Creative Effort

What does it take to create something that changes the way people experience the world? Ron Johnson helped transform Target, created the Apple Store alongside Steve Jobs, and later learned some difficult lessons from his attempt to reinvent JCPenney. In this conversation, we explore where breakthrough ideas come from, how taste and collaboration shape great creative work, why the best idea has to win regardless of who came up with it, and why creativity sometimes requires having the

Today I’m talking with Myke Hurley, who is best known as co-founder of the Relay podcast network, and as host of Cortex, a show about how creative people work. Out of that show came a much harder challenge: a physical product business. Lots of creators sell merch, but this is something very different. Cortex Brand makes premium notebooks and planning tools, and in this episode, we go deep on what that process really looks like.We talk about why he once paid hundreds of pounds just to

We often believe that structure kills creativity—that routines and schedules stifle the muse. Donald Miller argues the exact opposite. In fact, he says, believing that structure hurts art is the mark of an amateur.In this episode, I talk with the CEO of StoryBrand and New York Times bestselling author about how he transformed his creative process from a chaotic three-year struggle into a disciplined, repeatable machine. Don shares how he shifted from writing memoirs like Blue Like Jazz to

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, joins the podcast for a conversation about how great creative work actually gets made. We talk about why Pixar chose directors before ideas, what it meant to support “ugly” early concepts, and how the Braintrust created honest feedback without hierarchy. This episode explores creativity as problem-solving and leadership as the work of protecting ideas long enough for them to become something

This episode features a conversation with Tom Donaldson, Senior Vice President at the LEGO Group and the leader of Creative Play Lab, LEGO’s behind-the-scenes R&D and disruptive innovation group. Tom explains how Creative Play Lab is tasked with pioneering the future of play, combining deep engineering in electronics, firmware, and mechatronics with LEGO’s long-standing commitment to creativity and physical building.We focus on Smart Play and the new smart brick platform unveiled at

In this conversation, 3D street artist Nate Baranowski walks through how an unconventional creative career actually works in practice—from getting paid to draw chalk in college, to building a global niche creating anamorphic illusions for brands, festivals, and public spaces. What looks playful and ephemeral from the outside turns out to require deep discipline: idea filtering, client negotiation, physical endurance, and an almost obsessive attention to perspective.Throughout the interview,