, and weekly dashboards all reward what moves now, not what compounds later. Never have I ever been given a five-year OKR. If only!

• Risk concentrates downward. Executives can afford to take long-term bets rhetorically, but the risk of missing near-term targets usually lands on middle managers and ICs first. It’s rather icky to acknowledge this is how the machine works, but spend long enough as a cog (especially a marketing cog) and you quickly realize how blame rolls downhill.

Marketing and creative work sit at the worst possible intersection of these forces. We operate across time horizons by default. Growth and performance channels are immediate and legible. Brand, narrative, trust, and differentiation are slow, diffuse, and indirect.

One of my beliefs as a marketing leader is that marketing’s job is to see five years into the future and to ensure the company gets there safe and sound. This is lonely work. You’re often the only one looking that far ahead. It’s also hazardous work because everyone else’s incentives and mindsets are focused not on the next five years but on the next five months.

Depending on how you slice it, as much as 70 percent of the work that you do on the marketing side is intended for long-term results.

This table is how marketing work is often discussed internally. It’s also where a lot of short-term versus long-term conversations start.

You could say the same thing for how we go about our individual jobs within a team or even working for ourselves.

If you only do what’s urgent, you never create the conditions for what’s important. But if you only do deep work and strategy, you risk becoming disconnected from reality. The tension isn’t avoidable. It’s structural.

What to do about it

Turns out: Both tables are wrong.

The reality is that there is no short-term without the long-term, and vice versa. It’s a false choice. Most meaningful work lives somewhere in the middle, and the two extremes depend on one another. If you’re purely focused on the short-term, then I’m afraid to tell you, there isn’t going to be a long-term for you because you’ve spent too long in catchup mode and missed where the market was headed—or you ground yourself to dust by hustling every minute of every day to beat a monthly moving goalpost. And if you only focus on the long-term, then you may not survive through the lean times of not shipping enough and not growing enough.

The two tables above that show the breakdown of short-term versus long-term are wrong. Reality is more like this:

• Performance marketing requires both

  • Effective ads today because of brand and messaging developed over time

• Lead generation requires both

  • Greater lead volume due to brand trust and awareness built across months and years

• PR and comms requires both

  • More relationships to build as short-term payoffs yield results, contacts, and stories to tell

• Social media requires both

  • Immediate boost to awareness and engagement and attention, while building brand loyalty over time

But C-suite ain’t got time for reality.

Which is how we end up in short-term versus long-term debates, constantly.

The problem is not that short-term wins are bad. It’s not that long-term investment is always right. It’s that we often frame them as enemies rather than complements. What this rivalry obscures is a deeper truth: short-term actions shape long-term outcomes, and long-term vision must anchor short-term choices.

Fortunately, there are some tips and tricks that you can try if you’re finding yourself stuck in this endless loop. Here’s what we’ve tried before and what’s worked for us.

How to navigate the short-term

Break long-term projects into short-term milestones (with impact).

Instead of:

• Create updated messaging and positioning

Use:

• Complete 25 customer interviews to inform Voice of Customer guidance to be used by CS and Sales teams

• Deliver new suite of ad copy to test-and-learn about new CTAs and messaging in order to drive higher clickthrough

All the milestones can still build toward your ultimate goal, but you can also show how the steps along the way can drive short-term results across the business.

Measure your incremental progress toward a long-term goal.

Talk the language of short-term focus

It may be that your long-term initiatives are already having short-term impact. You’re just using different words than the rest of the executive team. Here’s an example of a way to talk about long-term impact using short-term language and laddering goals:

One of the things that a lot of leadership teams care about right now is efficiency.

So if I want to keep brand impact top-of-mind at the company level and among my leadership team, I need to connect the dots from brand investment to efficiency. Okay! I can do that! Instead of talking about metrics like brand reach or aided recall, I need to start talking about how brand investment can shorten the sales cycle, can increase velocity of a funnel, can decrease cost-per-lead from Direct Response spend.

Bonus tip (warning: may make you nervous): Ship stuff before it’s perfect.

Sometimes, the C-suite’s fear about long-term resources is that there is nothing literally visible (aka market-facing, aka something you can show off in Slack) about this work. If your long-term tendencies prevent you from sharing until everything is pixel perfect, it might behoove you to get out of stealth mode earlier than you think.

How to advocate for long-term

Attach long-term resourcing to your short-term confidence

We all know that long-term work impacts short-term results, so if a short-term resource is on the line, it can be useful to articulate the degree to which your hands will be tied without it.

My favorite way is to use confidence intervals:

The way I’ve phrased this in the past is simply: “If brand spend is reduced by $1M, then I have 50% confidence that I’ll be able to hit my goals next year.” (It probably goes without saying how important it is to align with your executive team on what marketing’s goals are first.)

Build long-term into a mathematical mix

If you can be consistent with the ratios for how you invest your time and energy, then it can make long-term emphasis an easier thing to justify. For instance, if you were to dedicate 60 percent of your time to short-term work and 40 percent to long-term, you’ve given yourself permission to do both (the exact numbers don’t matter so much as having a mental model).

One of my favorite ratios is Coca Cola’s 70-20-10:

Find comps in the market that you can point to (and that your C-suite will love)

Also: C-suite loves examples of themselves! If you can pull examples from the company’s past where long-term investments paid dividends, you can make a really compelling case to preserve some long-term plays.

We’d love to hear from you. What do you think?

Has this short-term vs. long-term stuff happened to you before? How do you navigate it? We’d love to know what it’s been like for you.

Join us in Campout

In Campout, our digital community, we talk about stuff like this on the daily in our channels and a couple times a month in our live events. All supported by exercises and templates to help you craft a career with purpose and intention.

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

New retreat dates are up! Head to our experiences page to join our next one in April 2026.

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!

Last night I missed a protest against ICE because of client calls.

I’m an American living in Paris, and between the large American expat community here and the general social conscience of the French, there’s a lot of solidarity on this side of the pond for what Americans are going through right now.

The protest was down on the banks of the Seine, a 35-minute metro ride from my apartment. It started at 6:30pm, and I had work meetings scheduled until 7:00pm. But this is France, and protesting is the national pastime, and I thought surely when I got there at 7:30-something they’d still be going strong.

I was on the metro at 7:20pm when my friend texted: “It’s ending now.”

Turns out it wasn’t a march, as I’d been expecting, but more of a gathering with a set program of speakers.

I turned around and went home, feeling stupid. Steeping in the absurdity of prioritizing my inconsequential little desk job as my home country slides into literal fascism, while the government is making a habit of executing people in the streets for daring to get in the way of an untrained police force hunting down, kidnapping, and disappearing people without even a facade of due process.

It’s hard to concentrate, it’s hard to stay engaged, and it’s increasingly hard to tell myself a story about how what I do, as a professional marketer, is purposeful and meaningful against the backdrop of upheaval, brutality, and so much naked bigotry. To be an honest human and not a responsible business owner for a second: That content strategy my client is waiting for seems pretty damn stupid right now. The CAC of LTV of the YoY ROI? Get a fucking life.

And maybe you’re feeling that way, too.

Marketing doesn’t matter. Not really, not in any way that anyone will be thinking about on their birthdays or death beds. All this white collar knowledge work is more or less a parlor trick at the Party of Modern Life, and knowing tricks is a great way to keep getting invited to the party. (Until the robots definitively take over.)

But it’s the people that matter. Their lives matter. You matter. Your relationships and quality of life matter. Almost everything else is a distraction that is, unfortunately, necessary to move through society…but probably a lot less necessary than we think, and definitely a lot less necessary than the Powers That Be want us to think.

Besides, if you’re keeping your eyes even halfway open, this is the state of the world all the time, isn’t it? Much has been said about cognitive overload, the human brain’s inability to process the deluge of information almost all of us are getting beamed directly into our cerebral cortexes on an hourly basis.

Given that, I know that the answer cannot be for humanity to take a time out until we all collectively learn our lesson. We can’t unplug civilization, wait 30 days, and then plug it back in again. We do have to keep going, earning money to pay bills and feed our families and even enjoy ourselves once in a while. Money to give to the causes we support. The answer isn’t despair, isn’t nihilism. And the answer also isn’t, universally, to quit our silly little white collar knowledge work jobs and hit the streets. The answer isn’t to bury our heads in the sand and retreat into whatever insulating privilege we have, but it’s also not to burn out on the bad news and fry our nervous systems because “always informed” seems like the only reasonable and responsible way to be.

The exhausting wrestling match is how to exist in the constant compromise between willful ignorance and paralytic knowledge. It’s how to continue to make meaning when the institutions that once readily supplied it are falling or being revealed as facades. It’s how to care enough about the stupid screen-mediated bullshit work to get it done without giving up a part of yourself.

While writing this, I looked up some of our subscriber stats. I was surprised to see that only 37% of you lovely folks are American, like me and Kevan, though that’s our largest single demographic group reading this newsletter. Second largest demographic is India (13%), followed by the U.K. (7%), Canada (4%), and then Brazil (2%).

The remaining 37% of you are reading this from all over the world, across 6 continents, living in countries with wildly different cultures and under a range of government systems and regimes, some fully democratic, some authoritarian, some dictatorial, some in messy stages of transition from one to the other.

I looked all this up because I’m self-conscious that what I’m saying here may sound obvious and played out to our readers in Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. It might seem naive to those reading this in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and Palestine. And it also might smack of white privilege to my Black and brown fellow Americans. Yes, there is worse political instability and more extreme violence than what’s happening in the United States right now. But I’m also aware that relativizing pain and struggle is a race to the bottom.

