The Little Houses of Mérida

I sometimes think about the little houses in Mérida. Not so much the inner-city ones – as beautiful and bright as they were – but the ones further out. I saw them from the coach window as we drove out to the cenotes to swim. Washing lines hung across the front of some, little tricycles abandoned, maybe as a child leapt off and ran inside to heed a mother’s call. Some sold ice cream, or other wares; tiny convenience stores in the heat, dried leaf litter, and trees around them. The colours, naturalised by the sun, knew no bounds.

When I think of them I wonder what life is like out there, in these Yucatan villages, what the community is like, and what kind of creativity happens in them.

Of course, I visualise myself shuffling about in knee socks and long shorts, or light trousers to minimise my bite risk, working on either side of the hottest time of day. Interestingly, I’m not writing, coaching, or illustrating here. I’m painting. I take my time, applying loose strokes and stepping back for minutes at a time to consider what it means, whether it’s successful in some way. Or not.

Designing a career

Simon Dixon, co-founder of DixonBaxi posted the following advice:

Design the career you want to live.

If you don’t define it, someone else will, and you’ll be the one stuck living it.

And it left me flailing on the deck, stunned out of my shoes by the sheer power of it.

The way I coach my clients is through a cocktail of therapy, discussion, connection, ideas, and guidance. Connection not in the sense that I’ll end up best mates with everyone I work with, but in a way that just like my podcasts, I bare my soul to access their inner child, their authentic self, not their job title.

Creativity is directly attached to our personality and story. An extension of self.

You get the best from someone by understanding them enough to remind them of their worth, freeing them from learned doubt and inhibition, destructive inner-dialogue, and dreary prescriptive anti-creativity.

We get vulnerable. We vent frustrations, and we throw dreams, whims, ideas, and silly thoughts around and look at them from many angles. All of this is done within a framework I call ‘The Anatomy of Creativity’ – otherwise, without direction and guardrails, I’d never shut up, and we’d both just die and turn to dust while coughing and spluttering about all the possibilities creativity presents.

But what Simon said. That’s everything.

I mean it. Everything.

In the end, it’s all on us. In career and life. We have to design both. That’s not to say we can control everything. We can’t. Three of the life pillars I get my clients to acknowledge are highlighted in Stutz – a tremendous film about psychotherapist Phil Stutz – and they are:

Pain

Uncertainty

Constant work.

And these never go away. It’s the way of the universe. Everything falling apart, Fight Club style. But acknowledging them and welcoming them into our planning phase, our production processes, and our final execution means we are adaptable, present, and somewhat resilient to what may or may not lie ahead.

After reading Simon’s post, it occurred to me that designing a career and a life is what we do in my coaching, and what I’ve been doing since I set foot in the creative industry.

I use the Japanese philosophical mindset of sei-katsu-sha, which loosely translates to ‘those who live by doing’ - becoming the author of one’s own life.

I’ve done this with varying degrees of awareness.

My first portfolio was a snarling, antagonistic, partisan blast of activism in pen and ink. I did this to ensure I scared off work that didn’t align with my creative desires, and to engage the clients who could give me the stuff I’d give a shit about working on. Since school, I’ve recognised that if I am not passionate about something, I can’t learn or apply myself. It remains the case to this day. It always will. So I set out with intent, designing the career I fancied. I was aware of this.

Champagne and Wax Crayons, my debut book. It’s origin was in freelance frustration, and using the negative emotion spectrum is not a straight forward exercise. It’s bloody confusing and full of doubt and uncertainty.

A blog rant became a rough manuscript because my cathartic release tool – writing – gathered attention. It was real, raw, and resonated with others leading with creativity. I got addicted to the process, the joy of having a voice and connection through it. Suddenly, I was a writer and a published author. Lucky fucker? Well, the luck was being connected to David Woods-Hale, by editor and at the time an illustration client, but the authoring, the designing of my life and career was committing to the work, believing in the story I was telling enough to talk about it, not just lip-service, but glowing as I voiced the magic it made me feel. I was living as a writer, carrying myself with enough self-belief to transmit enough positive energy to hook David’s interest and excitement.

He took that resonance and fought my corner, convincing his superior to offer me a book deal.

I’d had no plans to be a writer. The designing bit was allowing my curiosity to lead because I valued that and trusted it to open the right doors, even if I didn’t know where they were or what opportunity might be behind them. That’s instinct, play, faith in what feels right, and belief in my ability to see the opportunity and my skillset to deliver on it. Fast turnaround responding with the elements that dropped into the folder I shared with the universe, if you will.

Many of my clients lack this self belief or trust in process and play because we live in a world with data pouring our of its arse, and it terrifies people into creative stasis at every level. They disconnect from their instinct, devalue and often demolish their story as they live and die by CVs and track records. Serving the expected, handing the keys to automation.

They await instruction and don’t even put their ideas forward because they already know someone in some department is likely to say no because they know that someone else will never entertain such unpredictability. That’s why burnout, disillusionment, distraction, and ultimately creative self-destruction are rife even among those who we assume live the dream.

