Table of Contents
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Intro: Stay Buoyant
My hope for 2025 is my search in 2024, which is to live in that spiritual place where good work is inevitable. Where "mistakes are everything."
Now that I'm independent again, I'm everything: sales, finance, founder, farmer, publisher. Not just brand, content, partnerships, ops, comms.
Sometimes it feels electric, sometimes it feels like an illness. (except farm, farm always good)
But it's also an undeniable gift if you don't squint too hard at things like week over week cash flow. And it's encouraging to see indie life trending up. I think a lot of us are seeing how this model of white collar labor we've been living and breathing, sprinting and slogging in — it's not built for those of us with unconventional velocities.
My operating speed hasn't slowed from when I worked in-house. It's just distributed across more directions, with lots of taste testing in the process. For all the life-giving clients and conversations, there's always strange and unsettling ones too.
But it all develops your practice. Also literally, practice in saying no. In letting a dream go. In parting with something that was once right, for the hope that whatever buoyancy has left you - will return.
So yeah, that's what's been on my mind as I think about the year that we all had. And if you're considering decisions that wouldn't thrill your parents and want to talk to someone, I'm here for you. Or if you'd rather maintain a parasocial relationship, I'd say, don't be reckless silly. But do be bold.
With that, introducing my 2024 Field Notes.
The Soft Skills Beneath the Soft Skills (ft. Anna Wilhelm)
A pulse check on the state of being a woman at work, or just being a human at work. Keeping jadedness off your lawn. Treating companies like public parks and leaving them more lush than you found them. In conversation with Nashville-based strategist Anna Wilhelm. <3
Vicky: Starting with this essay in Monocle's Oct 2024 edition where Ukrainian senior corporal Yaryna Chornohuz advocates for female conscription:
"...I have witnessed how much better women can be at dealing with situations that men might shy away from...perhaps because women encounter much more of it in our civilian lives, many are less scared to deal with it.
Women are also often more likely to be open about how they are feeling. We start conversations that men might otherwise avoid. This allows us to deal with stress more effectively. With rates of PTSD in Ukrainian society rising, it is paramount that we are all open about our experiences, both mental and physical. Some qualities that have been traditionally deigned feminine actually serve to complement many aspects of a soldier's experience."
She may be talking about war but I immediately read it as the modern workplace.
If we're able to deal with stressors effectively - what's going on with the lack of female leadership?
Anna: So women would be, as Chloe from the timeless canceled sitcom “don’t trust the B in Apt 23” says, men’s “emotional Sacajawea”?
It could be a thing in the workplace if all women actually wanted to be in the c-suite, but many women I’ve talked to enjoy the work too much to be a truly powerful person. It becomes really frustrating for them — they’re in their 40s, primed for executive leadership, and they want to make more money. But they don’t want to give up the work they enjoy doing, and they don’t want to give up their lives and the time spent with family or friends. So they plateau as a VP.
And it’s conscious — it’s a choice they make — but it is a bummer that it’s the only option. I wish there were more women at C-suite level to have that impact the Ukrainian woman describes, but in the corporate world, to get there sometimes means to sacrifice those feminine/rational/emotional qualities.
Vicky: And yet — even if not at the top, even if an intern or middle management — there is still this implicit role of mothering that women often bring to the table.
It’s like having to practice soft skills beneath the soft skills.
Anna: Soft skills beneath the soft skills FOR REAL.
Vicky: At best, the dynamic isn't mothering, it's co-learning. It's a mutual accountability towards kindness, shared by everyone. But when it gets to “emotional Sacajawea” level it gets complicated. You can't meet goals, much less surpass them or retain the team to get there, when you have a set of people who are burdened with the extra hidden labor of managing emotional volatility.
Anna: For it to work, the burden has to be shared by everybody, not just women.
I don’t know what it means for women to be able to remain fully themselves all the way up the corporate ladder. Decades ago, women didn’t enter the workforce en masse to be “a provider” in the way men were and are conditioned to. They did it because they enjoy the work and the self-sufficiency. Thanks to the different conditioning, our workplace incentives are just very different, culturally speaking, and I don’t think workplaces have caught on.
What would work look like if we could just do our work? OR what would it look like if we were compensated and rewarded for our emotional labor in the workplace? Honestly, I have no idea. But either would be welcome reprieve.
Vicky: Yeah, I'm just tired. And at the same time I don't want to overindex on gender, because you will always meet people on both sides who prove you wrong.
Anna: Always!! For me, being in ad agencies most of my career, the client services element and “the client is always right” rhetoric was strong. I’ve since distanced myself from client management to be a pure knowledge worker as a result. I get to do what I love, without as much outward facing performance.
Vicky: Yeah I feel like client management is much healthier to enter later on in your life rather than earlier. I once had someone tell me (about a dream consultancy I had in college) that it’s a much better place to end up than start out at.