The people in power in these oppressive regimes all over the world, the broken people hellbent on inflicting pain on others because they mistakenly believe it will make them feel important and safe, they really want you to care about your job. They want you to be terrified of losing it. They want you to participate, obediently, in the traditional economic and social structures that got them where they are today, and that includes a quasi-religious devotion to the primacy of business interests as an unquestionable good.

They don’t want you to realize what it seems like many of us are anyway: The work isn’t real, and it was never real, not compared to the suffering and the injustice.

But it’s also not real compared to the outcry, the beautiful ways people are showing up for their communities, the resistance.

There’s not a real moral here. I don’t actually have any tips, which means there’s the part of my brain that says: “Delete this. You’ve offered nothing of value.” Maybe the only thing I can say is to resist the pull to the extremes. Resist ignorant dissociation, but also resist crushing resignation. Whatever you can do to remain functional, to contribute in little ways to the causes you care about, to zoom out and stay calm in the midst of polycrisis, to show up for your family and your neighbors—whatever that takes is what you gotta do. Less guilt, less shame, less despair. Do the bare minimum at work and wherever you can to preserve your energy for mirco-agitations, mini steps forward, speaking out on the fringes of where it’s totally comfortable to do so, and bearing up.

Over to you…

If you’re resonating with this, just know you’re not alone. Feel free to hit us up in the replies or comments if you want to chat.

Wanna hang out in person?

New retreat dates are up! Head to our experiences page to join our next one in April 2026.

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!

How to craft your origin story

I am in the middle of re-watching all of the Marvel superhero movies—in chronological order this time, so I can tell what’s going on—which means I am presently steeped in comic book lore: Captain America as a virtuous skinny kid, Thor and Loki as bickering brothers, Tony Stark as a hotshot tech founder (I wonder who his VP of Marketing was?).

Marvel is really good at storytelling.

And their movies, in particular, are great at the origin story.

The origin story is a narrative that explains who you are, combining context and details with meaning and purpose.

A superhero’s origin story is critical to their being able to resonate with an audience and ground future action in meaning, purpose, and intent. Marvel’s origin stories come in all shapes and sizes, too.

For every Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow, there is a Matter-Eater Lad, a superhero from an alien race whose defining power is the ability to eat literally anything: metal, glass, concrete, weapons.

For every Peter Parker / Spider-Man, there is a Spider-Ham, a spider bitten by a radioactive pig, which turned the spider into a super pig who retained the powers of a spider.

The origins of some of our most well-known brands and products also run the gamut; a business’s beginnings can take all shapes and forms. Some of the more remarkable ones include:

• Slack started as an internal chat tool for a video game development team. No one wanted the video game they made (Glitch).

• Twitter was a discarded side project at a struggling podcast company, Odeo.

• Ben & Jerry’s is an ice cream brand, but the founders originally wanted to do bagels, not ice cream. The equipment to make bagels was too expensive.

• Craigslist began as a simple email list Craig Newmark sent to friends to share local events. It wasn’t intended to be a company, product, or platform at all.

But if we were to stop at just the trivia of these stories, we’d miss the heart-and-soul impact of what an origin story truly represents. At Bonfire, we believe that stories make meaning—for business, sure, but also for us human people. Stories reveal who we are and how we tick. Origin stories especially. So let’s explore this together! We’ll get to an origin story template further below, but first, let’s see why these stories matter in the first place.

Why an origin story matters

Businesses go bananas for differentiation. We’ve worked with dozens of these companies through our agency work at Bonfire. Take any commoditized product category—email marketing software, CRMs, design tools, and especially AI products—and it’s remarkable how quickly a sales pitch devolves into a side-by-side feature comparison: “Who has which features, and how much do those features cost?” Spoiler alert: Feature differentiation will never last. Price can always be disrupted. So rather than differentiate on the particulars of what you sell and how you price, we encourage companies to differentiate on who you are.

No one will be able to match your origin story.

Why do origin stories matter to businesses? They create differentiation by forcing you to articulate why you do what you do. (This is the heart of brand marketing, which we also just so happen to believe is THE biggest thing businesses can do to survive and thrive these days.)

But it’s not every day that us regular humans are waking up in a cold sweat, shouting, “But how can I differentiate myself?”

Where else might origin stories come into play for us?

One of the most obvious places is the job search. When I was interviewing for roles back in the day, it took me six months at least to hone my origin story into something that felt true, cohesive, and helpful for explaining to others why I was here and what I was looking for next. But it’s not just the job market where an origin story can shine. Here are a few other realms where a story like this can be helpful:

• Meeting new people

• Choosing your next creative project

• Career pivots or reinvention moments

• Leaning in to leadership or management roles

• Recovering from burnout or taking a sabbatical

Certainly, an origin story can be good for explaining your unique perspective, your one-of-a-kind-ness. Every origin story is unique and unmatchable by anyone else; we are all snowflakes. But let’s take this one level deeper into what an origin story can do for you.

• Origin stories help crystallize your purpose. By going back to the beginning, you can better understand why you’ve taken the paths you have and to see more clearly a throughline of purpose behind your actions.

• Origin stories prescribe meaning. Rather than a mishmash of details, an origin story puts the pieces together in a thematic way where every step means something and gets you closer to who you are / where you are today.

• Origin stories build connection. Stories, in general, do this. Sharing where you started from can be a sticky way to bring people closer to you, people who have shared your experience or can empathize with where you’ve been.

• Origin stories point you in a direction. As you’ll see in the template below, the output of an origin story is a “so what now.” The origins build momentum by clarifying what kinds of problems are worth your energy next.

How to craft your origin story

You can build an origin story in any number of ways, although we will give you one specific formula to try here in a moment. As you’re drafting, keep in mind some things that an origin story doesn’t need to be:

• It doesn’t need to be hugely comprehensive. E.g., we don’t need to know the details of what Spider-Ham wanted to be when he grew up.

• It doesn’t need to be revisionist history. E.g., we’re not judging Slack’s video game failures, we’re just noticing that these failures played a role.

• It doesn’t need to be impressive. In fact, trying to make it impressive often makes it less true.

Your origin story can take many shapes and forms, but in general we wanted to provide a guiding framework to help you think logically through a handful of components that go into your final story.

Below, you’ll find six steps of the origin story creation process, which should give you all the context you need to fill in the template we include at the end.

1. Identify a friction

All good origin stories start with some sort of conflict moment. We’ve written a lot about storytelling frameworks before and how to tell a great story from beginning to end. For origin stories in particular, one of the best places to start is with the “bad stuff”/friction:

Some questions to consider:

• What was nagging at you?

• What was it about your situation that felt inefficient or misaligned?

• What were you tolerating longer than you should have?

2. Name the constraint

Related to the friction, you might find that there is a larger theme of constraint that is central to your story. Oftentimes this can look like:

• Time

• Money

• Confidence

• Permission

For me, I noticed that impostor syndrome and “shoulds” played a huge role in constraining who I wanted to become. This aspect of my origin story could be traced directly to the friction of seeking a promotion or landing a new job. I felt constrained by my own (false) inadequacy.

3. Identify the first small choice you made

As the friction and constraints become clearer, you can start to move your origin story into action mode. Ask yourself, “Because of the friction and constraints, what did I do first?” The answer could be things like a simple experiment you tried, a new side project you kicked off, or even just a conversation you had that got you started on the road to where you are now.

4. Articulate a pattern

At this stage, you can start putting some pieces together of the issues that keep cropping up. You’ve already by this point noticed the friction and constraints that spurred you on. Now it’s time to reflect on the collective meaning behind all the context.

Some questions to ask:

• What kept repeating?

• What problem followed you from role to role?

• What were people consistently asking you for help with?

In past versions of my origin story, I found a pattern of dissatisfaction with the state of in-house marketing roles, a pattern of my failing to bet on myself, a pattern of longing for a job that gave me more creative freedom..

5. Describe the internal shift you made

We’re at the transformation stage now! It’s important here to not merely talk about the external details of what happened to you in the story but to focus instead on the internal change that took place. In particular, you can focus on:

• How your thinking changed

• What you stopped believing about yourself or about the world

• What you trust now that you didn’t trust before

6. Name what you’re oriented toward now

And finally, we arrive at your current focus. Given the friction and constraint and choices and patterns, where has this shift brought you? Keep in mind: Frame your answer as an orientation, not an identity. Rather than a statement like “Now, I am X,” instead think about your orientation in these ways:

• “I’m drawn to…”

• “I tend to work best when…”

• “I’m interested in problems that…”

This way you still have the flexibility to think of yourself in all sorts of different ways while specifically calling out the things that draw you.

When you’re done with these steps, you should have the context to go and create your origin story from beginning to end. Here’s a simple template you can use.

I kept running into ___, even when I changed roles.

I didn’t plan to pivot, but I started experimenting with ___.

Over time, I noticed a pattern: ___.

What changed wasn’t just what I do, but how I think about ___.

Now, I’m oriented toward work that ___.

It’s okay if your origin story changes

Your origin story is not canon in the way that Marvel makes its movies. Sure, you can’t change some of the actual details of your story, but you can certainly change your perspective on the details and the takeaways of what you’ve learned.

You may change your origin story in different contexts. Perhaps you have one origin story for your job search and one for your dating life. Perhaps you have one at work and one with friends. If you’re a business, perhaps there’s one you tell the media and one you tell employees.

You may also see that your origin story changes over time. For one thing, life will keep happening, so you may choose to pick up a new origin story at any new point, or to add context and color to an existing story. But also, you’ll be changing as a person, so your perspective and interpretation of past events may also change. What matters to you may change, so it would make sense that your story would change, too.

