Hey 👋🏽,

"You never want to see a clown without it's makeup on,"

said my sister Kenzie TTH, describing the premise for a music video concept she's working on.

"How do you come up with these ideas?"

I asked, curious about her creative process.

"I know the environments where I’m really excited or comfortable where I have my best ideas. The key thing I think is creating an environment early on where it's clear that there's no way you can fail. If you can create that space in the first 40 minutes, the session will be productive, regardless of the outcome. If you can't, well, then it will be a miserable session."

The best sessions weren't necessarily the ones where she got the most done but those that fostered the psychological safety to follow momentum or to move on to something else if/when she got blocked.

Creating a safe space to fail, get back up and try again has been top of mind for the last week at Animalz. It’s easy to lose sight of how long it takes to get good at something or to forget that it’s ok to ask for help.

"When we withhold [ideas, questions or mistakes], we rob ourselves [and the people around us] of learning. We don't come up with new ideas. Better teams have a climate of openness,"

says HBS professor Amy Edmonson during a TED Talk on building psychological safety in the workplace.

On the Bare Necessity of Psychological Safety

Kenzie used to consider a day successful when she got a song done within 6 hours. Now, she acknowledges that having the ability to walk away and then come back makes the end product so much better. You never know when inspiration may strike you again.

"One of the songs on the EP i started 2 years ago. I wrote a verse that became the chorus. I felt like I had something to say. I was looking through ideas recently and stumbled upon the demo, realizing how closely tied it was to something I was journaling about the other day. I went back to it and frankensteined the pieces together until it felt cohesive."

I would love to do the same with my writing and work but acknowledge that my second brain is fairly disorganized. I like neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff's concept of a mind garden and Ann Friedman's vision for a compost heap:

"The discarded false starts, the things you thought you were just reading "for fun," the drafts of unsent texts. It all goes into the compost heap so it can fertilize a future piece of work. For a long time, I've tried to do this intentionally. Saving even my clunkiest prose and worst ideas, reading lots of random stuff, copying quotes and making observations. Then letting it all decompose together in my notes app and in less-frequented corners of my brain."

How do you make space for your ideas? I'd love to know.

I see you, I love you, follow the momentum this week,