Invite Like an Artist
Because your worth is not up for debate
When the Northern Lights recently appeared across the UK, my family WhatsApp went wild as we took to the streets, alongside thousands across the country, to seek and share our own glimpse of the remarkable.
Generally, the photos weren’t great, the Aurora unspectacular when weighed against the explosion of colour you might see in Norway or Iceland. But here we were, experiencing wonder for the very first time.
To share it, a natural act.
We didn’t ask ourselves, ‘Is the photo good enough?’ or whether it was better or worse than our siblings’. No, separated by hundreds of miles, we simply wanted to say that we saw it too and revel in the moment together.
What we captured was good and enough.
The next morning, I wrote this reflection:
The productivity treadmill can be exhausting. We need to practise looking up sometimes. To look beyond the tasks and goals. To get some perspective. To remember that the world will keep turning regardless of how successful you are. To take a moment and remember that you are unique, a never-to-be-repeated being. You have nothing to prove. You don’t need to earn your place. And there’s a cosmic invitation on your life to help the world turn with a little more goodness in it.
We make contact with our Majesty as the wonder at hand temporarily silences the noise. Against the grand vista of the heavens, the things we usually leverage to measure our worth (job title, social metrics, bank balance, etc.) simply melt into oblivion.
For a moment, only what you are remains.
A never-to-be-repeated being whose worth is not up for debate. It just is, because you are.
For a fleeting moment, we invite like artists. Expressing what we’ve found and sharing it without qualification, without framing the perfect shot, managing how you look, or trying to control what others see. Instinctively, we turn to the people around us and say, ‘Did you see that? Let me show you.’
The rest of the time, the noise returns and so does the grind. Our worth is obscured once again by the things we lack, the titles we don’t have, and the things we believe we deserve and haven’t received.
But that night, without thinking about it, we all just invited.
The heavens made artists of all of us.
Seek and find
I grew up alongside the verse “seek and you shall find.” I understood it as a way to get something. It felt like manifestation, an attempt to call down the mountain’s peak as if by magic. A response to the noise and the things I lack.
I did seek, and I rarely got what I wanted.
Eventually, I realised it wasn’t a promise about getting; it was an art of attention. If I seek contentment, I notice opportunities to practise peace. If I seek knowledge, I notice opportunities to learn. In my case, my losses could be understood as an opportunity to practise resilience.
Not spin. A truth to notice.
There were times, however, when I was defined by what I’d lost versus who I was. It felt like it was me versus the world. There’s a sort of corrupted resilience on offer when we can blame others for not getting what we deserve. I looked for blame, and so I found it.
Of course, no one knowingly seeks a damaging trait. But take a moment to be honest with yourself. If it’s always someone else’s fault, if you’re overly resentful of work, or the need to succeed weighs heavily on your heart, that might reveal a difficult but honest truth about what you’re seeking.
Make no mistake, we find what we’re looking for.
Sometimes, we get lucky. The universe puts on a show, demands our attention, and reveals what we needed to see when we weren’t even looking. Our inner artist steps forward, our willingness to share, a reflex.
But those moments are rare.
The rest of the time, we have to choose that path of awareness and practise the art of invitation.
From summit to rubble
When I started my business, I had something to prove; repeated redundancies will do that to you.
I decorated my website with the logos of previous businesses I’d worked with. I told stories of my scaling impact. I believed that I needed to validate my own voice, so in an effort to prove that I’d been to the mountaintop, I created a treadmill of content that cried out, “See me!”
I was operating from insecurity and missed a profound truth: The market didn’t need to know what I did. People needed to know who I was.
I wasn’t ignoring them; I couldn’t see them.
I was too preoccupied with trying to define my place in the world and fighting for position in the market that I failed, miserably, to notice the person in need and say: “I see you, what do you need?”
Perhaps I still haven’t, but at that point, I hadn’t yet made peace with the rubble of my story. The offer I was making the world was an idol of my effort and the outcomes I wanted, rather than an expression of who I was.
I wasn’t an artist yet, willing to express what I’d found and share it without qualification, managing how I looked, or trying to control what others see.
People didn’t need me to prove another summit story. They needed to know what it cost me to get there.
Broadcast Invitation
For me, starting Culture Crush opened the door to the artist’s posture. In those podcast conversations and live community meetups, my experiences weren’t evidence of failure; they were stories of relatability, points of overlap with members of the forming community.
Slowly, the ways I could help naturally emerged. But it took me a moment to notice.
The shift in awareness started when a few members of Culture Crush asked me to help them with their projects. I became a practice coach, helping them to close the gap between their idea and actually doing something about it.
My confused career became a toolkit. My losses a source of resilience.
So I stopped trying to carve out a niche and simply started meeting a need right in front of me. I had finally found my best work and a practice that paid the bills. To extend the invitation became a natural next step.
I asked the Culture Crush community a specific question: “Can I help any of you shape your projects?” Not a broadcast. Not a pitch. A direct question to people I already knew. I didn’t know if anyone would respond. I didn’t know if it would lead to work. I simply trusted that the question itself was worth asking.
What came back was £50,000 worth of enquiries.
Now, in a traditional business book, this is the part where I tell you how I scaled my impact, closed the deals, and unlocked the secret to wealth.
