The Roundup: Embrace your creatureliness
Insights from recent Design Better interviews.
Before we get to The Roundup, we wanted to share some of the exciting guests we have in queue, including:
Fiona Crombie, Academy Award-nominated production designer for the film Hamnet.
Sam Beam, Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter who has been creating music as Iron & Wine for over two decades.
A guest we can’t reveal yet, but who has been a writer for a long-running television series you probably know and love.
If you want to catch these interviews in their entirety, consider upgrading to become a Design Better premium member.
We recently interviewed Austin Kleon, bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist, and sent him some of our Design Better coffee and tea as a small thank-you for being on the show. He wrote us a very kind thank-you note, along with a delightful little sketch of an owl:
It wasn’t until I went back and re-listened to the interview that I realized what the sketch was referring to. At one point, Austin spoke about owls, and how they probably never think about being owls, they just are. Similarly, if we can embrace our own “creatureliness,” we might be able to access creativity that otherwise would remain locked away.
Listen to our conversation with Austin Kleon
🎧 Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack
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Embrace Your Creatureliness
In our day-to-day work, we can get stuck in the same rut, sitting at a desk, grinding away with a keyboard and mouse. We’re not using all of our human capabilities, and that limits our creativity. Austin finds inspiration in an unlikely place—owls—to counteract this.
One of the things that I really loved about looking at my little screech owls that we get out back here is that I check all these webcams of like other owls, like bigger, more impressive owls. And it’s really funny, because if you look at owls, they all do the same thing, even the little ones, the little owls and the big owls, they all act the same…they do owl things, you know?
If we can get back into our bodies, and embrace the capabilities that make us all human—and creative—we can open doors to creativity that we may have unintentionally closed.
The body guides the brain as much as the brain directs the body. In many creative practices, the idea doesn’t exist before the action: it comes to life through the movement of the pen or brush. Acting like a human being out in the world is a necessity for a fully activated creative mind.