It’s my biggest pleasure to see my client’s faces as I remind them that they can design a better way forward by realligning them with their inner child, making them answer to their deathbed selves, and reinstalling the reasons they wanted to create in the first place. I like to identify big dreams and tiny inclinations, blow up the little things sketched in notebooks onto billboard-sized canvases. I love to encourage them to reframe the little jokes shared between friends or to draw with the dirt that’s been festering in the backs of their minds. To begin actively doing, to get sharing it, is to come into possession of a skeleton key that will unlock the door to the exhilarating unknown.

Once I got the sense that coaching was a beautiful fit for me – an empathetic, sensitive, perceptive soul who knows a lot about human needs and creativity – I started to build a home so they might come. First, hundreds of podcasts to build trust and show that my motivations were pure despite my need to ask for money in exchange for my work in a capitalist society. Then public speaking at schools, colleges, universities, businesses, and events. Then another book, The Creative Condition. A degree of risk and uncertainty meant I had to stay attuned to instincts, but this was me. Creativity was by now my life’s passion, and while I adore and continue to make my illustration and art with deep love for the craft, I wanted to put just as much stock in my desire to elevate society’s perception and use of creativity.

I wasn’t making any money, but by designing a scenario where that was possible and would further the cause, I steered things towards a future where I could pay my mortgage and commit to my crusade without having to wait for the economy to collapse. That felt terrifying but also unbelievably enticing.

My coaching clients are often either not making much money – if any at all – from the thing they’d like to become their main work. Or, they’re just not bringing their best version to their roles in companies because they don’t believe something they love so much will be validated in a commercial environment.

Both situations will only change if you design a scenario where they can.

In my case, I invested my own money into a brand, a website, and an infrastructure to visually convey my competency and understanding of what I wanted to bring to people’s lives. Through good copy and visual communication, I made a spider-web, woven from the warm rush this work gave me.

Again, challenges everywhere – imposter syndrome, moments of silly comparison, so much doubt in pricing the work, full-blown financial panic, and lows in which I almost surrendered and ran off, perplexed by what I was even thinking in the first place when I already have a career doing something I love.

But then, through the podcast, some bookings. 6 pilot Pit Stop one-to-one standalone sessions. Each one was thrilling, transformative for the client and me. Then, workshop bookings for agencies and organisations. Positive feedback. Confidence rising. Becoming what I already was inside.

Trust the process, keep doing, feeling – tiny deadlines, holding yourself to account – and compound results start to come. That’s what I tell every client, and every time, things start to change because they’re designing their career again. No massive end goal to overwhelm yourself and miss the signposts along the way. Just one foot in front of the other, going with the flow.

Creativity coach. Writer. Illustrator and artist. All the titles make me smile. I’m whatever I want to be according to what’s in front of me, but, unknowing and knowing in equal measure, I crafted it to be this way.

Whatever you want to do with your creativity, it’s all possible, but just like Simon says, only if you take it by the horns and make it move, feel its movements, trust them, especially when they seem wild and frenzied, and lean in.

Nobody else can do that for you, but I certainly get a lot out of helping you know where to start and how to keep going.

For what this all looks like, pop over to the coaching area. Let’s talk about you.

Playpark (near) perfection

They have half an hour and then we have to get back so I can make tea. That’s the clear briefing delivered before the kids barrel into the local play park. I sit down on a sunny patch of grass and the dog does his own thing, exploring, grazing, rolling in enviable delight. My brain wants me to reach into my pocket for my phone but I deny it as part of my habit breaking efforts. Instead I pick up a small twig and begin to bend it, twist it around my finger, toss it onto the grass and pick it back up again. It brings on the warmth of nostalgia as I recall days of laying in this same position – up on one elbow – soaked in sweat after a big summer football match on the old school yard.

The memory fades and I check the dog’s whereabouts before watching the kids in their element. They’re talking to a boy roughly two years older than them and now he’s setting a decent pace, up the big slide, down it, up on the monkey bars, then across the little bridge from which he swings down, around the halfway mark. My two follow him, but they’re not there yet, so run at cross-sectional angles, reading his moves, creating their own little circuits, but clearly inspired by his mastery of the frame. It’s fucking beautiful, so pure and essential. Primal release, physical activity, responsive creativity, innovation – I could go on. They’re alive. It’s almost perfect save for one mother of a smaller toddler, who stands in the corner, her back to said toddler and these moments playing out behind her, doing something on her phone.

This isn’t judging – parenthood leaves little time for communications or anything, really – but it takes away from the purity of everything around her, and I can’t help but feel sad about it. Like we, as a species, have taken a seismic misstep by getting too connected in the wrong ways.

Thankfully my moment passes and I get back to the twig.

Embracing the calm

The tension soup made from financial pressure, fierce drive, and a passion for my work doesn’t always taste good. It burns me out, bringing on a destructive overwhelm. But I’m getting better.

Since Paradiso festival in Mexico, I’ve focused on reduced task sheets, allowing myself a little more time to enjoy things, feel the flow, and act accordingly, in tune with my energy.

And while I feel more idle (a wholly good thing), I feel more alive, aware, and tuned into the source. I’m not a religious man, so don’t read this as divine. By source, I mean the irrefutable everything we belong to, the same source everything in this world belongs to. Eco systems emanate from it. It’s subatomic, if that’s the right word… Oh I don’t know – words fail me with this stuff because it’s just so much more than our language.