But here is the truth: it was three separate contracts. And none of them worked out.
In one conversation, I was completely ghosted. In another, I realised that they needed me to be someone I wasn’t, so I walked away. In the third, the very questions I asked helped the business owner realise that they were pursuing a path that wasn’t right for them entirely.
In inviting from who I already was, not from what I needed to prove, I could welcome these outcomes as information, not judgement. The ghosting taught me something about timing. Walking away from work helped me find my boundaries. In helping someone reach clarity, I was serving the work; I didn’t get paid for it, but it felt right.
Three invitations. Zero revenue.
And I was far from disappointed.
Once again, The Rhythm was at work. I reflected on what was shifting, took action by extending the invitation, and observed what came back.
Without realising it, I’d stepped away from the amateur: broadcasting, performing, and fighting for attention.
I had become the artist, inviting people into a conversation.
The artist and the amateur
That’s the choice in front of you, too.
To be the amateur who creates and waits, or the artist who expresses and invites.
It is not an easy one to live out because the system we live in is designed to keep you playing the amateur. It needs you on the treadmill, broadcasting your worth, managing your image, and waiting to be picked.
Look at the platforms we use. We were sold on the dream of connecting with others, but our only job in the eyes of the tech oligarchy is to keep the scroll going so they can sell ad space. If you’re not keeping people on the platform, you don’t get seen.
It’s why organic reach is dead and every platform is constantly begging me to ‘boost’ my posts. It’s much more effective to monetise millions of people like me than it is to sell ad placements to mega-corporations.
In the end, you’re not a platform user; you’re free labour, and the platform you use knows your fiscal value to them with terrifying precision.
The system we live in has a name for what you are, and it isn’t a human being. It’s human capital: a phrase popularised in the 1960s as a polite economic term, but the literal practice of turning a human being into a financial asset (quantifying their output, calculating their depreciation, and using them as collateral) was pioneered and perfected during the transatlantic slave trade. Plantation accounting developed the sophisticated practices for optimising “human assets.”
That is the dark heritage of the productivity treadmill.
The system demands a metric. It wants you to broadcast to the void, manage your image, and pray the algorithm picks you.
But you have a choice.
You do not have to delete the platforms, but you can absolutely refuse their posture. You don’t have to leave the marketplace; you just have to refuse to be its inventory.
Instead of performing for an algorithm optimised for velocity and outrage, and worrying about engagement rates, follower counts, or external validation, choose to speak the quiet language of an invitation.
Create your art. Put it into the wild. If just one person responds, that is not a flatlining metric; it’s a genuine human connection.
Take the win.
Invite them and say, “I created space for you, will you sit with me?”
Being takes the throne
When the world wants you to be an asset, remember the Northern Lights: your worth is not up for debate. You are a creative being destined for connection.
The heavens reveal your worth. Your friends help you feel it. The work you serve helps you find it.
And being takes the throne.
When I stopped broadcasting from the summit and started serving the work in front of me through Culture Crush, the frantic, performative doing began to melt away. It was in these very conversations that I first noticed the next chapter of my story, The Unremarkable Entrepreneur.
I didn’t choose what was happening; I chose to notice it.
I wasn’t trying to earn my place anymore. My invitations were no longer fraught with the spectre of rejection, of being ignored, or of simply being overlooked, because I had released the need to control the outcome.
From that solid ground, the true, fearless expression of the artist could finally begin. My best work could be discovered, not decided. My invitation, an act of discovery, not a performance to be judged.
That same ground is waiting for you too. When you notice your worth, only what you are remains. You can finally release your grip, abandon the performance, forgive the part of you that didn’t know enough, and become the person that says, ‘Did you see that? Let me show you.’
And when someone says yes, that’s a thread. Pull it.
When someone says no, that’s information. Adjust.
When someone asks a question you didn’t expect, follow it.
The invitation is not a risk to manage. It’s the art of attention.
Extend the grace. Call out from the rubble. What comes back proves you are no longer climbing alone.
The question is, who’s on the other side?
Look up.
I recently watched a movie called The Life of Chuck, and one scene made me look up.
I wish I could show you the Northern Lights to remind you who you are, but this screenplay adaptation will have to do.
If you took the 15-billion-year lifespan of the universe and compressed it into a single calendar year, the Big Bang happens in the first second of January 1st. And right now, we’re in the final millisecond of the last minute of the last day, December 31st.
The Milky Way didn’t form until May. Our sun and our Earth don’t show up until mid-September. Life appears soon after.
But not us.
We don’t appear until December 31st.
The very first human beings on Earth make their debut around 10:30 pm on the last day.
At 11:46 pm humanity tamed fire. And then we’re out of minutes, we’re into seconds. At 11:59 and 20 seconds, the domestication of plants and animals begins. At 11:59 and 35 seconds, agricultural communities evolve into the first cities.
Our recorded history, everyone we’ve ever heard of, every single thing in any one of our history books, happens in the last 10 seconds.
Never forget that you are. And that is enough.
Where We Are:
This is Week 12 of a year-long practice.
Movement 1: Presence - eight weeks, eight stanzas, exploring how to show up as yourself.
Invite Like an Artist ← You are here
The World is Abundant
From there we’ll explore Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.