This Week, I Made ...
Week 007 | The start of a story
We went from 75-degree sun to a snowstorm basically overnight this week, and it made me laugh how fast life can flip the script. You don’t get a warning. One day you’re in one reality, the next day you’re in another. It reminded me how adaptable we are.
It brought me back to a quote I love:
“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react.”
That’s what I’ve been thinking about all week. Not just in a “motivational” way, but in a real way. When something changes—weather, work, relationships, technology—you don’t always get to choose the change. But you do get to choose what you do next. And that choice is everything. It can turn into stress and shutdown… or it can turn into growth, new skills, and outcomes you honestly couldn’t have planned.
GenAI is a good example of that right now. I’ve been talking with a lot of artists from animation and VFX, and the reactions are all over the place—curious, excited, cautious, against it, overwhelmed. And I get all of it. But underneath all those opinions is the same moment we all face when something new shows up: how are you going to respond?
For me, when I’m trying to understand something, I usually end up turning it into an analogy or a story. It’s what I do when I build curriculum for kids, and it’s what I do when I’m building a deck for adults. Story is how we make sense of things—and how we help other people make sense of them too.
So this week, I started sketching a way to tell this idea without words. I wanted it to be simple and visual, but still layered. Something organic came to mind: a flower. From far away, it looks simple. Up close, it’s anything but—so many details, and no two are alike. Kind of like people.
The concept I’m currently playing with is a macro visual: a flower. A flower that finds itself in a moment where it needs to adapt … and seeing what it does in that moment … like the weather changing the conditions. There’s a tension moment. A choice point. And depending on how it reacts, the same flower either closes down—or adapts and becomes a new version of itself. That’s what I have so far, let’s see where this goes ;-) …
This week I made …