Anyway, things are happening in accordance with this feeling. I’ve begun a great, exciting conversation with PJ Richardson, Laundry co-founder, who shared a book signing with me at Paradiso. Other meaningful chats have happened since, with people who were just… there. Part of it.

I’m giving myself to the things that I feel drawn to.

Reading with my morning coffee if that’s what will nourish.

Getting rid of abitrary numbers assigned to emails to send to prospective clients and looking for coffees – proper chats – remote or in person so we can begin relationships.

And unsurprisingly, some magic has begin to break down the unreasonable amount of anxiety these last few weeks.

Feel the brush of those invisible hands.

Jeopardy Rush

I spend a week preparing for a live event portrait job. Sketching the family as they eat, watch TV, sit patiently. Every time I take on live work, do a lecture, go somewhere new, there's part of me wondering whether I might have been happier sat in my studio without this jeopardy.

Of course not.

Not happier, safer. Dangerous comfort.

It's about balance, of course, but finding the right amount of jeopardy for you is key to maintaining creative growth. But is the right amount right? Sometimes full blown knife edge panic brings on such precious clarity, such appreciation of the peaceful baseline that we feel born again.

On the big night, I'm sketching away, half-worried about messing up the likeness of the girl who glides her phone around the table like a child's imaginary spaceship, documenting my pen, my face, the drawing event in every detail. In the end, the likeness is kind of there, if not the Mona Lisa.

Does an absence of risk do anyone's creativity any good? I'm not so sure. But maybe some folk really do need yawning canyons of comfort to ease into their optimal.

But I doubt it.

Sometimes

Back in 2016 when I interviewed Adrian Shaughnessy for the podcast, I asked him for a love and hate. I used to do that to sign off an episode. ‘The shark in the tank’ I called it because nobody is indifferent about the Hirst piece, are they?

He told me he was repulsed by corporate culture, how they were messing everything up for the rest of us.

Nine years later and literally everything we hold dear is in turmoil as the rich run roughshod in just about every facet of our societies, driven by narcissism and greed.

Some days I sit and fantasise about every one of us downing tools, holding global economies to ransom, taking back control.

Silly, I know. It’s not so much a hope, but a vision of someday, what might, in some alternate dimension at least, might be possible.

We’d pull the TV out of the wall, stop commissioning more plastic, and start singing, painting, playing, coming together in unbreakable bonds of spirit and flesh. We’d do it under swollen storm clouds and unbearable heat, and show original rebellion. Wait for the fat cats to drop dramatic weight as they run from packs of hunters, alive for the first time in forever.

And then I go back to my emails.

About the boys

The following is a Steven Bartlett LinkedIn post about young men and the crisis explored in-part by the TV show Adolescence:

‼️ We are losing a generation of young boys, it may not be popular to say, but boys and men need help...👇🏾

This month The Centre For Social Justice released a report that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

The report opens with the following statement:

🗣️ "At the Centre for Social Justice, we are asked: what is really going on in our homes and communities? We listen to those working on the frontline - the teachers, youth workers, charities, and parents who see, day in and day out, the struggles playing out in the lives of young people. And in recent years, they’ve been telling us the same thing: something is going on with our boys."

📉 "Boys and young men are in crisis. Whilst the last hundred years have been marked by great leaps forward in outcomes and rights for women, in this generation it is boys who are being left behind. And by some margin."

📉 "From the day they start primary school, to the day they leave higher education, the progress of boys lags behind girls. The proportion of young men failing to move from education into employment or training has been steadily growing for 30 years."

📉 "Since the pandemic, the number of males aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training has increased by a staggering 40% compared to just 7% for females."

📉 "For those young men who are in work, the much-vaunted gender pay gap has been reversed. Young men are now out-earned by their female peers, including among the university educated."

🧠 "Young men are increasingly drawn to right-wing political movements, whilst young women become ever more liberal and left-progressive."

🧔🏻‍♂️ "In an increasingly online existence, boys and girls no longer walk the same path from childhood to adulthood, with their interests, values and aims in life increasingly incompatible with each other. As Britain grapples with an epidemic of family breakdown, millions of boys are deprived of any positive model of manhood."

😔 1 in 5 young boys grow up in households without a dad, and young boys in farther-less homes struggle more with depression & anti-social behaviour than young girls.

💵 "For boys in Britain - especially those who are poor - the picture is an increasingly bleak one. We also highlight different outcomes across certain ethnic groups."

📢 The first step in addressing this is public conversation (which we haven’t had enough of), I hosted a discussion this week on my show about this topic which will be out soon.

📺 I'm hoping to produce a documentary about this for TV / streaming sites, alongside several friends of mine / former podcast guests. (if you can help, please get in touch)

I'm extremely keen to hear what you're seeing & your thoughts? Teachers? Parents? Care workers? Therapists? What are you seeing? What can we do about it?

__

Thank you to Tim Shipman, who's article in The Times brought this to my attention. Search "The Lost Boys, The Times" to read his full article (I've linked it below).

