You, Incorporated

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Hey friend, Katie here.

This email contains the most important lesson you will ever learn.

It’s the most important lesson I’ve ever learned, and I’ve been learning lessons for a long time (academic + teacher here).

To explain it, I’ll start by saying:

You’re reading this because you’re creative, and you found me because I’m creative.

As creative people, we know one thing for sure: Being creative is hard.

These are some of the challenges I’ve experienced as a creative person, which you may have too:

• I’m sensitive to the world
• I see things differently than other people
• I’ve had times I’ve felt alone and misunderstood
• I’m at times overwhelmed by information and stimuli
• I find it challenging to balance creative work with self-care.

Yet as a would-be creator, I’ve always had huge ambitions for myself, not knowing quite how to realize them.

I’ve pushed forward blindly, driven by instinct, drawn to the fields of productivity and self-development.

Why?

I was searching for the path I was already on.

Self-actualization has no blueprint. It’s bound up in your self.

I recently wrote about Maslow’s hierarchy reimagined as your ship of needs.

It’s a holistic metaphor for all your needs working together, driving you towards self-fulfillment.

You are a uniquely integrated set of needs and talents.

In pushing forward as a creator—in becoming a personal brand and business—all your potential is contained within your person.

As I recently posted on X, your brain and your body are your business.

You are incorporated.

What is incorporated is:
→ combined into one
→ included as part of a whole
→ constituted as a business entity
→ contained within a bodily form (ie. embodied).

This means all parts of your person must be working harmoniously to help you achieve your full human potential.

Your
• habits
• health
• spirituality
• environment
• employment
• relationships
• self-relationship
all need to be working together for your highest good.

All of these factors are bound up in your personal preferences, decisions and actions—and in the life challenges you work to overcome.

No one else will have your exact same set of parts, or the same life events or outcomes.

As a result, your creator path is uniquely yours to carve and walk. Your personal brand and business can only be your own.

As you work to develop and apply your talents to your personal enterprise, the following also need to be incorporated:

Your
• skill
• style
• brand
• design
• customer
• marketing
• sales mode
• operations
all need to be interworking, aligned parts of you.

The most important lesson of your life is therefore this:

It’s all one.

Everything you do is crafting the outcome.

Every
action
reaction
interaction
collaboration

Every
call
offer
post
video
service
product
meeting
newsletter

Every
intention
thought
choice
deed
word (*we’ll come back to this)
is shaping who and what you are meant to become.

Let this integrated self-conception guide every decision and system you make, with your highest self in mind, and it can only lead to one result.

You, Incorporated.

*As starred above, I’m crafting a super fun and useful tool for your creator journey, that you will love. More to come on this.

Stay tuned for deeper dives into the personal and business aspects of your incorporated self, with actionable tips for each one.

All warm best,

Katie

Your Ship of Needs

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Hey friend, Katie here.

We live in interesting (crazy) times.

In the midst of global turbulence, the Internet is entering its Web 3.0 stage, where the creator economy is self-organizing into interactive micro-communities.

On the one hand, there has never been a better time to be a creator. Opportunities abound for industrious, creative people willing to build businesses from their talents.

Based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (‘A Theory of Motivation’, 1943), the global economy has developed to where many people are now reaching beyond basic and psychological needs.

People are now pushing for self-actualization.

On the other hand, AI technology is developing at an accelerated pace, set to change the global economy—and the creator game—entirely.

That’s an unsettling prospect for aspiring creatives, as technology seems likely to threaten their fundamental needs, making it harder to realise their dreams.

So how do you self-actualize when you’re worried about security?

Times like these demand a new way of thinking about our needs.

Enter Scott Barry Kaufman, American cognitive scientist.

In his study Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization (2020), Kaufman explores Maslow’s highest level, which Maslow reimagined to include the spirituality of purpose he called transcendence.

Transcendence, according to Maslow, is the highest realization of the self, in seeing needs beyond the self. It’s a greater purpose in life.

It’s the ‘most holistic’ level of human consciousness, relating ‘to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos’.

Given this higher level, Kaufman explains how the Maslow pyramid is too linear for reality—as we move up, down and around its levels at different points in our lives.

So Kaufman reimagines the pyramid as a sailboat.

The sailboat of needs is not only more useful for creators—it’s more realistic and optimistic.