Tell us about your origin story

We’d love to hear from you if you have a story to share, or even if you just want to bounce off some version or draft of your current story. We’re all ears!

Join us in Campout

In Campout, our digital community, we talk about stuff like this on the daily in our channels and a couple times a month in our live events. All supported by exercises and templates to help you craft a career with purpose and intention.

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

New retreat dates are up! Head to our experiences page to join our next one in April 2026.

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’m not a Doctor Who fangirl, and I can’t even claim to have seen a single episode. But, as our culture is wont to do these days with popular properties, bits of Doctor Who have become atomized into the web-o-sphere and I’ve picked up a few things by osmosis. One of which is the Doctor’s description of time:

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect. But actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey…stuff.”

Mmm, yes. Very clear.

But actually, let’s think about that for a second, because buried in this humorous quote are some rather uncomfortable truths about time: namely, that for humans it isn’t, like, a quantitative thing. Even though we’ve almost all agreed, as a species, to measure time in 24-hour days of 60-minute hours of 60-second minutes, we don’t actually experience time passing like that. We don’t carry an innate sense of an hour or a minute in our brains or bodies. We need clocks to keep track of the time, and time often surprises us with how much or how little has passed, doesn’t it?

A rock, on the other hand, has properties like mass, length, width, height, texture. The material has a certain hardness you can feel when you knock on it and a weight when you heft it. A hundred people could hold the same rock, and you’re not going to hear that some of them thought the rock was very small and soft and others thought it was absolutely huge and hard and heavy and that some people didn’t even realize you had given them a rock at all and others were crushed by it.

But we do talk that way about time.

An afternoon will drag on, feeling seemingly endless for someone, but zip by in an instant for another person. We can’t believe it’s already 2026, or we spent 2025 wondering if this year would ever end. We’re stunned that our babies are already going to kindergarten when it feels like just yesterday they were in diapers, but at the same time we feel like we’ve known a person forever, but it’s only been a year.

In all of those scenarios, we can correctly identify the amount of time that has actually passed. (No one would insist that their kindergartener was actually born yesterday.) But our felt sense is the dominant human experience of time, not its objective measure.

There are all kinds of reasons why this is or might be true, and those things involve understanding time as the 4th dimension of our reality, delving into the fundamental properties of human consciousness, and a bunch of other things that I don’t feel entirely qualified to explain (but love reading about).

But what I can say, definitively, is that our perceptions of time are individual and subjective, and while we can’t literally “create more time,” we absolutely can create the feeling of having more time! (Which is, when you think about it, the exact same thing!)

The science of time creation

Our perception of time has to do with sensory—and therefore memory—density, meaning how richly experienced and remembered our lives are. And that density is a product of novelty and attention. New and unfamiliar experiences tell our brains to perk up, and that attention encodes richer and deeper tapestries in our minds, leading to a feeling of time dilation. This is why you often have memory holes for things you do habitually—your commute, brushing your teeth, your dog’s morning routine—and why hours can pass in a blink when you’re sucked into the monotonous scroll of your phone.

So if you want to create more time in 2026, you have to create more novelty and attention. That doesn’t mean you have to go on an exotic vacation every month (though if you can, more power to ya!). Rather, it means identifying small, daily ways to incorporate newness and to practice presence. And the time will follow!

Here are some tried and true ways to up your novelty factor and boost attention in 2026:

1. Design one “novelty anchor” per week

Not a big life change, but a small, specific interruption to pattern. Think of one premeditated deviation each week and treat it as non-negotiable. Some examples:

• Take a different route to a routine destination

• Cook a cuisine you’ve never made before or something that involves a new recipe

• Work from a café you’ve never been to or just change up your usual coffee shop

These little changes work because our brains need contrast to encode memory. One distinct anchor per week will help prevent the weeks from collapsing into a blur—without creating decision fatigue or feeling like a major chore or time investment.

2. Purposely slow down one daily activity

This is about attention density, not efficiency. Choose one recurring, totally mundane activity and deliberately do it at half speed—or as slow as you can make it! I’m talking about things like:

• Drinking your first coffee. Just sit and sip. Pay attention to the temperature of the coffee, the physical sensation of liquid passing over your lips and tongue, what it feels like to swallow. Are there patterns in bubbles or foam on the top? What about steam rising? How heavy is the mug in your hands? How strong is the smell? Etc.

• Showering. This one is great because of the amount of sensory input all over your body! Temperature, water pressure, the feeling of soap on your skin, shampoo in your hair, what your hair feels like when wet, the scents of all your different products, any tight muscles that feel good under hot water.

• Walking the dog/taking a walk. Probably, you’re walking in a very familiar place, like your immediate neighborhood. Really look at all the houses and buildings around you. Notice their colors, what materials they’re made of, how many stories they are. Can you see other people through the windows? How many different kinds of trees or plants can you spot? Do you hear nature, cars, people’s activity? Any smells wafting out to you? What’s the ground like under your feet?

With all of the above or with whatever activities you can think of that fit this bill, the key is NO MULTITASKING!!! No optimization. No screens, no music, no podcasts. No calling your sister to catch up. No escaping into your own fantasies or worries. Just awareness of the physical world around you.

This works because time expands when attention increases. You’re not adding time; you’re like…thickening it. If you feel faintly uncomfortable or impatient, you’re doing it right!

3. Try for “firsts,” not goals

Or, if you’re someone who just has to have a goal, make it your goal to have “firsts”!

Pick a few things every month you’ve never done before. It could be relatively simple like a new recipe, getting into a new hobby like journaling or painting, talking to the regular barista at your coffee shop for the first time, checking out a new restaurant, a new class of some kind… Anything that you’ve never done before, try it!

The first time you do something, it produces disproportionate memory density. Repetition is what flattens and speeds up time, and firsts stretch it. Measure success by “Did I do something unfamiliar?” not “Did I stick with it?” (Refreshing, no?)

Join us in France for The Soft Reset, and reconnect with your vision and purpose. Spots limited!

Learn more

4. Build some temporal landmarks

Without landmarks and milestones, days collapse into weeks which collapse into months. But with temporal markers, time stacks.

Create a regular cadence of “landmarks.” Maybe it’s once a month, or maybe it’s just every quarter or a “half year check in.” Think of a ritual you could do, maybe a solo excursion, a letter to yourself, a reflective journaling moment, or even just a very intentional walk. This is even something you could do as a family or in a small group of friends and share your reflections!

During this time, you’re going to think about all the things you’ve lived through, accomplished, or started over the previous period. It’ll help to write them down or record yourself talking. When you get to the end of your ritual, you could even “open” the next period/season with an intention, wish, or goal. The point is to spend time consciously acknowledging the time that has passed and what filled that time.

Landmarks like these break the year into psychologically distinct segments, making it feel longer in hindsight. You’re reinforcing the memories of what you did, encoding them so they stick better.

5. Reduce passive novelty

Sorry. You probably knew this one was coming! Scrolling delivers constant stimulus but low memory encoding. It feels stimulating and absorbing in the moment and empty in retrospect. This is passive novelty. You want active novelty!

The easiest ways to make sure that what you’re doing is active vs. passive are:

• Don’t involve a screen.

• Do something rather than consume something.

• Do one thing instead of multitasking.

• Involve your body, not just your mind.

• Extend your consciousness to what’s around you, not just what’s going on in your head.

Net-net: Your brain remembers what you participate in, not what passes through you. If you want time to slow down, stop “outsourcing” experiences by consuming them passively!

In all 5 of the above tips, the underlying principle is that you’re not hacking time; you’re hacking memory formation. A day, month, year feels long or short in retrospect, based on how richly it was encoded. The equation is: Novelty + attention = denser memory = longer felt time.

Which brings us back to the core idea buried in that quote from Doctor Who:

Time isn’t something that happens to us, outside of us. It’s something we experience—and experience is malleable.

Over to you…

What commonalities have you noticed about when a day or period of time feels long or short? Is it something you consciously try to manipulate? We’d love to hear about it!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

New retreat dates are up! Head to our experiences page to join our next one in April 2026.

Wanna be friends?

If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.

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!

–

6 predictions for our 2026 work

For the past several years, I have tried in vain to predict upcoming trends, strategies, stories, and channels that will matter in the new year. Most of my predictions are wrong. No need to search the archives to see what social network I predicted would be the next big thing in 2021. (Spoiler: I failed to predict TikTok.) 🤦‍♂️

Even though I get the details wrong, I still find predictions to be a fun exercise in imagination, trendspotting, and—dare I say—hope. To wit, you will not see me predict the downfall of civilization in 2026, despite the evidence. My predictions are mostly rose-colored, somewhat marketing-related, and proudly hit-or-miss.

Here’s a look at how the 2025 predictions panned out:

Predictions that were mostly right:

• TikTok will not be banned in the US

• Normal “googling” will decline 10% or more

• Employee advocacy will be the #1 new marketing channel

Predictions that were mostly wrong:

• Threads will be the new Twitter (for reals this year)

Mixed:

• Every marketing job description will ask you to exhibit strong AI literacy. (Turns out, many marketing jobs were fully replaced by AI.)

• You will be asked to run a campaign for a Gen Alpha customer / buyer. (I personally was not asked to do this, but I’m sure it happened to others.)

• The best-performing content will be human-outlined, AI-written, and human-edited. (No doubt lots of this content was created in 2025, and lots of it performed well. I’d like to think that some fully-human content also did well … but I can’t always tell what’s human and what’s not anymore.)

6 bold-ish predictions for 2026

1. AI will be used less at work

By some estimates, employees who use AI at work are saving up to 5 hours per week.(How are these reclaimed 5 hours being used? On more work, of course!)