In response to this, I vomited some initial thoughts, having had this cause close to my heart over the years both through The Creative Condition and a believer in the emotional benefits of artistic expression:

The intensified marginalisation of the arts in education, funding cuts to youth and cultural organisations, and the seismic impact (especially since 2010) of the Wild West age of social media is a triumvirate of evils for young men. Girls, too, of course. Arts and community organisations are key for not just filling in where the family and community failings have left holes, but also teaching fundamental life skills; independence, initiative, imagination, self-awareness, tolerance, primal release, physical activity, etc. We don't see maths not making 30 mathematicians per class as a failing, so to discredit dance, drama, and art as hobbying because it doesn't generate 30 Picassos is a preposterous oversimplification of a vital tool to get by in this information-drenched world. Look at Bikestormz, Dance United, CALM for examples of organisations creating unity, belonging, and purpose through arts. Read 'The Anxious Generation' by Jonathan Haidt, 'Your Brain on Art' by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, and the work of Richard Louv about the need for kids to play freely outdoors and be in nature. Young men are media scapegoats, instruments of political leverage when they should be, like the girls, seen as the next generation of everything.

and to follow on:

Ben Tallon Furthermore, lack of public space for young folk to hang out, play sport, explore, connect, and just be is shamefully scarce. Every plot of land seemingly becomes flats, car parks, or some other beacon of corporate dominance when a humble basketball court, skate park, or dare I say it, meadow – we've lost a terrifying amount of wildflower meadows (high 90%) since WW2, contributing to not only a dangerous loss of biodiversity, but also lack of open ground to roam and be free – would massively boost community and connection for kids and young women and men.

I’ll return to this topic with something more refined. We have indeed reached a crisis point. Several of my female coaching clients have voiced deep concern over rising misogyny, which I believe is completely weaponised by the same politicians and corporate cultures that I believe would strangle the last breath out of freedom of expression, inititative, and the natural world for every last penny. But to address this, we must start now, we must start with the roots, and we must start with the antagonist front of the aforementioned triumvirate of evils. It’s too much for here, but send me your thoughts and ideas.

A new insurmountable

I have a major AI problem and it’s multi-faceted.

It feels to me that humanity is sliding into a new age of stupid. This obsession with smart phones was bad enough before the developed world woke up sweating in the night and vomited AI all over itself. It was already upsetting enough to see teenagers hunched over screens, rows of them on park benches, next to each other in the physical realm, but each off in some virtual brain soup sludge swamp, alone in spirit. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation spells out a damning account of why it’s caused a mental health crisis, and what we can start to do about it. But now… fuck me… NOW.

I can’t fucking move without someone smacking the word ‘AI’ against the side of my head. Not only has it shrunk the work pool for illustrators and other professional creators, it’s just everywhere. People are asking the likes of ChatGPT stupid, basic things, that their brains should be processing to stop them turning to grey mush. There are people making videos of rows with ‘AI partners.’

The genie is out of the bottle, and as a father and professional artist, it’s causing me all kinds of anger to manage.

The energy/resource consumption of the technology, just like blockchain technology, is apocalyptic. With each unseasonably wet, hot, or cold day, I’m convinced climate breakdown is being accelerated by our unfettered data gluttony. We sleep with the sounds of birdsong, or rivers streamed. We add our absent cousin into photos. We try to make a Google search but without any say in the matter, spend 10 x the energy because Google also routes our query through AI.

Darkest of all, I see a video of a ‘humanoid robot’ demonstration as it works away tirelessly at a Mercedes Benz car manufacturing plant, triggering very real waking nightmares akin to The Animatrix and Terminator.

Don’t get me wrong, there are astounding uses of AI, including the tracking of illegal loggers in rainforests and study of the gut microbiome in medical science, but why oh why was this powerful technology every lumped into the lap of every Tom, Dick, and Harry?

I haven’t touched it yet (aside from clumsy uses of Google Chrome, forgetting their ugly default) on moral grounds. Freshwater is already in short supply out there. I have to look my children in the eye, knowing that one day, they’ll want to know why society is collapsing around them.

Needless to say, all of this pushes me close to, and often, deep into fight, flight, freeze, into perplexed rage and a sense of alienation from my fellow humans as I see mass idiocy flirting with ecological disasters that we cannot yet imagine.

But what am I to do? Sit here stewing, fucking up my body and energy, jeopardising my ability to find work where AI has left a commission-shaped hole? Being a shit dad chewing at his nails and snapping at his kids? No. I’ll continue the assemblage of my go-bag, and my slow attempt to learn basic survival skills, and protesting and refraining where possible. Last week at Paradiso, I listened as artist Tala Schlossberg spoke of her beautiful writing, explaining that yes, there’s heaviness out there, and the future might hold dark things, but right here, in this present, the only bit we can control, the only bit that exists, there is beauty. Beauty in the sounds around us, beauty in the shape of shadows. So I breathe and try to shut down the whirring visions of mechanic robots before I suffer another overheated fan because Tala is right, and if the rest of my clever apes are going to blow it all up for the silliest of reasons, then I’ll at least try to go down cherishing what is right here before it’s gone.

The Anatomy of a Burst of Anxiety

I caught the bastard. Watched it on CCTV as it cackled, hosing down my guts with cortisol, scattering spreadsheets of financial not-quite-enoughs around my buckled brain. That’s what they say: step back and observe. The trouble is, when we’re talking about anxiety and panic thoughts, there’s no hired muscle we can send in to apprehend the offender.

