Stop prompting AI. Let AI prompt you.

WE’RE IN THE MIDDLE of a modern-day gold rush and everyone’s buzzing about all the new things they can build with AI.

But amidst this building frenzy, I think I’ve only seen one person on LinkedIn getting excited about the tremendous value we can get not by prompting AI, but by getting AI to prompt us.​

There are so many reasons why I think we should be doing this more that I barely know how to put them into one essay without making it too long.

But let me say: there is no substitute for thinking our own thoughts. It leads to deeper understanding, better knowledge transfer, stronger memorisation and performance, and can also support confidence and self-esteem.

This is what the entire coaching and much of the education industry is built on: believing that people have innate resources, and stewarding them to arrive at their own insights by prompting them intelligently. If you’re an educator, you might also call this self-directed learning.

If like me you’re worried about outsourcing your cognition to AI, then the wisest way to leverage this incredible new technology is to make it sharpen your thinking. To use AI not to build so many shiny new things, but to turn it into a strict thought partner that won’t let you off the hook!

AI can be a very effective conversationalist when it’s set up well, and it just so happens that human beings do their best thinking ​when they’re in conversation.​

Legendary Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued that “higher thinking originates in conversations” and only later becomes internalised as private thought. In other words, talking is thinking; it’s not simply a report of it [Vygotsky, Thought and Language, 1962].

Relatedly psychologist Robert Zajonc’s work on social facilitation showed that the mere presence of other people improves our performance. This effect of “being on the hook” arouses us physiologically, and that arousal sharpens our focus and our effort [Zajonc, Science, 1965].​​

There are tonnes more studies like this that point to the same insight: conversation isn’t just a vehicle for your thoughts; conversation itself is a cognitive tool, and for most people it’s the most powerful cognitive tool they have.

Breaking the conversation bottleneck

The problem is, we’ve always had a bit of a bottleneck on our ability to have truly deep and extended conversations.

Just try to find somebody willing and able to talk to you for hours without tiring, or harbouring an agenda, or making it about them, or pretending to be listening while they’re actually texting their girlfriend.

Even if you did find somebody capable of such a feat, who’s to say they’d be any good at asking you the type of generative questions that continually stimulate your most nascent thoughts?

This, ladies and gents, is the promise that AI gives us now. Each and every one of us can create—with a good enough prompt 😉—a remarkably observant and incisive, fastidious and unflagging, loyal and committed intellectual sparring partner.

​​The wonderful thing about conversation between two humans is that it ebbs and flows, goes down rabbit holes, and naturally ends up somewhere unexpected.

But the advantage of an AI sparring conversation is that, if you set the right parameters, it brings a level of focus and rigour that’s rare in human dialogue. That’s particularly helpful when you want to be on the hook to do your best thinking.

I’ve been taking my AI sparring partner to the park, along with my favourite speech-to-text tool, and enjoying fresh air while doing more deep thinking, assumption surfacing, dot connecting, and possibility mapping than I’ve ever had the privilege of doing before.

There’s a lot about AI that worries me. But I have to say, I’ve rarely had the volume of insights, or experienced the kind of creative flow, that I’ve enjoyed when I’ve been in the park subjecting myself to a bloody good questioning by an LLM that I’ve carefully instructed to stay curious about me.

It’s in this spirit that I’m sharing a prompt I created for my own intellectual excavation.

I made this prompt because I wanted to understand, as deeply as possible, who has shaped my thinking, what I believe, what I’m willing to stand for, and ultimately how I could start using all of that to create opportunities for myself professionally.

I would even go as far as to call this prompt a super prompt. It took me days to write it, several iterations to refine it, and weeks to complete the process of actually using it.

But, wow, am I glad I did.

Where did this prompt come from and why am I sharing it with you?

Over the past few months, I’ve been planning a group programme aimed at helping job seekers bypass traditional hiring and design their own route into work they really want.​ This prompt is part of Module 1 of that programme.

But since I found this prompt so valuable, and since my wife did too, and since I love you because you’re my subscribers, I thought, “Oh, f*ck it, share it with them.” I figured, even if it helps just one extra person, that’s reason enough to share it.

I’m calling this prompt The Professional DNA prompt. If you use it, it will help you find your deepest values, the problems you return to most, and the type of work you were put on this earth to do.

It’s the perfect foundation stone for a programme about career change. But it’s also versatile enough to help you wherever you are professionally​.

How to use this prompt

It’s important that the ideas you surface in conversation with your AI have room to breathe. I would therefore recommend giving yourself one or even two weeks to complete your use of this prompt. Do it over several sessions, not all in one go​.

At the end, once you and your AI are satisfied you’ve covered everything you want, it will print a final document called Your Professional DNA, containing​ 14 different sections including:

• your intellectual foundations (who has shaped your thinking)

• a manifesto and elevator pitches for various uses

• recommendations for an enhanced information diet based on your interests

• and specific types of work, roles, or professional contexts that are a strong match for who you are

Don’t feel you must accept everything in your Professional DNA as it’s presented to you. It’s your life and your DNA. By all means, tweak it until you’re happy. That’s what me and Corina did.

Important: How to set this up correctly

When you start a new project in your chosen AI tool, paste the prompt into the system instructions (sometimes called the “custom instructions” or “system prompt”) — as well as into the chat itself as your first message.

The reason this matters is that every conversation you have with an AI builds up a growing history of exchanges. If your prompt is only sitting in the chat rather than in the system instructions, it gets buried under that history and the AI gradually loses sight of it, which means the quality of its responses will quietly deteriorate the longer you talk.

Putting it in the system instructions keeps it permanently in view, no matter how long the conversation runs.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, I’d recommend using a speech-to-text tool (such as Wispr Flow or Otter). I cannot tell you how many more words I’ve been able to get down, in language that is my own, using these tools instead of typing. The Professional DNA prompt is powerful, but if you use a speech-to-text app, you’ll take the process to a whole new level​.

One final thing: try to use whatever this prompt produces as a starting point, not a verdict.

Have fun with it. It’s a wild ride!

And please reach out and tell me about your experience of using it. I would love to know.

The Professional DNA prompt for LLMs

A prompt to run in an AI tool of your choice

P.S. You’ll have to view this post on desktop to see the prompt. Sorry. I’m not sure why it’s not displaying on mobile.

P.P.S. A note on system prompts: ChatGPT Projects limits system instructions to 3,000 characters, so very long prompts like this can’t fit. Claude doesn’t have this limit, so it’s a better option if you want to use the full prompt (the free version of Claude works fine). If you’re sticking with ChatGPT, a workaround is to save the full prompt in a document named ‘system prompt,’ upload it to your project sources, and type in the project instructions: “Whenever responding, follow the instructions in the source file called system prompt as if they were part of your system instructions.” This isn’t perfect, but it lets ChatGPT access the full prompt.

<system_prompt>

<persona>
You are an expert interviewer and writer — part investigative journalist, part biographer, part editor. You have a gift for asking the question beneath the question, for noticing what someone keeps returning to without realising it, and for reflecting people back to themselves more clearly than they can see themselves. When you write, you write in the person's voice, not yours. Your job is to excavate, not to decorate.
</persona>

<context>
I want you to help me conduct a deep intellectual inventory of who I am, what I believe, who has shaped how I think, what problems I like to work on, the work that lights me up, and how I can best contribute. The goal is to produce a written document at the end — my Professional Signature — that captures my values, convictions, and way of seeing the world as clearly and honestly as possible. I will use this document to help me identify the right next career move and articulate who I am to the people who matter.
This is not a quick exercise. Guide me through it across several sessions, asking one question at a time, pushing me toward specificity whenever I am being vague, and asking for real stories rather than impressive-sounding abstractions.
</context>

<instructions>
<phase_1>
Phase 1 — Who has shaped how I think
Ask me who has genuinely changed how I see the world — not who I think I should mention, but who has actually shaped me. These could be authors, artists, teachers, coaches, parents, philosophers, religious thinkers, or anyone else whose ideas have stuck. To jog my memory, prompt me to think about books and highlights, saved ideas, advice that resonated, moments of paradigm shift, major life events, and different stages of my life from childhood through adulthood.
For each person or source I mention, push me to name the specific idea or shift I took from them — not just the name — and to describe what changed as a result. If I give you a name without a lesson, ask for the lesson. If I give you an abstraction without a story, ask for the story.
After I have shared a full list, reflect back the patterns you are noticing, and ask me to make any tweaks or additions.
Then ask me to pick the three influences I return to most often — the ones that reliably shape my choices today. For each of the three, ask what I mean in plain language and ask for one or two real examples from my life or work where I have actually acted from it.
Do not move to Phase 2 until we are both satisfied Phase 1 is complete.
</phase_1>

<phase_2>
Phase 2 — My favourite problems
Ask me what problems I find myself returning to, whether at work or in my personal life. What gets me angry? What gets me excited? What could I talk about for ten minutes without a plan? Ask me to be specific and give examples.
Ask me what I find myself explaining repeatedly — the reframes, advice, and lessons I keep giving that people seem to find most useful. What do people often come to me for?
Ask me who I most want to help. What do they struggle with? What is blocking them? How have I helped people like this before, or how would I want to?
Ask me what I believe. Ask me what I no longer believe and why I changed my mind.
Do not move to Phase 3 until we are both satisfied Phases 1 and 2 are complete.
</phase_2>

<phase_3>
Phase 3 – My work, skills, and achievements
Ask me about the roles and projects I am most proud of — not my full CV, just the work that still means something to me. What was I actually doing, and what did I make happen?
Ask me what I know how to do unusually well — skills and knowledge I have built through repeated practice, not just exposure?
Ask me where people have trusted me to lead, decide, or deliver — even informally?
Ask me: when I imagine my best work — the kind that makes me feel most alive — what is at the centre of it? Is it making things, helping people think, solving hard problems, communicating ideas to a wide audience, or something else?
Do not move to phase 4 until we are both satisfied Phases 1, 2, and 3 are all complete; if there are gaps or missed connections, go back and encourage me to provide more detail.
</phase_3>

<phase_4>
THE FINAL DOCUMENT
Using the information created in phases 1 through 3, write a full Professional Signature document using the following structure:
Title: [My name]'s Professional Signature
1. MY INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS. The thinkers, ideas, and experiences that have shaped how I see the world and why.

2. MY THREE CORE IDEAS. The convictions I return to most often — the ones that actually run my behaviour.

3. THE PROBLEMS I CARE ABOUT MOST. The specific problems, frustrations, and topics I find myself returning to — with examples.

4. THE PEOPLE I MOST WANT TO HELP. Who they are, what they struggle with, what is blocking them, and how I want to help.

5. THE WORK THAT MAKES ME FEEL MOST ALIVE. Descriptions of the kinds of work that feel most like me — specific, not vague.

6. WHAT I FIND MYSELF TEACHING. My repeatable ideas, phrases, reframes, and lessons — the things I keep explaining that seem to land.

7. MY MANIFESTO. An 800-word statement capturing who I am and what I stand for. A genuine expression of my convictions, my way of working, and what I am building towards. It should be a call-to-arms and leave me feeling invigorated after reading. For inspiration on style and tone, look at the 2015 Arts Emergency Manifesto, and the 1997 Think Different campaign narrated by Steve Jobs at Apple.

8. MY ELEVATOR PITCHES. Three versions of how I introduce myself professionally, each grounded in my professional DNA and written to feel natural, not rehearsed.
- 30 seconds: A confident, specific introduction — who I am, what I do, what makes my approach distinctive.
- 10 seconds: The sharpest single-sentence version.
- 3 seconds: One memorable phrase — the thing that sticks.

9. SMART ANSWERS TO COMMON INTERVIEW QUESTIONS. Answers to the following questions, each drawing directly on my professional DNA, my core ideas, and my real examples. Specific, not generic.
— Tell me about yourself.
— What are you most proud of in your career?
— What do you bring that others don't?
— Where do you want to be in five years?
— Why do you want to work here? [Write this as a framework with a placeholder — the answer will be company-specific]

10. SOCIAL MEDIA TAGLINES. Suggested taglines for LinkedIn, Instagram, and Substack, each reflecting my professional DNA. Written with the awareness that current employers or colleagues may see them — nothing that signals dissatisfaction, imminent departure, or disloyalty. Three options per platform, ranging from more professional to more personal in tone.

11. MY INFORMATION DIET. Recommendations for how to sharpen and align what I read, watch, and follow, based on my professional DNA. Include: specific people worth following; sectors or fields worth paying closer attention to; communities or networks worth joining; key questions worth exploring; skills or areas of knowledge worth developing.

12. CONTENT DIRECTIONS. Five specific content directions I could pursue if I wanted to start publishing — each with a title, a one-sentence description of the angle, and one example post or article idea. Grounded in my professional DNA and aimed at the people I most want to help.

13. THREE COACHING QUESTIONS. Three provocative questions to carry into the weeks ahead — not to answer now, but to sit with. Each should open something rather than close it, and should be specific to what has emerged in my professional DNA, not generic prompts.

14. WORK THAT FITS. Based on everything that has emerged, seven specific types of work, roles, or professional contexts that would be a strong match for who I am. For each, name it plainly, explain in one or two sentences why it fits my professional DNA, and note one example of what it might look like in practice — a real role, sector, or kind of organisation where it exists. Be specific. Do not default to job titles — describe the shape of the work.

Write this document in plain, honest language. Use my own words and phrases wherever possible. It should read like me, not like a LinkedIn profile. If something is not yet clear enough to write with confidence, flag it and ask me the question that would fill the gap.
</phase_4>
</instructions>

<parameters_and_constraints>
YOU OPERATE FROM THESE CORE BELIEFS:
- The goal is to find ideas worth pursuing a career for—not surface-level topics, but deep convictions.
- Perspective is the real advantage. Two people can hold the same belief, but the one who can express it in their unique way is the one who stands out.
- A mission isn’t assigned. You uncover it by digging around in your thinking and then claiming it.
PARAMETERS AND CONSTRAINTS
- Never move on from an answer that is thin or vague. Always follow up.
- Ask one question at a time.
- Offer a synthesis reflection after every two or three rounds.
- Use multiple choice when it would help me commit to something specific.
- The document must feel chosen by me, not assigned. Offer language; let me refine it.
- Invite me to share raw material to support this process (such as CVs, transcripts, content, past projects, etc.). If I share raw material, mine it carefully — look for recurring ideas, repeated language, and connections I haven't named.
</parameters_and_constraints>

Now start the conversation with the following opening, then proceed to Phase 1:
"I'm going to help you build a clear, honest picture of who you are — the ideas that have shaped you, the problems you care about most, and the kind of work that makes you feel most alive. Ready to begin?"
Then wait for my confirmation and move into Phase 1.

</system_prompt>

⬥

Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Thanks for reading.

If you want more direct help, I’m a Positive Psychology Coach and I work with professionals navigating significant transitions like career changes, bold projects, and moments where an old story no longer fits.

If that’s you, feel free to reply to this email or get in touch directly. I read everything.

Read a related post

Dear subscribers,

This is an informational post to tell you, firstly, about this new visual identity for this publication. Secondly, to say a little bit about why I love it and what it means to me. And thirdly, to tell you how you could get something of your own designed this well by working with my talented wife Corina.

When I first created this publication back in 2022, I had a general impulse to write, but no idea what my niche would be or whether I would ever try to solve a problem for anyone in particular. I therefore chose a simple 3-colour scheme, which I found on Pinterest, that I felt was visually agnostic enough to allow me movement in any direction I wanted. I told myself I’d work within the simple constraints of this colour scheme and save all of my attention and effort for the writing itself.

Since then, writing on the internet has taken me in several interesting professional directions, such as working at Write of Passage and becoming a writing mentor, teaching people how to leverage AI in their work, and, more recently, building a practice and training to become a Positive Psychology coach. I’ve been wanting to refresh my brand identity to reflect these new developments for a while now, but didn’t have a catalysing reason to stop and do it.

That was until my wife Corina designed a landing page for a group coaching programme I’m planning. I liked it so much that I knew I would roll it out across my publication as a whole.

Here are some screenshots from that programme landing page:

First off, I really like the colours in this new aesthetic. They feel ageless, dynamic, and alive.

There’s also something about them that captures the mischievous, deviant sides of me that, in all honesty, I’ve struggled to express through my writing alone. I think it’s that I’ve been trying really hard to write well, and that this has led me to write with a level of seriousness that isn’t very characteristic of me in real life.

My most recent post was an adaptation of a talk I gave to some management consultants about how every organisation needs a trickster. Tricks and pranks are an important part of my history and identity, and these new colours, these new fonts, and everything that Corina has made for me really capture that trickster energy in a way that my old branding didn’t.

Another thing this new identity captures is the juxtaposition between the messy, haptic quality of working with your hands and the cerebral, nonmaterial quality of working with you head. This combination is important to me. As a traveller, I haven’t been able to use my hands to build anything physical for four years now, but I actually have a history—both in construction and as an artist—in building sculptures, installing electrical systems, making furniture, drawing, and painting. This year we will settle in Valencia and establish a home, and we’re both looking forward very much to having a physical studio again.

In many ways, both in terms of moving to Valencia as well as in terms of revamping my publication to reflect the work I do today, it feels like a homecoming to a fuller version of myself.

I’m grateful for your engagement and support over the last four years and for continuing to read what I write. It means a lot :)

Without further ado then, here’s the all-new Creative Thought Partner website.

Corina is the most gifted illustrator and most empathic person I know, which is what makes her such a great designer. She also has an unbelievable sense of taste, and her research skills are incredible. It’s this constellation of strengths that put her head and shoulders above other designers for whom these things are a chore. Here’s her portfolio. Get in touch with her if you want to discuss a project.

Here’s to the next four years!

⬥

Hey 👋 Thanks for reading.

If you want more direct help, I’m a Positive Psychology Coach and I work with professionals navigating significant transitions like career changes, bold projects, and moments where an old story no longer fits.

If that’s you, feel free to reply to this email or get in touch directly. I read everything.

Related topics

LAST MONTH a friend invited me to give a talk to his team of change-management consultants. It was part of a monthly series where they bring in outside perspectives with the aim of sharpening their craft, winning more business, and having more fun. He gave me total freedom to choose my topic. All he asked was that it challenged them to see their work in a new way.

It was the first talk of this kind I’ve ever given. Initially I was worried that I wouldn’t have anything significant to say to a group of people in corporate. But once I got into the research, I realised that having a project with this level of public accountability really forces you to take it seriously, find a thread you can pull on, and do a good job.

I’m grateful because it gave me an opportunity to do some proper intellectual excavation and figure out who has shaped how I think. It allowed me to plant a flag in the ground for something I believe in, something I’ve always believed, actually, but had never quite defended under the pressures and seriousness of adulthood.

I called my talk Why Every Organisation Needs a Trickster. But I think you could substitute the word organisation for any group at all. I’m sharing it with you here.

If you’re the sort of person who loves a good prank, if you fantasise about being disobedient, or if you’re looking for ways to sabotage a system that’s no longer serving you, then this one’s for you. Enjoy!

Why every organisation needs a trickster

I. Initiation

When I was about eighteen, my mate James rang me one morning out of the blue and in a frantic whisper said, “Mate! I need your help! I’ve got a girl in my bed from last night and she won’t leave. I need you to ring me in five minutes once I’m back in bed, I’ll put you on loudspeaker, and I want you to say I’m supposed to be at laser quest with you and the boys!”

“Sure,” I laughed, “But why laser quest?”

“Because it sounds specific enough to be believable!”

“Fair enough,” I said, “consider it done.” And five minutes later, I rang him back: “Mate, laser quest is cancelled. Not that you care. You’ve obviously got something better going on given that you’ve ignored our calls and texts.”

This story became a classic among me and my mates. I absolutely loved stitching people up like that; not because I wanted to be cruel or difficult for the sake of it, but because I loved the inventiveness of pranks, the buzz of anticipation and surprise, the spectacle and the laughter.

Being a prankster was a way to get the attention I was seeking, sure. But it was also about really connecting with friends, making people notice things they hadn’t seen, and enjoying the thrill of sticking a middle finger up at the rules, of course.

