🤔 INTERESTING
Motivation is what gets you started.
Habit is what keeps you going.
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📐 DESIGN
The biggest reason most folks believe they can’t make visual metaphors may come to you as an obvious one—”I can’t draw.”*
But I’ll scream this till my face is as blue as my brand colors: visual metaphors are not about pretty pictures, they’re about thinking. My friend Laura Evans said it best: “It’s not art. It’s marks with meaning.“
And the meaning doesn’t come from the graphic. Sure the pictures are a vehicle. But the passengers they deliver are the message behind the pictures.
The truth is if you can write, you’re 70% of the way to crafting your own visual metaphors.
Okay. Okay. You’re right. They are called VISUAL metaphors. But the above visual is an example of how the writing is MORE important than the graphic.
Check out my Instagram comparison of the same graphic, different words:
Feb. 21, 2025 — 1,525 Likes
Feb. 21, 2026 - 24K+ Likes
It’s true you have to understand some basic visual strategies to translate a metaphor into a visual metaphor, but if you know how to wordsmith (and if you understand that creativity is an iterative pursuit), you will stand in the top 1% of visual creators!
*side note: is anyone else pissed off that A.I. has killed the human use of em-dashes?!
🔮 ENCHANTING
People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.
→ Leaves offer color & change.
→ Branches offer support.
→ Roots become a part of who you are.
🤓 WHAT I’M READING NOW
Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” feels less like a book than a whispered conversation across time. It’s almost painfully short, but the prose is just chef’s kiss.
The book is a compilation of ten letters Rilke (the Austrian poet) wrote to nineteen‑year‑old cadet, Franz Xaver Kappus, between 1903 and 1908. The letters gently reflect on themes of solitude and creativity. Reading them feels like being entrusted with wisdom never meant to be seen by anyone’s eyes other than Franz Kappus’s.
If you check it out, I recommend reading the book one letter at a time (instead of all in one go) to digest the reflections slowly.
My favorite passage below touches on embracing uncertainty:
“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
What does it mean for you to live into the question? I have my thoughts, but I’d love to know yours 😊 Reply and let me know!
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