It started on Wednesday when I found myself fretting about the obscene resources use associated with AI. As a parent with a stake in the next generation of living things, hearing this stuff conjures horrendous imaginings of uninhabitable futures.

The concerns pinched at me as I got dressed and set off for a meeting in London but dissipated in the business. As I barrelled back from the meeting, through the park in Salisbury, I started mentally calculating the job money I’m owed. Welcome to the pinball freelance brain. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. The trouble is, I was still shattered and slightly jet-lagged from a trip to Paradiso festival in Mexico. So, my defences are down. Said meeting was about coaching work with an agency. I’m in the midst of a transitional phase in my career – still an illustrator, but caught in a downturn. I’m coaching and writing more too. I love all of it, but it’s a heavy load. This extra weight of pressure capitalised on my financially concerned brain, and the ageing, brittle, corrugated roof gave way.

Before I knew it, tired and unable to challenge my thoughts the way I know I need to, I’m anxious. Freaking out as I struggle to get my key in the lock. Too much to process, all out of energy.

Each concern is valid, but in the classic anxiety way, they’re mutated beyond all rational recognition, mating and multiplying into other concerns, trivial but terrifying concerns ranging from when will I find time to clean the house through to will next door suddenly decide to cut down their tree in the midst of a biodiversity crisis that threatens our very existence, like seemingly every other fucker who wants to fit another car on their driveway.

But it gets exhausting, so I drop voice notes on friends who I know will care, and will help with suggestions and personal stories. I talk to my wife who is better at mental equilibrium than me, and helps.

Now, late afternoon, I feel much better, but must remain vigilant for the return of the adrenaline as darkness falls. They say do the thought challenging when you feel better to avoid the classic anxiety tactic of stopping the work the moment you feel better. That’s great advice for us busybody artists, isn’t it?

With a Bump

An incredible trip to the inaugural Paradiso festival in Mérida, Mexico, is surreal and brilliant. I wrote on my social media and made sure to remind any readers that this kind of career high is invariably gift wrapped in 1000 frustrations, lows, and blasts of self-doubt.

Now I have a stunning example.

There’s no grace period when you’re a parent. Laura heroically steered the family ship for almost a week in my absence, ensuring that not only were the twins catered for, but Walter White, our hound was walked twice daily too. Oh, and she had to work each day too. So, I land, I tell hyper-paced tales of my adventure, I crash and sleep. Then, WHAM! Welocme back, 6am, make breakfast, walk dog, do school run, and into work. It’s fine. It’s what we do.

I’m nodding on the sofa, trying to update this diary through closed eyes when someone rings the doorbell. Up I jump, distant and detached from reality, and open it.

‘Hello, I’ve come to read your gas meter.’ Red rising. My forehead pounds like a horse heart. For context: We just passed the 3 years mark without a working electricity meter. 10 rounds of phone calls to our utility provider, jumping through hoops, filming the meter as we fail to switch it on, sending them various numbers of things, ID details, only to listen as the operator doesn’t know at full volume. It’s deafening and hurts my brain.

Now, unannounced, there’s a man from an independent agency, sent by the utility provider to read the one meter that works fine, of which we’ve sent the reading every month. His eyes tell the story as he tells me “they’re all as bad as each other.”

I’m telling you this because these are the conditions of creativity. They always were. I can’t help but wonder if there was ever a time when a carrier bag full of real life didn’t split and cascade all over the fictional ‘pure’ creativity. I think of classic writers penning timeless tales of love and monsters, in castles and lakeside retreats, but it simply couldn’t have been as toasty and mesmeric as the picture my imagination paints.

Mary Shelley was probably worrying about a patch of dry skin or something.

I know from experience that the Brönte sisters were fucking freezing, despite the rolling moors I’ve walked my dog on countless times during childhood, not to mention the inescapable, savage illnesses of the day lurking at every turn.

I could go on, but for creativity to flow, it has to be cause; unwavering, defiant cause, or insatiable passion that can pull in all of this shit, and thrive regardless.

After we both sigh a lot, and he makes a note on his device, which I have no doubt will result in a ‘failed appointment’ fine to the tune of £66 that will have to be contested as I prepare to draw, or record a podcast monologue. Then he’s in the car.

The rage sloshes like molten lava in my gut, but I breathe, and run a series of things I’ve creatively and personally excited about, or grateful for, and it works. It works because life is short and I won’t have it. Not from those bastards. Not when I have this in my life. This ability to create it out of my system.

Now I’m thinking about a collection. Real-life nonsense of those who appear to be winning. Maybe not.

Date Night

Less than 48 hours after we launch Héctor Ayuso's biography, The Reason You’re Doing It at the inaugural Paradiso festival, I get a message. Its sender, someone from Mexico City now living in Mérida, tells me that he was at the venue, Sallon Gallos, on a date. He did not know about Paradiso, but found a copy and got talking to designers and artists at the festival. He tried to find me but I was busy eating at the time, unaware.

But now, he explains, this book has impacted him.

He’s been working for big IT companies, and wants to get into art. The landscape is complicated for him, but Héctor’s story is an eye-opener.

It blows my mind every time this kind of synchronicity, this serendipity plays out, in new places, in many ways.