Anna: That’s a great point. Your sense of self and boundaries and general workplace expectations are more fully formed. Thankfully, I had a boss who taught me some of this (e.g. tactful ways to say “no” without saying the word “no”). But saying yes to any client request was also a cultural issue in the industry.
Vicky: But also there are no shortcuts to self respect and so you still have to learn how to be aware and react more quickly to situations that don’t feel right. Like at the beginning when you're confronted with disrespect or harassment at work, it's not like you quickly conclude, oh, this is just another personally lived example of the collective injustice of misogyny, racism, etc etc, you just get chest pain.
Anna: And that chest pain often comes because you very suddenly remember just how unsafe unconscious sexism or racism can be for you.
Vicky: Yeah honestly I often think of my first boss, who was such a force in the area of “good work but also care for the people.” She was the first person who showed me how to lead with grace.
I was an insecure kid out of college and did a lot of things out of that insecurity. And instead of getting angry or petty, she always knew, she’d pull me aside and say, "Hey what was that? What’s up? Talk to me."
Anna: I love that! Too many people haven’t been managed by people like her, and haven’t developed their own personal ethos of management. (It’s absolutely not always their fault. But I do wish more people would give themselves the chance to imagine things could be a little different.)
Vicky: I was talking to a friend yesterday about how growing in maturity is retaining your sense of wonder. And it’s really that wonder, that ability to be curious, be hopeful - that prompts actions like speaking up or walking out, which is often incorrectly perceived as more negative than positive.
Anna: Jadedness is a defense mechanism. It tends to work, which is the worst part. But it took me realizing that wonder and awe helped me better assess when I was treated poorly, because I allowed myself to be surprised by it. Someone’s talking down to me at work? How surprising. A man is doing the bare minimum and expecting me to be impressed? How absurd. It’s hard to see those as lackluster or inappropriate unless you’ve spent time beholding anything dazzling and awe inspiring.
Vicky: Literally the work of my year is trying to keep jadedness off my lawn! Make room for the beautiful strong delicate Japanese maple!!! (Which abound in my neighborhood, really great landscaping out here.)
Anna: 🥹 aw i love that
Transcontinental n' Experimental (ft. Eugene Kan, Charis Poon)
In conversation with Eugene Kan and Charis Poon, HK-based friends who share the space-time continuum that is "artists who work." The chat started with making art vs making strategy, approaches to getting to desired outcomes, and then...
Charis: Experimentation is an outcome too, in my mind, did I succeed in being experimental?
Eugene: I like this.
Vicky: Question for the class - tell us about a time you were experimental?
Charis: The realm in my life I’ve been experimenting a lot to some success and failure is the design of the courses I teach. (Editor's note: Charis teaches Social Design at the PolyU School of Design in Hong Kong.)
My first year of teaching, I hadn’t fully realised how teaching is an intense creative exercise. Where I’ve been flexing my experimentative muscles is in how the course is structured—what is the schedule, what is taught each week, how is material delivered, what kinds of critique activities would be impactful, how can I provide for different learning needs.
I ask myself a lot how teaching and learning can happen differently than the mainstream narrative we’re told to expect in classrooms.
Should the teacher speak the most? Should students do homework? I’m not saying that my answers are always radically different, but I like to keep changing the model and seeing what works or doesn’t work.
Vicky: Omg! That reminds me of something you said in our last piece on online communities -
“Charis: I have to share this book with you two, it's called Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich published in 1971. Essentially he says that we don't need schools and we could each of us be teacher and learner. And some of what he says did come true, with the Internet and Discord channels and Patreon, Substack, etc.
And actually to what Eugene said about being attracted to "here's what I'm expressing" is what he puts forward as a possible model for how people can come together — that people will come together based off of a common media artifact or a common desire of expressing yourself around something.
We talked about this a LOT with [our publication] MAEKAN and never really wound up somewhere actionable. How can MAEKAN not revolve around me and Eugene and Alex Maeland, but be about equal participation, as much participation and action that any one participant wants?”
/
Charis: lmao, we are self-referential
Vicky: Good gives me a push to backlink lol
Charis: (non-derogatory)
Vicky: (I cannot for the life of me optimize my own content)
Charis: we have continuity!
/
Eugene: I think it all comes down to incentive alignment, as much as I hate using that word. Like if you want to create this platform where others participate, you have to find people that want to be part of that.
There’s a high barrier to entry to get people to create and there has to be a clear upside to it:
- Prestige (association with a movement)
- Distribution (lots of people seeing it)
- Creative intentions (desire to create)
- Remuneration (or not lol)
- Luxury of time (free time to create if 4 isn’t on the table)
Eugene: Like MAEKAN never really worked out cause you didn’t have this highly specific 5-circle Venn diagram that was firing on all cylinders.
