Daily Creative with Todd Henry

In this episode, we dive deep into the real value of creative work—what we truly get paid for, beyond our time and output. We bring together two insightful thinkers, Rebecca Hinds and Jen Fisher, whose perspectives on meetings and hope transform how we structure our work days and support our teams.
We explore why most meetings sabotage productivity and how “visibility bias” tricks us into equating a full calendar with actual progress. Rebecca Hinds (author of Your Best Meeting Ever) challenges us to rethink meetings as products: expensive, important, yet often poorly optimized. She shares actionable strategies like "meeting doomsday" and the "rule of halves" to declutter calendars and refocus collaboration.
Shifting gears, we unpack the often-overlooked topic of hope in organizational culture. Jen Fisher (author of Hope Is The Strategy) reframes hope as a strategic, action-oriented process, not just a feel-good slogan. We discuss Gallup’s finding that hope ranks higher than trust as what people want most from leaders, and how misaligned incentives erode both hope and well-being, leading to disengagement and burnout.
Throughout, we challenge creative pros to rethink their real value—insight, intuition, and emotional logic—and encourage leaders to create environments where these qualities flourish.
Five Key Learnings:
Insight is Indispensable: Our unique perspectives, intuition, and courage—not just our time or output—are what make us valuable in creative roles.
Meetings Need a Reset: Meetings often serve as a status symbol rather than a tool for progress. Treating meetings as products and regularly auditing their purpose and effectiveness can dramatically improve collaboration.
Subtract to Add Value: Applying the “rule of halves”—cutting meeting length, attendees, agenda items, or frequency—forces us to focus on what’s truly essential and breaks the cycle of addition sickness.
Hope Is Strategic, Not Sentimental: Hope is a cognitive, actionable process that drives teams forward. Organizations must foster strategic hope to encourage risk-taking and innovation.
Alignment Drives Well-being: Stated values must match incentives and systems. Misalignment between what leaders say and reward creates dissonance, burnout, and disengagement.

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Mentioned in this episode:
The Brave Habit is available now
My new book will help you make bravery a habit in your life, your leadership, and your work. Discover how to develop the two qualities that lead to brave action: Optimistic Vision and Agency.

Buy The Brave Habit wherever books are sold, or learn more at TheBraveHabit.com.

On this episode of Daily Creative, we explore the myth of the lone genius and make the case for why sustainable creative brilliance happens when we grow and nurture real relationships. We’re joined by Daniel Coyle, bestselling author and researcher, whose new book Flourish examines how true growth emerges not through competition, but through intentional connection and community.
We discuss why relationships sit at the heart of creativity, what it means to build a meaningful circle, and how to design environments where both individuals and groups can grow. Daniel shares practical insights on “making meaning” and “group flow,” illustrating how small acts—like telling stories or organizing joyful gatherings—can catalyze shared energy and transformation. We reflect on why the most profound creative work, and indeed the solutions to our most complex problems, are more likely to be found at the neighborhood level than through grand top-down initiatives.
This conversation isn’t just about feeling less alone; it’s a blueprint for intentional action in your creative life. We leave you with a challenge: take one step this week to strengthen your creative community, whether that’s reaching out to a peer, convening a group, or simply asking deeper questions.
Five Key Learnings from the Episode:
Community Is Creative Infrastructure: Creativity doesn’t thrive in isolation. The most resilient, sustainable creative work is built on relationships that provide stability, challenge, and honest feedback.
Cultivate, Don’t Compete: Flourishing is about shared, meaningful growth—think gardens, not games. Real creative communities are spaces for nurturing, not just winning or accumulating.
Design for ‘Beautiful Messes’: Innovation and group flow emerge when we intentionally create environments where people can experiment, collaborate, and bring out new facets in each other—even if things get a little messy.
Deep Questions Build Trust: Asking ambiguous, personal “deep questions” unlocks vulnerability, connection, and trust far more quickly than waiting for trust to appear before opening up.
Power With, Not Power Over: Leaders unleash real growth when they support, ask great questions, and give power away—moving from controlling outcomes to facilitating collective brilliance.

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Mentioned in this episode:
The Brave Habit is available now
My new book will help you make bravery a habit in your life, your leadership, and your work. Discover how to develop the two qualities that lead to brave action: Optimistic Vision and Agency.

Buy The Brave Habit wherever books are sold, or learn more at TheBraveHabit.com.
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In this episode, we dive deep into the evolving relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence. Inspired by Ada Lovelace's early vision of creative machines, we explore how the boundaries between expertise and common sense have been reshaped by modern AI, from expert systems to today's generative models. We sit down with pioneers and practitioners—Vasant Dhar, a longtime AI researcher and author of Thinking With Machines; Christopher Mims, technology journalist and author of How To AI; and the creators of Tachi AI, Aden Bahadori and Brett Granstaff—to discover how AI is shifting not only what we make but how we make it.
We unpack the promise and the pitfalls of treating AI as a true thinking partner, not just a tool for automation. Our guests share practical strategies for using AI to augment creative work, streamline tedious tasks, and enhance idea generation—while emphasizing the necessity of human framing, expertise, and judgment. Whether you're a leader, designer, marketer, or filmmaker, we reveal why using AI thoughtfully is the real competitive edge in creative fields and business.
Five Key Learnings:
AI’s Compounding Edge: Utilizing AI consistently and benchmarking progress gives creatives and teams a multiplying advantage—not by replacing human originality, but by amplifying it through incremental improvements.
Framing Questions Matter: The ability to ask the right, nuanced questions remains fundamentally human, and is essential when using AI as a partner in ideation, research, and strategy.
Context and Expertise Are Critical: Experts benefit most from AI—leveraging their knowledge to dig deeper, validate outputs, and push beyond generic solutions, while ensuring originality in their work.
AI as Scaffolding, Not a Substitute: The greatest value of AI today is in reducing friction and clearing time for creativity—whether it’s summarizing information, managing knowledge, or prepping film edits—so humans can focus on what matters.
Human-Centric, Supportive AI: Tools like Tachi AI demonstrate that supporting creativity is more transformative than automating it; AI as infrastructure enables faster iteration and more creative decision-making, not just higher productivity.