It was Héctor himself who nodded and smiled when I asked him that, despite the darkness he had witnessed, if he believed in the power of small actions and ever decision, provided we felt it. You just never know.

The Burrills at Breakfast

Anthony Burrill is in my house like he is in many, many houses. My house on the other side of the world in the UK. THINK OF YOUR OWN IDEAS. The kids like to read it as they learn phonics, and Anthony has more than earned his place among design royalty. I recognise him having seen him speak in Manchester and my room in Mérida's Sureno Hotel is next to his. I introduce myself to him and his lovely wife, Emma at breakfast and join them. Very quickly I'm enamoured by their warmth, their pleasant nature. The Creative industry is littered with renowned names bereft of ego. This thing we do, this creativity, it's fundamental. We do it purely, professionally, but in the majority of cases, with decency and with little ego. This happens on several mornings before Paradiso kicks off each day and we keep bumping into one another around and at our respective events at the festival.

On day 3 I finally get the chance to properly meet Zipeng Zhu, a New York-based artist and designer. We said hello on day one in a group setting, and now, he's sitting alone in the restaurant one hour or so before his workshop. He waves me over and says "Don't be alone!" Zipeng is a bundle of energy, dressed in brilliantly loud clothes, and full of great stories. We eat together and after he's finished and I'm still working on my chips, he begins telling me a story.

"Oh, so I got talking to this unassuming couple, and I didn't recognise them. I say, nice to meet you Anthony and Emma, and we talk about Mérida and all kinds of things. It's only after about 20 minutes that I see the ‘B’ of his surname. Wait... Anthony... B, ANTHONY BURRILL, at what point were you going to tell me I'M TALKING TO GOD?!'

I almost choke on my veggie burger as he somehow illustrates the way it so often is in our profession. He pays for his food and leaves to prepare for his workshop, his unmistakably bold look bringing full colour to the room, and I chuckle over his omnipotent casting of this unassuming industry favourite. It's only when I call for the bill that the waiter tells me Zipeng paid for mine too.

Despite the hours in my hotel room, when you lead with creativity, it’s hard to ever be truly alone.

School Trip

At Paradiso Festival, each day kicks off with an optional trip somewhere in Mérida, creating a lively rabble of people wearing backpacks. There’s a local tour guide hoisting up a little Yucatán flag on a pole, on a bus.

The festival doesn't kick off until 3pm, and by that time, new friendships have been made without the formalities. Moments have happened. At breakfast, people are learning about one another and there's not a speaker in site. In the cenotes - luscious natural sinkholes filled with brochure blue water - we bob around and drift towards one another in life jackets and say hello. I meet Ivan Cash this way, a talented filmmaker who I've recently discovered. Stefan Sagmeister and Oliver Jeffers are ahead of me on the bikes we hire to get between each cenote, but we are lost, and Stefan scratches his head, voicing all of our concerns that 'this doesn't look right.' It's funny, we are present, and it's a level playing field in which we're not competing, but sharing ideas and experiences.

Héctor Ayuso knows what he's doing. During the time I spent writing his biography, The Reason You're Doing It, he spoke of his love of this, of turning to the person next to you and saying what you might not say, that could lead to anything.

It creates a warmth, an atmosphere of mass conversation and curiosity. People listen to speakers, get dirty in artistic workshops, listen to local music, eat, and drink, and it all takes place in a Roman Bath rumble of connection and sheer possibility.

Immediacy

Mexico City Airport. Foreign passport queue. Present, head snapping from side to side, locked into everything.

New surrounds, feeling lost, being here, now.

Seeing happens with all the senses. Break from the sleepwalking through the achingly familiar.

It needn't be the other side of the world. That's where my creativity has led me for the week, but the next postcode can invoke the same sense of uncertainty. The new.

It takes effort to welcome the right amount of risk. But without it, we see nothing.

Looney Tunes

I never stopped finding those old Looney Tunes cartoons funny. Hysterically so. The backfires, the anatomic impossibilities, the burned faces, and the good v mischievous see-sawing in 2D. We left my Granddad –around the age of 87 – watching Daffy Duck on his own downstairs one Christmas holiday while we sorted a few bits around the house.

I remember my dad smirking and saying to my mum, ‘Have you heard your dad down there? He’s watching bloody cartoons!’

You couldn’t not hear him. His laugh boomed two floors up and probably three houses along the terrace despite the century-old thick Yorkshire stone walls. So, I went downstairs because I wanted in. My granddad, always in his suit, lay on his side, tie draped over the edge of the sofa, glasses off his face next to him, in pieces, tears rolling down his cheeks. On the screen, Daffy’s beak was halfway around his head. I fell apart too.

Humour is personal, but an elixir in creativity’s makeup. It can come in any form, and needn’t be overt. Anything from straight up jokes, Mr Bingo style rude drawings and words, right through to the mood in a line drawing, piece of music, or approach to a workshop. It’s a defining aspect of personality, and personality means everything.

And here’s another thought – it need not even be involved in the creative process.

I spent 24 hours of this weekend holding back a smirk, or laughing in public because I tried to trick a group of fellow Fantasy Premier League players into thinking I’d played my wildcard (A twice-season get out of jail, revamp your squad for free chip) in the hope it would convince them to play theirs at a time I deemed silly to play it. It got me nowhere – I’ll be bottom of our league tonight. So, my brother, finding this attempted ‘ruse’ and subsequent backfire utterly ludicrous, began likening me to Wile E. Coyote, the famously inept antagonist from the cartoon ‘Road Runner.’