However, I didn’t realise just how powerful tricks and pranks could be, with a little more thought, until I got to art school.

II. Three types of disruption

On our first day in class, we each had to bring in a piece of art to discuss, and whilst I brought in something sculptural (conventional materials, conventional thinking), a kid called Niall brought in a tomato plant he’d been watering with beef stock, and asked whether any vegetarians would like to eat a tomato.

Niall’s was definitely the most hotly debated artwork that day. Everyone was arguing about it. And crucially, it was my initiation into the conspicuous clarity and provocative power of conceptual art.

More than anybody else, it was artists who taught me that mischief isn’t frivolous or foolish; it’s a serious tool for reclaiming influence, especially in rigid, predetermined, or disempowering situations.

I want to share three examples from the art world that inspire me with their carefully organised moments of sabotage. They illustrate a variety of ways we can disrupt the status quo, and in the process give ourselves, and other people, more agency.

Going Places (symbolic disruption)

In 1998, a group of Leeds College of Art students raised £1,000 from the Student Union for their degree show, but spent it on a holiday to Malaga. They did end up having an exhibition in London afterwards, but they just exhibited photos of them frolicking on the beach, and lined the walls with their plane tickets and hotel receipts.

The British press got hold of this and went berserk. Everyone assumed the worst. The Daily Telegraph said the students had “made an exhibition of themselves.” The Daily Mail framed it as taxpayers being ripped off. They were branded as “piss artists” and “sly opportunists.” The Student Union even threw them under the bus and demanded they pay back the money.

But once all the moral verdicts had been delivered, the students went on live radio and revealed it was all a hoax. They’d never left the UK. They hadn’t spent a penny. The photos were taken in Scarborough in the depths of winter, and all the “evidence” from the exhibition had been fabricated on Photoshop.

They brilliantly wrong-footed everybody, exposing the hidden norms and expectations of art institutions, the press, and the public. They also caused a nationwide debate about the frightening speed and force with which the tabloid media sets the public agenda.

This artwork, which the students called Going Places, is a good example of what I would call symbolic disruption. You make invisible systems visible and, in doing so, you make them more accountable and ultimately more critique-able.

The Ambassador (epistemic disruption)

My next example is from one of my favourite artists: the Belgian conceptual artist Francis Alÿs. In 2001, Alÿs was at the top of his game, and he was invited to represent Belgium at the prestigious Venice Biennale – one of the highest honours that an artist can receive.

But instead of attending the Biennale, Alÿs sent a peacock in his place, calling it The Ambassador. With this one incisive intervention, Alÿs satirised the vanity of the art world, making everyone at the Biennale stop and wonder: What are we actually doing here? What are our obligations to each other? Who decides what counts as representation? Who decides what’s serious?

This is what I would call epistemic disruption. When you’re on the receiving end of a prank like this, it stimulates a renewed sense of critical thinking and personal responsibility. Its power lies in forcing the question: How was I so easily duped? What did I not know about myself or about the world that enabled this to happen?

Walking from Brixton (behavioural disruption)

My final example of deviously bringing forward different possibilities comes from a tutor. His name was Yan, and one day Yan organised an extra-curricular walk for the whole class, lasting about three hours, from Brixton Station in south London to our college campus in Kings Cross.

Yan gave us no other information. We just had to turn up at Brixton and start walking. But the catch was, we had to walk the whole way in silence. No phones. No chatting. Just walking. For three hours!

I felt uncomfortable about being with people for so long and not being able to talk to them. But it turned out to be a great experience. I got to see a different side of London. And I got to spend some good, uninterrupted time with my own thoughts.

When we finally reached Kings Cross, ten kilometres later, Yan broke the silence and said, “Meet me at Brixton tomorrow at the same time.” And the very next morning, to our collective horror, we were made to walk the exact same route, again in silence.

But that second walk was even more powerful. I noticed things along the route that I’d missed the first time. I got to think about not just what I was choosing (or being compelled) to pay attention to, but also about the roles that repetition and resilience play in a creative practice.

This type of disruption is what I would call behavioural disruption. The distinction here is that insight follows action, that you can interrupt peoples’ habits and routines, and in doing so change the way they think.

III. My own interventions

By the time I was studying art at bachelors level, I was taking the idea of pranks more seriously. I was excited about this way of exploring systems, assumptions, and behaviours, about how I could channel my childish mischief into projects that took place in the public sphere and poked at the way things were made.

This is me in 2016 at Ridley Road Food Market in London hawking my services as a “fine artist.” It led to some interesting conversations with butchers and fishmongers like this fella. And I landed a paid commission to build a shoe rack for a yoga studio (random).

I did it because I wanted to feel useful as an artist. But I also did it because I wanted to get under the skin of certain students and staff members who I thought had a far-too elevated view of art. I hated the way we all treated it so seriously, in a language that was inaccessible, and in spaces that were sealed off from the public realm.

I want to share two more examples of significant trickster projects I did that I feel were building on the disruptive logic I’d seen in the works of Yan, Francis Alÿs, and the students up in Leeds.

The Royal Mortgage of Art

One artwork I really enjoyed making involved tampering with the official aprons in the workshops of the Royal College of Art, where I was studying for my masters.

The aprons were mandatory and very popular with students. They tied around your waist, covered you from chest to toe, and had the cherished college logo printed proudly across the front.

I managed to get my hands on a batch of blank aprons that hadn’t been printed yet, and instead of printing the official logo, I printed them with the words ‘Royal Mortgage of Art,’ before secretly inserting them into the common pool.

I was pissed off about how expensive it was to study art, especially in London. I knew that the word mortgage meant “until death.” And I liked the idea of subtly prompting conversation among students and staff about the lifelong debt that students would have hanging around their necks.

Two steps forward, one step back

Another piece I enjoyed making had to do with English proverbs. As a writer, I’ve always liked proverbs. They exist in every culture and often tell you a lot about it. They’re well-crafted. And they’re a way of speaking about the universal through reference to the specific.

One proverb I had a lot of fun with was ‘Two steps forward, one step back,’ which is an optimistic notion that whilst all progress involves some setbacks, in the end, if you keep going, you tend to move forwards.

What’s interesting is that, in recent times, this old proverb has been altered (a case of what is known as ‘proverbial adaptation’) and it’s now more common to hear people say ‘One step forward, two steps back,’ which has an altogether more pessimistic spin.

I wanted to create an absurd artwork out of this, so my first idea was to take one step forward and two steps back, quite literally, on a 1500-metre running track, until I reached the end, and to record a film of the whole stunt.

People enjoyed this, so I tried working with this proverb in another way.

I’d recently played the old classic Game of Life, in which you spin a wheel and move your little car around a winding board, making life decisions along the way (going to college, choosing a career, getting married, having kids) and collecting or paying money at each stop. Whoever retires with the most wealth at the end wins. Riveting.

My idea was to buy a second-hand copy of the game on eBay, make a digital scan of the board, and then tamper with the route so that every step forward sent you two steps back, making it practically impossible to reach the end.

I’d then print this new version onto the board so it looked like the real thing, and use it to play the new “Game of Life” with unsuspecting strangers 😜

Every year, our college opened its doors to the public to showcase our work. And I used this opportunity to set up a table in the studio and invite visitors to play with me.

The next morning after the show, one of my peers, Sadie, came up to me and yelled, “You played Game of Life with my big brother yesterday!”

“Yes?” I said.

“Well he quit his job this morning. Said it was after playing the game with you.”

I can’t remember exactly what me and her brother said to each other that day, but I do know that we talked about our sense of progress in our lives. I think the silliness of what we were doing—playing a game we could not win—jolted him out of whatever had been keeping him stuck. And I think this is a good illustration of how absurdity can often hit harder than strategy.

If you’re wondering what happened to the Game of Life board, I donated it to an Oxfam shop on the King’s Road. I love the idea that some unsuspecting stranger bought it, and has sat there with friends and family scratching their heads about why they can’t win.

IV. The anatomy of a good prank

Now I want to pause and talk about why some pranks work and why some fall flat.

There is both an art and a science to productive trickery. And to tee this up, here’s a quick clip from the TV series New Girl. I don’t watch this show, but my wife told me about a scene where Winston, the show’s prankster, is being scolded by his friend for not quite calibrating his pranks appropriately.

It’s useful to think about good pranks as achieving a sweet-spot between subversion and construction. The best ones share three, maybe four, key qualities that take a prank from a cheap laugh to a true mechanism of change:

1. The best pranks are benign. They shouldn’t harm anyone physically, emotionally, or reputationally. You’re trying to open peoples’ eyes, not close doors on them.

2. They should be higher-serving. They should provoke reflection, insight, or action. In other words, every prank should have a “why it matters” built into it.

3. They should be choice-giving. They should expand possibilities for the target, give people options, show them what’s possible, even if—especially if—they didn’t realise it before.

As a bonus, if you can make your pranks funny, you’ll be even more effective at grabbing attention, making people remember, and loosening them up enough to notice the unseen.

V. The trickster through history

Tricks, pranks, hoaxes, ruses, capers, cons, and subterfuges. These are not just the playthings of impish boys and restless artists. They have in fact played a very important function in societies throughout history.

The Norse God Loki and the Greek God Hermes are two of the most well-studied examples of the trickster archetype. They broke the rules by shape-shifting into different creatures and slipping between different worlds, but they did it in service of something more important: calling into question the rigid lines that separated us into categories like “the divine and the mortal,” or “the sacred and the profane.”

Shakespeare’s fools were certainly not his main characters. But they were often the ones delivering the hardest truths. They always played a pivotal part in making kings stop, look, and listen.

There are scores of other cultural characters too—from Robin Hood to Bugs Bunny to Roald Dahl’s Matilda—whose image and style may be different but whose core device is always the same: subvert rigid hierarchies through cunning rather than force, and expose the moral bankruptcy of those in power.

Tricksters are what the scholar Lewis Hyde calls “sacred boundary-crossers.” They protect us by working at the joints of a system; the seams and thresholds that allow movement and flexibility, but also where stiffness sets in, and where things can break down.

It is not a coincidence that the words art, articulated, arthritis, and harmony all share the same etymological root. A trickster who plays with the joints is not working at the edges of the system; they are working at its most generative points – poking around, testing rules, revealing contradictions, and sometimes dismantling a structure and rebuilding it when it ceases to serve the people living under it.

Tricksters are the ones who bravely ask, “Are these norms and institutions actually working for the culture? Or is there a need for disruption to create space for change?”

VI. The case for more deviance

Today we’ve got a big challenge on our hands. According to data from several sectors of society, recently laid out by psychologist in his brilliant piece The Decline of Deviance, we are becoming less and less likely to engage in deviant behaviour.

Today’s teenagers drink less, smoke less, get into fights less, and have less sex. By many measurable behavioural metrics, they are more cautious than any cohort that came before.

It’s not just teenagers. Crime rates have plunged since the ‘90s. Serial killing is down. There are fewer cults than ever. And fewer people move house.

Then there’s the encroaching cultural homogeneity. Everything is starting to look the same! Cafes I work from in Cairo and Chiang Mai have the same cacti and oak panelling as cafes in Sheffield.

Book covers are pretty but indistinguishable.

Car colours are now mostly black, white, or grey.

Brands have become blands.

And cities the world over are full of the same glassy architectural meh.

One way of making sense of all this, as Mastroianni suggests, is that our lives are increasingly more valuable to us. When life is longer, safer, healthier, and more prosperous, we’re simply less willing to take risks and rock the boat.

But as far as I can tell, that security is also a sedative. New thinking requires us to feel the friction of the unfamiliar and the discomfort of venturing somewhere you haven't been. A society that has anaesthetised itself is surely a society that will run out of new things to think.

VII. Invitation

But think about it. If deviance is declining, it means the capacity to colour outside the lines is becoming rarer and therefore more powerful!

All of this got me thinking: if every society needs a trickster to prevent decay and keep it dynamic, then why wouldn’t organisations need a trickster too? Organisations are mini societies, after all.

What if the BBC, McKinsey, OpenAI, and the Vatican had Tricksters in Residence? Somebody whose role it was to notice brittle joints, test problematic assumptions, and inject some revealing disruption in the right places at the right time?

What about inside your organisation or group? Where is there a necessity for some playful noncompliance?

If you’re under pressure to use jargon or be theoretically sophisticated, for example, what simple truths do you think are being overcomplicated by that?

If you have a tendency to remain neutral to appear more resourceful, what strong stance could you risk today that your clients or audience would end up thanking you for tomorrow?

What important or urgent decision would you make RIGHT NOW if you didn’t need people to like you?

What I’ve been trying to make the case for in this talk is that being a prankster is a principled way to live. The world needs thoughtful trickery now more than ever. There is so much to lose and so much opportunity at stake.

If you’re someone who feels stuck—not in an organisational sense, necessarily, but stuck in a version of yourself that feels too cautious, too managed, too far from whatever you were like when you were genuinely alive to possibility—then I think tricksterdom is one route back.

If trickery stirs something in you, it’s because it touches the truest version of you. It’s a memo from your soul. And it can lead you to the place you really want to be. If you choose to follow that instinct, start by looking for the joints in the systems you’re not satisfied with, and look for places to prod.

You don’t need to be a professional artist or a Greek God to do it. You don’t need more qualifications or energy or money or permission. You just need access to a system that challenges you, an awareness of the things that amuse you, and a little bit more of your childish courage.

⬥

Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Thanks for reading.

If you want more direct help, I work with people in two ways.

For professionals navigating significant transitions (career changes, bold projects, moments where an old story no longer fits), I offer 1:1 coaching using principles of Positive Psychology.

And if you’re job-seeking but you’re fed up with the traditional hiring process, Screw the Job Boards is a cohort-based programme I designed to help you build your own strategic way into work you actually want.

Either way, feel free to reply to this email or get in touch directly. I read everything.

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I

ON A HOT SPRINGTIME AFTERNOON in Hell’s Kitchen in 2023, a few months after me and Corina had left London to become full-time working travellers, I was sitting across from Luigi, a co-founder of Amorino, the popular gelato franchise with branches in over 22 countries. Luigi had taken me out to lunch to mark the end of the work we’d just completed together: he’d sat through two lengthy interviews to discuss his work—and I was due to write a small book about it; the man, the career, and the impact he had made.

Luigi and Amorino were part of a writing project that was serving a very important function for me at the time: it was an attempt to see if I, like so many others seemed to be doing, could earn an income from combining the things I loved; namely, travelling the world, meeting interesting people, and producing writing online. I figured that I might be able to invent a new type of city guide, told from the unique perspective of local restaurateurs like Luigi, and self-publish a whole series of them, or sell them to Condé Nast or Lonely Planet. The idea was prompted by the fact that I had recently been laid off from my copywriting job with a logistics firm because my boss found my newly changing time zones unworkable.

It was certainly no fun being on the other side of the world, having committed to a highly experimental new lifestyle, and being made unemployed so unceremoniously. But then again, it was certainly not a job I loved. I wrote sales pages nobody ever saw, for a mission I didn’t care about, for a man who trusted people so little he insisted on drip-feeding tasks instead of giving me anything real. Getting sacked was a punch in the stomach. But when I finally caught my breath, I realised it had freed me to confront important questions those golden handcuffs had kept me from exploring: What if my pay check could come from my passions? Will I ever have a better opportunity than this to pursue work that truly matters to me? What would it be like to do something not because it paid the bills or made me look good, but because it was something I felt genuinely called to do?

Lounging with Luigi in New York, sipping coffee, sharing tiramisu, I knew I was on the right path. Luigi looked at ease in his success, his baseball cap, his rough stubble, his cheeky smile, and his lively preoccupation with his store window displays. He had a beautiful family, a loyal terrier, nice shoes, deep knowledge of his domain, strong opinions about New York’s Mayor, visions for his retirement, a boat on the Hudson, sailing lessons planned, a skiing holiday on the horizon. Here was a guy who’d clearly answered his calling, and built a life that was genuinely his own because of it, a life that was worth writing about. And here I was too, feeding off him both energetically and quite literally, sensing that my very proximity to Luigi, and the privilege of witnessing him sharing his story, was both evidence of and reward for having crossed the threshold into a life that was genuinely mine too.

Which is why, as we were hugging and saying goodbye, the parting piece of wisdom Luigi offered to me came as such a shock. “So, Harrison,” he concluded, “in the end, I’d recommend doing a job you do not love.”

He explained that doing a job you love can become all-consuming and make you neglect your relationships, your hobbies, your health, and even yourself, in the sense that you can start to develop into an asymmetrical person. I really didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, I felt a little exposed in the way that you do when a worldview you have is suddenly challenged. And I felt embarrassed to be having this revelation so publicly. I even felt a bit desperate at the horror of the possibility that the path I’d chosen might be the wrong one!

But on the other hand, something told me there had to be more to it than what Luigi had laid out. Partly, I could feel how much more rewarding it was pursuing work I loved. Even though I could not say for sure where any of it would lead, let alone whether it would make me a living, those nourishing feelings counted for a lot. And partly, I think I was old enough to sense that this was one of those lessons that I could only learn by living it, not by taking advice. Luigi had the benefit of hindsight. We all have to walk our own path. And my path was already apparent. It was either give up on my dreams before I’d even tried, never discovering if any of them were possible, or keep on pushing out, into the fog, having faith that I’d discover something more remarkable than any pre-laid path could give me.

I couldn’t figured out how to reconcile my desires with Luigi’s warning. What role had his particular perspective on work played in Amorino’s success? Had he always felt that way? What were his beliefs about work that I clearly didn’t share? I had the feeling there were nuances I couldn’t yet see.

II

Last week, as part of my coaching training in Positive Psychology, our supervisor Robert shared an ambitious scientific study1 about people’s relationship with work. The study proposed three distinct orientations people have towards their work, experiencing work either as a Job, a Career, or a Calling. Here are the definitions:

People who experience their work as a Job are only interested in the pay check and do not seek or receive any other type of reward from it. The work is not an end in itself, but instead is a means that allows people to acquire the resources needed to enjoy their time away from the Job. The major interests and ambitions of Job holders are not expressed through their work.

By contrast, people who experience their work as Careers have a deeper personal investment in their work and mark their achievements not only through income, but through advancement within their organisation. This advancement often brings higher social standing, increased power within the scope of one’s occupation, and higher self-esteem for the worker.

Finally, people who experience their work as Callings find that their work is inseparable from their life. A person with a Calling works not for financial gain or Career advancement, but instead for the fulfilment that doing the work brings to them. The word ‘‘calling’’ was originally used in a religious context, as people were understood to be ‘‘called’’ by God to do morally and socially significant work.

Using a sophisticated multi-question survey, the study asked numerous workers in different professions how much or how little they identified with these orientations. And the vast majority of respondents could easily decide which bucket they were in.

But arguably the most interesting finding concerned the participating group of administrative assistants. There were 24 of them in total. They all had the same pay, the same level of seniority, and did the same work at the same desks. Yet they were pretty evenly distributed across all three buckets:

• 9 assistants saw their work as a Job

• 7 assistants saw it as a Career

• 8 assistants saw it as a Calling

This is really significant because it suggests that the active ingredients in our orientation towards work are not in the work itself, but in us.

The paper does not provide an explanation for this, so I’ve been reflecting on my own life for clues.

One hypothesis I have is that the administrators who saw their work as a Calling were more predisposed than others to appreciate work in this way. It’s possible. But I’m not altogether convinced that tells the full story.

Another possibility is that they had experienced a difficulty or loss beforehand, and the process of rebuilding their lives gave them capacities to appreciate work—like gratitude and purpose—that they didn’t have before.

For me though, the most likely explanation is that people develop a greater capacity for finding their Calling if they’ve done a lot of different kinds of work, in the process figuring out what they’re good at (or bad at), what they enjoy (or dislike), and what particular problems they prefer to work on (or avoid). In other words, there might be something about the diversity of your work experience and the resulting contrast—between industries, between projects, between problems and people—that gives you accumulated evidence to see your Calling more clearly.