Data like this would lead you to believe that AI is working, that we’ve figured it out.

But then you read reports like this from MIT: 95 percent of AI-at-work initiatives fail.

Yikes.

Certainly, in 2026 AI will keep advancing at breakneck speed, and we’ll continue to be amazed and revolted at what AI can create for us. But when it comes to the expectation of AI’s work productivity facelift, businesses are going to pump the brakes. They’re going to see how often their AI projects fail. They’re going to see how discouraged their workforce is becoming. And they’re going to pull back demonstrably on the use of generative AI platforms.

2. Bootstrapped startups will outpace VC-backed startups

In 2026, more people will choose to build a bootstrapped startup than will choose to go the VC route.

It’s never been easier to build your own software product before, or at least to build one that can get you some early traction and enough of a foundation-—revenue, users, usage, etc.—to not need any outside investment.

Plus, the attitudes about VC investment seem to be shifting. Younger generations are more attuned to the downsides of “doing it for the shareholders,” largely because we are living with the fallout of VC-backed, growth-at-all-costs behemoth companies today. There’s an entirely different vibe with a bootstrapped business. We’ve been fortunate to have several bootstrapped companies choose to work with us at Bonfire, and we wish the world were full of these folks. From our lips to God’s ears, in 2026.

3. Every marketing team will have a vibe coder

Vibe coding uses prompts to guide an AI in generating, refining, and debugging code, so that you don’t have to.

Vibe coding allows non-developers and non-technical folks to build all sorts of interesting apps, tools, websites, and more.

For years, this was a huge blocker on the marketing teams I led. We had big, weird ideas. We couldn’t code them! The previous solution was to hire a dedicated marketing developer to solely work on marketing engineering projects. But in 2026? You can just let anyone on your team with a vibe-coding interest lean into building you all sorts of cool stuff.

(BTW, if you want this vibe coding specialist to be you, here are some of the best vibe code tools out there: Cursor, Lovable, Base44. Or check out this list from Fillout.)

4. Every marketing strategy will have an in-person component (and not just events)

Consumers deal with so much AI slop these days; one of the best ways to combat this is to take things out of the digital realm and bring them IRL.

Events have been back on the marketing menu for a couple years now. In 2026, this is going to ramp up even more to include all sorts of in-person gatherings. Here is a shortlist of possibilities:

• Meetups

• Dinners

• Summits

• Pop-ups

• Workshops

5. Nostalgia will take over our campaigns

In 2026, nostalgia will become the go-to creative lever across marketing campaigns as more and more consumers long for The Good Ol’ Days. We’ll see a full aesthetic swing back to analog Y2K and early 2010s: pixel fonts, skeuomorphic design, grainy textures, interfaces that feel delightfully analog. It’ll be a cure for homogenized Big Tech blandness and a way for brands to stand out and stand apart.

You may notice it in the designs, and you may notice it across the mediums that marketing teams choose:

• Zines

• Direct mail

• Swag and gifting

6. Creative Directors will become Chief Storytelling Officers

Storytelling has been a buzzword for several years now, but you might have noticed it gaining steam in the AI era because so much of our content has become cliche. The companies that stand out are the companies that have a cohesive, clear, differentiated story.

And in 2026, brands will elevate a C-suite role to someone who can keep that story straight.

Today, that role probably falls to a Creative Director or to a CMO (or a really marketing savvy CEO/founder). CMOs have enough else to do and are already at the C-suite table. But Creative Directors tend to be pigeonholed into design-specific arenas, which are story-driven in nature but not often holistic enough. If businesses really want to embrace story, they need storytellers who can influence design identity, verbal identity, and even business strategy. It’s 2026; it’s time for storytellers to be part of the executive Slacks and Zooms.

What are your 2026 predictions?

We’d love to hear them! Drop us a comment, or hit reply to this email.

Come join us in Campout 🏕️

Join Campout’s 3-month challenge to find your values, your vision, and your people for 2026.

Tired of resolutions that fizzle by February?

Start 2026 with intention.

Join us for our 3-month challenge, Start With Intention, beginning January 15.

You’ll get:

• 3 live workshops (Jan–Mar) + anytime replays

• A private channel to connect and keep momentum

• Async prompts + resources for deeper reflection

• Full access to Campout’s community, library, and tools throughout the challenge

Full details are available in Campout. We’d love to see you there!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

New retreat dates are up! Head to our experiences page to join our next one in April 2026.

Wanna be friends?

If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.

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!

Every January, there’s a predictable scramble to become, it seems, an entirely new person. New planners, new goals, new habits, new routines, new selves.

No pressure.

So often, our New Years resolutions come down to doing or not doing. We buy the gym membership and the fancy alarm clock, throw away the sugar and booze, and download the various tracker apps, but we spend a lot less time considering the why behind our actions compared to all the external stuff that’s related to them.

Over here at Bonfire, we believe being intentional is the key for most things, but especially when it comes to what you’re pursuing on a macro level, understanding why something is important to you or not, how it fits into the bigger picture of your life, and how to scaffold those choices so you have the best chance of succeeding is of paramount importance!

We developed our 3-month Start With Intention challenge in our Campout community to help you do exactly that in a relaxed, supported way, but we figured we’d also start off the year with a few thought-provoking prompts to get you thinking about all the motivations behind the curtain of your goals.

Oh, and no resolutions required—just some honest noticing.

3 prompts to begin 2026 with more clarity

1. What do you want to feel more of next year, and where did you already experience that feeling in 2025?

We’re already talked about how you don’t want the thing, you want the feeling you associate with that thing. So let’s go!

We’re better at recognizing patterns than inventing entirely new ones. Try tracing the moments that already felt great in 2025, and see if you can identify common threads, environments, or circumstances that link them all together. Maybe all of them were when you were working with a team. Maybe most of them involved being able to set your own schedule. Or they all included friends. Whatever the commonality, this gives you a major clue for what to do more of in 2026.

2. What’s one story you can let go of that would immediately create more room for creativity or ease?

In December, we did a Campout event all about letting go of what wasn’t serving us. Kristen Pavle and Dave Gorum of Play Into Being led us through an exercise to “compost” projects, activities, or beliefs that we wanted to ditch in 2026, but in a way that expressed gratitude for them and turned their energy into something new. (Like composting!) Most of us chose to compost a belief or story that we felt was holding us back.

So maybe it’s the story that “If nobody else sees this, it’s not worth doing.” Or it could be “If I make less money than last year, that’s a failure.” Or “The only way to move forward is if I commit 100%.”

Whatever it is, identifying what that story might be for you can be powerful! And even if you don’t “release” it right away, acknowledging the story means you can start noticing it—and noticing it might take away some of its automatic thrall.

3. If you had zero limitations of time, money, or logistics in 2026, what would you choose to do?

This one’s a classic, we admit. But give it a think.

We know that answering this question implies a level of luxury and privilege that few of us can actually exercise in real life. But the real value in this answer might just be the element of surprise. Maybe in answering, you’re surprised to find out that you wouldn’t change a single thing, even if you had all the time and money in the world. Maybe you realize that you’d go back to school, or quit your job, or move abroad. Maybe you have “Buy a house” on your general life to-do list but actually…if you had unlimited resources…you wouldn’t do that at all. Interesting!

When we free ourselves to think of what we would choose to do without constraints, it shakes up the “shoulds” and “musts.” And helps us see more clearly how many of them are actually mandatory after all.

For all the above questions, hold your answers lightly. Let them guide your first few steps instead of forcing a perfect plan.

Over to you…

What questions do you use to guide your New Year planning? Or do you reject all that out of principle? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

If you want more just like this…

Beginning January 15th:

Join Campout’s 3-month challenge to find your values, your vision, and your people for 2026.

Tired of resolutions that fizzle by February?

Start 2026 with intention.

Join us four our 3-month challenge, Start With Intention, beginning January 15.

You’ll get:

• 3 live workshops (Jan–Mar) + anytime replays

• A private channel to connect and keep momentum

• Async prompts + resources for deeper reflection

• Full access to Campout’s community, library, and tools throughout the challenge

Full details are available in Campout. We’d love to see you there!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

New retreat dates are coming soon. You can join the waitlist for our next one, coming spring of 2026.

Wanna be friends?

If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.

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!

Make something you love

One of the trickiest challenges we face when building startup brands at Bonfire is working with a founding team that doesn’t care about their product.

Seems hard to believe, I know, but it’s amazing how many products exist simply because the founders saw a lucrative opportunity and/or a technology gap and went for it, throwing purpose and passion to the wind. We marketers can (and do) reverse-engineer a “why” story for these brands, but doesn’t that seem a little backwards?

In the words of Simon Sinek, shouldn’t these businesses “start with why”?

In the words of the Black Eyed Peas, “Where is the love?”

By contrast, when you do meet someone who has crafted something they really truly love, their output radiates warmth and energy and positivity. Their output draws people in. Their output gives them the spark to go and create even more.

Throughout 2025, we’ve had the chance to meet so many folks making something they love, be it startup founders, retreat attendees, business friends, or community members. And we’ve had the chance to reflect on this question for ourselves.

What do we love?

(Important, not-easy question.)

And how can we do even more of it in 2026?

(Also important, also not easy to answer.)

This question is not only for those of us who are running a business. This question is for everyone! Sure, you may not be able to turn the B2B company you work for into a personal passion project, but we all have aspects of our time and energy that we do control. What would it look like to spend a little more time focusing on what you love in 2026, big or small?

Looking ahead, I’ve come up with a handful of ideas of ways to do more of what you love in 2026, ideas of all shapes and sizes.