This and thousands of other acts of immaturity take place in a private group, and some of the escapades are the most creative things I’ve ever made. They never see light of day. But the positive emotions, stunts, and ideas hatched in that forum grease the wheels of my creativity like little else.

That’s what all of this creativity coaching work is: helping humans re-attune with a purer self, a sense of magic, enabling idiocy and play in ways intellectual work rarely does, but can always benefit from. It need never be seen in a portfolio or pitch, but it can elevate the way a person feels and acts so much that the dots can always be joined regardless.

So I don’t hesitate to take 10 minutes to turn myself into a failed villain, scheming atop a cliff with a cart full of ACME dynamite, waiting for a protagonist to emerge. It makes me laugh, it lifts my mood, and nudges me into the headspace in which the unconscious is more accessible.

We’re not silly enough.

Less cynical and calculated. More daft and immature. Take that as a prescription.

The Heels

Heel: A storyline antagonist in professional wrestling.

I tell people to use their own passions to frame things in a way that energises and motivates them. John Cena, the ultimate ‘babyface’ – a hero or ‘goodie’ in wrestling – sold his soul in the TV story. The drama and shock of it reminded me why I adore the theatre so much.

I also took nerdy pleasure from a section within my creativity coaching, helping clients to identify the most dastardly ‘heels' in their creativity's ecosystem.

Procrastination

Perfectionism

Jealousy

Comparison

Burnout

Rejection

Fear of Failure

Comfort (creative or financial)

Subservience

We’ve all encountered most, if not all of them, and there are myriad couplings or group dynamics amongst them at any given time.

Procrastination. What are you refusing to face? Running from? Evading? Denying?

Perfectionism. The enemy of big ideas and progress.

Jealousy. Pointless in a subjective realm. Get inspired, but don’t desire.

Comparison. Thief of joy. Each human has an utterly unique story and lived experience. It is arguably the best asset in your creative arsenal.

Burnout. We have to learn to manage our energy flow, know when something is draining, and be brave enough to move towards the more nourishing use of our minds and skills.

Rejection. Inevitable. Next.

Fear of failure. It happens, a lot. That’s a good thing. What’s the lesson and how can we use it to get better?

Comfort. A degree of risk is essential in the creative process. Jeopardy needn’t be sharp-edged.

Subservience. Question. Push back. Demand better.

Keep a list of these bastards on the wall, visible, and stay alert. They’ll don the brass knucks and bloody your creativity the moment your back is turned.

Hyper-consumerism or pure magic?

This isn’t an ‘either or’ conversation. The scale of fashion waste in the west is abhorrent. We know this. It’s why I so seldom buy new clothes. Besides, the good stuff is always in the vintage and charity shops. For the kids, it’s all about Vinted and re-purposing when it comes to fancy dress in our house.

Today is World Book Day. My son calls out for his night light at 5.45am and I notice his open eye, watching me despite the rest of his face ploughed into his pillow.

‘Dad….’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’m just so excited about World Book Day.’

And he is. They are. Stories. That human glue. We need them on every level, and have to watch out for the sneaky narratives we weave that cut us off from our creativity. The reasons we can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t do things that are right, or perpetuate damaging behaviours.

If I think early, it’s under a duvet with a torch, totally absorbed by the descriptions of the inside of the giant peach by Roahld Dahl.

A bit later it’s Point Horror and my first serious literary chills.

As an agitated teenager suspicious of the version of success I saw offered up, it was Fight Club.

I could go on, but a man listing his favourite books belongs on Goodreads.

The reason I adore seeing the kids running up to school dressed as their favourite book characters is because it highlights the unifying magic of stories. How they equalise, illuminate, inspire, and show us the way. The purity of kids who are not yet caught in the ‘maturity trap’ that later ensnares adolescents, and keeps too many adults in it to the detriment of their ability to flourish as a human, in their creativity.

We could all learn a thing or two from them.

The Insurmountables

It's heavy out there. Turn on any radio or TV. Go online. The weight of the world bears down on us in a matter of seconds. I think of those awful metal octopus things on The Matrix, swooping down to clamp onto my brain before injecting it full of grey gloom goo the moment I wake in the morning.

As society finds itself at various tipping points, humanity focusing on all the wrong things, it's hard to escape the tension in the air.

But we can't go around in a state of fear and hope to create.

I'm doing my 4th one-to-one PIT STOP creativity coaching session this week, and of increasing importance, each time I work with a client, is the need to address their insurmountables right out of the traps.

Creativity is a potent tonic for our biggest monsters. Think The Diary of Anne Frank: a powerful, haunting, sharp-edged example of the potential of an outlet for our troubles to change lives and soothe its maker.

For me, a cloud of eco-anxiety followed me around for almost a year before I began intense work on my thought patterns and found my cause to take action against the climate crisis.

My clients speak of rising misogony, financial challenges, and family disharmony, among many other 'heels' in their lives. (Heel: wrestling villain)

We get deep very quickly because it's essential to create a framework to face our fears and empower ourselves, returning the drive to our time making.

