Work Your Brilliance: the uncommon art of being paid to be yourself Certainty is overrated. Uncertainty is where real things happen. What the vision looks like from the inside Last year I spent a few days at Film Oxford with a small group of people, all flexing our budding filmmaking muscles. I expected to enjoy it. I didn't know I'd love it. And the real thrill wasn't the filmmaking itself - it was realising that a long-held dream, a vision that came rushing through one birthday retreat a...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Work Your Brilliance: the uncommon art of being paid to be yourself Most people who struggle to share their work have not misunderstood marketing. They have misunderstood themselves. What changes when you share from a different place The word 'marketing' isn't the problem Most people who struggle to share their work have not misunderstood marketing. They have misunderstood themselves. A friend once said to me: we need a new word — marketing has become contaminated. And I completely...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Work Your Brilliance: the uncommon art of being paid to be yourself Stopping is not the enemy of the work. It is part of the work. A life's work, not a season You are allowed to stop. Not as a reward for finishing. Because stopping is part of how things are made. Somewhere in the logic of modern productivity, pausing became suspect. Rest has to be justified - as recovery, as fuel for the next push, as an investment in future output. We've even found a way to make stopping feel like falling...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Work Your Brilliance: the uncommon art of being paid to be yourself Every desire is the effort of an unexpressed possibility to come into action. The ceiling you put on wanting This is Wallace D. Wattles' formulation, but sit with it as a claim about how things actually work rather than as a nice idea. The desire isn't a sign that something is missing. It's a sign that something is pressing to emerge. It is the unexpressed possibility - the unlived work, the unspoken truth, the gift not yet...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Work Your Brilliance: the uncommon art of being paid to be yourself "Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you." - Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak Most people look for their gift. Some people eventually realise they've been living it. The thing you didn't realise was your work James Doty writes: only when we believe we are enough in ourselves do we find the ability to contribute to life, but only in contributing to our world do we...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Work Your Brilliance: the uncommon art of being paid to be yourself Choosing fewer things so I can love each of them more deeply. Doing more For those of us who feel deeply, who can tune into the needs of others almost effortlessly - the impulse to do more, hold more, take on more, is not a personal failing. It's what happens when gifts go without a container. In the proverbial village, someone would have looked at you and said: this is yours to hold. And just as importantly, you would have...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Work Your Brilliance: the uncommon art of being paid to be yourself If the standard advice feels heavy, it's not because you're doing it wrong. It's because you're called to walk a different path. Some of us spent years thinking the discomfort was a personal failing. It wasn't. Built differently by design There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from following advice that doesn't fit you. It's not the exhaustion of hard work. It's the exhaustion of going against your own grain. The...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Work Your Brilliance: the uncommon art of being paid to be yourself "We're not stuck in traffic. We are the traffic." The means chosen to achieve a result becomes the result. This is not a metaphor. It is a description of how things actually work. How you do it is what you make Arnold Patent puts it plainly: means and ends are the same. How we choose to express ourselves results in the outcome we attain. We tend to think of how we work as separate from what we produce. The hustle is just the...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Work Your Brilliance: the uncommon art of being paid to be yourself We talk a lot about the wounded inner child — the one who needs healing. But what about the vibrant one? The one who's still shining. The kid who already knew When I was in primary school, around nine or ten, I put together a music show. No Google back then — so I spent hours listening to songs over and over, transcribing every lyric by hand so we'd have the words. I rallied the other kids. We put on the show. Later I even...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
