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.
I did not know what to call this at the time. I only knew that it was real, that it was mine, and that ignoring it felt like a kind of waste.
I had discovered my creative surplus.
What Creative Surplus Is
Creative surplus is the creativity that no one is asking for. It is the thinking that exceeds your job description, the ideas that arrive after the meeting ends, the instinct that your professional role cannot contain. Every person has it. Most people ignore it, dismiss it, or let it evaporate. Some channel it into hobbies or side projects. A few recognize it as the most important signal of their creative life.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: what you are paid to do is rarely where your deepest creativity lives. Your job consumes a particular bandwidth of your ability. It asks for specific outputs, measured against specific standards, delivered on a specific timeline. That is production. And production, however skilled, is never the full expression of a creative person.
The surplus is everything else. It is the part of you that notices things your role does not require you to notice. It is the connection you make between your work and something completely unrelated – a conversation with a friend, a book you read years ago, a walk through a neighborhood that has nothing to do with your industry. It is the question that keeps returning, the one you push aside because no one is asking it and no one will pay for the answer.
That question – that persistent, inconvenient, unclaimed question – is almost always the most valuable thing you carry.
The Geography of Surplus
Think of a writer finishing a novel. She has more in her than the current manuscript can absorb. That excess does not disappear; it becomes the engine for her next exploration, her next experiment, her next way of seeing. The creative surplus is not leftover energy. It is generative energy – the part of you that is already reaching toward what comes next, even as the current work is still warm.
- 01 What No One Is Asking For Week 1 of 10 – Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week You are here
- 02 Why This Matters Now 4 min read
- 03 Design Is Not Production 4 min read
- 04 Aesthetics Is What Doesn’t Fit 4 min read
- 05 The Practice of Discovery 5 min read
- 06 Putting Language on What You Carry 5 min read
- 07 Integration Is Not Monetization 4 min read
- 08 From Communities to Circles 5 min read
- 09 Thirdness and the Efficiency Singularity 5 min read
- 10 56 Prompts for Your Creative Surplus Week 10 of 10 — Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week 11 min read