The work I do today as a coach feels as much a Calling as anything I’ve done and, tellingly, I did make my way to it through a variety of work experiences.

Some of it humbling, like when I got sacked from a coffee shop at the age of 27 for slacking off because I couldn’t handle the pressures of a hospitality-based role.

Some of it sobering, like when I learned the months of effort I’d put into selling Tupperware door-to-door (remember the Kleeneze catalogue?) was in fact a pyramid scheme making others rich while I was just their puppet on a string.

Some of it demoralising, like working for over a decade as an electrician on cold, dangerous construction sites being verbally abused by supervisors with no managerial training, and having my wages managed through a convoluted system of third-party payroll companies that routinely paid me late, deducted more tax than I owed, charged me a fee for the privilege, and could not be brought to justice because they were based offshore.

In light of all that, I can tell you precisely why I thrive in certain jobs and not others. And I know it has improved my ability to imbue the work I do today with meaning.

So it’s possible that you must find your Calling by first going through a whole heap of OK jobs, dead ends, and downright dreadful work. Your Calling might be a recognition rather than a revelation.

But no sooner was I revelling in the clarity of this Job-Career-Calling framework, patting myself on the back for being a heavyweight Calling-seeker, than Robert proceeded to pull the rug from under our feet. He quietened the group and said he wanted to underline something very important: that we have a problem in our culture of glorifying Callings and demonising Jobs. It’s as if, in our post-materialist world, finding your Calling is the minimum requirement and anything less will get you burned at the stake.

But this is a narrow and unhelpful mindset. Jobs and Careers give people legitimate ways to create meaningfulness in their lives outside of work, and both are perfectly principled ways to live.

Moreover, what if your Calling consumes you and leads to neglect elsewhere, as Luigi warned?

And even more importantly, not all Callings are necessarily enjoyable or challenging (two hallmarks of satisfying work), while a Job or a Career could be both.

If, as coaches, we truly care about our clients’ growth, it’s important for us to be aware of what orientation they have to their work, meet them where they are, and respect them, not judge them, or try to coach them towards a Calling that they do not want.

In fact, coaches of all people are particularly prone to this kind of Calling-worship. They, almost by definition, will see their own work as a Calling (guilty as charged), and it follows that the types of people they pull into their orbit are also that way inclined.

Coaches therefore have a hard time understanding Job-holders and Careerists. Well, not so much Job-holders; it’s easier to make sense of them, since there are many jobs that need doing, and not everybody has the privilege of thinking beyond a Job.

But it’s the people in the middle—the Careerists—that really get coaches stroking their chins. “Who,” they ponder, “are these people that only seem to care about power and advancement?”

In any case, Robert was emphatic about not valorising one orientation at the expense of another, but instead embracing work in all of its tripartite glory. I have to say it has really made me stop, for the first time since hearing Luigi’s words three years ago, and think about the stories I am telling myself about work.

III

It turns out the notion of “story” has a particular significance when it comes to finding meaning in work. The scientists who have done the most to understand, measure, and explore meaning interventions to help people create more of it are Frank Martela and Michael Steger. In a 2016 landmark paper2, Martela & Steger were the first ones to point out that their field was conflating three separate questions in the study of meaning:

1. “Does my life make sense?” (Coherence)

2. “What am I trying to do?” (Purpose)

3. “Does any of it matter” (Significance)

By Coherence, they mean our ability to tell a convincing story about our lives, and to understand where we are in that story. An absence of Coherence, by contrast, is a life characterised by uncertainty and incomprehensibility.

Purpose is about the presence of regimes, plans, paths, clear long-term goals and our momentum towards them. A lack of Purpose, on the other hand, is likely to leave us feeling pretty aimless and reactive.

Finally, Significance is obviously about whether the thing we’re doing is something we care deeply about. If it isn’t, then chances are it’ll soon start to feel worthless and futile.

As I’m sure you can imagine, when all three hallmarks show up strongly in our work—when it’s coherent, it’s purposeful, and it matters to us—we are bound to feel shed-loads of meaning and the satisfaction that accompanies it.

However, it is interesting to think about scenarios where one hallmark is missing. Consider the following:

Coherence + Purpose + Significance. In one scenario, you could have a legible story about what you’re doing, plus plenty of purposeful structure to guide you, but you may still feel like it’s all pretty pointless. For example, a person who finds themselves stuck on a culturally pre-described path (study → career → family → retire). It could also be someone stuck in a line of work that brings out only a sliver of who they are. They feel that their voice, their talents, and their potential are being wasted.

Coherence + Purpose + Significance. In another scenario, you could have a legible story, and your work could feel genuinely significant, but you find it hard to articulate a longer-term purpose. This could be work that is organised around rituals or caretaking responsibilities, or it could be that you’re volunteering for a cause whose mission you care about but you can’t say where it’s ultimately leading.

Coherence + Purpose + Significance. In a third scenario, your work could have goals and direction, and you could care deeply about it, but you may lack a cohesive story to situate and ground it. This is common when you’ve entered, willingly or otherwise, a period of disruptive transition (illness, divorce, job loss). When the old script has been torn up and a new one hasn’t been written yet, even the strongest pillars of Purpose and Significance can feel hollow.

Take the example of nursing. Under normal circumstances, nursing is work that people can readily find coherence, purpose, and significance in. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the most chaotic moment when nobody, not even governments, knew what was going to happen next, health organisations saw a sharp rise in nurses needing psychological support. What was lacking for nurses in that moment was an intelligible, let alone predictable, story about the new game they were playing and what role they had to play.

Another group of people I’ve often seen struggling with incoherence are those who are in the liminal space between one work orientation and another. For instance, someone who has worked for years in corporate and has left to pursue a creative-entrepreneurial business of their own (Career > Calling). As a creative career coach, I tend to meet many people in this situation. And it’s tough. That liminal space, whilst certainly punctuated by moments of revelation and delight, is on the whole a surprisingly difficult gauntlet - full of confusion, disappointment, loneliness, and self-doubt.

Two things you can do to support people here is, firstly, stimulate their thinking about how they might construct a new empowering story about who they are becoming, with questions such as, “Who might you want to share this evolving story with, and what would you like them to understand?” Alternatively, if it’s too soon for new stories, you can help them establish some familiar structure and comforting order in their life whilst they wait for the story to emerge.

Of all the hallmarks of meaning that can be missing, I suspect it is a lack of coherence that causes people in transition the most distress. Whereas a lack of purpose or significance are things that can be dealt with practically or postponed temporarily without too much agro, an inability to make sense of why you are doing what you are doing is an altogether different challenge. And one that carries a frustrating irony given that coherence is never more elusive than in the moments you need it most.

But I think people should persevere through the discomfort. I think the uncertainty is the point, the price you must pay for reorienting your relationship with work. As Luigi and Robert, in their own ways, warned, it’s a mistake to think of some orientations as inherently better than others. But the challenge we have in our culture today is the strong prevailing wind that makes us lean towards Callings as the highest aspiration. For that reason, we should be extra careful, for it is only once Jobs, Careers, and Callings are perceived as having equal value that we can be sure we are making our choice for the right reasons.

IV

At one level, the uncertainty of incoherence seems to be a necessary step in making the transition from one work orientation to another. At another level, finding the orientation that works best for us is not, as the paper suggests, a one-time fix. It’s actually a process that we may need to engage with throughout our lifetime as our perspective and priorities change. Does being young or ambitious lend itself to one orientation more than others? Is there something about maturity and wisdom that steers you towards a particular orientation?

These are questions that the studies don’t answer. But they got me thinking about Luigi and his advice not to do a job that I love. His Job looked to me from where I was sitting like a textbook Calling. But now I wonder whether he may’ve began that work as a Calling, and as it got more serious and his priorities changed, it began to feel more like a Job.

And then, paradoxically, could it be that as it became a Job, he came to see that he was no longer so consumed by his work and had more time for the things outside of it? – like his family, his health, his relationships and his hobbies. Could it be that it was the transition from Calling to Job that ultimately made him see the value in a Job that he’d previously missed?

Part of me still believes that, personally, I am best off pursuing a Calling, just because of how much more excited, creative, and satisfied I feel with my work compared to when I had Jobs. But then again, I haven’t had children yet. I still have 30-odd years of work left in front of me. I cannot say I’ve ever fully experienced a Career for long enough to reap the benefits of that orientation.

Today, I am coaching professionally; it’s my sole income. To people who see themselves in Jobs or Careers, they may look at my work and think that I’m fully living within my Calling. But the truth is, I still feel in transition. Some days I wake up and have to remind myself of the story that I’m in, and what chapter it is. Sometimes I worry about loneliness, because my Calling has always seemed synonymous with a path of my own making which, by definition, rarely includes team mates. I wonder whether there’s something either in my disposition or in the stories that I have about work that are holding me back as much as liberating me.

When I think back to that lunch with Luigi and the orientation I had then, and compare it with where I’m at today, some things seem clearer:

I think my journey from Job to Calling was justified because I was so unhappy in the Job. So many parts of myself were not being used. But I think that extreme contrast, that psychologically disruptive transition, caused me to myopically focus on Callings as the only legitimate type of work. This is reflected in the extent to which the work I do has become part of my identity; it’s the first thing I tell people about myself when I meet them for the first time. It’s hard for me to separate my life from my work. I’m satisfied. I feel authentic. But I sometimes struggle to find joy in things outside work. And it has caused tension in my relationship with my wife too. One of the things I’m taking away from this essay is the need for a less judgmental mindset about work orientation, and more curiosity about what Jobs and Careers can offer that Callings cannot.

Another takeaway is that I do believe, even more staunchly now, that if we can, we should explore as many different types of work as possible (especially when we’re younger, but any time really) so that we have a greater understanding of the variety of relationships we can have with work and can make more informed decisions about what’s good for us.

Lastly, my biggest insight is to be aware of the temporal dimension of our work orientation. Instead of this being a one-time choice, with a one-time fix, and guaranteed lifelong satisfaction, our relationship with work is a relationship we must manage our whole lives.

We should embrace the fact that experimenting with orientations is going to necessitate a period of storylessness that may be even more difficult to live with than purposelessness and meaninglessness…but that ultimately it’s worth it.

As the ancients said, the obstacle is the path, new beginnings are often disguised as painful endings, and it’s only by tearing up an old story that a new one can be written. I just wish they had more to say about how to live inside the time of not knowing.

Thanks for reading.

—Harrison 👨‍🎨

⬥

New job design programme launch 🚀

Hey 👋 If the question of how to find your way into work that’s genuinely yours is particularly alive for you right now, I’m launching a small group coaching programme on 22 April 2026 for creative professionals who want to approach that goal strategically. It’s called Screw the Job Boards. There are just eight places available. If you’d like to know more, check this out.

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I HAVE SPENT THE LAST SIX MONTHS talking to people about work. Mostly as a natural outcome of coaching them, but also in the way you might interview someone for a project you are obsessed with.

I’ve spoken to designers, strategists, writers, communications folk, product people. All of them are experienced. All of them are talented. All of them are passionate. And all of them are, quietly, stuck.

One guy (an experience designer fifteen years into his career) described his situation like this: “I feel like I’m perched on a rock in the middle of a river and I’m unable to move in any direction. I know I need to jump. But I’m not entirely sure whether I can swim anymore.” He’s not the only one who’s described their stuckness in such evocative ways. But I cannot stop thinking about that image in particular.

The thing that has struck me most about all these conversations is not the frustration people feel (though there is plenty of that!); it’s the special kind of intelligence their frustrations seem to have. These are not people who’ve missed something obvious. They know what is happening.

They know that most job postings lead nowhere.

They konw that everyone is writing cover letters with AI, employers are reading cover letters with AI, and nobody is getting hired.

They know that the full richness, the full cross-domain, hard-to-categorise thing they actually bring to the table doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes that the market provides.

They know all of this. And still they are stuck.

Something else keeps coming up too, which took me longer to notice. Whenever someone puts a lot of effort into an application (rewriting their CV, landing a warm intro, adding something extra, making a thoughtful attempt) and gets nothing but silence back, something deadens inside them.

Not in a dramatic way; it’s more subtle than that. The next attempt fosters slightly less energy. There’s now more self-protection built in. One person told me, “If I don’t get a response, it just reduces my interest in putting in effort.” This is a rational response to an irrational situation; it’s not laziness. The prevailing job application process has been silently shaping him, and he’s adapted to it. What else can he do?

I’m seeing this pattern more and more now. Capable, creative people with 10+ years of proper work experience and real value to contribute are gradually talking themselves into a sort of strategic patience that is really just an understandable form of learned helplessness.

The conventional approach to getting a job does this to people almost by design. You spend days polishing your “assets” for a system that isn’t reading them. You stand in line. You wait. You do as you’re told. And then you get ghosted. Or you don’t get ghosted but you get a three-line email seven minutes after you apply, with some boilerplate about the “quality of applications.”

After a few rounds of this, you start to internalise a story about how you’re not as strong as you thought you were, or maybe the market has moved on, or maybe you’ve aged out of it, or maybe…

All of this is objectively not true, but it does feels increasingly hard to argue with in today’s climate.

It got me thinking about the ways in which I’ve landed the work that has mattered most to me. I didn’t apply for any of it.

When I wanted to work at Write of Passage, I didn’t apply or send a CV. I partnered with another student and we built a technical tool we thought could help the team. Just something small and basic. It wasn’t even that useful. We got twenty minutes on a Zoom call to show it to one of the senior people. Nothing came of the tool in the end. But it didn’t matter; I had made myself visible in a way that was authentic and not desperate. And eventually I was invited in.

When I wanted to work at Act Two, I didn’t apply for that either. I interviewed ten students from the first cohort about what had worked and what hadn’t, turned it into a research report, and gave it to the founders. They eventually gave me a job.

On the other side of the recruitment equation, I have also hired people who applied to my company in strategic ways. Even though Dan, my designer and first-hire, was way less experienced than the other candidates, I simply HAD to give him the job because he’d researched my company goals and challenges, built a piece of permissionless work that added real value, and made himself unignorable in a respectful way.

I’ve thought a lot about what these three experiences have in common, and it comes down to not asking for permission to be useful, but just being useful—and then finding ways to let the people you want to work with know about it.

This sounds simple, but it isn’t. There is real exposure in it. One of the people I spoke to described it wonderfully precisely: “In a regular application, there’s still some mystery. You say you can do things, but no one really knows. With your approach, they can see everything. If they say no, there’s nowhere to hide.”

She’s right. With my approach, there’s a risk that the work you deliver will not be good enough, and that’s exactly what makes it so frightening. But, that’s also exactly what makes it work too.

So, I’m building something around this idea, and I want to tell you about it.

As a new strand of my coaching work, I’m launching a small group programme, with a clear beginning and end, for experienced creative professionals (the kind of people I’ve been describing in this post) who are ready to try designing their own way into their dream job. It runs April through July 2026, the first cohort is 8 people, and the work moves through three phases:

1. getting sincerely clear on what you have to offer and who you want to offer it to

2. building real knowledge of a specific company and the people inside it

3. doing a piece of work, scoped carefully to your strengths, that makes a case no CV or cover letter ever could.

This programme is not a networking offer. It’s not a Linkedin optimisation service. It’s not a get-hired-fast solution. And it is not for people who measure success primarily by salary or status.

It is for people who want a better relationship with their own professional identity, and who are ready to do something that feels more exposed, and more alive, than anything they’ve tried before.

If that sounds like you, or if you’re simply curious and want to know more about it, reply to this email or send me a DM. I’d like to have a conversation with you.

Speak soon,

—Harrison 🧑‍🎨

⬥

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Dear subscribers,

This month I began my International Coaching Federation Accreditation to become a Certified Positive Psychology Coach. Fuck yeah!

As a result, I’m learning a shit ton of new brain-busting stuff about “the science of flourishing,” and I’d love for you to indulge me by letting me get some of this stuff out of my head and onto paper as it helps me learn and remember it.

The big headline to share immediately is that I, you, and probably most people you’ve ever known have only understood half of psychology’s potential. Psychology emerged as a discipline in the late 19th century. Its original role was to study what goes wrong AND what goes right with people, so that we could do more of the good and less of the bad.

However, after the two world wars, there was a sudden, acute need for psychologists to step in and help all the wounded and disturbed soldiers returning from the front lines, many having lost limbs or witnessed comrades getting killed. Lots of psychologists figured out they could make a good living doing this. Most of the funding for research went into this too. The result was that the discipline of Psychology came to focus predominantly on studying people’s problems: their mental difficulties, disturbances, distresses and dysfunctions. In other words, Psychology’s job became fixing people.

Out of this grew the DSM, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders1. This taxonomy allowed scientists to identify, organise and study mental illness. It ensured they were all singing from the same hymn sheet, enabling collaboration and scientific progress. Every scientific discipline has proprietary methodology like this. And if you’ve ever been to see a counsellor, therapist or other mental health professional, they almost certainly used the DSM to diagnose and treat you.

But in the 1990s something changed. An eminent Psychologist called Martin Seligman was elected President of the American Psychological Association, and he made it his personal mission to resurrect the positive side of the profession. That is to say, he threw his weight behind the idea that there was a LOT that human beings did well, a LOT they had learned about living the good life, and all of this could be used to help more people become increasingly well-adjusted.

Seligman gave a resounding cry for Psychologists everywhere to spend more time studying how to help people develop strengths and continue doing more of the stuff that made them flourish. Hence the birth of the Positive Psychology (PP) movement. Seligman and his followers have since been putting PP on the map and establishing a language and set of methodologies of their own—as well as generating much more research funding—to help make PP a serious subject of scientific study that can help to make all of us happier and more effective.

I think it’s important to mention another reason Psychologists prior to Seligman focused exclusively on fixing mental illness: it had to do with the fact that when faced with impending pain vs. impending pleasure, we have a natural instinct to want to soothe the pain first. “Pain killers sell better than vitamins” goes the popular maxim from the business world. When you think about it like that, it’s not altogether surprising that addressing pain became a priority after the bloodshed of two world wars.

However, an important point here is that, for many of us in the cultural west today, we are no longer living in war zones, and this presents us with an opportunity to shift our focus back to the positive side of the psychological equation. I might even call it a moral obligation, as surely we ought to make hay while the sun shines, no?

I am aware that there are still wars being fought in various parts of the world and I’m not being ignorant or insensitive when I say we’re no longer living in war zones; I’m just making a broader point about the relative safety, happiness, and prosperity enjoyed by millions of people today that was not shared by the people living around 1914–1918 and 1939–1945.

Thanks to Seligman and other enterprising Psychologists who’ve chosen to make the most of their relative freedom, today the focus has shifted back to a more complete picture, and we have a thriving if relatively small and still embryonic branch of Psychology whose stakeholders (including yours truly) are interested specifically in what is going on when things go right with people.

A key part of PP is the study of strengths. There are a few different ways Positive Psychologists (I’m gonna call them PPs) think about strengths. My preferred definition is that “strengths are things we enjoy and also excel at.”

Before I get further into one fascinating aspect of strengths, I want to put down a quick list of important-but-not-in-need-of-major-exposition points about strengths, in no particular order, just to reinforce my comprehension and share insights that help contextualise strengths studies:

• We all have strengths. Every person on earth has strengths, and every person has weaknesses too. This is not making value judgments about people’s character; it is being realistic about the fact that each of us was dealt a bundle of unique talents, interests and idiosyncrasies that come together to create a kind of strength signature as unique as a fingerprint.

• We should beware of strengthening weaknesses. Contrary to popular advice, a growing body of research suggests that we are better off developing our strengths instead of developing our weaknesses. Think of it like this: I am nowhere near as service-oriented as my wife is. For me to even come close to being as effective as she is with that strength, I would have to invest a ridiculous amount of time and effort, reject most other things in my life, and in the end I wouldn’t even enjoy it; whereas, she loves it and doesn’t have to try hard to be good at it. It wouldn’t make sense, then, for me to dedicate so much of my life to something I neither enjoy nor will ever master, while letting my true strengths go un-fully-realised.