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Mentioned in this episode:
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The Brave Habit is available now
My new book will help you make bravery a habit in your life, your leadership, and your work. Discover how to develop the two qualities that lead to brave action: Optimistic Vision and Agency.

Buy The Brave Habit wherever books are sold, or learn more at TheBraveHabit.com.

Episode 92: Ownership
Daily Creative
In this episode, we dive into the nuanced meaning of ownership in creative work and leadership. As the landscape is rapidly transformed by AI and powerful new tools, we explore the temptation to offload not just labor but also the very thinking that gives our work its unique signature. We unpack what it means to retain genuine ownership of process, relationships, and output—moving beyond merely curating machine-generated results and instead staying empathetically engaged in the creative process.
Our guest, Greg Hawks, joins us to challenge the difference between “owners”, “renters”, and “vandals” in organizations. He brings fresh perspective on why many disengage, how environments subtly encourage or discourage ownership, and what teams and leaders can do to foster a climate where true creative engagement thrives.
Some of the themes we touch on include:
The fine balance between leveraging technology for efficiency and maintaining our emotional logic in creative decisions
Why struggle and friction are the crucibles of meaningful, resonant work
How organizations inadvertently suppress ownership—and how to change that dynamic
Concrete strategies for shifting from a renter to an owner mindset
The powerful impact of reducing toxic “vandal” behavior on overall team engagement

Five Key Learnings:
Offloading too much of the creative process—especially decision-making—can hollow out our unique voice and intuition.
Emotional logic, shaped by lived experience and intuition, is irreplaceable and differentiates meaningful work from mere output.
Vandals—self-centered, divisive team members—can demotivate large segments of an organization, and removing them often unlocks higher engagement.
True ownership requires us to understand the personal “returns” we seek (emotional, financial, relational, opportunity, growth) and articulate them courageously.
Struggle and friction aren’t just obstacles—they’re where creative insight emerges and individual judgment is strengthened.

Get full interviews and bonus content for free! Just join the list at DailyCreativePlus.com.
Mentioned in this episode:
The Brave Habit is available now
My new book will help you make bravery a habit in your life, your leadership, and your work. Discover how to develop the two qualities that lead to brave action: Optimistic Vision and Agency.

Buy The Brave Habit wherever books are sold, or learn more at TheBraveHabit.com.

In this episode, we dive deep into the human urge to create—what fuels it, why it feels so essential, and how we can harness it more intelligently in our work. We are joined by psychologist George Newman (author of How Great Ideas Happen) and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (author of The Mattering Instinct), who guide us through both the mechanics and meaning of creativity.
We explore why creativity is not just a talent or an act, but a fundamental human response that pushes back against chaos and entropy. George Newman unpacks the myths of the "lone genius," showing us that real creative breakthroughs emerge from collaboration, exploration, and persistent engagement—not isolation. He introduces smart frameworks for idea development, including gridding, transplanting, and overcoming the “originality ostrich effect” and the “creative cliff illusion.”
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein takes us a level deeper, exploring why our drive to create is intimately tied to our need for meaning and validation. She discusses the “mattering instinct”—the pursuit of significance—and explains why conflict, resistance, and friction in organizations are often expressions of this core human need. Together, these conversations reveal how creativity is both an existential response and a practical tool for leadership and team health.
Five Key Learnings:
Great ideas aren’t conjured in isolation. Creative breakthroughs come from ongoing engagement, trial and error, and exposure to new perspectives—not from waiting for inspiration alone.
Originality is often misunderstood. Striving to be radically original can backfire; the most resonant ideas have personal freshness but build on approachable, recognizable foundations.
Guiding questions and iterative refinement matter. Defining and regularly reframing your creative questions ensures you’re solving the right problems and making meaningful progress.
Discomfort signals opportunity, not failure. The “creative cliff illusion” means our best ideas may arrive late in the process, and discomfort is often a sign that transformation is near.
Creativity is deeply connected to our need to matter. According to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, our drive to create stems from our longing for meaning and significance—making every act of creation a resistance to insignificance and entropy.

Get full interviews and bonus content for free! Just join the list at DailyCreativePlus.com.
Mentioned in this episode:
The Brave Habit is available now
My new book will help you make bravery a habit in your life, your leadership, and your work. Discover how to develop the two qualities that lead to brave action: Optimistic Vision and Agency.

Buy The Brave Habit wherever books are sold, or learn more at TheBraveHabit.com.