We look at gallows humour, activism, and active, curated participation in the news, instead of scrolling and passive overwhelm.

We do this because while there is great value to the negative emotion spectrum in small, concentrated doses, it's unsustainable to walk around believing 'the world is f*cked.' If we do, then it is.

A baseline of optimism, curiosity, and purpose is essential if we are to think differently, invite luck, and see the opportunities ahead of us. But this cannot be achieved through blanket ignorance of what's going on. That way, the evils remain facelessly present in our subconscious.

I used to think activism meant big banners and aggressive protests. It can, but that is just one way.

One designer client brought a stunning, powerful book of poetry she'd written to our session. This was her emotional creativity during a personal crisis, separate from her professional work but enriching as a tool for her well-being. This might be a found texture or defiant positivity in the face of the oppressor in the way a person dresses or carries themselves in the street. It all counts.

All of this must be determined by the individual, their story, and what energises them.

As a coach, it's my job to understand the psychology of managing the information overload in this too much world. See how our negativity bias is hijacked by well-funded, targeted news cycles and make my clients aware of it. To reframe their fears and barriers in a way that hands them cause and purpose instead of alienation, futility, and nihilism.

Their fears are invariably valid but blown out of all proportion, actively damaging their creativity by cutting off flow and masking the fact that they remain powerful agents of change. This despite the deafening volume of those disgraceful, gelatinous abusers of power.

But I heard it said that the empty can makes the most rattle, and I believe that. Despite the intensification of the ills of capitalism, we are in the midst of a social psychology shift towards a greater understanding of human needs. If you pay attention to what's happening amongst us, at ground level, it's easy to see. Those quiet ones, you and I, may lack that volume and willingness to abandon principles. We lack those media channels, but now is our time to stand up and use our creativity for good in this fight.

It starts with a smile and recognising the power of our story.

We’ve lost Ken

I’m back at UCLan for the design department’s Conference Week 14 where I’m giving my new talk, ‘Where the F*ck Did that Come From?’ They’re fiddling with tech when I sidle over to the display wall, upon which, as ever, Ken Garland stares back. Ken penned ‘The First Things First Manifesto’ in the 1960s – an iconic call to arms for creators to pledge all free time making work with meaning, as opposed to commercial gain.

I smile, having been as wowed by this form of activism as the other 5,000 or so students to have handed in a paper about the manifesto. And when the course leader, Andy has prepared my slides, I ask him how many. He laughs, a tired chortle, but not without admiration.

“Did he die, Ken?” He asks me. I hadn’t wanted to confront the possibility. I’d spoken to Adrian Shaughnessy on the podcast in 2016 and back then, Adrian, who was good friends, and an admirer of Ken, had alluded to Ken not being in the finest health.

This encounter had come 3 years after Ken had me over to his house to chat for a voluntary awareness campaign on behalf of CALM, The Campaign Against Living Miserably. At 83 years of age, Ken paced his workspace as he spoke passionately about the ills of capitalism, the way the banks had blown the surplus wealth that belonged to all of us.

We don’t retire, you see. Not when we shape our lives around our passions and find ways to get by in this harsh financial system. Ken hadn’t retired, and his fire burned bright.

His spirit, his outrage, and his joy swirled and melded like cosmic showers, as he showed me work, pulling down books from his wall, one collating his work, designed by Shaughnessy’s UNIT Editions. I basked in his glow, even as he bollocked me for saying ‘Saint Martins’ and not ‘Central Saint Martins.’ This I loved. The antagonists have always been fascinating to me.

He sent me away with a copy of his book and so much inspiration that I ran the short distance back to Camden station and swore off caffeine for the train back to Manchester.

So it was with sadness that my fears were confirmed. Ken had passed in 2021. But my ongoing fascination with the cycle of life, death, and rebirth in nature, we as a part of that, means I smile when I think of one of our industry greats, his tempestuousness, his craft, and his fights for what he believed in—not gone, of course, but on to something new. He is one of two Kens to have made a colossal impact on my life – Sir Ken Robinson, of course being the other – to have handed over a legacy I feel a welcome responsibility to build upon through The Creative Condition. My life cause of elevating creativity’s role in our lives, in healing the ills of our days, and to, at time, simply cope without falling apart.

Timeslip/warp

Last Saturday I read a dinosaur book with my kids.

50 million years ago. 100 million years ago. 250 million years ago. The mind bends. I find it comforting when the world feels heavy. Donald Trump and our current ills will be farts on the wind soon enough, and it reminds me not to let the fuckers pull me under.

On Sunday, Salisbury Cathedral try to wow me with 800 years, and I just snigger, thinking of those gigantic beasts all that time ago. Historic, ha!

And yet in Preston, where I spent 6 years including the three years of my undergraduate study on a BA (Hons) in illustration, where I’ve returned to give a lecture at the UCLan design conference week. I’m hammered by the realisation it was 22 years ago when I arrived with my several bags of possessions and a key to my halls of residence. TWENTY-FUCKING-TWO!

What is time, anyway? They say it’s all relative, Hawking and that. Or something?

Buildings I spent significant time in have disappeared and I can’t handle the deluge of memories and sensory ripples.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so dismissive of the cathedral’s efforts to impress.