Marketing, mysticism, and other brain drippings.
This July, UpStart hosted our staff retreat at The Hive in San Diego. I was able to take the clips of video I'd captured throughout the four-day event and turn them into something slightly cohesive for our team to enjoy as they returned home. Check out the recap of our Team Retreat 2019.
Apparently, Ralph Waldo Emerson fantasized about the merits of a pentagonal relationship with four of his closest friends as the ideal Platonic form of intimacy. Among his selected poly-platonic partners would be revolutionary Margaret Fuller, astronomer Caroline Herschel, poet and transcendentalist Samuel Ward, and his wife, Anna Baker Ward, with whom Margaret Fuller and Emerson …
A little over a year ago, two friends and I discovered that as a group we most enjoyed talking about all things tech: productivity tools, gadgets, graphic design, and the like. A Slack workspace called The Year of Ease (h/t to my friend Jeff and his practice of bestowing each life-year a theme), the purpose …
Continue reading Mamish Tech: A Slack Community for Intentional and Digital Living
Each Coming Night (click to listen) Iron & Wine's meditation on death and remembrance. Will you say when I'm gone away "My lover came to me and we'd lay In rooms unfamiliar but until now" Will you say to them when I'm gone "I loved your son for his sturdy arms We both learned to cradle …
Originally written for The Times of Israel, June 22, 2019 When you go to a gathering with people you don’t know, are you a hugger, a waver, or a high-fiver? Over the last decade, movements such as #MeToo and Time’s Up have brought the issue of consent and physical touch to the forefront of the …
Continue reading How we got 450 people excited about consent at The Collaboratory
when the surface is unsettled, peaking and swaying, one curve to another my image fails to exist glimpses of my skin are found in pale color, and across many distant angles but left to calm itself slowing its dance from side to side the fragments rearrange themselves to form a more focused gaze and there …
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It seems I have fallen in love again. This time, the poet comes not from medieval Persia (Hafiz) or 15th century India (Kabir), but from Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, around 1875. And apparently I'm late to the game: the whole world has fallen for Rainier Maria Rilke. But I have just recently discovered Letters to a Young Poet, …
Continue reading On Love, Fear, and Trust: Lessons from Rilke
There is a myth out there, probably perpetuated by someone lazy and underqualified, that brand and visual identity are the same thing. Brand, in the simplest of words, is your reputation. It is the mark you leave on your stakeholders, the proverbial taste in their mouth. When we talk about brand, we're talking about values, …
Continue reading How Mailchimp Got it Right: Visual Identity vs. Brand
Some may know that I am on the Brand Strategy team for a national nonprofit organization. Part of my role has been supporting the progress of our organizational rebrand after a successful merger. I'll save the details for when/if they're relevant, but part of the rebrand process has been a deep exploration of brand activation …
