Media I've Consumed As A Creative Director

Being average, leading badly, design religion, and the curse of knowing too much.

You're Not a Perfectionist. You're Just Scared.

you want to be special, but you're just average

The fear of being average is just perfectionism in disguise. I wasn’t expecting a piece from chicgirlmoment this week to get at that so clearly, but it did. The point is simple. Not everything deserves your full effort. Pretending it does does not make you exceptional. It makes you scattered.

Your job is to have a strong opinion about everything. Type, color, copy, concept. Eventually, that way of thinking starts leaking into your personal life. Sometimes without you even noticing. Everything becomes a project. A hobby stops being a hobby and starts feeling like a portfolio piece before you have even had the chance to enjoy it. An interest becomes an identity test.

What the piece gets right is this. The real skill is being honest about what actually matters. What is a passion? What is just something you like? Those are not the same thing, and they do not ask for the same level of energy. Confuse them, and you end up doing both halfway.

You will be average at one thing so you can be great at another. That is not failure. It is just honesty about where your time and energy are meant to go.

»»»»»»»»»

The Room Takes Your Temperature Whether You Like It Or Not

The most underrated leadership skill is self knowledge. Damola Adamolekun runs Red Lobster with the kind of clarity that suggests he knows exactly who he is. He is transparent. Direct. Comfortable setting high goals. Comfortable, too, with the fact that he works a lot and does not feel the need to apologize for it. That is not a personality type. It is a decision, and most leaders never fully make it.

What stayed with me from the interview is how much of his thinking applies to creative leadership. You are always setting the tone. You are showing people what is acceptable, what is not, and how much ambition the room can actually hold. Culture is not something you announce once and expect people to absorb. It comes from what you model, repeatedly.

That is what his point really gets at. You cannot build a culture you have not already lived yourself. If you want honesty from your team, go first. If you want people to take creative risks, you should be the first one taking them. Otherwise, what you are asking for is performance, not trust.

He came up in private equity, where so much of the work is about analyzing decisions from a distance. Moving into an operator role asked something more personal. Not just what do you think, but who are you when the decisions are yours and people are watching. That question is not only for CEOs. It belongs to anyone leading a room.

»»»»»»»»»

A Thousand Small Decisions Pointing the Same Direction

Other phone companies are still trying to understand why their products look cheap. Apple solved that problem years ago and never really looked back. The squircle, that exact shape sitting somewhere between a square and a circle, is not just an aesthetic move. It is physiological. G2 continuity reflects the shape the human eye seems to accept most easily. Too sharp, and it feels aggressive. Too round, and it starts to read as soft or even a little unserious. Apple found the balance. Then they built an entire world out of it.

You see it everywhere. In the hardware. In the software. In the icons, the motion, the animation. It is one visual language carried across every surface, which is what makes the whole thing feel so resolved.

It is not any single decision that makes Apple’s design feel untouchable. It is the consistency of the system underneath every decision. The same principles. Applied again and again. No drift. No moment where the logic drops.

That is what most brands cannot copy. Not because they lack talent. Not because they lack money. They usually lack the discipline to set a rule and keep following it once the rule becomes inconvenient. Apple is not just doing one thing well. They are doing a thousand things in the same direction, all at once. That is bigger than design. It feels more like obsession with operational support behind it.

»»»»»»»»»

You Lost the Reader Three Sentences Ago

Nobody taught you to write badly. You just forgot the reader exists. Pinker has been making this point for decades, and somehow it still does not land the way it should.

The curse of knowledge is simple. Once you know something, you lose your feel for what it is like not to know it. So you stop explaining. You skip steps. You assume people are following. Most of the time, they are not.

This is not just an academic problem. Creative industries do it constantly. Briefs filled with jargon that nobody stops to question. Decks built to explain the concept to the people who already agree with it, instead of the client who does not. References that make perfect sense inside the building and absolutely nowhere else.

That is what makes the older examples so interesting. Darwin. Holmes. Edison. They were not writers by trade, at least not in the way we mean it now. They lived before jargon had become its own kind of armor, so when they described something, they had to describe the thing itself. A bunny. Not the stimulus. Something you can actually see.

Concrete language wins every time. Not because it sounds smarter. Because it is closer to the way people actually take things in. The job has not changed. What changed is that a lot of people stopped doing it, including plenty of people whose whole job is supposed to be communication.