/
Charis: Ugh, lists make me think of AI generated content so much now
Vicky: not the lists of bulleted lightbulbs on LI posts!
Charis: Sorry, unrelated comment
/
Vicky: On the barriers to entry — reminds me of this piece from writer Paul Ford where a 2000 and 2020 speaker talk about how tech's progressed:
"’00: There also must be some really good music discussion forums.
’20: Independent forums are mostly dead, swallowed up by Reddit, social media, and the like. I cannot overemphasize how much the lesson of the web is that people, given the choice between the freedom of operating and managing their own platform, and running a centralized platform that they do not control, will choose the centralized platform. The desire of regular people, people with things to do, to also become systems administrators is far less than what we assumed it would be.
Personally, I think it’s relaxing to write this, even though 150 people will read it at most, because it lets me resolve internal tensions and organize my thoughts. The reward for doing good work is more work. But most human beings find labor…laborious. Most people don’t have obsessions with boring, abstract things. They don’t get the chance. And they don’t have lots of time they can use to write “for free.” There are many theories about how this all works, including, say, Marxism."
Charis: I’m also reminded of desire, in this conversation. A lot of my students I find don’t know what they really want, they don’t have an intuitive sense of what they desire, and I find this to be something they need to develop.
For a younger creative person, if you’re not clear on your own desires, you allow yourself to take on other people’s or other structures' desires.
Of course, we all know in business and corporate situations we have to play within limitations and restraints, but I think actually you have to first develop a fine-tuned recognition of exactly how what you desire is being limited.
And then look to set up for yourself situations in which you can satisfy those desires (and I don’t mean desire like “I want to get rich”).
Vicky: I think what you say about not knowing your own desire is true for those who are decades into their career too.
Looking back at how I’ve toggled between conventional FT work and independent work - I can see how each switching point was due to understanding myself more clearly. Having sharpened principles. I can’t always verbalize the intuition but there is an innate annoyingly unstoppable force that’s like, it’s time for the next.
Eugene: Yeah without doing the hard internalized work of asking yourself honest questions (or the luck of just stumbling upon a passion), most people lack direction.
Charis: Wait, can you two go back and answer the question about what you two have experimented with lately and felt succeeded?
Vicky: Definitely in making my first zines. I befriended one of the guys who runs my local record-shop-that-sells-coffee and found out he’s a screenprinter. Took his intro class which forced me to come with print ideas on a weekly basis. Then a year later it turned into the perfect storm of Good Arson.
Truly had no idea how involved the process would be, I couldn’t plan much beyond going step by step.
Charis: We talked about this in person when you were in HK and I’m still excited for you that you had this creative experience.
Do you think you can link this specific zine experiment, Good Arson, to thinking about outcomes? Do you remember what intentions or outcomes you had in mind when you started?
Vicky: Honestly I wasn’t thinking about outcomes, it was just an exercise in expression. It was for me.
Charis: Just to be annoying, can I reframe that statement to say “self-expression for yourself” is an outcome 😛
Vicky: hahahaha yes to your desire
But I could probably tie it a bit to the strategic part of our earlier conversation - I think with making art, the helpful part is how it validates what’s true regardless of technology. For example, my personal work is very manually made because I'm a psycho, but even at a small scale it’s proven if you have a brand and a community - aka if you have a self and friends - it's enough. You can distribute your stock and have your beloveds physically holding your words.
Of course there is planning, like how much do you produce in the first place? How do you fit process into the margins of life? You’re still having to define pricing, willingness to pay, what is the value of this to someone? (Not to make money, more so to cover costs.) I’m not calculating when I’m making art, but these things do run through my mind as a natural consequence of creating a thing.
Eugene: On the experimenting question - I generally try to minimize big drastic movements unless there a big variable change.
It could be as simple as, how am I recording information for a project and am I doing it in a way where everybody has access? (Editor's note: Eugene is founder of Adam Studios.)
Maybe don’t do it on Notes and use a widely accessible option that’s built into say our project management app. That’s the most boringest shit ever but that arguably represents how small and seemingly meaningless these changes can be.
Charis: I don't find that boring! I think thinking about documentation and accessibility and collaboration (all important values) includes actualizing it in everyday small things.
Not everything is razzle dazzle.
Eugene: I like doing mundane things as quickly as possible to free up time for more important/challenging/fun things.
Vicky: Wow that’s like the fight song for AI
Eugene: Yeah but I’ve been on this tip for a minute
Vicky: you heard it here eugene was here before the machines!!!
/ ...from the cutting room floor...
Charis: Can I get an example of experimentation, Eugene
Charis: are we talking small like I’ll put Yakult in my coffee today
Charis: (I didn’t have milk in the fridge one day and used Yakult for my cereal and…don’t try this)
Vicky: an inspiration to us all
/
More chapters to come...