As you start to wrap up the year and look ahead to 2026, we hope you can spend some time thinking about the things (and people) you love and how the coming year might offer opportunities to lean in even further to these places of warmth, energy, and positivity.

How to do more of what you love

Find the love in what you’re currently doing.

You might not be in your dream role right now. You might not be able to control every aspect of your workday. So it might require a bit of creative thinking or compartmentalizing to unearth the parts of your standard day-to-day that bring you joy.

• Notice when you feel most “in flow” during your day—what are you doing?

• Reframe the work toward purpose. What is your work teaching you? Where is it taking you? How does it fit into a bigger picture?

• Keep a quick log of tasks that leave you feeling good afterward.

• Volunteer for projects that lean into your strengths or interests.

• Notice what you do first in your day. That may be the thing you love! (Or maybe you just love clearing out your inbox first thing. Understandable.)

• Alternative to the above: Notice what you save to do last during your day. This may be what’s getting in the way of doing more of what you love.

Schedule time for enriching activities.

One of the hardest parts of doing what you love is finding time to do it. So, as we’ve advised before with creative projects, you just have to schedule it.

• Block out one hour a week for something just for you.

• Add joy-based time to your calendar like any other meeting.

• Pick a “do what you love” day and batch the unlovable stuff for the rest of the week.

• Use commute or transition time for a mini reset (a podcast, a call, a walk).

• Set boundaries around your evenings or weekends when you can.

Spend a little L&D on something you care about.

A learning and development budget can be a great way to invest in yourself in the new year, whether it’s an L&D amount given to you by your employer or an L&D amount earmarked from your personal budget. There are countless ways to spend it; we’d just hope you choose something that gets you closer to the types of work and activities you love.

• Take that weirdly-specific-but-entirely-YOU course that you’ve had bookmarked forever.

• Subscribe to a newsletter that teaches you something new and delightful. There are some old favorites of ours here.

• Follow creators who share knowledge in fun, accessible ways.

• Create a personal syllabus for 2026 with 3 things you want to learn.

• Book a Bonfire retreat with us! (Shameless plug.)

Ask others what brings them joy.

Doing more of what you love is made all the better when you are doing it alongside others. Having a community of like-minded people can be a great way to boost your inspiration and your accountability. Not only might you get to learn what others find joyful, you’ll also gain friends to encourage along your journey.

• Start a group chat among friends or a Slack channel among colleagues

• Ask your team or friends: “What’s been energizing you lately?” You might learn a thing or two about where people find joy.

• Host a low-key “show and tell” of hobbies, side projects, or wins.

What will you be doing more of in 2026?

We’d love to know! Let us know the type of things you love and how we can cheer you on in the new year.

Join our 3-month challenge 💪

Sign up for our 2026 community challenge: Start With Intention

3 live workshops & more!

• January: Defining your values + understanding their shadows

• February: Vision crafting for the year ahead

• March: Building rituals that make your work joyful

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out?

Reservations are OPEN for our next retreat in April 2026! Come chill in the French countryside while you explore your values, your inspiration, and your love of fine cheeses.

Wanna be friends?

If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.

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!

Best Books of 2025

In what has become a favorite yearly tradition on this substack, here are our favorite books from the past 12 months, ranked and recapped and linked for your book-reading pleasure.

For the past six years, Kevan has shared a list of all the favorite books he’s read—an eclectic mix of genres, authors, topics, new releases, old classics, etc. To check out some of the past lists of favorite books, here are the lists for 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021. (The archive goes even deeper if you want to search in Substack.)

This year, we’re doing a collab with a total of 15 great books worth checking out.

We love stories. We read a LOT (an average of a book per week or more). We read widely and with a lot of curiosity. We can’t imagine you’ll find too many book lists like this one.

What books did you love this year?

Let us know in the comments or replies. We’d love to add to our reading list!

Kevan’s favorite books of 2025

Nicked by M.T. Anderson

One of the first books I read in 2026, and I never forgot it!

NickedI is historical fiction about a monk on a treasure hunt. It’s the year 1087, and the monk in question is sent as an envoy on a quest with real treasure hunters to recover the bones of a saint. It’s one of those books where you just can’t wait for them to make a movie out of it, and the monk, Nicepherous, is one of those characters you can’t help but root for throughout. He may be the most tenderhearted character you’ll ever meet, and his tenderness is put to good effect in the raucous, entertaining plot.

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkman

Beyond the mountains, more mountains.

~ Haitian proverb

Oliver Burkeman is like if James Clear and Marcus Aurelius had a baby. Oliver’s latest book is a collection of observations and perspectives inspired by a life of meditation. You’ll probably recognize bits from the Slow movement (Slow Food, Slow Internet, etc.), stoicism, and mindfulness. I felt at times existentially challenged and neurotically soothed, often in the same chapter. Overall, though, it was my most-highlighted book of the year, which tells you just how much its lessons on acceptance, peace, control, and patience really hit home.

Oliver also wrote Four Thousand Weeks, a book about time management for our very, extremely, cosmically fleeting lives.

Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara

There’s this sense you convey, through the rhetoric you use, that we should trust you. It’s not just the inclusive language we talked about–including the fact that you keep saying, literally, that you’re here to help. It’s also the authoritative language (the near-perfect grammar, the well-organized lists) and the flattery (praising our writing and our arguments).

The above quote is from a conversation that Vauhini Vara had with an AI chatbot; in the conversations, Vauhini is telling the AI why she found its diction so trustworthy. and I realized, oops, I also convey trustworthiness in the same way.

The book is rife with acute observations like this, connecting our very human lives to the inhuman technologies that are more and more present. There’s an entire chapter about AI image creation. Multiple chapters about tech billionaires. And a really beautiful section about grief and loss, all told with our hyper-technological age in the background.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.

The book title is based on a viral tweet of the Omar El Akkad’s, back in 2023 during a particularly intense moment of conflict between Israel and Palestine. The entire book, then, is that tweet enhanced into hundreds of pages in which Omar states a passionate case for why “conflict” is putting it way too mildly; it’s a war, a genocide, and an atrocity.

What I found particularly gripping about Omar’s narrative is his unpacking of the role that journalism plays in how our world gets shaped. I don’t know that I’ve ever nodded along so enthusiastically to someone’s take on disincentivized media outlets, biased reporting, and the systems that create the status quo. I was a high school sports reporter, so I was literal and figurates MILES away from the war reporting he describes. But as a journalism fanatic, I found it fascinating.

How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast

I want to tell the whole story not for any kind of pity, but for the hope that telling it will make me stop trying to relive it, will make my past go away.

Even though I have spent my entire adulthood creating a different kind of life for myself, my head, my soul, my spirit – whatever you want to call it – is still stuck in the mire of my childhood.

Molly Jong-Fast is the daughter of Erica Jong, a novelist famous for writing Fear of Flying and a mini-celebrity in the 1970s and 80s. I’d never heard of Erica, but I did hear a podcast featuring Molly, picked up this book, and loved it.

I’m a sucker for memoirs by self-aware people, especially when they’re navigating things in life that I have experienced. I’ve yet to lose my mother, but I have lost my dad, and it was—this might sound weird—a bit of a comfort to hear Molly’s journey.

Margot’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

“You think it will wreck my life?” I asked. She stroked my hair. “Yes, Noodle, it will ruin your life, for sure. But sometimes ruining your life is the only thing you want.”

Soon to be an Apple TV+ show, starring Elle Fanning and Ron Swanson!

#notanad (Although wouldn’t that be cool if Apple TV sponsored this newsletter.)

How to Dodge a Cannonball by Dennard Dayle

“Anders.”

“Yeah?”

“You talk a lot.”

“I do, sir. Unless freshly traumatized.”

Tbh, this whole book is rather a trauma for the main character, Anders, who is dodging cannonballs and other Civil War-era chicanery for the entire book. It’s an entertaining, lighthearted form of trauma, though. Turn-of-the-century historical fiction, especially from the Wild West, is an instant add-to-shelf for me, and this was the best one I read this year.

(Content warning: It does contain slang that was used in that era, which had me speed-reading portions. Just fyi.)

Boy by Nicole Galland

“I’m glad you were out here as I was walking by,” he said. “It’s my favorite thing about today. And it’s been a good day.”

There’s a really sweet love story at the heart of Boy, which takes place in Shakespearean England and features two young stage actors, a boy and a girl, navigating the weird gender politics of the 1500s. The boy is a famous actor, playing women’s roles on stage and granting him access to sophisticated inner circles of English high society, where he is utterly inept save for the coaching of his friend, the girl, who is not allowed into these conversations because she is lower class and, critically, a girl. Oof.

It should be noted that I stopped reading this book 3/4 of the way through at the end of a very fulfilling section because, you know, I was just so tickled at where the book ended up and I didn’t want the final act to ruin the vibes.

Shannon’s favorite books of 2025

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

“All ghost stories were wrong; hauntings were so rarely malicious. The dead only wanted to feel included.”

I know folks have been excited about R.F. Kuang for a while, but this was the first of hers I picked up, and I’ll definitely be reading more!

Here’s the concept, which I promise isn’t a spoiler because it’s laid out on the first page: A woman’s PhD advisor dies in an “analytical magick” accident, so she decides to literally go to Hell to retrieve him as that’s the only way to protect her career ambitions. It’s a smart allegory for the abuses of the academy, chock full of philosophy, a surprising amount of humor, satisfying speculative/fantasy elements, and beautiful imagery. Inventive and addictive!

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

“In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness.”

I finally read Braiding Sweetgrass this year, botanist Kimmerer’s love letter to the natural world by reminding us of the indigenous wisdom Western society has worked hard to erase. But “love letter” isn’t quite accurate, as it implies an object of love rather than a merging of subjects through love, which is really what Kimmerer is saying on every leisurely and thoughtful page of this book. We are the Earth, and the Earth is us—how could it ever be otherwise?

