Wishing you a great week!

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

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

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

But as Lowe beautifully states:

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

Quite simply, you have an exchange rate problem.

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

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The real question: What’s cheap for you?

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

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

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

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

• Do I mind paying this cost?

• Am I willing to pay this cost?

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

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

• What costs can I pay sustainably over time?

Success currency checklist:

Time & effort currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

• Give up my leisure time

• Give up time with my loved ones

• Restrict my ability to be spontaneous

• Follow a very strict schedule

• Put in long or grueling hours

• Deal with bureaucracy/administrative overhead

• Delay gratification for very long periods

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

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

Financial & security currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

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

• Spend the money I have

• Take big financial risks

• Endure financial instability/inconsistency

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

• Bet on myself financially with no guarantees

• Ask for money and/or negotiate aggressively

Relational currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

• Miss important moments with loved ones

• Accept outgrowing existing relationships

• Give up or delay having a family

• Lose proximity to family/community

• Be lonely

• Be emotionally available even when exhausted

• Endure the vulnerability of being known by others

• Survive without my support system

• Network even when tired or introverted

• Navigate conflict with those I love

• Handle relational ambiguity or instability

• Have to rely on others to get something done

Reputational currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

• Accept public exposure/lack of privacy

• Be unable to fully separate my work from my identity

• Have my work/output criticized

• Be publicly attacked or scrutinized

• Be disliked or misunderstood

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

• Experiment publicly

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

• Risk failure in public

• Attach my name to unfinished ideas

• Be visibly ambitious

Emotional & psychological currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

• Endure emotional discomfort

• Maintain emotional regulation in the face of strain

• Practice mental discipline

• Accept living with uncertainty

• Navigate a new/foreign situation

• Maintain conviction despite negative feedback

• Be patient with slow progress

• Tolerate a lack of structure

• Tolerate an extremely strict structure

• Wait or pause for indefinite periods

• Sit with boredom

• Stay optimistic through repeated setbacks

• Have to rely only on myself to get something done

Identity & ego currencies

I believe I find it easier than others to…

• Have a low status/unprestigious job

• Have a boring or unstimulating job

• Experience rejection

• Express my true point of view

• Not express my true point of view

• Not have autonomy/creative autonomy

• Be a beginner again

• Repeatedly start over

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

• Follow direction even when I disagree

• Be the one ultimately responsible in high stakes situations

• Change identities repeatedly across my life

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

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

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Aligning goals and tolerances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over to you…

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

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna work with us?

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

Wanna hang out in person?

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

Wanna hang out online?

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

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

~ Kevan & Shannon

Remedies for feeling alone on a team

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

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

Or lack thereof.

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

How would you do on the survey, today?

Here are the 12 questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Do you have a best friend at work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The archetypes of under-support

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

You might recognize yourself here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are people-managing yourself

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

• manager

• coach

• career sponsor

• therapist

• strategist

• advocate

• motivator

• feedback loop

• recognition system

• boundary setter

• chief of staff

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

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

Where to find support

1. Manager support

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

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

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

2. Peer support

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

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

3. Sponsor support

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

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

4. Craft support

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

5. Self-support

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

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

6. Community support

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

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

Getting the support you need

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

• Who could be helping me with this?

• Have I clearly asked for what I need?

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

• What would change if this were supported?

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

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

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

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna work with us?

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

Wanna hang out in person?

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

Wanna hang out online?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Register here

The thing vs. the feeling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Job title

• Income

• Lifestyle

• Material goods

• Appearance

• Relationship

• Influence

• Creative output

• Awards

• Etc.

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

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

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

Let’s break down the mistakes of each.

Mistake 1: Just trying to get the thing

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

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

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

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

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

Mistake 2: Believing we can’t get the thing

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

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

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

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

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

How to listen to your jealousy instead

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

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

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

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

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

Over to you…

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

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

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

Wanna work with us?

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

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

Wishing you a great week!

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

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

One of our dreams involves retreats.

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

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

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

First off, what exactly is a Bonfire retreat?

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 takeaways from Bonfire Retreat #2

1 - Transformation isn’t demographic-dependent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 - Everybody needs somebody.

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

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

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

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

Or to have a group where you could be yourself.

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

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

3 - Nature was the real MVP.

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

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

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

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

4 - Logistics get easier the more you do logistics.

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

Logistics we got better with at Retreat #2:

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

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

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

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

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

Wanna come to the next one?

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

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

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

Wanna work with us?

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

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

Wishing you a great week!

“We’re a data-driven company.”

“I use just the facts to make decisions.”

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

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

Yeah. It doesn’t work like that.

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

And newsflash: Emotions are data.

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

Let’s get into it.

You can’t decide without emotion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data doesn’t decide. People do.

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

It obviously doesn’t.

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

• Which metrics even matter here?

• What timeframe or other constraint is relevant?

• What’s the definition of a successful outcome?

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

^^^ These layers are never neutral!

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

Data-driven decisions vs. motivated reasoning

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

According to researcher Ziva Kunda:

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

In other words, our process looks like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real decisions are imperfect. Bummer.

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

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

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

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

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

• What do I want to be true?

• What am I afraid of?

• Which metrics am I privileging—and why?

• What story am I trying to justify?

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

Over to you…

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

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

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

Wanna work with us?

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

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

Wishing you a great week!

AI’s impact on the way we create

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

• Ooh, I have a newsletter idea!

• Hmm, the idea is only a headline.

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

• Writing is hard.

• What if I had ChatGPT do it?

Rest assured, I did not capitulate.

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

But the temptation was there.

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

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

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

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

Are you, as readers, destined to consume slop?

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

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

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

We are savvier readers because of AI

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

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

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

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

That’s ai;dr.

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

Instant ai;dr.

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

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

Scroll Sick

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

Thanks for reading! Scroll Sick is a newsletter with cherry-picked suggestions about where to devote your attention…

Read more

2 months ago · 29 likes · 6 comments · Carmen

Carmen goes on to say:

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

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

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

• Blog posts

• LinkedIn content

• Newsletters

• Strategic docs and memos

• Emails

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

• Lists

• Headlines

• Subject lines

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

We need to be savvier writers, working with AI

AI is very good at certain layers of writing:

• Structuring

• Summarizing

• Pattern-matching

• Filling in gaps

• Generating options

But those were never the hard parts.

The hard parts are:

• Having a point of view

• Noticing something others haven’t articulated yet

• Deciding what matters

• Choosing what not to say

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

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

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

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

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

• Revising my outline for structure

• Summarizing my research

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

• Filling in gaps in my reasoning

• Generating options for headlines and keywords

Rather than prompting AI with:

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

I could have used:

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

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

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

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

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

How to move forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

• For speed, not substance

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

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

What rules and reminders have you put in place?

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

But wait! There’s more…

Wanna hang out in person?

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

Wanna work with us?

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

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

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

Wishing you a great week!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No. No one is asking for free.

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

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

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

1. Social media: Algorithmic throttling and paid amplification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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?)

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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.