Twelve primers for a nonlinear year
Sharpen your creativity, perception, and momentum for opportunity.
THOUGHT ESSAYS are your weekly dose of open-ended, playfully subversive explorations that invite you to think differently about the everyday and the systemic alike.
The New Year can often feel hijacked by resolutions which assume progress is linear. In this state, discipline must be rigid and hyper-consistent, and the necessary ambiguities of life are tempting to view as failures at worst or inconveniences at best.
But creativity, and life, does not move so predictably.
If the Chinese zodiac dubbed 2025 the Year of the Wood Snake (deep shedding, foundational integration) and 2026 as the Year of the Fire Horse (acceleration, bold momentum), then consider this list your transitional instrument between the two.
Let us enter a New Year with a much more fire-horse-oriented premise: that confusion is often a prerequisite for actualisation; that aesthetics and deep beauty function as strategic tools more than we are taught to admit; and that joy and play are perhaps the penultimate states from which meaningful work emerges.
It’s one thing to propel forward into your year of accolades and achievements. But you can only act on an opportunity if you can first perceive it. For every month of fire-horse running ahead, here are twelve primers for you to channel your creativity for good.
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Play is the same thing as problem solving. The former is just not yet knowing what it solves.
Ambiguity and uncertainty are companions of creative process. Know this signals progress, not error.
Things often look chaotic before they look refined. This is normal.
The moment you force an idea (or person) into a predetermined mental framework, innovation stops. First, witness it without archetype. Then, allow a new category to form.
Effort is not always proportional to value. Some ideas demand friction before clarity. Others arrive unannounced. Trust both.
Aesthetics usually communicate what logic and data cannot. Harness beauty as strategy.
To access intelligence beyond logic, invite in somatic practices that temporarily bypass the mind (e.g. journalling, physical movement). This is where raw insight emerges.
Never dismiss an absurd idea too early.
Be brave enough to frankenstein together unrelated concepts, just to see what happens. (This is the instinct of the inner child.)
Deliberately choose joy, daily. Flow and creativity emerge more reliably from this state than from force.
Treat every small move as a prototype. Even partial opportunities generate momentum.
Think of your creative practice — whatever it is for you — as a compounding investment. As in finance, get the fundamentals right, and growth follows.
Congruent across all twelve is a deeper remembering: before anything else, we are human. You must give yourself permission to be one, and use your humanity as your advantage.