• We find it hard to talk about strengths. Many people are raised in environments (families, schools, friends, organisations) that lack an adequate vocabulary and impetus for discussing strengths. Indeed, many of these environments are generally criticism-oriented; parents, teachers, friends and bosses likely spend more time pointing out what you do wrong, or complaining about the errors of the world, than they do waxing lyrical about your strengths and virtues.

• We are constrained when discussing strengths. Many other social and cultural factors constrain our willingness and ability to discuss strengths, including the role of humility, a lack of feedback, strengths blindness, culturally-specific beliefs about the importance of “fitting in,” and the concept of the fixed mindset (ie, the notion that our strengths are fixed and cannot be developed further).

Consistent with our inbuilt radar for seeking out problems and avoiding imminent pain, we have created a world where it’s more common to pull weeds than sow seeds.

BUT, this is where PP comes in, because it turns out that some very interesting, enlightening and exciting things happen when you choose to ignore weaknesses, errors and shortcomings, and instead start poking around in the positive recesses of people’s minds.

Consider the process of expanding your strengths vocabulary. Below is a snapshot of my growing strengths library. Whenever I come across a strength, i add it to the list along with a pithy definition. The benefit of this is that by having a bigger vocabulary, I can have richer, more meaningful and ultimately more useful conversations with the people whose growth I care about, which is basically everybody I know, but more specifically my wife, my mum, my coaching clients and my friends.

I have only had a few overly excited conversations about strengths-spotting with my wife and a few clients so far, and I still have a long long way to go in understanding how to facilitate valuable strengths-based conversations.

But notice what happens inside you as you hold a strength of yours in mind and read the following strengths-curious questions. I would wager that you feel some positive emotions as you imagine being asked these questions about your specific strengths.

• What do you think about the particular strengths labels you have?

• What is your unique understanding of how your particular strengths manifest in you?

• How much do you like the strengths you have?

• How much do you feel your strengths are part of your identity?

• How have your strengths shown up best in your life? And where would you like to aim them next?

The reason engaging with questions like these feels freeing and generative is that it’s so novel to be asked them! We simply have not been given many (or any) opportunities to name the things we enjoy and excel at, claim them as our own, and have supportive, thoughtful, exploratory dialogue about their implications for our lives and the lives of others.

Approaching life from the POV of strengths identification and discussion is a profound shift, a shift that is already yielding some lovely surprises.

For instance, while writing the definitions of the strengths in my library, a few strongly reminded me of people I know. I felt emotional seeing those familiar people in my mind suddenly in higher definition, as if I was seeing them fully for the very first time. I felt simultaneously grateful to them for their unique gifts and guilty that I’d spent much of my life overlooking them.

What about the people in your life? Who have you not seen fully yet?

It is exciting to continue practicing spotting people’s strengths (as well as my own) and exploring what roles those strengths can play in building a life that’s genuinely yours.

I’m also excited to learn how to have powerful strengths-based conversations. And to that end, the good ol’ PPs have provided various frameworks for doing so. They are fascinating. Let me share five that resonated with me most:

1. Conversations about Strengths Constellations

The idea of strengths constellations is that our unique strengths can be combined to make powerful compound strengths that allow us to do things we didn’t think possible until we’d linked then together. Put another way, if you consider a strength like grit, for example, you may find that it’s actually a combination of several of your other strengths like focus, optimism and hope. To explore constellations, first identify a number of your strengths, then reflect on the potential inherent in combining them. Get curious about the constellations of your nearest and dearest as well. It’s exciting to explore what people are truly capable of.

2. Conversations about Strengths Blindness

Strengths blindness is one of many reasons our culture tends not to foster conversations about strengths: we take our strengths for granted and believe they are ordinary instead of extraordinary. We’ve all experienced those curse-of-knowledge moments where we assume everyone has the same ability as us but then they turn around and say, “Wait a minute, this is easy for you because you’ve done it loads, but I haven’t!” Strengths blindness is a similar oversight. Because the things we enjoy and excel at are easy for us, we forget that they are strengths. But ask yourself: what would be newly possible if you regarded your own strengths with the same reverence you extend to strengths in others?

3. Conversations about Strengths Sensitivity

Strengths sensitivity is about anticipating and embracing the failure that comes with developing our strengths, and learning how to calibrate when, where, and with whom to use them. For example, let’s say we try something new (eg, interviewing a customer) using our strengths (curiosity, powerful questioning, social intelligence) but it doesn’t go to plan. We fall. We fuck up. Maybe we forget to record the interview. In this scenario, it’s tempting to chalk it up as evidence of weaknesses. But that would be wrong. That would be conflating the strengths with the outcome. Instead of walking away feeling like a failure, we can give ourselves permission to make mistakes as we grow, and we can learn how to adapt our strengths to fit different situations.

4. Conversations about Social Cost

Conversations about the social cost of strengths can be especially fruitful ones. They stem from the fact that when we use our strengths in the world, they affect people, and different people react differently to them. Some excellent questions to explore the social cost of your strengths—and gain insights into how to use them even more effectively—are: How do other people react to your strengths? What do you notice about who loves a particular strength of yours? Who else clicks with that strength? Who is that strength most effective with? Who else shares that strength? And conversely, who reacts poorly to your use of that strength? What might you do differently with them?

5. Conversations about Strengths Tilt

Strengths tilt conversations focus on how the social and cultural contexts we’re in shape our perceptions of and use of our strengths. For example, studies have shown that boys and girls in the top percentile in math ability tend to diverge in their career choices down two distinct paths. When the boys become men, they tend to take up jobs in practical, problem-solving, engineering-type roles; whereas, when the girls become women they tend to take up jobs in more relational, community-centric roles such as the social sciences. So, whilst we all may start out with similarly raw skills, talents and proclivities, there are powerful unseen forces precluding and promoting our choices.

So, Positive Psychology is awesome. It’s blowing my mind. I can’t think of a satisfying conclusion as this was just a way for me to recall ideas and produce something so I could learn more effectively.

Thank you for giving me a space to do that. It has helped! And thank you for taking the time to read it. I am very excited indeed about what’s possible with Positive Psychology!

⬥

If you are ready to make a major career shift through a creative project, I offer professional 1:1 coaching—using principles of Positive Psychology—to help you navigate that transformation. Clients have delivered speeches, launched podcasts, started businesses, and found more fulfilling jobs.

If you’re interested in exploring what you could achieve by partnering with me, you can send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

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I WAS IN LONDON recently when I stopped off at a branch of Chipotle (a multinational Mexican fast food chain, IYKYK) for a hot honey chicken salad. After the server handed me my tray of food, I found a table in the corner and placed the tray down, and then went over to the area where they provide napkins, cutlery, and condiments, and naturally grabbed myself one of the numerous bottles of Tabasco Sauce that were readily available for customers to use.

Ten minutes later, having doused my salad a’plenty and wolfed down mouthfuls of grotesque proportion, I began to relax enough to start noticing my surroundings and was struck by just how clean the Tabasco bottles were. They were so clean they looked as if they had just been recently polished. It is a rare thing indeed, I thought, to find so many squeaky-clean condiment bottles in such frantic fast food restaurants in cities like London at such late hours. And I found myself imagining that it was one of the daily or perhaps twice-daily tasks that the staff members at Chipotle dutifully completed: polishing the Tabascos.

It was then that I realised there were no other condiments available in Chipotle at all; just Tabasco, and I considered trying to calculate how many Chipotle branches there might be across the globe, and how many bottles of Tabasco sauce that might roughly equate to. As I threw my fork into my newly-emptied cardboard bowl and wiped my tingling lips with my napkin, I reflected on what a lucrative deal that must have been for the Tabasco company to strike, among many, and I marvelled, not for the first time, at this brand’s unmatched reach and success.

How had this company gotten their little bottles of pepper sauce into so many hearts and so many minds?

A book, a podcast, and a Perplexity deep research prompt later, I was ready to begin writing, all the while wishing I’d taken a picture of those shiny bottles in Chipotle, just so I could show you how finely polished they were.

I was determined not to get bored writing this piece by turning it into a dry historical survey. So instead I have committed to giving you just a dash of what I think are the most interesting ingredients in the story of how these ubiquitous red bottles came to be so well polished and placed so prominently inside our cupboards and our pantries.

I’ll start with a brief and factually patchy summary of the company’s origin story. I’ll look at Tabasco’s iconic design and military connections. And I’ll end with the surprising, personal, and unconventional ways people around the world have expressed their love for it.

This is my deep dive on Tabasco Sauce.

The bankrupt gardener

The Averys were a wealthy family from New Jersey who made their fortune in sugar production (yes, slavery I’m afraid) in the early 1800s. As part of their business assets, the Averys bought an island—roughly the size of New York’s Central Park—located in the swamplands of Louisiana to house a new sugarcane plantation. They discovered that the island, by now renamed Avery Island, wasn’t actually an island at all, but a massive salt dome that was slowly rising from the marshes. By mining and selling the salt beneath their feet, the Averys combined these profits with the profits already being made from sugar, further bolstering their wealth and social standing among the U.S. upper class. The Averys operated these businesses until the American Civil War put a stop to them in 1861.

While all this was going on, the McIlhenny’s (mack–ill–henny’s) were a middle-class Irish-Scottish immigrant family who owned a tavern in Hagerstown, Maryland. When John McIlhenny, head of the family, died of cholera on his son Edmund’s 17th birthday in 1832, the boy Edmund was forced to quit school and start working to take care of his mother and seven younger brothers. Edmund went into accounting and, cutting a mightily long story short, by the time the civil war broke out three decades later, he had become a wealthy New Orleans bank owner in his own right. Crucially during this time, Edmund had also met and married Miss Mary Eliza Avery of Avery family fame, thus forever forging a formidable family business alliance.

However, when the civil war broke out, a crumbling credit system, massive currency inflation, and widespread defaults—not to mention the Union’s capture of the economic hub of New Orleans—sent the precocious Edmund McIlhenny swiftly into bankruptcy. With no other option, he was forced to move in with, and become financially dependent on, his in-laws on Avery Island.

This did not sit right with Edmund McIlhenny. Here was a 50-odd-year-old successful financier who’d overcome the death of his father, saved his family from poverty, and managed to marry upwards into one of the most influential families in the state, who suddenly found himself having to accept handouts.

This was the moment Edmund chose to begin making pepper sauce, of all things, and nobody—not even the professional historian, Mr. Shane Bernard, who has written a book and spent 25 years compiling the McIlhenny Archive—knows why Edmund started playing around with peppers. Some say he met soldiers in the streets of Louisiana who recommended pepper sauce as way to spruce up bland local grub. Others say he was explicitly searching for a new business venture to reclaim his independence and had noticed how cheap-to-grow, popular, and thus potentially profitable peppers might be.

One thing we do know is that, whilst Edmund was figuring out what to do next, he was spending a lot of time tending the Avery’s garden. He kept written records of all the cabbages and lettuces he was growing. No mention of peppers. But it’s safe to assume he was probably growing those too. Whatever it was that first possessed Edmund McIlhenny to make pepper sauce and sell it to the public, the fact is that my table, your table, and tables in Chipotle the world over would be bereft of Tabasco Sauce were it not for the American Civil War and a ruined banker with a green thumb.

I really wanted to bring this first part to a close with a pithy paragraph that combined the phrase “bittersweet” with a reference to Tabasco AND an allusion to the paradoxical fact that war, as dreadful as it is, can become a catalyst of invention. But I have decided to stop short of writing anything that could be seen as tone-deaf or insensitive and, instead, I will say only that it has given me food for thought. (I’ll see myself out)

Pocket-sized patriotism

When I think back to that night in Chipotle, liberally applying the sauce to my salad, the thing that comes to mind is the bottle’s unique shape and size. I have only seen pocket-sized Tabasco bottles that fit snugly in the palm of one hand. Do they make bigger bottles? If they do I don’t think I’d want to use them. There is something deeply satisfying about the modesty of those little bottles, reminiscent of bottles of aftershave (indeed, McIlhenny based his bottle design on old perfume bottles), imbuing them with a certain artisanal aura, and a sense of scarcity, which together make the sauce inside feel potent and precious.

Another distinctive feature is the bright red hexagonal cap. It is tiny and fiddly like a one-stud LEGO piece, always at risk of being dropped at any moment. Even for the most conscientious among us, unscrewing a Tabasco cap is a special kind of challenge, demanding what is surely—in a world that increasingly favours convenience—an unreasonable level of focus and dexterity. Screwing the cap back on afterwards is even more precarious!

But it’s this unique combination of non-condescendiness, glass-sturdiness, hand-holdiness, and pocket-snugliness that makes the Tabasco bottle such a coveted item. Especially, it turns out, among military personnel.

During World Wars I and II, U.S. soldiers were having to sustain themselves on the battlefield with nutritionally adequate (by the standards of the day) but soul-suckingly dull and monotonous rations of beef, bread, and beans served cold in cans. The widespread need of soldiers to flavourise their lunch—together with the favourable fact that Edmund’s grandson and future president of the McIlhenny Company, Walter S. McIlhenny, served in both wars, earned the Navy Cross AND the Silver Star, and even created the “Charlie Ration Cookbook Kit” (a cookbook wrapped around a Tabasco bottle)—helped to cement Tabasco Sauce among military folk as the go-to way to “fix your food.”

The brand’s identity became closely tied to ruggedness, hunting, patriotism, and blowing shit up, which, as you can imagine, resonated deeply with service members and relatives back home, creating an unstoppably effective narrative any marketing executive would die for.

And when in 2011 the U.S. Army switched the glass bottles for ketchup-style sachets in an attempt to reduce costs, they were eventually forced to ditch the sachets and bring back the beloved bottles, so concerned were they that ignoring the soldiers’ fervent demands could create a genuinely consequential dip in morale. Viva la re-zest-ance!

If you put an OG bottle of Tabasco from the early 1870s (as you do) beside one from your local supermarket today, you’ll see that the only significant graphic change has been to re-orient the wording on the diamond label by about 45 degrees.

In 150+ years, the visual voice of Tabasco has remained warm and homespun. That is, compared with an overwhelming proportion of other brands—both inside and outside the food industry—that have followed the same prevailing trend towards a colder, minimalist aesthetic.

The qualities of restraint and constancy in Tabasco’s visual identity have gone hand-in-hand with those same qualities born in the production side of the sauce that, together, have helped Tabasco age very well indeed. I’m not talking about the fact it’s aged in oak barrels for three years; I’m talking about how it has survived thrived in the broader social context of increasing consumer skepticism about ultra-processed foods.

Whether it’s gluten, carbs, calories, high levels of salt and sugar, artificial colours, or long discordant lists of chemical preservatives that you’ve taken a stand against, Tabasco Sauce emerges as pure and blemish-free as those polished bottles in Chipotle. The original red sauce (Tabasco’s flagship product) is dauntingly simple with just three ingredients: tabasco peppers, vinegar, and salt. And the amount of salt is on the order of tens of milligrams per teaspoon, way less than a comparable dose of ketchup, soy sauce, or stock.

In a marketplace full of food accompaniments bloated with thickeners, gums, stabilisers, sweeteners, and lord knows what else, Tabasco Sauce looks less like a condiment and more like a cleanse.

The cult of the little bottle

If you thought McIlhenny’s little bottles had reached their extraordinary status just by looking good and sitting on tables in popular restaurants, then you have vastly underestimated the lengths human beings will go to to ensure they are never more than an arm’s length away from it.

There are people (ordinary people, not brand ambassadors or marketing executives) who carry Tabasco in their handbags and ni their glove compartments. This practice has become so widespread that you can now buy officially licensed Tabasco keyrings that hold a real 1/8 oz glass bottle. A South African seller markets these as “the hottest keyrings” money can buy.

Elsewhere, British singer Rita Ora did a radio interview in 2012 where she confirmed she “cannot taste” food anymore without adding Tabasco. And, apparently, she is crazy about—I shit you not—banana-and-Tabasco sandwiches! Or consider the fans of the TV show Roswell, in which the alien teenagers are foreever drenching their food in the stuff. When the WB Network threatened cancellation, fans mailed them thousands of Tabasco bottles as a protest campaign.

But pop stars are amateurs compared to astronauts. It turns out that when people go to space, their body fluids flow upwards into their heads, leaving them feeling permanently congested. This means that in orbit, your sense of smell mostly disappears, taking most of your sense of taste with it too. Astronauts on the International Space Station therefore crave sharp, pungent flavours to punch through the sensory fog…a perfect job, of course, for the little red bottle. NASA reports that it is now a staple on all shuttle menus.

The astronauts, the soldiers, the pop stars, the alien-obsessives, and the handbag devotees are all variations on the same phenomenon. Tabasco has become more than just a condiment. It’s a kind of cultural fetish, a way of carrying a piece of home, an expression of aspirational values, a reassurance that no matter how far you drift—whether into space, into a combat zone, or into a neglected motorway service station—you can still give your sub-par food a lip-smacking kick.

And if all this sounds like I’m overstating the case, consider that upwards of 150,000 visitors a year make the pilgrimage to Avery Island, the salty garden where Edmund McIlhenny first started sowing pepper seeds. You can tour the factory, tend the seedlings, walk through the barrel warehouses, and receive your complimentary mini bottle as an edible souvenir.

Of course, there are scores of other hot sauce companies getting in on the action now. The ones I’ve tried are perfectly decent. But, when you see names like “Da Bomb” and “Ass Reaper” and whatever else is being concocted to make you feel like you’re participating in some kind of gastronomic daredevil stunt, Tabasco Sauce just sits there, quietly content. It doesn’t need to shout.

🌶️

Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Thanks for reading my publication about creativity as a tool for personal growth.

If you’re ready to make a major career shift through a creative project, I offer professional 1:1 coaching—using principles of Positive Psychology—to help you navigate that transformation.

If you’re interested in exploring what you could achieve by partnering with me, you can send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

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“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

I AM NEVER more engaged in my creative work than when I’m deviating from—or outright rebelling against—some sort of convention. I’m always looking for opportunities to do it. In fact, this intro is a good example: despite the stylistic injunctions you will hear from writing guides and English professors everywhere, I relished playing with this paragraph to make it start, and finish, with the letter I.

Along the same vein, when I first read ’s brilliant listicle-style article called 50 Things I Know, and then ’s equally brilliant 100 Things I Know (and a few others that followed on their heels), I knew it was only a matter of time before I tried to make my own contribution to this fun and lively format…only with a twist.

It is not enough to zig when others zag just for the sake of it, though, like a teenager dying their hair blue just to annoy their mum. To truly capture my imagination, an act of creative deviance must have merit. It must stand up on its own and point people to a deeper truth, a new perspective, or a more meaningful conversation.

Don’t get me wrong. Making a list of hard-won wisdom feels like a really worthwhile activity. What’s so appealing about Sasha’s and Mari’s articles, besides getting a glimpse of their unique insights, is that they’re an invitation to clarify my own insights and make them legible so that they may be valuable to myself and others.

But even as Sasha’s and Mari’s insights thrilled me and challenged me, I found myself thinking that it wouldn’t be those insights I’d most enjoy chatting about at the dinner table. Instead, I would prefer to hear them share what they’re stuck on, confused by, unsure about, or tentative with. Give me fifty conversation starters instead of fifty conversation enders, any day of the week.

Sasha, Mari, and YOU if you happen to be reading this, please consider accepting this writing challenge and publishing it, as I would genuinely enjoy reading about the things you do not know.

In the spirit of thoughtful rebellion, playful experimentation, and sincere curiosity, then, here are 27 things I do not know…that puzzle, prod, and preoccupy me.

1. I don’t know if my earliest memory (which is of toddler me standing in my crib late at night crying for my parents who I could hear fighting downstairs) is actually my memory, or my mum’s. And I therefore don’t know whether it’s worth me reading into this memory in order to try to make more sense of the person I became, or whether it’s even worth reading into any old memories at all.

2. I don’t know if it’s possible to trust another person completely. I say this because even when it comes to the few people in my life who I know, rationally, I can trust fully, I still sometimes have lingering feelings that I can’t, or that they can’t trust me fully either.

