watch me write my next manifesto

this is going to be ridiculously meta

There’s a manifesto I've been dreaming of for the better part of three years. But I’ve never felt "ready" to write it. Still don't.

So over the next week, I'm going to write the first “living draft” of this manifesto in public. Piece by piece. Along the way, I’ll be stress testing my own framework for how to write manifestos that are bursting with transformational energy. Basically, I’m “dogfooding” my own process, as the tech folks would say. It's hard to overstate how nervous and anxious this makes me.

The manifesto in question is about conversational creativity. The core idea is that our job as creatives—and as humans more broadly—is to pay close attention to what sparks us, then step into conversation with it.

A conversation by its nature is unpredictable, alive. It consists of two or more parties, each with their own will, each with their own lineage and root system of unfathomable depth and complexity. A conversation is more than the sum of its parts. The magic lives in the space between participants. In the dynamic tension and spontaneous synthesis that emerges when we truly listen to one another. Sure, you can try to control a conversation and steer it towards a specific outcome. You can make rigid plans and close yourself off and be all transactional about it. That’s how most of us were conditioned to approach creative work. But usually that approach drains the life out of you, the work itself, and whoever happens to consume it.

When we step into the conversational paradigm, our job is no longer to be an Expert, monologuing in a way that conveys our Unimpeachable Authority. It's not to Create Content that competes for mindshare in the attention marketplace. Our job is to notice what stirs our spirit a little bit, piques our curiosity, and then breathe life into it through intimate dialogue. Our practice is speaking what’s true or interesting or scary, however imperfectly, then listening for what comes back. Notice what this new information arouses, and then speak the truth again. Repeat. My hunch is this is how we reclaim our humanity in the age of machines. Not through exerting ever more white-knuckled control, but by surrendering to the natural flow of conversation.

Conversation is the atomic, indivisible unit of relationship, and relationship is the balm that begins to heal the wounds wrought by our incessant drive to control everything. Conversational creativity, therefore, is as much a tool for dissolving blocks and doing meaningful work as it is a philosophy for living in more harmonious relationship with life itself.

As you can probably tell, there’s a seed of an idea here. A big one. But it is anything but fleshed out. Definitely not ready for primetime yet.

So this week, I am going to follow my framework. I will excavate raw material from the old story of creativity, the new story, and build a bridge between them. And finally, I will fit these puzzle pieces into the first draft of a manifesto that that I hope will not only resonate with others, but resonate so deeply in me that I’m continuously inspired to step into deeper conversation myself.

That’s why it’s taken so long to write this manifesto. The ideas have been there all along. But I haven’t been ready to embody them. I’ve been too scared. Too locked up. But the longer I do this work, the more I realize that waiting to feel ready is a trap. The moment you feel totally and completely ready to create something, is likely the same moment that the inspirational spark leaves you. It was never asking you to control it. It was inviting you into conversation.

And the truth is, I have no idea where this manifesto will end up. But I’m tired of not being in the conversation. It’s time to surrender to it and see where it all leads.