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The Truths

That Guide Us

Blurb about why we love this topic here

A collection of beliefs we hold at our core. Ones that shape our understanding, color our vision and inspire our decisions. We’ve written them out twice - first for them to land on their own. And second, with annotations to add context and provoke deeper thought. 

“People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.”

— Neil Gaiman

  1. Our collective future lies in the depth of our imagination 
  2. Human attention is one of the most powerful resources in the world
  3. There’s freedom in trusting our own instincts 
  4. True expression is more powerful than any trend 
  5. Most of life happens not at the extremes, but in the messy middle 
  6. It’s time for new definitions of success, ones that help us live fully and connect deeply

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A Case For Depth in a World Obsessed with Reach

What are we going farther for?

A reframe on Darwin in the book Bittersweet, by Susan Cain, recently stopped me in my tracks. Cain, who also wrote Quiet, has a knack for taking characteristics that society overlooks and placing them on center stage. 

In the book, she talks about how Darwin is most associated with the phrase “survival of the fittest” - a zero-sum mentality that explains our evolutionary need to keep pushing farther. But as it turns out, Darwin is not responsible for that phrase. Instead, it was coined by a philosopher named Herbert Spencer and fellow “social Darwinists” who were…promoters of white and upper-class supremacy.

According to those who have closely studied Darwin and his work, “survival of the kindest” is the more accurate moniker for his wisdom. Darwin was known for being a rather gentle and melancholic soul who loved being in nature. He was a large proponent of compassion and connectedness, stating that extending compassion “to all sentient beings, would be ‘one of the noblest’ moral achievements of which we’re capable.”1

"In this singular pursuit, there’s another dimension of growth that’s largely overlooked. And that’s the quality of our experiences. The depth of it all."

What are we going farther for?

As a culture, we have a tendency to treat catchphrases like runaway trains - a phrase sticks, goes viral, and rarely do we turn back to understand the full intention and context. But what happens when culture gets the meaning of a phrase so wrong? What are the ripple effects of that?  

There’s a lot that gets justified under the guise of “survival of the fittest.” In our so-called “dog-eat-dog” world where the “ends justify the means”, we feel a constant need to protect and prove ourselves and keep chasing our core desire for success (conventionally associated with monetary wealth, power, and/or fame). We think we aren’t succeeding unless we are pushing harder, faster, better. Ultimately, we equate achieving such success with winning the game of life, aka survival. 

It’s worth noting, though, that in this singular pursuit, there’s another dimension of growth that’s largely overlooked. And that’s the quality of our experiences. The depth of it all. 

Because, if we’re honest with ourselves, what are we going farther for? Which version of ourselves is showing up to meet us there? And what are we leaving in our wake to get there (personally, socially, environmentally)? 

The existential tensions of our world are begging us to turn a corner. To ask new questions and create a new standard for aspiration. 

Looking back at Darwin’s original intention, what can we learn about how to move forward?

Can kindness - towards ourselves, others, and the planet, ensure our survival far more than zero-sum pursuits? Could the quality of our experiences and how connected we feel be a better benchmark for a life well lived? Could we aim for depth trusting that it will unlock a type of reach (and yes, conventional success) that arrives in its own time, in a way that feels natural and aligned?

How might this shift our lives and transform our society?

There’s freedom in trusting our own intuition 

A harmful byproduct of giving our attention away is that we lose sight of our own intuition. In order to trust our intuition, we have to nurture it first. That means clearing the cobwebs, confronting our conditioning, breaking through limiting beliefs, dancing with fear, hanging out with our inner child, and taking responsibility for ourselves and the lives we want to lead. 
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It means recognizing that our society isn’t necessarily designed to help us trust our intuition, and working daily to ensure that our inner voice has a chance to be heard. When we do that, it opens us up to a world free of limits and invites us to play.

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True expression is more powerful than any trend 

For the bottom line and for our souls. Listening to our intuition leads us to truth - or at least, what is true for us. It means ignoring the noise and following your own wisdom. It means creating from a place of not looking at the white-hot space or the latest trends and instead rooting in your own inspiration - no matter how wacky, unconventional, unclear, or uncomfortable it is.

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Most of life happens not at the extremes, but in the messy middle 

Humans are imperfect, complex, contradictory creatures. Businesses are imperfect, complex, contradictory creatures. What if we let ourselves embrace that?

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We have to be better at acknowledging the mess. Stop obsessing over perfection and binary thinking, and pretending we have everything figured out. Stop canceling one another and instead lead each other back to responsibility, with honesty and compassion. 

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It’s time for new definitions of success, ones that help us live fully and connect deeply 

What is success? What is happiness? What is well-being? We loosely chase these things our whole lives, but do we have a shared understanding of what they mean? Or at the very least, what they mean to each of us?

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When we start to ask ourselves these questions, we see that our vision of success, happiness, and well-being might look different than our neighbor’s. We’re fascinated by a world where this is celebrated instead of endlessly measuring people from all walks of life against the same empty benchmarks.

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You might be wondering, what in the world does this have to do with building brands? And in short, the answer is…everything.

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In between the individual and the systemic, there’s a force that has incredible power to shape how we think, how we act, what we value, and what we aspire to. And for the last century, that force has only been getting stronger. Our organizations - what we give most of our days and most of our attention to - have the ability to steer us toward a future that’s most nourishing for us all. If we choose to see it that way.

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The truths above can be read at a personal level, or at a brand level. To us, returning to them over and over again is our best course forward.

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A little reminder: Everything you see here in the library written by us, is in process. In order to imagine new worlds, we have to give ourselves the freedom to create without the pressure of perfection. We don’t have all the answers, and no one does. But our ability to explore freely is paramount to ever finding them. 

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As a studio, we’ve become interested in how to make our lives richer (in all senses of the world), instead of simply better on the surface. What we’ve come to understand is that this richness of experience is a result of a reclamation of our precious attention, and continuous orientation toward our core values of care, truth, imagination, iteration, and interconnectedness.

But I want to be candid here and share that this reorientation does not come without discomfort and unlearning. Over the past couple of years of coming into this language, I’ve experienced this firsthand. In an attempt to root more deeply into our values, we haven’t quite moved as fast as I’d like (based on conventional metrics), and I used to have (and still sometimes have) plenty of uneasiness around that. 

Yet at the same time, I feel more alive, more connected, and more myself than I ever have been. I feel more gratitude than ever that I get to do the work that I do. This depth of experience allows me to tread towards longevity without building on the back of burnout (mine or others), and more importantly, while enjoying life in the process. And honestly, the work itself is better for it.

The shift has taught me two things 1) I can’t encourage something I’m not actively living myself 2) We have to live the life we want now, to make sure it exists in the future. 

It’s a result of this understanding, as well as the continuous witnessing of brands with the best intentions crash and burn, that our studio’s intent is to create aspiration around depth. Helping brands, leaders, and their communities move into that place, collectively frees us from our need to push for the sake of pushing, and allows us to step into a more authentic and enjoyable experience of our own lives and the things we create. 

The thing about depth, is that just like reach, it has no end. But unlike pushing farther faster, which often leaves us stressed, isolated, and wondering “Is this it?”, infinite-depth leads us to more meaning, more richness, and a knowledge that not only survival but flourishment, lies on the other side. 

Sources:
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1Cain, Susan. p15-17 “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make us Whole.” 2022.

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