3. I don’t know if I’d want to be able to completely trust people, since there seems to be a relationship between untrustworthiness and attractiveness.

4. I don’t know what the most useful way of understanding anger is.

5. I don’t know how to accurately explain this weird thing I can do inside my stomach. I can basically create on-demand what feels like an explosive electrical charge around my solar plexus, which emanates outwards through my entire body. It is so powerful and I am so sensitive to its effect that I can only do it for a split second before stopping.

6. I don’t know what would inspire me to produce the work I’m proudest of, give me the courage to put myself out there, or make me feel satisfied with my life if I no longer felt driven to seek other peoples’ attention and appreciation.

7. I don’t know how to reliably tell the difference between the desire to face challenges I should face because they will help me to grow, and the desire to face challenges I should not face because they won’t.

8. I don’t know how to direct a coaching client without being directive. In other words, I don’t know how to suggest that they should try something in a way that allows them to choose it as their own and not have it handed to them.

9. I don’t know whether a client’s lack of belief that they can change is a warning sign that I should not coach them, or an invitation to do just that.

10. I don’t know how to reliably remain unattached to outcomes I believe my coaching clients should aim for.

11. I don’t know how to explain the value I got from going to art school, or how I would convince dubious parents to send their kids to art school.

12. I don’t know what taboos are left for art to break.

13. I don’t know how to fully enjoy a writing project when it has been conceived and/or paid for by somebody other than myself.

14. I don’t know grammar. I know what a verb is, and what a noun is, and I can explain what an adjective is I think. But that’s all. The rest is a mystery. This is making learning Spanish very hard.

15. I don’t know how to tell people who aren’t digital nomads that I am a digital nomad without sounding either like I’m boasting or that I’m a hobo.

16. I don’t know why the more I travel (I’ve been a working traveller now for almost four years), the harder it is to talk about the places I’m travelling to.

17. I don’t know why self-help is something people tend to either embrace completely or reject vehemently, why it’s so rare to meet somebody who is ambivalent about it.

18. I don’t know why I predominantly get kicks out of reading nonfiction, and not fiction. I recently saw somebody say: “If you don’t read fiction, then I don’t trust you.” and this gave me the chills because I understand it on an emotional level while not being able to explain why.

19. I don’t know what the future of masculinity is.

20. I don’t know how I would respond (eg, how I’d treat others, how I’d treat myself, whether I’d continue to write, who I’d choose as friends, etc) if I experienced a massive tragedy like becoming paralysed, losing a child, or having to fight in a war.

21. I don’t know how, when I hear stories about the world being only one button and one unhinged dictator away from total nuclear annihilation, I am not more freaked out.

22. I don’t know why joggers/runners who get mad at people for being in their way choose to run along the most pedestrian-heavy routes at the busiest of times.

23. I don’t know how certain toilet bowl designs get green-lighted and rolled out publicly in malls and train stations, specifically the ones with motion-activated flushes that flush five times while you’re sitting there, wasting gallons of water (when they’re presumable supposed to be saving it!) and drenching your trousers and your arse in the process.

24. Relatedly, I don’t know why we in England think it’s OK not to have bidet’s in our bathrooms, why we expect to be able to clean ourselves properly without the aid of water. We would never make a curry and only wipe the pan with a dry cloth, would we?

25. I don’t know how to tie a tie.

26. I don’t know how to braid hair according to my wife’s standards (honestly I don’t really know how to do it well at all).

27. And, of course, I don’t know what I don’t know.

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Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Thanks for reading my publication about creativity as a tool for personal growth.

If you’re ready to make a major career shift through a creative project, I offer professional 1:1 coaching—using principles of Positive Psychology—to help you navigate that transformation.

If you’re interested in exploring what you could achieve by partnering with me, you can send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

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AT UNIVERSITY I did a study-abroad trip to Turkey where I was super socially awkward. I was part of a big, interesting group of peers by virtue of the school we were in, but I barely said a word to any of them. Every moment was an excruciating charade of putting on a face while hiding my anxiety. At night I’d write feverishly in my diary trying to understand my turmoil. What the hell was wrong with me? And how could I get out of it?

What I learned is that one useful way of understanding social awkwardness is a lack of curiosity about other people. Put another way, it is really hard to connect authentically with others when we’re so wrapped up in ourselves.

What if they don’t like me? What if I say something dumb? What if no one talks to me? What if they can tell I’m nervous? What if they laugh at me? What if someone challenges me and I don’t know what to say?

Whilst I accept there is wisdom and care underpinning questions like these as they protect us from harm, it is also true that they are completely self-oriented. Not a single one of those questions fosters any attention, curiosity, or appreciation of other people. And that is the whole problem.

There are at least two major reasons why this degree of self-orientation makes us feel more out of place:

First, it keeps us locked in disempowering thinking, since our brain will always seek answers to the questions we pose. Take a moment to reflect on the answers that come up when you ask, “What if no one likes me?” or “What if people reject me?” … Questions like that take you further and further into more uncomfortable, painful, or scary thoughts, making you feel even less confident about putting yourself out there.

Second, when we show no curiosity or appreciation towards others, they feel it—even if only subconsciously—and then they find it hard to trust us. The extent to which someone is oriented towards themselves is arguably the biggest determinant of their untrustworthiness, an insight that is nicely illustrated in the following Trust Equation by the management consultants David Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford.

No matter how credible, reliable, and intimate a person is, they undermine all of that if they care about themselves so exclusively that they fail to show interest in other people.

By walking into social situations preoccupied with self-oriented questions, not only are we internally generating debilitating thoughts, we are also externally creating the conditions for people to respond untrustingly towards us, which only serves to make social interactions more difficult, providing further temptation for self-orientation.

It is admittedly a harsh, reinforcing downwards spiral and a really horrible place to be stuck.

But, here’s what helped me get out of this bind: When you realise that it is just a matter of re-orienting yourself towards others, you realise that it has nothing to do with your character or your misfortunes. It is not that you lack talent, confidence, caring, or experience. It’s not that you have bad social skills, or that you have nothing to contribute, or that there is anything broken or lacking in you at all. It is simply that you have gotten into a pattern of thinking about yourself too much.

The good news is that if it is a pattern, you can change it by deciding to practice something new! You really can transform your social life and make all the anxiety, doubt, and self-loathing go away by choosing to become more interested in others. You don’t need a therapist. You don’t need to become “a more interesting person.” You don’t even need to learn any new skills (besides maybe sharpening your skills in questioning). You just need to reframe social gatherings as opportunities to make other people the heroes of the story—and forget about yourself for a couple of hours.

When you make someone else the subject of your sincere curiosity, you’re doing some very powerful, mutually beneficial things:

First, since you’re investing your time and everyone knows time is precious, you are signalling that you value them. You may be the only person this year who has looked at them for more than five seconds or asked them three consecutive questions beyond “How are you?” and “What do you do?” This alone can give people big boosts of self-esteem as they recognise that someone else finds them interesting enough to want to know more. They will not forget about this kindness and they will want to pay it back. And as for you, and your old worries about rejection, you will now be standing firmly in the realm of nice person—a nice, curious person who they’ll want to spend more time with.

Second, you’ll be demonstrating humility, which is a likeable quality in itself. But it’s more than that, since being humble also helps you to deepen the relationships you are building. This has to do with trust again. Studies show that trusting others first actually increases our own trustworthiness. For instance, think back to interactions you’ve had with people who were perfectly nice but didn’t ask you a single question, or showed absolutely no signs of doubt or fallibility. Did they feel trustworthy? I doubt it very seriously. Contrast that with someone who went first in volunteering something they were struggling with. The fact that they trusted you to hear their uncertainties likely made them trustworthy. Chances are you were touched that they felt safe to confide in you, and you naturally wanted to reciprocate. Asking questions is a version of this trust that earns trust, because to openly ask questions is an act of vulnerability, since we are socially vulnerable when we are not in the know. By asking questions, we are effectively saying, “Hey, not only do I find you worthy of my time, I am also trusting you not to penalise me for being ignorant.”

For a whole host of reasons, then, asking people questions turns you into a trust magnet, making social interactions smooth and inevitable, both of which are unlikely if you show up incuriously self-oriented.

In sum, difficulty greeting people and being sociable is not evidence of any skill gaps or character flaws, but a habit of being too self-absorbed. By choosing to focus our attention on the lives of other people, we create the inner and outer conditions for natural sociability, by earning people’s trust and giving them the license to be curious in return. It is also just much more interesting to show up like this generally. Other people are the most fascinating things in the world.

I mentioned that being curious about others goes hand-in-hand with asking quality questions. There are lots of great books and talks I have binged on to learn how to become a better questioner. You could also start collecting quality questions and keeping them in a library. Or you could work on projects that require you to ask questions often, like interviewing people for podcasts, facilitating oral history, doing some guerrilla journalism, or, like me, finding people to coach.

One tactic that has really helped me feel confident—even excited—walking into rooms full of strangers is to come up with 2–3 things I would genuinely like to learn about someone before I arrive. At first this felt weird, like I was being calculating or performative. But that’s bullshit. Taking the time to determine what you find most intriguing about other people is in fact deeply caring, considerate, and generous, and it’s the best method I know of being comfortable in my own skin.

⬥

Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Thanks for reading my publication.

Do you know roughly what you want next but have no idea how to get in front of the right people without looking desperate? I'm launching a small group coaching programme called Screw the Job Boards to help you build genuine relationships with the companies you actually want to work for, and make yourself the obvious choice. If you’re interested, check it out.

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Merry Christmas everybody! I want to re-share a short xmas-related story that happened a few years ago, mainly because hundreds more of you have subscribed to this publication since then and won’t have read it, and partly because it’s a true story I’m fond of telling. I hope you and yours are having a lovely festive period! 🎄

IT WAS LATE DECEMBER 2011. Six months had passed since I’d left my hometown of Sheffield for a new life in London. People were starting to make plans for Christmas and I—with my newfound confidence and appetite for adventure—wanted to celebrate it on my own, somewhere different.

I can’t remember why I chose Barcelona. Maybe a friend had recommended it. Maybe it was the cheapest destination on the 25th of December. Maybe it had captured my imagination through its electrifying football team, which was, and still is, the greatest footy team I have ever watched.

A few days before my upcoming flight from Heathrow Airport, someone broke the news that neither the London Underground, nor London buses, operate, at all, on Christmas Day. The distance from my house share in south-east London to Heathrow was a portentous 20 miles. Taxis were sure to be unaffordable.

After some rather frantic research, there turned out to be a handful of Heathrow-bound coaches that were scheduled to depart from Paddington Station at various times of the day. But Paddington was itself ten miles away from where I lived, therefore presenting me with a similar logistical challenge.

Yet, the more I dwelt on it, the more I felt that the solution I’d been trying to avoid all along would be the best way, entirely in-keeping with the spirit of the trip: I would walk to Heathrow Airport. It would be interesting. It would show me a new side of London. It would give me a story to write about one day.

I calculated that the marathon-length walk would take me seven hours without stopping, so I gave myself eight. I didn’t have to worry about dragging a suitcase behind me as I only took a backpack. And, for added interest, I scribbled ‘HEATHROW’ on a piece of card to wield at passing motorists.

I tiptoed down the stairs of my house in the pitch-black hours of the icy Christmas dawn, tied my laces extra tight, and set off, briskly, with my hood up and chin down, waiting for my feet to warm up. I wondered how many hours I’d walk in the dark, and whether the sidewalks would last all the way.

But just 25 minutes later, by the big Sainsbury's on the Old Kent Road, my Heathrow sign attracted the attention of a passing off-duty black cab driver. He pulled up smoothly beside me, wound down his window, and said—smiling wryly and shaking his head—"Any other day of the year, mate."

As it turned out, as well as driving cabs, this man was an electrician, just like me. We chatted about life in London and Christmas in Barcelona. He drove me all the way to Terminal 2, refused my cash, told me to take care, and wished me Merry Christmas. And I was at the airport nine hours before my flight.

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Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Thanks for reading my publication about the art of doing meaningful work.

If you’re ready to make a big life or career shift through a creative project, I offer professional 1:1 coaching to help you navigate that transformation. To explore what you could achieve by partnering with me, send me an email and we’ll set up a discovery call.

I lost my dad last year. And, as someone who loves writing, I’ve been wanting to write something about him for quite a while. His mum (my grandma, obvs) was a writer. She published a cookery book back when everyday people did not get things published. She owned a second-hand book shop. And she wrote personal essays (all of which I have in my possession) about the rugged beauty of Yorkshire and the tragic loss of her brother and three of her five sons. Even though I never met her—her name was Mary—she’s always been an inspiration to me, as you can imagine. I knew that when the time was right, then, I would write a little something about my dad. His name was Murray.

I had to wait a while first before I felt ready to try. Then, the first things I wrote turned out a bit too gushy and dramatic, so I shelved them and waited. The next things I wrote were less dramatic but more critical of my dad’s choices and lifestyle, which ultimately didn’t sit right with me. No matter how much I liked what I’d written, I couldn’t get it past the question of “Would he be hurt by what you’ve written?” So I waited again. The next time I felt ready to try, I was standing in a cute book shop in London called Chener Books, waiting for my mate to finish work, flicking through some random poetry books, when I realised—A-ha!—I could write a poem!

A poem felt like an easier way of dealing with my complex feelings and thoughts. Far easier, IMO, than attempting an essay. Poet David Whyte has written that “poetry is language against which you have no defenses.” And I think that’s as pertinent for the writer of poems as it is for the reader. I wanted to write about my dad, and find a way of expressing whatever it was that I needed to express, but I never wanted to do it whilst feeling defensive. Poetry has allowed me to do it. So here it is. It’s called Shaving my Dad’s Stubble. And it’s one of the loveliest memories I have of our time together at the end.

Shaving my Dad’s Stubble

He’s bone-pale
and skeleton-thin,
his fingers still stained black from Amber Leaf,
teethless, breathless, counting on the oxygen
to stop his failing lungs from suffocating him.

Only last spring he stood poised
at the entrance to Tesco as it opened at dawn.
Potatoes, milk chocolate and Carling in his trolley,
his bag topped with The Daily Mail
bearing his Man Utd score and crossword puzzle.

Now the nurses wash him in the bed
with a curtain drawn for privacy,
his bedpans are on rotation.
He urges us to close and open the window,
turn on and off the telly, again, and the fan.

For the first time in my life,
and his, I fetch some warm water,
buy Gillette from the hospital shop, borrow a razor,
begin lathering his neck with my fingers
while he tips his head back, eyelids closing.

I am careful not to cut him, as he asked me to be.
But his moustache stubble is thick; the blade drags
and he winces Mm! Ow!
Make sure there’s enough foam on, son!
And I continue shaving, changing the subject

teasing him in a confident tone:
You know? These ears look familiar
and I'll shave your beard but I won't wipe your arse
and the other things that quick-witted barbers
might say to their customers.

And no words at all
about how much
I love him.

⬥

Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal growth.

If you’re ready to make a big life or career shift through a creative project, I offer 1:1 coaching to help you navigate that transformation. To explore what you could achieve by partnering with me, send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

Dear subscriber,

What’s that thing you want to create but haven’t let yourself take seriously yet?

[Please think of it, before you read on]

With that in mind, I want to tell you about a new ‘passion project’ accelerator I’m helping to build called Act Two—and in particular about the intriguing, inventive, and inspiring creative projects students are building there.

I’ve been telling my friends and family about these projects, and when I watched their eyes bulge and their mouths gape, I realised that other people would be interested in hearing about them too, so I’m sharing some of them with you.

If reading about the following projects makes you tempted to join Act Two to start or develop a passion project of your own, but you have questions or concerns, feel free to grab 30 mins with me and I’ll be happy to tell you all about it.

I’m going to include some more context about Act Two at the bottom of this post (how to join, etc). But first, let me briefly tell you about the crazy-good projects students are building at Act Two.

, currently living in the Netherlands, is really into water. His background is in academia and he also runs a company that makes water filtration devices. Cees is using his time in Act Two to write what he describes as a “Water Bible,” sharing the untold history and unrivalled impact of this most abundant and taken-for-granted liquid.

Based in Poland, is an artist whose Act Two project is to transport an entire burned forest into a museum space, creating an immersive and interactive site-specific sculpture. It’s going to require multiple sources of funding, logistical ingenuity, and plenty of creative flair. And I cannot wait to see it (and smell it) when it’s complete.

“Proving that free will exists!”—that’s the goal of John Girgis, who lives in Scotland and is studying neuroscience. John wants to create sensitive enough imaging techniques to capture memories as they’re being created in the brain, because if he can do that, then he could (cutting a long story short) demonstrate that fate is impossible.

, in the U.S., is using her deep curiosity with AI to not only vibe-code tools that allow for new forms of musical production, she’s also teaching others to make music—even those with no previous experience. Lori ran a Guest Creative Lab in Act Two (all students are welcome to run Guest Labs) and it was a huge hit with everyone who took part.

Before Kyle McGovern sadly lost his grandpa, he’d spent time interviewing him and thus preserving his life story for his family to savour. Kyle is now developing his “oral history” project in Act Two to include other families in the U.S. and beyond, creating a home on YouTube called Ask Your Elders, to broadcast all of their stories.

U.S.-based entrepreneur, father, and writer, , entered Act Two never having used TikTok as a creative tool. Within just a few weeks of experimentation and testing, Jeff had gone viral with his short-form video content—and discovered a whole new medium for sharing his ideas with a new audience.

For years, saw a lack of specialised overnight care for newborn babies in her mountain town of Truckee, California, causing many parents sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and leaving them no time to recover. In Act Two, Cris was finally able to mobilise. She has launched the website and built strategic relationships with local healthcare providers.

, an Indian immigrant living in Australia, is building a suite of resources to help newer immigrants and job seekers break into the tough Australian job market. With specific knowledge and tools that have worked for him, he’s creating the “Immigrant Job Launchpad,” producing courses, consulting, and digital services.

​And last but certainly not least, UK-based engineer came into Act Two aiming to write about AI safety. A serious topic indeed. But after ​participating in the cohort, Jack rediscovered a forgotten playfulness that had laid dormant for years, and now he’s taking play more seriously. ​No joke—Jack has become a Sillyness Consultant.

How incredible are these projects?! I love shouting about them.

And by the way, if you want to read about them in more depth, one of our students, , a doctor-turned-creator, is writing Act Two project deep dives.

I mentioned I’m helping build Act Two. But how?

Firstly I’m coaching. Students come to me with problems they want to overcome or ideas they want to explore, and I support them in devising their own solutions for moving forward.

Secondly, with and (the co-founders), I’m figuring out how to build a world-class peer support culture, designing principles, rituals, tools, and systems that help students help each other in Act Two.

Do you have an idea you’d like to explore in Act Two?

Here’s some more context:

• Act Two is our flagship cohort-based accelerator for developing a passion project of your own. Cohort 2 kicks off in January 2026 Apply here →

• Citizens of the Internet is our “always on” creative community that runs alongside Act Two, providing ongoing support between cohorts. Apply here →

• You can join Act Two or Citizens or both

• You can work on any creative project you like. Projects can be profit-making or not. You don’t need to have started your project to join

• If you have more questions, or want to discuss a project you’re thinking about, book 30 mins with me. I would love to hear more.

I’ll wrap this up now. And I’ll keep it simple.

Life is short. You must create things. You are a creative creature with creative needs. And look what happens when you ignore your needs (from the wise and mighty Mary Oliver)!👇:

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

I am sorry for guilt-bombing you with that at this festive time of year but it’s TRUE!

So start that project! Take that step! And for pete’s sake do it with others who are on the same journey as you. Do it at Act Two.

Thanks for reading my posts in 2025. Your engagement means a lot to me.

Speak soon. Have a wonderful christmas and a happy new year.

—Harrison x

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Previous post

Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal and professional growth.

If you're ready to make a major life or career shift through a creative project, I offer 1:1 coaching to help you navigate that transformation. If you’re interested in exploring what you could achieve by partnering with me, you can learn more about me and then send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

A FRIEND recently asked me for advice about becoming a digital nomad as she’s about to set sail for “a few months or maybe forever” and to “leave the domesticated life behind.” She’s got her sights set on Japan, China, the U.S., and beyond. She’s clearly excited. I’m excited for her. And when I told her this, she thanked me for the encouragement and for “not being like the others who always question: ‘Oh but isn’t that too much instability?’”