The sailboat of needs is:

• less hierarchical and linear
• more integrative as a set of working parts
• more proactive, imagining the self as a vessel to captain
• imagining all the needs working harmoniously, synergistically
• moving the self towards health, wholeness and purpose
• ultimately transcending individual growth
• in a connectedness with humanity.

In unfavourable conditions (the bad weather of life and the state of the world) we may need to be:

• more preoccupied with safety and security
• less focused on growth and self-actualization.

But if, as creators, we self-actualize with a purpose greater than ourselves, we’ll be working to build a sturdier ship, that sails better, in potentially more favourable conditions.

Imagine you are the builder and captain of your ship.

How is your sailboat coming along?

Are you designing your boat?
Are you building the base?
Now hoisting the sails?
Are you in a storm?
Are you cruising?
Are you bailing?

Have you found a fleet?

Remember in the unpredictable winds and waves of these crazy times, community is the fleet of friends you have to flank you.

In that spirit, I invite you to hit ‘Reply’ today. I’d love to know what you’re working on and how you’re doing. I look forward to getting back to you.

All warm best,

Katie

PS. For extra motivation today, here are five curated thoughts on the concept of purpose.

KAUFMAN’S SAILBOAT
Here’s an interview with Scott Barry Kaufman on growth and self-actualizing
in our times, and how to imagine your sailboat of needs.

The OG Language Tech

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Hey friend, Katie here.

If you’re following me on X, I’ve been on a tear lately about originality.

There’s an epidemic of copying on the platform and on social media in general. 

Written content that is bland, clichéd and repetitive over time.

Content that is, at best, paraphrasing other people’s ideas, and at worst plagiarising them.

With AI on the rise, we’ll see a massive proliferation of this cheap content.

To combat this poor use of modern tech, I’m called to recall the original tech we can be using to write originally.

This OG language tech is the art of rhetoric.

Rhetoric is the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, through the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.

Rhetoric is at work in most good content, so the trick is to increase our awareness of it, so we can be employing it in our own writing.

Take for example this recent post by Dan Koe:

The middle section is packed with rhetorical devices.

• The repeated ‘It means you’ employs anaphora, using the same words at the beginning of successive sentences.

• Those sentences use the rule of three, a trio forming an effective structure, and they increase in length with a climactic effect.

• The ‘bubble of comfort’ is a metaphor for a protective haven.

• The bubble line employs antithesis, with ‘finally left’ and ‘go back’ hinging on the ‘worst thing you can do’.

It’s a clever set of technical tools, skillfully employed.

Evidently Dan is practiced in the art of rhetoric.

Stick with me, and you will be too.

Going forward my emails with the subject OG Tech will be breaking down content for you in these technical ways.

I so can’t wait to do this again, that I might not wait long at all.

Looking forward to it.

All warm best,

Katie

PS. If you have any questions or thoughts, hit ‘Reply’ and shoot me an email. I’ll get back to you.

Fashion Your Self

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Hey friend, Katie here.

As part of my mission with Craft Polish, I’m invested in helping you craft your future human self.

In that process, the past has valuable lessons to impart.

Something you maybe didn’t know about me?

I’m a Shakespearean.

For most of my life I have loved, studied and taught Shakespeare.

Now before you bail, hear me out.

I’m not here to make you love Shakespeare. I’m here to tell you why Shakespeare is useful to you.

It’s for this reason:

Shakespeare is about self-fashioning.

‘Self-fashioning’ is a theory by Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt.

It’s the process of constructing your identity and public persona.

In his drama, Shakespeare was fascinated by how language constructs the self in the world.

‘All the world’s a stage’
‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’
‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’

So what?, you might say. Why does that matter to me?

That’s what I’m here to tell you.

You can fashion your self.

Renaissance-style.

You can craft and polish who you are, like a work of art.

This is how you become the Main Character of your life.

You do this by learning how you combine these three elements:

  1. Character – all the traits that make you ‘you’

  2. Narrative – the unique story of your life

  3. Language – the words you use to construct yourself

Giving you insight into these elements, and how to use them to build and present yourself to the world, is why I’m here.

This is what Craft Polish is all about.

Are you ready to become the MC?

If you haven’t yet, hit ‘Reply’ and tell me about you. I’ll get back to you.

All warm best,

Katie

PS. If you’re intrigued, browse my Shakespeare blog archive here.