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
Translated by Ros Schwartz

“Is there satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering?”

When a group of women emerges after years in an underground bunker with no memory of how they got there, an entire empty (alien?) world awaits them.

Now what?

As this list is revealing, I love me some speculative fiction. Narrow and disquieting, this book has a startlingly contemporary feel when you realize it was written in the 60s. It’s a quick read that will haunt you just a little!

Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica by Sara Wheeler

“As far as I was aware, [Antarctica] was a testing ground for men with frozen beards to see how dead they could get.”

Wheeler’s prose is somehow both dense and funny, cram-jammed with esoteric vocabulary that she tosses off lightly while completely suffused with personality. I’m making my way through her whole oeuvre, and if you like witty, well-researched travel writing and somehow (like me) hadn’t yet read her, you’ll love reading about her whim-forward ramblings on the world’s only unpopulated continent.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

“‘There’s no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little more.’”

There is a micro-story in this book that I will never get out of my head, I don’t think. And like so much of this book, that part smears together fact, faith, and fiction. Cyrus, newly sober, is the orphaned son of Iranian immigrants. Hardly knowing why—let’s call it faith—he seeks out a terminally ill Iranian painter at her exhibit at the Brooklyn museum, and uncovers family secrets along the way. Part dream, part meditation, part poetry (which Akbar is also known for!).

Wanderlust by Reid Mitenbuler

“‘When you stop to consider it, it is amazing how little one year matters.’”

I am decidedly not a biography girlie, but maybe that’s just because you don’t find too many gregarious, loveable weirdos like Peter Freuchen in the annals of history. Freuchen, a Danish Arctic explorer from the early 20th century, Nazi resistance fighter, Hollywood screenwriter, adventure novelist, and eventual American gameshow contestant, was a larger-than-life figure—and not just in the literal manner you can see on the cover of this book. Mitenbuler brings Freuchen’s sparkling personality to life, taking us on a survey of the explorer’s life, in which he seems to have lived ten different lifetimes.

Good Material by Dolly Alderton

“‘You don’t let go once. That’s your first mistake. You say goodbye over a lifetime. You might not have thought about her for ten years, then you’ll hear a song or you’ll walk past somewhere you once went together—something will come to the surface that you’d totally forgotten about. And you say another goodbye. You have to be prepared to let go and let go and let go a thousand times.’”

Despite the pull quote I chose for this book, it’s honestly hilarious. Floundering standup comic Andy just got left by the love of his life, Jen, and he can’t understand why. So he’s trying to find out, while mostly torturing himself and making everything worse in the process. Until we find out maybe it’s quite obvious why Jen left Andy, at least to everyone but him. A truly funny, very clever, and introspective rom-com without the rom.

Upcoming Campout events

Join Campout’s 3-month challenge to find your values, your vision, and your people for 2026.

Tired of resolutions that fizzle by February?

Start 2026 with intention.

Join us four our 3-month challenge, Start With Intention.

You’ll get:

• 3 live workshops (Jan–Mar) + anytime replays

• A private channel to connect and keep momentum

• Async prompts + resources for deeper reflection

• Full access to Campout’s community, library, and tools throughout the challenge

Full details are available in Campout. We’d love to see you there!

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

New retreat dates are coming soon. You can join the waitlist for our next one, coming spring of 2026.

Wanna be friends?

If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.

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!

Content warning: Mentions of mental health issues, disordered eating, and suicide.

The dreaded interview question: “What’s your greatest weakness?”

And the usual answer: “Oh, you know…I would say that I’m a bit of a perfectionist!”

😑 🙄

Mmhm. Ok.

Now, do I think this is a bullshit interview question? Yes. It seems like interviews nowadays are more about seeing if you know how to interview than they are about any legitimate evaluation of your suitability for a certain job. But do I think that answering a question about a character flaw with perfectionism is revealing of the problematic way we think about perfectionism in general? Also yes!

Broadly speaking, we’re quite forgiving with perfectionism, tending to see the people who embody this trait as dedicated, hardworking, detail-oriented, and conscientious. We bandy it about as a humble-brag, a virtue gone just slightly awry.

Who wouldn’t want to strive for perfection? Like, duh.

Except, in our productivity-and-progress-obsessed culture, where nuance is considered inefficient, and all-or-nothing thinking is seen as a marker of conviction, we forget that perfection does not exist.

And there are serious costs to striving for the impossible.

Perfectionism is not the virtue we keep pretending it is

If you have a subscription to the New Yorker, I highly suggest Leslie Jamison’s article, “The Pain of Perfectionism,” from earlier this year. In it, she talks about research from psychologists Gordon Flett and Paul Hewitt, who have studied the topic for decades and have come to a stark conclusion:

Perfectionism is not excellence—it’s a self-sabotaging, stress-inducing trait linked to real psychological, physical, and social harm.

What we colloquially call “perfectionism,” they’ve elaborated into a 3-pronged model that adds a lot more depth:

• Self-oriented perfectionism: The belief is “I must be perfect.” Unrealistic internal pressure, chronic self-evaluation, persistent fear of mistakes.

• Other-oriented perfectionism: “Others should be perfect.” High expectations of colleagues, partners, employees; increased conflict and relational breakdown.

• Socially prescribed perfectionism: “Others expect me to be perfect.” The most toxic dimension—linked to anxiety disorders, depression, suicidality.

The impacts of perfectionism they’ve identified are quite severe, so why do we tend to think of it more lightly, just as a trait of our most annoying bosses or the frustrating part of ourselves that always wants more information before starting a project? I think it’s because we’ve normalized and even glorified the outward expressions of perfectionism for so long, and it’s a lot harder to perceive someone’s inner belief system and appreciate all the various behaviors that may stem from the same poisoned root. Meaning: Someone’s persnicketiness about over-preparing for a presentation may be classified “perfectionism,” and the results of that perfectionism even celebrated. But that same person’s tendency to cut people out of their lives, their chronic depression, or their eating disorder are all seen as unrelated issues.

Beliefs are our filters, and all of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors running through these filters. Boiling down perfectionism to the beliefs of “I must be perfect,” “Others should be perfect,” and “Others expect me to be perfect,” reveal exactly how pervasive and toxic perfectionism can be.

Self-oriented perfectionism has strong correlations to chronic anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. Those with self-oriented or socially prescribed perfectionism may also avoid “stretch projects,” mask procrastination as high standards, and have a hard time finishing work. Other-oriented perfectionism often shows up as criticism, impatience, and impossible expectations of those around you, leading to isolation. And overall, research links perfectionistic tendencies to, increased stress reactivity, sleep disturbances, higher rates of rumination and cortisol elevation.

It’s a short walk to seeing how all these beliefs can lead to isolation and shame.

Why we keep glorifying perfectionism anyway

Productivity culture, the myth of meritocracy, and Western capitalistic values keep our worship of perfection alive and well, despite the human costs.

As mentioned, perfectionism often masquerades as diligence or discipline, so high achievers are rewarded for “flawless” output even if the process is unhealthy. How many hustle-and-grind stories do you read on LinkedIn every week where someone is overblowing touting their triumphs after a frankly horrific-sounding period in which they sacrificed their sleep, peace, leisure time, hobbies, and sometimes their health to achieve some project or business outcome?

The concept of the “ideal worker” also comes into play here. Whether they admit it or not, companies want to hire people with unlimited availability, unfaltering loyalty, and as few competing priorities as possible. We all intuit this, and we act accordingly—and then, when we wise up to this bullshit, we must still pretend accordingly, or risk losing our livelihoods.

Additionally, we live in an increasingly surveillance-oriented culture. Not only does social media encourage us all to present an aesthetic of flawlessness, but it also becomes the permanent record of any mistake, real or perceived. We all operate under the “threat” of anything we do or say being captured and broadcast to a potentially infinite audience. And this internalized pressure becomes a self-reinforcing loop, whether or not our fears ever come to pass.

In these conditions, perfectionism becomes protection. And we fail to notice how it’s eroding us from the inside.

Join Campout’s 3-month challenge to find your values, your vision, and your people for 2026.

You’ll get:

• 3 live workshops (Jan–Mar) + anytime replays

• A private channel to connect and keep momentum

• Async prompts + resources for deeper reflection

• Full access to Campout’s community, library, and tools throughout the challenge

  Join the challenge

Detoxing from perfectionism

So how do you shuck the perfectionist manacles without swinging all the way to indifference and nihilism? (Though I would encourage everyone to consider positive nihilism if you need an existential breath of fresh air!)

First, we must reframe our definition of excellence to disinclude perfection. True excellence, and not just a snapshot of a single achievement, depends on adaptability, experimentation, creativity, and learning. Mistakes are data to learn from, but perfectionists treat mistakes as moral failures. Creativity thrives on experimentation, but a perfectionist can’t tolerate a failed experiment.

Sustainable success is about process, not outcomes. You iterate, you stutter-step, you find a way to keep moving forward.

Imagine if success depended on flawless first attempts. We wouldn’t have airplanes, vaccines, computers, movies. Imagine if every great artist, thinker, or inventor tried something once and then gave up.

You hear how bonkers that sounds, right?

So next time you’re tempted by perfectionism, try the following:

1. Shift from “perfect” to “effective.” Ask yourself: What outcome actually matters here? Optimize for sufficiency of that condition rather than holistic perfection. You might be surprised by what ends up being sufficient! Since perfectionism can be paralyzing, this shift gives you a way to move forward and break your patterns.