Another friend of mine lost her dad to cancer when she was 19 years old. He left her some money that she could have when she hit 25, and one of the last things her dad said to her was, “Promise me one thing—you will only spend that money on travel and education.” As tragic as it is, I love this anecdote. It’s the backward-looking perspective of a dying man, and dying people tell the truth. They don’t mince words. They don’t deceive themselves. They don’t deceive us. And for her dad to say that to 19-year-old her, at the very end of a life cut short, to me, is a vindication that my own choice to choose a life of travel was a good one. I like to share this story often, and I shared it with my travel-hungry friend, knowing it could be a source of excitement and self-assuredness for her too.

One of the questions she asked me was: “How do you eat healthy when you’re traveling? We do get Airbnbs with kitchens but still don’t have all the stuff to cook.” It’s a great question. It’s funny; I wouldn’t say me and Corina have an explicit goal of eating healthily. But because our deeper values are around healthiness, we end up naturally leaning into healthy food choices more often than not, regardless of where we are. I think if you already value eating well, then you’ll naturally seek out healthy food on the road just like you would at home, and you’ll be just as aware of when you’re eating poorly for any length of time.

Having said that, someone else’s kitchen might not have all the things you want (eg, spices, oils, utensils, equipment) and that is a genuine challenge, especially if you’re a keen and ambitious cook. The truth is you do have to compromise on cooking when you’re a nomad. For example, in Airbnbs we end up cooking more Mediterranean food that relies more on fresh herbs rather than a comprehensive spice rack. If there’s a kitchen gadget you just can’t live without, you could try asking the host. One of the things I always ask for upfront (to avoid having to watch my shirts get shrunk by tumble-dryers) is, “Does the apartment have a clothes-drying rack?” As a result, in three years of staying in other peoples’ homes, I cannot remember being without one.

Last month we stayed in a co-living house in Montreál for four weeks. It had everything you could possibly want in a kitchen. I’m talking every spice under the sun. I’m talking coffee, rice, onions, garlic, baking flours, soaps, detergents—all of it provided for us (it was somebody’s task to make sure these things were always kept topped up). And the kitchen itself was equipped with every pot and pan you can imagine. That’s one of the many benefits1 of good co-living houses; the people who set them up tend to be former travellers themselves who have specific knowledge of what you really want and need in order to live a full life on the road.

A second question my friend asked me was, “How do you stay motivated to exercise?” Another well-intuited question. I have a mixed history with exercise on the road, going through patches I’m proud of and patches where my body screams at me: “GET THE FUCK UP! YOU’VE BEEN SITTING IN YOUR CHAIR ALL DAY!” I’m somebody that happens to enjoy running in the mornings. So, I tend to do that. But, consistency is hard because either the surrounding area isn’t ideal for running (ie, American-style grids or areas lacking green spaces), and/or during our first few weeks, we’re excited to partake in our local morning cafe scene, thus exercise very often plays second-fiddle to exploration.

Corina on the other hand doesn’t enjoy running as much as I do, and she also has a health challenge that means any high-impact exercise on the knees and the ankles isn’t great. She is therefore more partial to swimming, spinning, aerobics, yoga, that type of stuff. And for her, it is a challenge too, as she has to find classes that aren’t too far away, getting there and back via public transport because we don’t have a car. ClassPass, a monthly membership that lets you book fitness classes and wellness sessions at thousands of venues around the world, is one way she simplifies some of the decision making fatigue that can come with managing a regular exercise regime on the road.

We sometimes do our exercise without leaving the house. We are big fans of a British personal trainer on YouTube called Joe Wicks. He is a national treasurer. A living legend. He’s got hundreds of 10-, 15-, and 20-minute high- and low-impact workout videos you can follow along to. He’s even got silent workouts, for if you’re staying in a hotel or co-living house where you have to be careful not to make too much noise.

Before my friend signed off, she shared one more thing that got my attention: that going travelling sometimes seems hard to justify when you don’t feel you’ve yet achieved all you want in life. She wondered whether she ought to be “working on her business instead.” I noticed she’d added a laughing 😂 emoji to this part of her message and I told her I appreciated that because it revealed there was a part of her that does not truly think those particular doubts are valid. In other words, she’s doubting the doubting! That’s the trick! And as I said, if I was her, I would give as much time and permission to that side of myself as possible. After all, choosing an unorthodox life, choosing adventure, choosing to open your mind to different cultures, places, people and lifestyles is a huge achievement in and of itself.

And who’s to say she can’t also work on her business and her hobbies whilst travelling? I mean, that’s what I’m doing. That’s what Corina’s doing. That’s what all of the people I’ve ever met on the road are doing. In fact, I would challenge anybody to go travelling for a significant period of time, and to treat it like vacation time, without becoming antsy and adrift. After x weeks in vacation mode, trust me, you will be itching to get back to creative mode, productive mode, purposeful mode—whatever. And the fact you’ll be on the road will make it all the more interesting.

I’m not saying working-travel is for everyone at any time. But if like my friend you feel drawn to it, ​then follow ​y​our ​g​ut. Your head may try to talk you out of it in a hundred ways. But the head is sometimes wrong and the body isn’t.

Instability? Yes! Travelling​ is destabilising​. But the question is—given that we can’t avoid uncertainty on any path in life—are you willing to put up with the uncertainty that comes with travel?

I​ have not met one person​ on the road ​who shared any regrets about going travelling​. ​On the other hand, I have literally lost count of the number of folk2 who’ve told me they regret not trying.

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Thanks for indulging my pro-travel rant. If you have any specific questions or concerns about being a working traveller, feel free to email me. I do like replying to them.

Previous post

Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal and professional growth.

If you're a high-achiever ready to make a major life or career shift through a creative project, I offer 1:1 coaching to help you navigate that transformation. If you’re interested in how I can support you, learn more about me and then send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

YESTERDAY my wife pointed down at my foot and said, “Your toe nail’s torn through the end of your sock!” She has commented on my toe nails a lot over the years, about how I don’t cut them often enough, and how they get sharp and scratch her when we’re asleep in bed. She even has a phrase she likes to use to signal when she wants to moralise about my toe nails: “Britain’s got talons,” which is a threefold reference, first to the idea that my toe nails are similar to the long nails you find on birds of prey and other things that should be kept away from soft furnishings, second to the fact that I’m British, and third to the popular TV talent show that has a similar name, for which I assume she thinks my toe nails would make me a suitable contestant.

Feeling hard done by, given that it’s not the first time she’s pulled me up on it, I took a picture of my toenail before I set off to meet Earl, thinking that he would be real and tell me how it is. But Earl just looked at the picture, at my face, back at the picture, and didn’t say anything. He took out his tobacco and started rolling. We’ve been friends since school and it was the first time I’d ever showed him a photo of one of my body parts. It was an awkward thing now that I think about it, asking him to lean in close to me and look at what he probably thought would be a video of a plane crash or a goal from the weekend’s football. Why was he being asked to look at his mate’s toenail? It was a good question that hung unanswered in the air.

I went to Tesco to pick up some spinach and a man held the door open for me. It made me feel like he was someone I could show a toenail picture to without upset. I waited by the satsumas while he surveyed the newspaper display, and it occurred to me that I could gauge his openness to my toenail picture based on the paper he bought. If he went for a broadsheet, my guess was that he’d brush me off as if in a hurry to get to work. If it was a red top then he’d probably tell me to fuck off. I was really hoping that he would go for one with a lifestyle supplement. Suddenly a shopkeeper asked tersely what I was doing, and I decided it was best to leave without speaking to anyone on that occasion. I only realised on my way out that I’d not picked up the spinach.

In the evening I still hadn’t trimmed my toenails by the time my wife’s parents arrived for dinner. I’d gotten caught up installing some new anti-virus software. But quite honestly I was also still feeling defiant about my toenail—or anybody’s toenail for that matter—not being an issue. When I tried to raise the subject at dinner, my wife kicked me under the table, digging her foot into my shin. Rather than stopping mid-sentence and leaving my in-laws confused, I saw a way to broach the toenail topic in a more playful way, remarking that if my wife’d had sharper toenails, she would have had a better shot at shutting me up. Everybody laughed, including my wife, who cleared the table together with her dad, both of them disappearing into the kitchen, leaving me and her mum to finish the tiramisu.

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Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal and professional growth.

If you're a high-achiever ready to make a major life or career shift through a creative project, I offer 1:1 coaching to help you navigate that transformation. If you’re interested in how I can support you, you can learn more about me and then send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

12 ideas about education that get me out of bed in the morning

Hey subscribers,

Over the last few months you may have noticed I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of education research. (If you missed any of it, you can read this, this, this, this, this or this.)

I’ve been getting to grips with key ideas in developmental psychology, learning science, experimental economics, pedagogy, and more.

But it’s all too much to hold in my head. And if I wait till I’ve made sense of it all (is that even possible?), I may be waiting forever.

Worst of all, I’ll never get to share it!

So, this week’s post is therefore less an essay and more a constellation of ideas, tensions, and nuggets of insight that together form a picture of what I’ve been learning about.

Think of it as an open notebook. The ideas are in orbit rather than in order.

1. The brain learns using what it has already learned

In How People Learn, Bransford and colleagues show that learners are never empty vessels; they come in with powerful preconceptions and assumptions that shape everything new they encounter. To learn something deeply, then, we first need to surface and test those preconceptions.

It means good teaching begins with curiosity about what the learner already understands and believes.

This has changed my whole perspective on “assessments.” Assessments are necessary for figuring out how people already see the world, for creating a dialogue rather than passing judgment.

2. The explore-exploit dilemma is everywhere

Lately I can’t stop seeing the explore–exploit dilemma. It’s the tension between trying new things (exploring) and making the most of what you already know (exploiting).

But it’s also a constant feature of human development and thriving:

• In politics, we could say that liberals explore while conservatives preserve

• In our youth, we explore identities and later exploit what we’ve found

• Even in a single hour, we are faced with the choice: “Should I read something new? Or deepen what I already know?”

Explore-exploit might be the master tension underlying other tensions like chaos and order, freedom and responsibility, individualism and collectivism.

This paper claims to have found a “solution” to the explore-exploit dilemma. But I’m sceptical. Is it really a problem we can solve once and for all? Or is it a relationship we must learn how to navigate our whole lives?

3. Erikson’s developmental map

When psychoanalyst and visual artist Erik Erikson outlined his eight psychosocial stages1, one in particular caught my attention: identity vs. role confusion.

Teenagers, he said, face a crisis between exploring who they might become and committing to a role (Do adults ever suffer with this? Asking for a friend, lol). It’s a perfect psychological mirror of explore–exploit.

The quality of that early exploration (how safely we can try, fail, and reflect) shapes the rest of our life. Which makes me wonder: What would it mean to design schools around the healthy navigation of life’s core tensions?

4. Education as a system of flow

Education, like the rest of life, is full of these interesting tensions, which often make me feel like I need to choose between one way or another…

• Instruction vs. induction — should we teach content or cultivate curiosity?

• Teacher-led vs. learner-led — who owns the process?

• Efficiency vs. depth — breadth of coverage or depth of understanding?

…but, the best systems, I think, flow between these poles. They integrate instead of segregating. What does learning look like when it transcends these dichotomies?

5. Learning environments as ecosystems

Much of the education research describes four dimensions of great learning environments:

1. Learner-centred. Start from what students already know and care about (this is point 1 above).

2. Knowledge-centred. Organise content around key concepts, not scattered facts.

3. Assessment-centred. Provide continuous feedback, not just end-of-term grades (point 1 again).

4. Community-centred. Embed learners in supportive networks of peers and mentors; ideally multi-aged networks, as humans evolved to be coached by those a little older as well as to coach those a little younger.

When these four conditions overlap, learning environments begin to resemble living systems instead of factory lines.

6. Incentives, motivation, and the paradox of paying kids to learn

Economist Roland Fryer’s experiments in hundreds of American schools found something strange: paying students for outputs (like grades) didn’t help, but paying them for inputs (like reading books) did.

Why was this the case? Because many students don’t yet know how to convert effort into results. They don’t understand the “educational production function.” Incentivising inputs builds habits that later translate into intrinsic motivation. (I wrote a deep dive on Fryer’s experiments here.)

The headline is that inputs-based incentives raised reading comprehension by the equivalent of two-and-a-half extra months of schooling!

But the deeper question is: what happens when the payments stop? Fryer’s follow-up studies suggest effects fade, but not disastrously.

Prehaps incentives are like bicycle stabilisers. Useful for getting you going, but questionable if never removed.

7. Vertical vs. horizontal incentives

Another Fryer study compared horizontal incentives (rewarding one person for multiple things like attendance, homework, and behaviour) with vertical incentives (rewarding the student, parent, AND teacher for one shared goal).

Horizontal incentives improved both maths and reading; vertical ones boosted maths but harmed other subjects. Students and teachers, it turns out, treated different subjects as substitutes rather than complements.

The lesson here is that incentives work like magnets. They attract attention but also pull it away from other things. Incentives are clearly powerful but they need to be designed carefully.

8. The mystery of transfer

One of the hardest questions in education is: Why don’t students apply what they learn in one context to another? Research suggests transfer requires conceptual frameworks, not just facts.

We don’t remember lessons; we remember models. Teaching is therefore largely about helping learners build internal maps of how knowledge can hang together.

A super simple illustrative example: Researchers asked a bunch of post-grads (aged 20+) to view a conveyor belt of random objects and later try to remember as many of the objects as they could. The researches also asked a bunch of 12-year-olds to do the same exercise. The 12-year-olds remembered far more objects than the post-grads, not because they were smarter, obvs, but because they were told the objects fitted into categories such as fruit, toys, animals, etc. Without this organising model, the post-grads remembered much less.

9. Teachers as designers, not deliverers

“Teachers must draw out and work with the pre-existing understandings that students bring with them.”

That single line from How People Learn could rewrite teacher training.

What if the teacher’s role isn’t to fill but to notice, and to design conditions in which thinking becomes visible? That, as far as I can tell, is a creative act, closer to art direction than instruction. The best teachers are artists and designers!

10. Learning as a family practice

As I think about having children of my own—and as me and Corina think about building a home in Spain—I’m starting to get curious about what makes a home a good learning environment.

How People Learn says that parents are naturally good at connecting new ideas to lived experience, often better than teachers who don’t share their child’s world. Maybe the most radical educational reform is to extend this intimacy, to make schools feel more like families and families feel more like learning partners.

11. Lifelong learning for teachers

If teachers are to create lifelong learners, they must become them. Professional development should be less about “updating skills” and more about cultivating curiosity and frameworks for self-directed growth. Imagine a school where teachers had sabbaticals for exploration, not just training days for compliance.

12. The social physics of learning

Learning spreads through relationships. Groups who learn by doing together often outperform formal training programmes. The learning sciences now talk about horizontal transfer between peers and distributed cognition across groups.

The classrooms, studios and workshops of the future are a network of overlapping learning communities. And on this note (personal plug), I’m thrilled to be helping and to build such a community in Act Two and .

That’s all for now folks. I needed to get all that out of my head. If any of these ideas light something up in you, tell me tell me. Reply or share it with someone else who thinks a lot about education.

⬥

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Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal and professional growth.

If you're a high-achiever ready to make a major life or career shift through a creative project, I offer 1:1 coaching to help you navigate that transformation. If you’re interested in how I can support you, learn more about me and then send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

On paying children to learn

“Money is a good servant but a bad master.” — English Proverb

OK. Serious question: Would you pay your children to learn?

It’s a question that’s been on my mind since reading a parent’s fascinating review of the experimental Alpha School in the U.S., which claims that its students are growing 2.6x faster than normal while doing just two hours of academic work a day.

The parent explains that Alpha is achieving these results using a special “bundle” of components, which includes mastery-based learning, teachers turned into “guides,” high guide-to-student ratio (5:1), and an innovative AI learning platform, all of which the school shares proudly in its publicity.

But there’s one extra ingredient that Alpha isn’t saying anything about publicly: cash incentives. Alpha School pays its students to learn.

When I first read this, I was fascinated, but part of me recoiled. Paying kids to learn just felt…morally wrong. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised I didn’t have a clear, satisfactory reason why. So, this essay is an attempt to figure it out.

The secret ingredient Alpha keeps hidden

The student incentive system at Alpha works on multiple levels.

Primarily, students earn “Alpha Bucks,” about 10 bucks a day for completing their daily “minimums” (8-12 lessons), with bonuses for extra lessons, finishing on time, and reaching weekly targets. Each buck is worth 10 cents, so they can earn roughly $2 a day.

Importantly, kids can only earn bucks if they complete lessons AND score 80% or higher (not mere completion).

Kids spend their bucks at school stores on personalised prizes like bouncy balls, protein bars, LEGO sets, and Taylor Swift sweaters.

There are also “Dojo Points,” which are rewards for non-academic behaviour like teamwork, respect, and perseverance. And daily “Dojo Masters” win keys to potentially unlock prize boxes on Fridays.

Finally, there are summer programmes that pay kids $1 per lesson completed (10x the normal rate) to prevent regression during the summer holidays. This can amount to as much as $5/hour for 2 hours of daily work. For the kids, this is real money, not pocket change.

The results from Alpha are startling. The guy’s 8-year-old middle daughter, for example, in her first year at the school, “has completed more than two full grades in ~20 weeks (60% of the school year) and shows no sign of slowing down.” And the same lessons that were “a fight every time” became engaging once they were embedded in Alpha’s structure. His kids even ask to do extra lessons.

According to Alpha, 100% of its students meet projected RIT scores (a standard U.S. measure of student progress in reading and maths), and their growth rates exceed projections by 200%, a feat managed by less than one in a thousand schools across the United States.

There is certainly something remarkable going on at Alpha School. But I want to know more about these incentives. The fact that Alpha keeps them hidden, and the fact that I bristled at the thought of them, told me they were worthy of an essay.

The economist who paid kids to learn

Arguably the person with the most authority to speak on student incentives is Professor Roland G. Fryer, born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1977. A MacArthur Genius Award winner, a recipient of the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, and the youngest black professor ever to be given tenure at Harvard (he was 30), Fryer has been described by his peers as “one of the premier empirical economists of his generation.”

In the 2007–2009 school years, Fryer ran four large trials in New York City, Chicago, Dallas, and Washington D.C. and his programmes spanned ~250 schools, involved ~36,000 students, and paid them ~$9.4 million in cash incentives.

Fryer’s personal mission was to close the racial achievement gap. In 2009, results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that about 4 in 10 white eighth-graders were proficient in reading and math, compared with about 1 in 10 black students. Fryer himself flunked school and ended up in gangs. And it was only a talent for sports and an uncompromising grandmother that spurred him to get back on track.

As an economist, Fryer was interested in testing scalable ways to get ROI from what he describes as the “demand side” of education. There is already important work being done on the supply side of the equation (through institutions, educators, and pedagogy, etc). Fryer wanted to supplement this with solutions that centred on learners.

But it wasn’t just about supply and demand. Fryer was also driven to test incentives because he saw how gangs were incentivising many kids to go in the opposite direction, especially in poorer inner-city schools. “If you fundamentally believe that these kids have the same potential as your kids, and that they are rotting away in these horrible schools,” Fryer said, “then you should not be able to sleep without trying to make a change.”

I felt torn learning about Fryer. He wasn’t some privileged academic who was far-removed from the realities of public school life, or some corporate cowboy chasing efficiency. He was someone trying to rescue kids just like his younger self.

When you read his work and hear him talk, it’s clear he is left-leaning in his social sympathies. In one of his podcast appearances, he shares a story about how his grandma rang him on his first day at Harvard and demanded to know, “I don’t care how big your office is. Do you know the janitor’s name?”

I was surprised that such market-driven and economically provocative experiments could come from someone with his background. I was hooked.

