We romanticize creativity. We imagine it as expansive and energizing. But more often, especially when the work is real and the stakes are high, it looks like deterioration before it looks like anything else.

Ikigai kept asking me to find the one thing at the center of it all. And I kept coming up empty. What I didn't understand yet was that I was reading a Japanese philosophy book with a western brain.

I love my corporate career. Thirteen years in, and I genuinely mean that. But I also question it. More than I usually say out loud.

Belle da Costa Greene walked into every room having done the work. Hard work with integrity has a way of rewriting the narrative over time. That's the reminder I needed.

My Tae Kwon Do master stopped me mid-practice to correct my form. I don't think he knew he was also giving me incredible life advice.

In 13 years of corporate life I've learned that the people who last are almost never the loudest or the hardest. They're the ones who figured out how to be taken seriously without making everyone around them feel small.

Miss Honey has nothing. No authority, no resources, no institutional support. And yet she is the most effective leader in the room. That's not a fairy tale. That's one of the hardest things to do in real life.

I walked into that exhibition hoping the paintings would reassure me everything was going to be okay. A landscape didn't do it. A portrait of a woman with big green eyes did.