2. Practice non-catastrophic mistakes. One of the best ways to retrain your brain out of fear is to give it new experiences that prove the fear untrue. If you fear making mistakes and the judgment of others, identify low-stakes scenarios where it’ll be ok to give less than 100%. Maybe cooking a risky new recipe for dinner. Maybe a totally internal presentation with only close colleagues. Make the mistakes, and watch how much nobody cares. (Freedom!)

3. Get clarity around others’ expectations. Speaking of nobody cares…Instead of assuming that everyone around you expects perfection, dare to have explicit conversations around other people’s expectations for you, your work, and your relationships. Negotiate clarity instead of assuming impossible standards.

4. Strengthen your self-compassion. Underrated performance tool! If you have to bully yourself to be “perfect,” do you think that will work sustainably? And even if it works temporarily, do you think that will have net-positive effects on your psyche? Kindness toward and compassion for yourself is also the first step in having those feelings for others—necessary to combat the trap of other-oriented perfectionism!

Perfectionism doesn’t have to be your destiny. It’s not some personality quirk that you’re the victim of—it’s a public health issue! And just like with other mental health concerns or neurodivergence, perfectionism is a spectrum.

Perfectionism strikes people, it strikes teams and organizations, and treating it like a virtue in disguise only stops us from addressing the systemic and cultural causes.

Over to you…

Are you the victim of your own high standards? Do you see perfectionism show up in your life and work? We’d love to hear how you’re combatting it!

Subscribe now

Events, resources, and more

Free Campout event 🗓️

LAST CALL: Let Go: A Release Ritual - RSVP HERE | Open to all

with Play Into Being’s Kristen Pavle and Dave Gorum

Join us for a free 60-minute workshop to practice the art of letting go as we usher out the year. Learn a simple release ritual you can use again and again, swap stories with others, a move into 2026 with more creative energy.

Join our 3-month challenge 💪

Sign up for our 2026 community challenge: Start With Intention

3 live workshops & more!

• January: Defining your values + understanding their shadows

• February: Vision crafting for the year ahead

• March: Building rituals that make your work joyful

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out?

Reservations are OPEN for our next retreat in April 2026! Come chill in the French countryside while you explore your values, your inspiration, and your love of fine cheeses.

Wanna be friends?

If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.

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!

Gift Guide 2025

It is officially gift guide season.

Some of our Substack besties are already posting their holiday gift ideas, so with a generous spirit and a FOMO heart, we are here to do the same.

The same, but different.

Last year, we put together a list of uncommon and unexpected gifting ideas, based on some of the things that were meaningful to us throughout the year. Things like buying a ridiculous domain name just for fun. (Spoiler: silly domains will make a return on this 2025 gift guide.)

Kumbaya Moments

Bonfire's 2024 gift guide of unexpected delights

Read more

a year ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Kevan Lee

For this year’s list, we are drawing inspiration from the Bonfire 2024 gift guide and again putting an emphasis on unexpected gifts: digital delights, one-of-a-kind experiences, and giving back. And it’s all based on the work we do at Bonfire and the things we value.

You will notice that some of these ideas are gifts you can give to people on your wishlist. In other cases, the gift recipient is a creator or an organization. Sometimes the gift recipient is future you. Our gift-listing knows now bounds!

Bonfire’s 2025 unconventional gift guide

1. Make a mixtape of TikTok and IG follows

Inspired by the days of mixtape cassettes and burned CDs, how about creating a modern mixtape of amazing accounts to follow on social? It’s the longform equivalent of sending someone a single video that made you think of them. It is a whole curated playlist of creators you think they will love.

You can theme them, just like an old-school mixtape.

Knowledge influencer mixtape

A short list to get you started:

• Cy Canterel

• Eugene Healey

• Sam Ogborn

• Christopher Morency

• Agus Panzoni

Dog meme mixtape

For the friend who sends you dog memes at 1:43 a.m.

• We Rate Dogs

• Life with Duke

• Albert the pug

• Tucker Budzyn

Package it up in a note or a tiny Notion page, et voila!

“Here is your personalized algorithm, curated with love.”

2. Subscribe to a content creator you love

If you get a lot of joy out of a particular person’s content, give them the gift of your support by upgrading from an every-so-often lurker to an I-believe-in-you subscriber. Speaking from personal experience, our hearts light up whenever we get a new subscriber notification.

Here are a few to get you started. We polled our LinkedIn followers for recommendations, and sprinkled in a few of our favorites too:

• The Offbeat by

• Delight Path by

• Creator Spotlight by Francis Zierer

• Money Words by

• VeryGoodCopy by Eddie Shleyner

• BTTM by

• The Brief Creative by Dmitry Shamis

• Gobbledy by

• Good Thinking by

Bonus: Give a gift subscription to a Substack you love

Substack makes it easy to buy a gift subscription for someone else. If there is a premium newsletter you love or you know your friend or family member loves, you can buy them a paid membership in their name.

“Your Christmas present is that you get all the good content with none of the paywall.”

Bonus: Tell a content creator that you love their stuff

This costs zero dollars, takes only a couple of minutes, and means the world to the creator.

It is easy to assume that your favorite creator is inundated with email replies and DMs all the time. Most are not. Most content is consumed quietly, with very little response, so a short note or a thoughtful comment can be a big encouragement.

“Hey, I have been reading you all year and your work actually helped me do X.”

That sentence alone is such a huge gift!

3. Commission something tiny and delightful from an indie creator

Instead of a mass-produced print, commission something small and specific.

Ideas:

• A personalized doodle from your favorite illustrator

• A custom pixel character from a game artist

• A poem from a Substack poet

• A 30-second “theme song” from an indie musician

• A handwritten letter or postcard from an artist you admire

This is a gift for the recipient and also for the creator whose work you are supporting.

4. Buy someone a single high-intent hour

Gift someone an hour with a specialist who can tangibly improve their life or work.

For example:

• A resumé or LinkedIn glow up

• A one hour website or mini brand audit

• A portfolio review

• A creative coaching session

• A storytelling or editing session

• A values or career design conversation

• A personal values workshop

• A goals and energy mapping session

• A creative brainstorming sprint

• A tarot reading or astrology chart reading

(We can do a lot of these for you at Bonfire, or we can recommend someone in our network!)

This is perfect for the friend who always says, “I really need to finally do something about X,” but never does. You can be the one who moves that dream forward.

5. Sponsor one small dream

Ask someone you love, “What is one tiny dream or experiment you have wanted to try but have not gotten around to yet?” Then sponsor it! Let your inner Shark Tank shark out.

You could:

• Sponsor a test launch of their Etsy shop

• Pay for their first Substack upgrade

• Cover their first month on a tool they have hesitated buying

• Sponsor their first print run of stickers, zines, or pins

• Pay for their first creative class or workshop

6. Create a “starter pack” folder of creative inspiration

A modern care package, of sorts, but all digital. There’s a big, community version of this at Corners of the Internet Database, but yours can be a micro, starter version.

Fill a folder or shared doc with:

• Five essays or articles that shaped you this year

• Screenshots, moodboards, Pinterest saves, or links

• Songs you played on repeat

• A few favorite quotes

• A short note explaining why each one mattered to you

This is a deeply personal, totally free gift. It says, “Here is what lit me up this year, and I want to pass that spark to you.”

7. Gift yourself (or your friend) a one-of-a-kind retreat experience

We just so happen to know the perfect retreat.

We are hosting a weeklong creative retreat / professional getaway / career sabbatical in the French countryside this April. For the next two weeks, we have special holiday pricing of $250 off the original price.

If you want to give yourself the gift of time, space, creativity, and a bit of adventure, this might be it.

Check out all the details here, and fill out the form or send us a reply to let us know you are interested.

You can also frame this as a gift: “I am buying Future Me one unforgettable week.”

8. Donate to a charity of your choice

Donating to charity never goes out of season.

We have spent a lot of time in values conversations this year. Coaching clients through their values. Talking values at our retreat. Finding charities and non-profits and virtuous businesses that align with your values can be an incredibly meaningful act.

You can give in money, time, or skills.

Donate money

Here are some favorite tech-adjacent charities and non-profits you could donate to:

• Code2040

• Black Girls Code

• Lesbians Who Tech

• Black & Brown Founders

• Anita B

• Project Potluck

Donate your time and your skills

We have been fortunate to connect with multiple brands this year through our Brand Together initiative, where we give free brand marketing support to purpose-led businesses.

You have great skills to offer too. Subject matter expertise. Strategy. Copy. Design. Operations. Mentorship. Donating a bit of your time and attention can be a huge gift for any organization.

Sponsor someone’s favorite charity in their honor

If there is someone in your life who talks openly about causes they care about, you can donate in their honor and tell them:

“Your work has inspired me this year, so I made a donation to X because of you.”

Unexpected, generous, and very likely to make them tear up.

9. Host a personal workshop for someone

You can also give the gift of your own gifts.

Offer someone a short guided session that you host, based on what you know and love. Maybe for you, that’s copywriting or editing, personal styling, Meta ads wizardry, yoga or a weight training routine, plant parenting, closet organizing, or a particular dish you’re known for cooking.

This costs you only time and attention, which are some of the most generous things you can give.

10. Send someone an “online vibe refresh”

Do a small glow up of something in their digital life:

• Rewrite their LinkedIn headline

• Design a simple Canva banner for their profile

• Make them a personal color palette

• Curate content pillars for their personal brand

• Clean up the copy on their website or bio

It is the perfect “I love you and also I am a nerd about this” gift.

BONUS: All-digital stocking stuffers

No shipping. No clutter. Maximum delight.