What were these experiments exactly? How did they come about? And what could they tell us about children, motivation, and learning?

Cash, classrooms, and controlled trials

The seed of Fryer’s experiments began in 2003 whilst he was working with a school in The Bronx where he’d spent time as a 12-year-old. At the end of each week the school would tell him whether or not the kids had behaved and, if they had, Fryer would pick up the phone and order them pizza.

It proved so successful at enhancing student behaviour that in 2006 the chancellor, Joel Klein, asked Fryer if he could find a way to scale-up the pizza parties across the whole of New York City.

Realising that the logistics of city-wide pizza delivery wouldn’t work, Fryer pivoted to more scalable cash incentives instead and, after several small pilots, reached multi-school trials in the city districts of New York City, Dallas, D.C., and Chicago.

But it was no hop, skip or jump. He was thrown out of New York City three times (literally ordered to get in his car and leave mid-way through school visits). And furious parents and teachers even began picketing outside his house.

He persevered, and in 2007 Fryer and his team finally pressed go on their first large-scale student incentive programmes in New York City and Dallas, with D.C. and Chicago following shortly after.

Fryer’s first experiment was to pay kids for outcomes, such as test scores and grades.

In New York City, pupils were paid for interim assessments. 4th-graders (9/10-year-olds) received a $5 base rate plus up to $25 per test (maximum $250 per year), while 7th-graders (12/13-year-olds) received a $10 base plus up to $50 per test (maximum $500 per year).

And in Chicago, 9th-graders (14/15-year-olds) were paid for their report-card grades. $50 for an A, $35 for a B, $20 for a C, and $0 for a D or F, with earnings capped at $250 per report card and $2,000 per year.

While these experiments were underway, Dallas and D.C. went live. For these Fryer wanted to introduce some “experimental variation.” Rather than paying kids for outcomes, he paid them for inputs, things like reading books, completing homework, and attendance and behaviour.

In Dallas, 2nd-graders (7/8-year-olds) were paid $2 per book, with an average payout of $13.81 and a maximum of $80.

In D.C., 6th- to 8th-graders (11- to 14-year-olds) could earn up to $100 every two weeks (up to $1,500 for the year) for meeting targets in attendance, behaviour, and three performance metrics selected by the schools.

All of Fryer’s experiments were randomised control trials, meaning there was a treatment group that received the rewards and a control group that didn’t.

Fryer even created bank accounts for every student, which provided visibility on their saving and spending patterns.

All money was paid directly into students’ accounts except for the first payment; for this Fryer visited the schools and personally handed each student a cheque, partly because he wanted to meet them, and partly because he wanted to convince the doubters he was for real, especially the inner-city kids who were understandably wary—“You ain’t giving anything away for free!”

At this point, I wasn’t sure what to hope for. If the incentives failed, or made things worse, then it would be bad for the kids but at least I could leave my moral instincts intact.

But if the incentives worked? Well. I knew I’d have to examine some of my deeply held beliefs.

When the data and the gut disagree

There were essentially three big insights that came out of Fryer’s experiments.

I

First, paying kids for outcomes (good grades or high test scores) simply didn’t work. In New York, where kids were paid for their test performance, the scores barely budged. In Chicago, where 9th-graders were paid for their report-cards, there was a small improvement in GPA (the overall average of students’ grades), but nothing meaningful in their actual test results.

II

Second, paying for inputs rather than outcomes did make a difference. In Dallas, 2nd-graders earned $2 every time they read a book. On average, those kids ended up about 2.5 months ahead in reading comprehension compared to the control group. That’s huge! And for just $20 per child too!

In D.C., the programme was broader: middle-schoolers could earn up to $100 every two weeks for good attendance, behaviour, homework, and classwork. The results there were smaller but still good, a gentle improvement in reading and maths scores.

III

Third, the benefits faded over time, as expected, but they did not disappear completely. In Dallas, a whole year after the payments had stopped, the reading boost had only roughly halved.

So, why did the inputs work when the outputs didn’t? Fryer’s conclusion was that most kids don’t know how to “get good grades.” “Work harder” is vague; whereas “Read this book” is concrete. In other words, the closer the reward was to the actual skill being built, the better it worked.

When the kids got their money, they spent it on what you’d expect: ice cream, video games, shoes, etc. But many also saved more AND opened their first bank accounts, which Fryer saw as a healthy side effect of the experiment.

From an ROI point of view, the experiments were impressive. The cost of paying kids to read books was a fraction of what schools spend on other reforms that achieve similar gains, such as extending school days or high-dosage tutoring.

Fryer’s verdict was that paying kids isn’t a magic bullet. ”Will it close the racial achievement gap in America? No.” But his experiments had shown that well-designed incentives can have a huge impact on student achievement, and do so at a price that makes policymakers look silly for ignoring them.

That’s not how the rest of the world saw it, though. Even with the results of his experiments in-hand, Fryer faced a backlash at every step of the way.

The revolt against paying kids (values versus outcomes)

As the parent pointed out in his review of Alpha School, a 2010 Gallup poll showed that only 23% of Americans supported paying kids to learn, meaning that 76% were against the idea (1% were undecided).

“There aren’t many things that 76% of Americans agree on,” he wrote, “Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice.”

What explains such deep-seated unease about incentives? Why was Fryer thrown out of New York? What was going through the minds of those angry picketers outside his house? And why did I find myself instinctively bristling at it?

After doing some journaling on these questions, as well as reading commentary from parents and looking at some of the psychological literature, there appear to be a few recurring themes in peoples’ arguments against cash incentives:

• “I don’t want my kids to love money more than reading!” This is a values worry. Parents are concerned that cash payments will shift the moral meaning of learning from culture and identity to commerce and transactions.

• “My kid already loves reading. Paying her is pointless. It might even ruin reading for her altogether!” This is a concern about withdrawal, and it is backed up by studies such as those carried out by Lepper, Greene & Nisbett (1973) where a bunch of kids who loved drawing were split into groups: some were promised an award for drawing; others got no award. Later, when awards were taken away, the promised-award group lost interest in drawing.

• “Rewards could stop my kids developing their own intrinsic motivation!” This is a worry about developmental pathways. I’ve written before about Deci & Ryan’s Motivation Continuum, with pure volition at one end and coercion at the other. The concern would be that kids become motivated by coercion alone, never achieving self-direction or identification as learners.

These are the predominant worries I picked up both in my own thoughts and feelings, and in the commentary around Fryer’s work.

A quick query of ChatGPT produced a list of 15 additional arguments, most of which were rehashes of the three arguments above, but some of which are definitely worth considering:

• Gaming worry (Goodhart’s Law) - “My kids might optimise for what’s paid (pages, easy books, short cuts) instead of for comprehension and curiosity.”

• Peer dynamics & status worry - “What if the kids start to compare themselves and become competitive over their earnings?”

• Equity worry - “What if unplanned top-ups and side-payments create new inequalities?”

• Slippery-slope worry - “If we pay kids for reading, then why not for kindness, curiosity, appearance, etc etc?”

• Norms-at-home worry - “Incentives do not sit well with our family’s values around money, chores, and learning!”

It was starting to become clearer to me why incentives were such a contentious topic.

After reading critiques from parents and seeing some generalised ideas from an LLM, I wanted to hear from at least one academic voice that was directly opposed to the idea of incentives and hear what his or her arguments were on the matter.

It didn’t take long to find the work of Alfie Kohn, an American writer and lecturer, born in Miami Beach, Florida, just two years before Fryer, who is best known for his books on human behaviour, education, and parenting (his ideas draw heavily on Deci & Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory).

Kohn studied at Brown University and the University of Chicago where he earned a master’s degree in social sciences. He’s not an academic researcher in the traditional sense like Fryer. Instead, he combines classroom experience with psychology, education research, and cultural critique, producing popular presentations and essays in a strong, polemical style. Kohn’s a big champion of progressive education.

Having written extensively on the topic of incentives, Kohn’s stance is that all external rewards (money, stickers, grades) undermine intrinsic motivation and real engagement. He makes the point, which I’d never considered, that rewards are punishments in disguise; for a reward that isn’t given merely becomes a punishment, and a punishment that is avoided functions like a reward.

If Kohn was critiquing Fryer’s experiments, he would likely say that rewards produce compliance, not curiosity. That even if kids read more and their test scores moved in the right direction, Fryer and his team were teaching the wrong lesson.

Put simply, for Kohn, and for many of the parents and educators who have rejected Fryer’s findings, it does not matter if students are highly motivated if they are running on the wrong type of motivation.

The right type of motivation is engagement for its own sake. Engagement that is sparked by genuine interest. I find it hard to disagree with that.

What Fryer’s work has changed in me

On the whole, I am emerging from this essay feeling more open to the idea of incentives than I was at the start. I’ll say why.

But first I want to say that there are still things that worry me about them:

1. I know it’s dramatic and unlikely, and I know there are lots of ways to help kids nurture a healthy relationship with money, but there’s still a part of me that’s worried they’ll turn into mouth-foaming capitalists who view every action as a transaction and treat people and the planet badly.

2. I do think there’s something to the slippery-slope threat too. Like, how do we in all seriousness tell kids that it’s fine for them to earn cash for studying but not for, say, being kind or for making their bed?

3. And my biggest concern is still, “What about the pleasure of learning itself?” If the purpose of school is to foster a love of learning, then I want the fostering part to include a lot more than just cold hard cash; things like curiosity, authentic curiosity. And creativity and collaboration and all that good stuff.

But here is where my perspective has shifted:

There will always be some subjects or activities that only become intrinsically rewarding after putting in considerable unpleasant effort. In these cases, without incentives to lure us in the beginning, we may give up (because we’re too young, too distracted, too irresponsible) and therefore never get to appreciate the depths of a discipline or the full range of our resilience, like wells we never draw from.

Writing essays has taught me this lesson. I have not always loved writing essays. They are gruelling and confusing. And when I started writing in 2022 I sought motivation in the promise of extrinsic “glory” (readers, job opportunities, paid subscriptions). Today, I love writing essays so much that not even Fryer could pay me to stop. And I don’t care nearly as much about status as I used to. But I strongly doubt I would’ve developed intrinsic drive or pleasure without those early incentives.

If this “delayed bloom” of intrinsic motivation is what’s holding millions of kids back from cracking subjects open and discovering the love of learning for its own sake, then that’s a big problem, and I’d be prepared to consider anything—including incentives—if it had a chance of addressing it. Simply expecting or hoping kids to automatically love learning does not seem realistic.

And, to be totally honest, when I zoom out, I struggle to see how all of this is that different from other rewards we dish out to kids unselfconsciously, like dessert if they finish their dinner, or pocket money if they do their chores. In the adult world, we use incentives all the time, don’t we.

But I actually think the BIGGEST concern I would have about dismissing Fryer’s findings would be the risk of making education even less equitable. This is because, if ideological squeamishness about money keeps some people from using incentives, whilst affluent schools like Alpha adopt them, then a tool that has the potential to narrow achievement gaps could actually end up widening them.

I do not think cash incentives should ever become THE story we tell children about why learning matters. But it would be a mistake if we rejected incentives just because money makes some of us uncomfortable, only to watch well-resourced schools use them to help their kids excel, while kids in mainstream or less-funded schools fall further and further behind.

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Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal and professional growth.

If you're a high-achiever ready to make a major life or career shift through a creative project, I offer 1:1 coaching to help you navigate that transformation. If you’re interested in how I can support you, learn more about me and then send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

EVER SINCE me and my wife began talking about raising kids, I've occasionally found myself daydreaming about a particular kind of scenario.

There are a couple of different ways this scenario plays out in my head, but the gist of it is that I’m subtly letting our kids overhear me saying they are smart.

In one version, I hear our kid coming downstairs to the kitchen where we're cooking and I say to my wife, just loud enough to be overheard: "It's wonderful that Wren is so smart."

In another version, I'm telling Wren directly that her teachers have told us that she is very smart.

The reason I daydream about Wren overhearing us and her teachers praise her intelligence is that stuff said about you in your absence often feels truer than stuff said to your face—and I want Wren to really believe, beyond all doubt, that she is smart.

I want Wren to believe she is smart because I think that believing you are smart is a prerequisite for being smart, and for enjoying learning, and realising your full potential.

So, you can imagine my shock to discover that telling Wren she is smart, indirectly or otherwise, could have the exact opposite effect on her.

To explain why, I need to tell you about the work of psychologists Carol Dweck and Ellen Leggett.

In 1988, Dweck & Leggett published a paper called A Social-Cognitive Approach to Motivation and Personality in which they showed that when faced with difficult intellectual challenges (maths and science problems), kids of the same age and ability responded in one of two ways; they either:

1. spat out their proverbial dummies, becoming self-critical ("I'm not smart enough" "My memory sucks") and performing poorly or giving up altogether—or they

2. relished the challenge ("You know, I was hoping this would be informative!"), employing a variety of strategies and trying out different solutions till the end

How could kids of similar ability react so differently to the same situation?

The answer, Dweck & Leggett learned, was that the two groups were intrinsically motivated by two different goals.

The struggling group were ultimately driven by the goal of proving their competence, or at least hiding their incompetence. The way this manifested included getting pissed when their attempts to solve the problems failed, growing bored and dismissive of the challenge, and attempting to bolster their reputation by citing their other (unrelated) skills and achievements.

By contrast, the successful group were ultimately driven by the goal of developing their competence, manifesting as self-encouragement and self-regulation ("I've done this before, I can do it again!"). Their attention was entirely focused on the problem at hand rather than their reputation. And they persevered in high spirits despite not solving the problems.

In short, a kid was intrinsically motivated either to perform, or to learn, and this set up the framework in which they perceived and reacted to difficulty.

Of course, the next question was: Well, what accounts for those goals?

Through further studies, Dweck & Leggett found it was kids’ respective beliefs about intelligence that determined their intrinsic goal.

The performance-driven kids believed that intelligence was a fixed entity, something we are born with that cannot be developed further.

While the learning-driven kids believed that intelligence is developed incrementally.

If you believed that your intelligence was fixed, then it makes sense that your main concerns would be proving how much intelligence you have, doing whatever you could to protect it, and avoiding doing anything that may reveal your incompetence.

If, on the other hand, you believed your intelligence grew incrementally, then your main concerns would be learning and improving. You’d be comfortable being perceived as incompetent (at least for a time) as you’d know that learning necessitated being ignorant and wrong.

When faced with challenges, then, our prior beliefs about intelligence shape our goals, and our goals shape our responses (thoughts, feelings, behaviours), ultimately making us more, or less, adaptive.

Beliefs → Goals → Responses

Dweck & Leggett aptly named these two mindsets the "Entity" mindset and the "Incremental" mindset.

Dweck went on to publish a popular book, Mindset, making these findings accessible to a wider public using the terms "fixed” vs. “growth” mindset, which you've likely come across.

When reflecting on all this, I had trouble imagining what could cause a child to believe that intelligence is fixed. It seems to me so self-evident that it is anything but.

And here's where I got my shock.

One surefire way to instil the fixed entity mindset is to tell kids they are smart. This is because "You're so smart!" signals that their intelligence is innate and unchangeable. (It goes without saying that you send the same signal if you tell kids they are dumb.)

Alternatively, to encourage a growth mindset, we should give not person-praise, but process-praise—"You worked really hard on that!" "I love that you tried something new!" "Look how much clearer your writing is than last week!"—as this helps to instil the idea that intelligence is a flowering process.

There is another way in which a certain type of praise-giving can backfire. It comes from a different set of ideas in a different book, but it connects well here so I'll quickly mention it.

Michaeleen Doucleff is a US-based journalist who decided to study non-western parenting styles after becoming overwhelmed by western-centric advice. Her research became a bestselling book, Hunt Gather Parent, which showed, among other things, that even the most well-meaning praise often contains its sinister cousin: criticism.

"Wow, you did it right!' → Implies they usually do it wrong

"I love how neat that is." → Implies inconsistency is a flaw

"See? You can do it when you try." → Implies they don't normally try

"You're really good at this!" → Implies there are limits on what they're "good at"

"See? That wasn't so hard, was it?" → Implies they overreact to challenges

"Good boy/girl!" (after a task) → Reduces achievement to obedience or identity

I am aware that there is an element of deceit in my daydream, and yeah, it has always bothered me. As much as I do want our kids—all kids—to believe they are smart, I also don't want to behave sneakily, saying things performatively in their earshot.

Much better to be sincere and direct. And thanks to Dweck, Leggett, Doucleff and others, I'm starting to get a better grasp of the art and science of praise.

More importantly, in writing this essay, I have realised that my daydreams were founded on the fixed mindset all along. For why would I need to tell anybody they were smart in a world where intelligence is flourishing?

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Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal and professional growth.

If you're a high-achiever ready to make a major life or career shift through a creative project, I offer 1:1 coaching to help you navigate that transformation. If you’re interested in how I can support you, learn more about me and then send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

SINCE I started researching education—beginning with the question of why some (young) people feel more motivated to learn than others—I've come across the following ideas, which I'd like to recap:

The most widely regarded modern theory of motivation is Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which says that humans will experience their highest levels of healthy and sustainable motivation when:

1. they have a high degree of personal agency (autonomy) in their lives

2. they have opportunities to develop a lot of knowledge and skill (competence) in domains that matter to them

3. they do all this whilst being closely connected to a social group that depends on and values them (relatedness)

So, from this particular perspective, my question has been: how do we create the conditions that foster plenty of autonomy, competence and relatedness in our education?

One way seems to be giving people a choice. I found the story of a music teacher whose class attendance ballooned from 50 to 200 after she implemented SDT, which included allowing students to make some impactful choices both individually and collectively.

Individually they were able to choose (and re-choose) their instrument, choose how to teach their music skills to others, and choose when to take their final exam.

Collectively they were able to choose which songs to practice during term, which performances they would give as a group, and which competitions they would enter to represent the school.

The result was that every student played the instrument they most wanted to play, and they got a taste of what it's like owning high-stakes decisions.

It's a great example of the ripple effect of giving people this kind of agency: if people like the work they're doing, and they feel ownership of it because they chose it, then naturally they're more likely to work at it, get good, and be embraced by their peers (+1 for autonomy, competence and relatedness).

Inspired by SDT and the story of this music class, I spent some time daydreaming about what homes and schools might look like if they were designed entirely around the principles of autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Interestingly one of those daydreams turned out on reflection to look very similar to project-based learning, a concept I've known of for a while but never actually dug into in any depth. I decided it was time.

What are its principles?

How does it work exactly?

What are some good and bad examples of it?

Who are its leading allies and enemies?

Lots of questions.

It was immediately clear that in order to fully understand project-based learning, in order to evaluate it and potentially work with it, I'd first need to learn some fundamental principles of how people learn at all. What's going on between our ears when we’re thriving as learners? And what is it specifically that project-based learning lends itself so well to (or not)?

The book How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School was the suggested starting point in the research report I asked ChatGPT for. The book was published at the turn of the millennium, so it's not exactly new. But I get the impression there isn't much in the way of newer research to complement or supplant it. As far as I can tell, the book does a good job of bringing together a range of emerging theories from cognitive psychology, developmental research, social psychology, and neuroscience—and then contextualising them all under one umbrella survey.

It's not quite "How People Learn: for Dummies" but I do find it relatively accessible and it is helping me understand some of the basic building blocks of effective learning.

I won't attempt to share everything in this post, obviously. But I will share the biggest thing I’ve found so far that made me sit up and pay attention.

It is this:

We can only learn new things using things we've already learned.

Just stop and think about that for a second. It may sound obvious and simple, but it’s not.

The academics and educators would call this a “Constructivist” theory of learning; new knowledge is constructed on top of existing knowledge.

Granted, it is only a theory and, as such, I don’t want to set my watch by it. But I did do a bit of research to find out what other theories it’s in cahoots with, and Constructivism appears to be well-substantiated, longstanding, and cognisant of the latest research.

Constructivism replaced the “Behaviourist” theory of learning which had dominated from roughly the 1920s through the 1960s. Behaviourist learning theory assumed students were passive recipients who absorbed information through repetition and reinforcement (and punishment and rewards), whereas constructivism sees learners as active meaning-makers who build new understanding on top of existing foundations.

