It’s early September, and I always find this the proper new year. Not January. January is dark and everyone is tired and nobody really means it. September is the one where something shifts. The light changes, the mornings have an edge to them, and there’s a feeling of everybody going back to their desks at […]

This is about a small, quite specific thing that makes an enormous difference to how much help you actually get. And it’s all in the way you ask. Picture the situation. You feel a bit stuck on something in your business, so you do the sensible, sane thing, you ask someone. A friend, a peer, […]

This is about the single most powerful way a creative business grows. And it’s not the thing you’ll hear almost anywhere else, which is rather the point. It isn’t posting more. It isn’t being everywhere, all the time. It isn’t finally cracking the algorithm. It’s something much quieter, and something, I think, you’re already rather […]

This is about something I hear from creatives more than almost anything else, and yet it’s the thing we talk about least. How lonely it can be to run a creative business. It’s a particular kind of loneliness, and I think that’s why it’s so rarely named. Because on the surface, you might not look […]

This is about the peculiar problem of having too many good ideas. Not too few. Too many. And why letting some of them stay exactly as they are, ideas, or hobbies, rather than folding every single one into the business, might be one of the most quietly confident things you can do. Because if you’re […]

This is the sixth episode of the Summer Series. It’s about a quiet fear I see in almost every creative I work with. The worry that we’ve already said our thing too many times, that everyone must be tired of hearing it, and that we ought to come up with something new. And why that […]

This is the fifth episode of the Summer Series. It’s about why work you’re genuinely proud of can quietly wash past people, and what changes when you start telling the story underneath it, rather than only showing the finished thing. You’ll know the feeling. You finish something you’re really proud of, a piece of work, […]

This is the fourth episode of the Summer Series. It’s about the most valuable thing you do, which is so often the very thing you’ve stopped noticing, because it comes so easily to you. It’s about a quiet blind spot almost every creative I work with has. The most valuable part of your work is […]

This is the third episode of the Summer Series. It’s about that gap so many of us have, wonderful in person, but somehow it doesn’t quite come across online, and how to close it. This one is about a gap I see in almost every creative I work with. The gap between how alive and […]

This is the second episode of the Summer Series. It’s all about how so much gets easier, your marketing, your decisions, all of it, once the centre of your business is clear. (If you’re just joining, episode 148, the first one in this summer series is the best place to start.) I read something recently […]