A few ideas:

• Emoji domain name — aka 🔥🏕️🏰.agency
  A callback to last year. Buy someone an absolutely unnecessary but deeply amusing emoji or novelty domain that matches their vibe.

• iCloud or Google Drive storage space
  For that friend who is barraged by storage upgrade notifications. You can gift it in the form of an Apple or Google Play gift card.

• Online reading buddy
  With Pocket no longer with us, how about gifting an article-loving friend a new bookmarking tool like Readwise Reader or Sublime.

• Membership community
  There are so many cool online communities out there. Take a spin through Circle’s community network to spot a few, or find out from a friend or loved one if there’s one they’ve been eyeing.

• A premium Notion template

• Cool tools
  Gift a month or two to a favorite tech tool: Canva Pro for the design-curious, premium Zoom so no more 45-minute calls, a Slack upgrade so everyone gets custom emojis.

• Digital “peace” kit
  Password manager, mindfulness app, adblock extension, etc.

Happy holidays!

We hope this gift list gets your brain turning with some fresh ideas. Let us know anything we missed in the comments or in the replies!

Upcoming Campout events

Let Go: A Release Ritual - RSVP HERE | Open to all

We’re joining up with with Play Into Being’s Kristen Pavle and for a free 60-minute workshop to practice the art of letting go as we usher out the year. Learn a simple release ritual you can use again and again, swap stories with others, a move into 2026 with more creative energy.

Check the event description for more. Spoiler: Actual fire may/will be involved! 🔥

In Campout, our digital community, we talk about stuff like this on the daily in our channels and a couple times a month in our live events. All supported by exercises and templates to help you craft a career with purpose and intention.

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

We have a holiday discount on our next retreat in April 2026! Until December 14th, you can come chill in the French countryside while you explore your values, your inspiration, and your love of fine cheeses for $250 off the normal price!

Wanna be friends?

If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.

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 brand, marketing, and creative 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!

Check us out on Robin Zander’s podcast, Snafu, talking about how we build a meaningful business!

Day Jobs get a bad rap.

If you’re a creative person or an entrepreneur, the idea of having a Day Job—labor that sustains your life and funds whatever pursuit you really want to be doing—is often tainted with the shame of compromise and implications of failure.

The Day Job seems to say that if you were actually successful at what you really wanted, then you wouldn’t need it. Poor you. How sad!

But what is missing from this attitude, of course, is nuance, subtlety, and the acknowledgment of the fact that transitions, transformations, and metamorphosis are processes. Becoming takes time! And while you become—become an artist, a writer, an entrepreneur, a stay-at-home-parent, a farmer, or any other thing that isn’t having a full-time salaried job working mostly for the benefit of someone who isn’t you—you need support.

Don’t let the binary thinking that upholds capitalist fairytales get you down. (There’s a reason we culturally fixate on the fantasy of overnight success, you know?)

But I actually want to back up a little in this employment equation. I want to talk to all the folks out there who don’t yet have a Day Job, but just a regular old Job-Job, a 9-to-whatever that you still think of as your primary work identity. I’m talking to you if your Job-Job still pays the bills. It still looks good on LinkedIn. It still gives you healthcare, stability, structure, and maybe even a sense of belonging at the monthly happy hour, or a feeling of accomplishment when you nail your QBR presentation.

…and you have a creative project or a side hustle or something sitting in your garage that calls to you on evenings and weekends. Because to even get to the point of having a Day Job, there comes a squishy decision moment where you have to make the call—not to quit the Job-Job. Not burn it all down. Not run off to Bali to write your novel in a hammock (unless you want to). But there is a time to demote your Job-Job to Day Job. To reposition it emotionally, mentally, spiritually, energetically. So that you can invest the best of yourself in the creative pursuit that’s been tugging at your sleeve.

There is a point where it can be healthier—not riskier—to quietly demote your Job-Job into your Day Job.

Here are a few signs it might be time. (And tips on how to do so below!)

1. You notice a shift or disparity in your enthusiasm compared to last month, quarter, year, etc.

You’re not disengaged. You’re still doing good work, still collaborative, communicative, and occasionally even delighted.

But the “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” performance review question and the “Here’s why it’ll look good for you to crush our Q3 targets” spiel your manager keeps on about no longer resonate or motivate. You can see the next rung on the ladder, but you don’t care to grab it. Last year, or maybe even last quarter, you were angling for a promotion, for a learning opportunity, to collect accolades or experiences that would look great on LinkedIn.

Now? It’s like you’re watching a movie about your job—and you aren’t even the main character.

Meanwhile, your “side project” won’t leave you alone. It’s haunting you. You’re thinking about it in the shower, on the metro, while your most annoying coworker is Slacking you. And when you talk about your work to loved ones, you’re only complaining.

Basically, your enthusiasm disparity is becoming too big to ignore.

What this usually means: Your motivation hasn’t disappeared—it’s just being rerouted. And ignoring that rerouting tends to breed resentment toward your job, toward yourself, toward anything blocking the other thing that’s trying to get your attention!

2. Your job starts draining your energy instead of giving it structure

Your job doesn’t have to be your soulmate, but ideally it should offer one of two energetic resources: momentum or scaffolding.

• Momentum gives you energy by moving you toward something. Think: a certain level of financial stability, novel experiences you crave, skills you want to build, etc.

• Scaffolding gives you energy by providing stability, like a savings milestone/financial safety net, a clear and boundaried schedule or a super flexible schedule, healthcare, paid vacation time, etc.

If it feels like your job is currently giving you neither—and you’re coming home too depleted to put any energy into your creative life—it might be time to reclassify it as a Day Job. (Caveat: You might not be able to fix a fast-paced and demanding workplace culture, but you can choose not to perpetuate that for yourself as much as possible!)

What this usually means: You’re over-invested or being forced to over-invest energetically and/or emotionally in work, or you no longer need the momentum or scaffolding your job previously provided. That’s a good sign to reevaluate its role in your life!

3. You’re performing a version of yourself at work that feels increasingly distant

This is a quiet but powerful sign.

You notice that Work You and Real You have drifted apart. The version of you in your creative life is sharper, braver, more expansive, more joyful, or more peaceful. The version of you at work is competent, polite, efficient, agreeable, pleasant, professional. Work You is…fine.

You’re not being fake; you’re being functional. Or maybe you’re only being a fraction of who you really are. And you’re definitely not being the version of yourself you like the most! There might have always been a gap between Real You and Work You, but now it’s starting to chafe.

What this usually means: Your creative identity has already moved on and rooted elsewhere. Even subconsciously, you’re not looking for your job to be the place you self-actualize anymore, so it’s not where you feel like yourself. (But it can be the place that pays you while you do that elsewhere!)

How to mentally and emotionally “downgrade” your job to a Day Job (in a healthy way!)

This isn’t about checking out—it’s about recalibrating. The goal is to reduce the emotional/mental load so you can reallocate that energy toward your creative pursuit without torching something that’s providing for your life.

Here’s what that might look like in practice:

1. Redefine success at work

Shift from outperforming to performing well enough to maintain trust. Ask yourself: What is the minimum viable version of work that allows me to keep my reputation solid? You don’t need gold stars when you’re building something bigger elsewhere. And you might even find that you’ve been waaay overfunctioning this whole time. (Bonus: Peruse last week’s Substack about 50 different ways to define success to find new things to hang your hat on!)

2. Create a psychological boundary

This is perhaps the true power of the Day Job. It creates psychological hierarchy! Try this manta: “This is just my Day Job.”

Say it before meetings with your manager. Say it after Slack pings from that annoying coworker. Say it when you feel your heart rate spike because someone used the phrase “Q4 OKRs.”

When you remind yourself that your real work is elsewhere, you’ll be surprised at how easily you can do this next one…

3. Cap the emotional labor

Start paying attention to and stop volunteering for all the invisible work: emotional caretaking, cultural glue, unofficial mentoring, conflict smoothing, morale repair. You absolutely can be a good colleague without being the office therapist!

4. Invest your “excess excellence” elsewhere

That extra hour of polish you would normally give a presentation? Now you’re using it to outline the next chapter of your novel. The extra tasks you would have picked up because Brian went on vacation and didn’t have a solid hand-off plan? What a great time to take an online seminar on setting up your personal website!

The excess excellence you were giving to your Job-Job? Your Day Job doesn’t need all that! Isn’t that awesome?

5. Schedule your creative pursuits like a job, too

The great thing about Day Jobs is that they are, categorically, less important than your creative pursuits. Which gives you permission to treat your creative pursuits seriously.

So schedule time to dedicate to it! Not just “after work,” or “if I have time this week.” Now, you can put it on your calendar with the same seriousness you’d give a client meeting and protect it without apology.

The bottom line: Demoting your Job-Job to your Day Job rather than quitting outright isn’t a failure; it’s a necessary step to set your creative pursuit up to actually succeed. And sometimes the bravest, most strategic career move isn’t quitting, but rather quietly, intentionally shifting your center of gravity toward the life you’re trying to build.

Over to you

Have you made the Job-Job to Day Job transition? Ever transitioned from Day Job back into Job-Job? (I have!) Tell us about your experiences in the comments—the joys, the challenges, the self-doubt, and triumphs!

Events, resources, and more

Free Campout event 🗓️

Let Go: A Release Ritual - RSVP HERE | Open to all

with Play Into Being’s and

Join us for a free 60-minute workshop to practice the art of letting go as we usher out the year. Learn a simple release ritual you can use again and again, swap stories with others, a move into 2026 with more creative energy.

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out?

Reservations are OPEN for our next retreat in April 2026! Come chill in the French countryside while you explore your values, your inspiration, and your love of fine cheeses.

Wanna be friends?

If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.

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.