Seek Feedback
Whenever you’re launching something new, the sooner you can get feedback from relevant stakeholders, the better. Often, that means sharing before you’re ready, which can be scary. And opening yourself up to feedback can be vulnerable. But the rewards are incredible.
Example from my own personal practice:
Earlier this week, I wanted to share a couple of pieces that touched on topics of race and gender. Needless to say, as a white male, I’ve got blind spots! Thankfully, I also have a community of practice where I can share early iterations of posts-in-need-of-perspective.
It was a little scary sharing early drafts in a semi-public venue, but wow! The end product was incredibly enhanced by the generous, insightful, and candid contributions of thoughtful collaborators with perspectives other than my own.
Actively soliciting contributions from others — whether when specifically dealing with issues beyond your span of perspective, as I was in this example, or otherwise — is a great way to reveal assumptions, challenge bias, and see possibility. After all, it’s often the outsiders who end up revolutionizing fields.
Related: Sharing Before You Feel Ready
Related: Embrace An Outsider’s Perspective
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I’ve been working on a radical new course at Stanford, which I’m excited to share more details on soon. In the meantime, sharing an early iteration of my thinking on the topic, in the form of my WSJ piece co-authored with the brilliant Kian Gohar.
This post marks my 200th edition of Methods of the Masters—and serves as a fitting bridge between my early focus on human creativity and more recent AI work. In an age of infinite AI inputs, our biology demands we cultivate equally intentional human disconnection strategies.
Special guest post by Brendan Boyle, one of Stanford’s most beloved professors, acclaimed toy inventor, and founder of IDEO’s Toy Lab. He’s taught me more about play than anyone other than my own children.
In five years, no one will care how many people logged into ChatGPT. They'll care about who used it to transform their work. The organizations that understand the difference between more use and better use are quietly outperforming their competitors-while everyone else celebrates meaningless "adoption" metrics.
I thought I was running a standard innovation workshop with one of my favorite clients. Instead, I came to face to face with my own biases, and accidentally broke an entire organization's understanding of what's possible.
My new favorite diagnostic: if you cannot find ways to generate more than $200 of value from frontier AI over the course of an entire month, you're failing a basic creativity test.
This isn't about AI's limitations—it's about yours.
“Think:Act Magazine” was curious about how I incorporate AI into my own creative process as a writer, so they visited my home studio to observe my workflow. What followed was a fascinating exploration of how I use multiple LLMs as collaborative partners rather than just tools. Fun to be featured alongside heroes of innovation like Astro Teller, Amy Edmondson, and the legendary design duo Charles and Ray Eames!
A recent study by American Management Association revealed that 58% of professionals feel "behind" in their AI adoption journey. While most folks know me as "the Beyond the Prompt guy," here's what you might not know: I struggle with this stuff too.
Last week, I proposed a simple but fundamental shift: we need to stop thinking about AI as a technology rollout and start treating it like a new teammate. What I didn't fully explain is that this isn't just a semantic distinction. It produces measurably better results.
Everyone’s panicking about “AI glazing.” But what if it’s a feature, not a bug? The creative industry's most successful practitioners understand something the rest of us are missing.