What No One Is Asking For
Week 1 of 10 – Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week
Series note: This is the first installment in a 10-week series drawn from Creative Surplus: Identify, Articulate, and Integrate Your Unclaimed Creativity (Revised Edition, 2026). Each week, we’ll walk through one chapter of the book. The first four posts are free. Starting in Week 5, the series will be available only to paid subscribers.
In 2015, I was deep in a project that had consumed months of my time – interviews, ethnography, ideation, and presentations. The work was demanding and rewarding in equal measure. I was surrounded by talented colleagues and engaged stakeholders. The deliverables were well received. By any reasonable measure, the project was a success.
And yet, when it ended, I was left with an energy I could not place. The project was done, but I was not. Something remained: ideas that did not fit the deliverable, questions that exceeded the brief, a restlessness that had no professional address. I had been hired to solve a specific problem, and I had solved it. But in the process of solving it, I had encountered a dozen other problems – more interesting ones, stranger ones, ones that no client was paying me to think about.