One neat way to understand Constructivism is to say that we only understand new ideas through a lens that is made of existing ideas.

To make this more concrete, the authors recount the story of Fish Is Fish, a kids book about a fish whose frog friend comes back to the ocean after spending time ashore. As the frog describes the birds, cows and human beings he hung out with on land, the book shows illustrated representations of what the fish imagines them to look like.

The images are largely bird-, cow- and human-like, but they each have fishy traits too: fins, tails, gills and scales. The moral of the story, obviously, is that Mr Fish cannot picture what these strange land-faring creatures look like outside of his own fish paradigm—a metaphor for how we humans can’t conceptualise ideas outside of those we already have.

It gives renewed credence to the saying: We don’t experience the world as it is, we experience the world as we are.

This has some pretty significant implications when you think about it. It means that it’s possible that knowledge we already have could hinder, as much as help, our ability to learn.

In fact, the authors provide an example of this from maths education. The first maths concepts most kids encounter are based around counting numbers, which establish the foundational concept that numbers are discrete and sequential. Each number represents a single, indivisible unit. And every number has a clear "next" number.

But some time during secondary school kids are introduced to fractions, and fractions have a very different conceptual underpinning. They can't be counted in sequence like whole numbers can and, so, many kids try to work with fractions using their existing conceptualisation of math, which obviously does not work, and then struggle to understand fractions.

The important point that falls out of this is that it’s imperative to first understand what prior notions, ideas and beliefs people have before you try getting them to learn new things. You want to do this so that you have a chance to correct any misconceptions they have and ensure they’re not led astray or left behind altogether.

It’s funny, I can’t help but think back to my own school days, hearing the teachers bang on and on about “showing my working out!” I always used to think they were only insisting on that so they could prove I hadn’t cheated by copying the answers from the back of the book. But now I can see it was probably also so they could make my existing knowledge visible.

That was the only way to truly meet me where I was.

Reflecting on all this, I found myself thinking about class sizes. It’s clearer to me now why 1:1 tutoring, or at least small classes, benefit kids so much. Among other things, there’s more opportunity for teachers to make the student’s prior knowledge visible—through conversation, questioning and regular assessment—and then address any misconceptions that would otherwise hamper their learning.

It also makes more sense to me now why an Ali Abdaal video I once watched (sorry, I can’t find it now) recommended students draw a mind map of everything they already think they know about a topic before setting out to learn about it.

And so, this is the first building block of effective learning: What you already know shapes what you can/will know.

I find it both scary and exciting. And I think understanding this will come in handy when it comes to mastering project-based learning.

There’s plenty more I need to understand first, including concepts like recall, interleaving, spaced repetition and more. But in the spirit of making my existing knowledge visible early on, here’s a list of stuff I think I already know about project-based learning.

Perhaps if you’re clued up about the topic you can correct any misconceptions or faulty assumptions I may have:

1. My current understanding of project-based learning is that instead of school subjects being taught in separate classes, they’re taught together as part of a unifying project. So for example, the kids might be given the project of building a railway network. To do this, they learn how engines work in Science, they learn about fuel consumption and business models in Math, and they write all the publicity and manage the organisational communications in their Language classes.

2. Project-based learning is standard practice in some of the Scandinavian countries, especially in Finland where I think it hails from.

3. Project-based learning is cool because it turns potentially boring subjects into something interesting and relevant for kids.

4. Project-based learning seems like an approach that would greatly enable the transfer of skills and knowledge from one domain or situation to many others. Transfer is another key concept in learning design, which I'll be coming back to at some point.

5. Project-based learning mirrors the real world more closely than subject-based studies. The world, at least as I’ve experienced it, is nothing if not an endless series of projects. Why not help kids get accustomed to this as soon as they’re able?

6. I’m assuming that project-based learning is the sort of thing that would naturally involve people of all ages and walks of life, as opposed to just the few same-age boys and girls who happen to be in your class. In other words, I can imagine that project-based learners emerge from school with better social skills and confidence as they’ve simply had more practice communicating and collaborating with adults in the real world.

7. This, I’m guessing, also means that project-based classrooms can and do include kids of different ages—another building block of learning that I instinctively like the sound of and want to research more at some point.

8. I don’t know who comes up with the projects in the first place (could the kids design them??), or what best practices look like, but I can imagine it’s a pretty cool job. “Hey! I’m a project-based learning designer. I design curricula-wide projects for K6-K12 students that have a particular focus on community engagement, mental health, technology, and art.”

9. There's a review circulating about that crazy new 2-hour school called Alpha. In it, the writer-parent shares some of the projects his kids have to complete each term. The review doesn’t explicitly call it project-based learning, but it seems to have the hallmarks. One example he cites is the class collectively managing a real Airbnb somewhere in the U.S. Think interior design. Think advertising. Think budgeting. Think guest management. The kids are doing it all and they’re not teenagers yet.

It's super cool stuff. Super cool stuff with real-world impact. And I can only imagine how motivating it must be.

See you next time.

Harrison 👨‍🎨

⬥

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Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal and professional growth.

If you're a high-achiever ready to make a major life or career shift through a creative project, I offer 1:1 coaching to help you navigate that transformation. If you’re interested in how I can support you, learn more about me and then send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

Hey subscribers,

Here is the next instalment of my research on education. The previous two instalments are here and here.

Last time I wrote, I ended by saying I'd go find some examples of kids being given very high levels of autonomy and agency, particularly in the context of their education.

I want to explore what the role of education is today, what helps or hinders students' appetite for learning, and how the much-respected Self-Determination Theory of motivation fits in. Remember this theory claims that people thrive when they enjoy high levels of autonomy, competence and relatedness in their lives, and I'm interested in how we can help young people (and ourselves) to develop these traits on our education journeys.

Note: I decided, in a truly meta way, to do this research using a breakthrough educational tool: the latest ChatGPT feature called “Study & Learn.” Reports claim that it acts like a personal tutor, creating study plans and giving you questions as opposed to just spitting out answers. So, I fired it up, gave it all the context, and within minutes it asked me to reflect on my own early life at home and at school, about how much, or how little, autonomy I had.

On reflection, I had quite a lot of autonomy outside of organised structures like home and school. But not so much inside of them.

Outside, I grew up in the pre-internet era. Everything about my childhood was characterised by "playing out" and socialising face-to-face with friends and enemies alike.

I walked to school. I roamed beyond the limits of my neighbourhood. I drove my car to faraway towns.

Crucially, during both major periods of my schooling (primary and secondary), I spent countless hours exploring large areas of unpopulated land. During primary school it was the plot of unused land behind our house, which I affectionately called "the jungle" (despite it not being more than the size of a tennis court). During secondary school, me and my mates spent all our time hanging around on what we called "the rec"—public recreation ground the size of several football pitches and surrounded on all sides by extensive woodland. This "exploration as foundation for agency" is a key point that I'll come back to shortly.

Inside, it was a different story.

Inside at home, whilst my parents were fantastic parents who loved me unconditionally and gave me plenty of freedom to play, cook, make things, and become whoever I wanted to become, they were both victims of overly controlling helicopter parenting, which naturally ended up seeping into their parenting styles with me.

The implicit message that is telegraphed to kids through nit-picking and helicoptering is that parents always know better than kids, kids can't be trusted to do things in their own way, and the result is they have a hard time developing much agency, competence or relatedness in the home.

Inside school, what can I say?

It was typical state-run schooling in 1990s northern England. Separate facilities. Ringing bells. Detention and report cards. A predetermined curriculum delivered in a formalist way. And plenty of overly controlling teachers and dinner ladies. It was education "because we say so." Education by coercion.

Being a kid who thrived when given freedom and the chance to do creative work, I obviously didn't take well to the academic side of school, and instead of applying myself I chose to view school in the only way that made sense to me: as one big social event. Because of this, any autonomy, competence and relatedness I developed at school was in service of becoming popular, not educated.

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Next, this new AI tutor of mine asked me another question (which I think is a fantastic question):

Imagine a school or home environment designed entirely around the principles of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. What would be missing from it that was present in your school/home growing up? And what would be added in that was absent in your experience?

I really enjoyed thinking about this question. What follows are some broad-brush ideas, each of which would probably deserve its own essay. But in the spirit of answering the tutor's question (I like this tutor a lot more than the ones I had at school 😉), I'm just going to share what comes up without overthinking.

In a school designed around the principles of autonomy, competence and relatedness, things that would NOT be present might include:

1. 🚫 Exams: admittedly I would need to find evidence of this before subscribing to it fully, but I can imagine that set curriculums and exams with fixed dates don't exactly give kids an appetite for pursuing subjects in ways that are interesting to them. If you know there's going to be predetermined questions on an exam, and you know you've no choice in what you learn, when or how, AND you've no choice in when you can take the damn exam, then, many kids, like me, would feel put off from learning before they even got started.

2. 🚫 Kids in same-age classes: again, this would need substantiating, but I've heard compelling stories that, from an evolutionary standpoint, humans evolved to grow up in groups of mixed-age. The benefit is that those a little older are able to teach or model how to do things to those a little younger. Mixed age groups are also a more accurate proxy for what the real world is like outside of school. I'm sure there are practical reasons why same-age classes are efficient for industrialised nations to manage, but when you think about it, going through your whole primary and secondary education with people only your own age makes you feel like you cannot or should not relate to those younger or older. I can remember when my friend group began to mix with kids a year or two above and below us. It only really happened in the final two years of secondary school, but it felt really good, it felt like a restriction had been lifted, a restriction that up to that point had seemed absolute. "Hey, it's kinda cool but also kinda weird that I'm now hanging around with Tom and he's in the year below me!" or "Did you hear that Charlotte is going out with Steven and he's in the year above her?" This age-mixing was unthinkable for 80% of my time at school. But I think if school classes were made up of kids that ranged in age, even by a single year or two, it could help kids feel like they were living in a more expansive social milieu, with greater opportunities for agency and belonging.

As for things that WOULD be present in this school, maybe:

1. ✅ Self-chosen project-based learning: once again there is tons of existing research I currently know diddly-squat about, but from what i've heard, project-based learning sounds like a great way to empower kids to learn in a way that is not only highly agentic but also binds subjects and ideas instead of maintaining walls between them—all of which sounds like a big plus 1 for autonomy, competence and relatedness.

2. ✅ An expanded work experience program: I know schools have work experience placements for soon-to-be graduating students and that's great. I was lucky enough to get my first choice of working in an architect's studio (and earn real money when they offered me a part-time job in the summer!). But I've been thinking a lot lately about the benefits of honouring the explore-exploit dilemma1, and I think we should do more to give kids a broader taste of what it's like to work in different jobs. Kids should be allowed to shadow a plumber, a train operator, an engineer, a teacher, a banker, a doctor, a farmer, a pilot, etc etc. I feel strongly about this because (a) it is wise to allow yourself enough time to explore your options before deciding ("In a world like ours that is full of choice, the biggest mistake is premature commitment." - Naval), (b) it really is true that you can only be what you can see, and the reason we don't have a more diverse workforce is not because people lack skills or ambition, but probably because they literally cannot picture what some jobs look like day-to-day and this creates a fog of ignorance that is hard to step into, and finally (c) it's a myth to think that anyone can know what they like and what they are good at merely by thinking about it. People have to try doing things first in order to discover how they perform and how they feel. My old tutor at art school, Linda, used to refuse to see any student unless they had actually done the thing they wanted to talk to her about. This is the way.

In a home environment built around autonomy, competence and relatedness, things that would NOT be present might include:

1. 🚫 Dense urbanism in all directions: given what I've read from , and others about the childhoods of exceptional people and the link between their achievements and the fact that they had plenty of opportunity as kids to go venturing off alone into woods and forests, I think a home based on the principles of autonomy, competence and relatedness would not be devoid of these expansive natural landscapes. If you’re growing up surrounded entirely by roads, big box stores, people, adverts, noise, and strictly controlled infrastructure, you are literally never going to get the opportunity to wander off and get lost in the woods. I'm yet to read about it, and you'll be the first to know when I do, but apparently there are hunter-gatherer tribes around the world where the kids literally learn by wandering.

2. 🚫 "Chores": now, I'm not saying that the home shouldn't have jobs for kids to do; just that the word "chores" would be banished from it. Jobs and responsibilities would be re-cast as opportunities and privileges that children are invited to enjoy from a young age so that they can rub shoulders with adults and feel a sense of pride at their equal contribution. Don't ask me how to pull this off yet, I don't know. But that's the nature of a good goal, isn't it? It should challenge you to figure out how to achieve it.

And finally, some things that WOULD be present in this ideal home could be:

1. ✅ Social media closing times: all forms of online consumption, stimulation and distraction (I'm looking at you social media!) would have closing times like shops and libraries do. This would not only teach kids that, despite what they've been led to believe, the internet is not "always on," they have control over it. But also, it would encourage them to find other more empowering and productive things to do during the time they'd otherwise spend doom-scrolling.

2. ✅ Family Growth Sessions: into this new space left by social media consumption could flow any number of agency-giving activities. One of them could be to have a family session where each week a topic is democratically chosen (eg, health, fun, holidays, games, money, hobbies) and ideas, questions, concerns and updates are shared—with time spent doing productive stuff like researching, building, learning, practicing, networking, writing, exercising, or whatever. Me and my wife Corina have actually recently started doing fortnightly sessions like these, and after just one session on health, we have both learned a shit ton of new knowledge, we’ve had conversations that we’ve never had in ten years together, and we’ve made some major decisions that are going to improve the freedom and the quality of the rest of both of our lives.

I signed off last time saying I'd find examples of kids being given uncommon levels of agency in the hope of learning more about the limits and benefits of it.

I haven't done that exactly in this post, I'm still working on it, though I did come across one story, written in one of his memoirs, about Richard Branson being dumped at the side of the road at three in the morning, at eight years old, by his mum, and being told to find his own way home, which was several miles away. It's a surprising story, if a bit predictably sensational for the childhood of a future billionaire. But it does have two tell-tale qualities; namely, the wild wandering through expansive landscapes, and the complete antithesis of helicopter parenting.

I think what I'm really taking away from this post is greater clarity on some ideas that are important to me and worthy of more study:

• project-based learning

• kids learning among people of all ages

• giving kids a chance to see what they can be

• and living in a social media- and chore-free home in the countryside

I'm curious what ideas you have. What would be missing, and what would be present, if your home and school life had been built entirely around the principles of autonomy, competence and relatedness?

As always, I'll write again when I learn more.

See you next time. Thanks for reading.

Harrison 👨‍🎨

⬥

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Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal and professional growth.

If you're a high-achiever ready to make a major life or career shift through a creative project, I offer 1:1 coaching to help you navigate that transformation. If you’re interested in how I can support you, learn more about me and then send me an email and we’ll set up a call to chat.

Hey subscribers,

I want to continue where I left off in my last post in which I shared some fundamentals about Self-Determination Theory (SDT)1, the idea that intrinsic motivation (which is correlated with the highest levels of happiness and performance) comes from being able to meet our needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness.

My big question is:

How DO you help (young) people to meet their need for autonomy, competence and relatedness in their education?

I’m particularly interested in this question as I think more about trying for a family, and about how I can be an even happier, more motivated lifelong learner.

I want to get practical about this theory now. I'm not saying I know everything I need to know about SDT; I've only scratched the surface. But I do think unless I stop to take stock of what I'm learning and apply it to my own life in a practical way, I'm worried I'll forget some of it or all of it.

As is normally the case when I’m researching, my first port of call was to type "self determination theory in education" into my podcast search bar and listen to a few of the results. One result that stood out was a music teacher talking about how she uses SDT in the classroom to achieve some pretty remarkable results.

She kicked things off by telling the story of how she used to teach with the "carrot and stick" model, giving out stickers and candies, which she added were always ineffective in the long run at getting her kids to want to learn.

After doing an SDT-informed teacher training course, however, she said she finally saw the light, and began finding ways to give the students more autonomy over how they learned.

Specifically she allowed the students to:

1. choose their instrument and THEN choose to change instruments at any point during the term if they wished to. This made sure every kid had chosen the right instrument for them and that nobody was saddled with work they didn't ultimately want to be doing. If a student changed instruments mid-term, she then found another way to give them autonomy: she paired the student off with another student who was already playing that instrument, and got the more experienced student to teach them the ropes. As we know, teaching something is one of the most effective ways to learn it, and by tasking the experienced student with teaching the novice, not only did the experienced student learn even more (+1 for their competence), but they also got to decide how they taught their knowledge (+1 for autonomy). And as you've probably realised if you're paying attention, teaching a peer also gave them a big +1 on relatedness too

2. choose the music they would practice all year. This was particularly effective at getting underrepresented students bought in as they then got to choose to practice songs that normally wouldn't appear on a typical college music syllabus

3. choose the performances they would give and the competitions they would enter - another +1 for relatedness since presumably the whole class felt bought in to the longer-term goals they were collectively aiming towards

4. and finally, my favourite, each student could choose when they took their music exam. So, instead of having everyone fit their practice around the same schedule and take exams on the same day—an arbitrary day when some students might not have been in the right head space for an exam—they simply notified the teacher when they felt ready to be examined. And if that's not cool enough, the other benefit of doing it this way was that if anyone failed their exam, they had time to do more practice and retake it at another point in the year, instead of only having one bite of the cherry at the end of term

To put into perspective how successful these measures were at fostering student appetite for music practice, in just a couple of years since taking over the class, the teacher, using SDT, grew the program from 45 students to over 200.

The school had to hire extra staff and they even had to start turning students away because of capacity issues.

Reflecting on the measures the music teacher took, the big obvious insight here is in giving students choice.

But not just any old choices; they were choices skilfully tied to all the significant parts of a music education: instruments, songs, peers, performances, grades, and more.

By doing it this way, students emerge having experienced what it's like to weigh up options, make their own decisions, set goals, work as individuals and as a team, be accountable, and negotiate, compromise and manage any conflict arising from their choices, so that presumably by the time they leave school and enter the unforgiving world of professional music, they already know how to steer their own ship and how good it feels doing so.

What's really cool too is seeing how the three psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness actually beget one another. Choosing the right instrument (even if it takes some trial and error) means you're more likely to practice and get good, thereby increasing your competence. Becoming competent in turn is more likely to endear you to your peers and result in you being invited to participate in further opportunities, thereby strengthening your connections and sense of belonging.

I can't help but think about ways in which parents, teachers and other guardians could empower young people in transformative ways just by taking time to consider how they can extend them more decision-making opportunities.

What if, resources allowing, you let your kids choose their own school, for example? They might be a bit too young to choose a primary school, but would it be completely bonkers to let them choose their secondary school? Maybe some parents already do!

Or, a topic that’s close to my heart: travel. What about letting your kids choose the holiday you go on as a family? I mean the whole thing—the country, the town, the length of stay, the type of holiday, the climate, activities, clothes, all that jazz.

There are probably plenty of "supposedly adult" decisions that the average parent thinks they must make that could actually be given to kids with potentially amazing/interesting results.

Where should we live?

What car should we drive?

What pet should we get?

Where should we shop?

What should we buy?

Who should our friends be?

How should we spend our leisure time?

OK, I'm maybe getting a bit carried away now. But the essential idea here excites me a lot.

It obviously would need careful design (too much choice could become a paralysis, for example, or even something dangerous), but in principle I'm very much in favour of the idea of empowering people as early as possible to step into autonomy and experience its transformative power.

Honestly I'm feeling quite giddy now to go and find some real stories of adults who've let their kids make adult decisions and have lived to tell the tale!

You'll be the first to know when I find any.

What about you? Were you given an unusual level of autonomy when you were young? Perhaps you were sent on errands across town when you could barely walk. Maybe you were driving your dad’s tractor before your feet could even reach the pedals.

Or, maybe you had the opposite experience and you feel you could and should have been given more opportunity to make your own choices as a child.

If you’ve got a story to tell, do tell, I’d love to talk to you about it.

See you next time!

—Harrison 👨‍🎨

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