Make Culture Creative Again

Even failures and broken starts will be more interesting than the boring stuff.

It started in my living room with a question that made me feel a thousand years old.

My youngest daughter, Pip, had some friends over. They were standing there, looking cool and detached, wearing the uniform of the modern teenager: vintage band T-shirts. One was wearing a Def Leppard shirt, a band I love, mostly because slow-dancing to “Hysteria” at school discos is a core memory I can’t scrub from my brain. The other was wearing Nirvana.

“The one-armed drummer,” I said, pointing at the Leppard shirt. “So good.”

She looked at me blankly. “Um, what?”

“Def Leppard,” I said. “The drummer has one arm.”

She blinked. “What the hell is a Deaf Leopard?”

I shifted my attention to the other friend, hoping for a win on home soil. “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” I said confidently.

Her reply was instant. “Um, what?”

“All Apologies,” I tried.

They both looked at Pip, silently begging for an exit strategy from her strange, weird dad. As they left the room, I looked at my wife, Nicola. She saw the look in my eye, the dad about to launch into a lecture on grunge history, and immediately said, “Do not quote ‘Rape Me’.”

“Come As You Are,” I whispered to the empty room.

It is a funny moment, but it points to something deeper, something W. David Marx wrote about recently in The Atlantic. He noted that “Kurt Cobain would have wanted the next generation’s musicians and listeners to kill their idols, including him. Instead, they wear his face on T-shirts.” It raises the question of why Cobain’s image endures while his spirit of rebellion fades. Perhaps it’s easier to commercialise a face than embody a challenging ethos. This invites us not just to wear symbols of the past, but also to question the culture of consumption behind their popularity.

We have turned revolution into aesthetics. We have turned the raw, dangerous energy of creativity into a costume we can buy at the mall. Marx argues that “everyday life has never contained more stuff than an endless reel of words, ideas, games, songs, videos”. We are drowning in content, yet we are starving for something that feels new.

Why? Because to make something new requires “the imagination to reject kitsch” and pursue “complexity, ambiguity, and formal experimentation”. That pursuit is terrifying. It is safer to wear the T-shirt than to risk what it represents. It is safer to scroll than to create.

We stop chasing curiosity because we hit the wall of fear. But there is a specific, electric tension between the safety of what we know and the pull of what we don’t. This tension isn’t a barrier; it’s the spark that ignites our creativity. Instead of freezing at the wall, we can choose to lean into the tension and let it fuel our journey forward.

There is a story about Dave Grohl that haunts me. After Kurt died in 1994, Dave vanished. He couldn’t listen to music. He couldn’t play. He ran as far away as he could, eventually finding himself driving a rental car through the Ring of Kerry in Ireland. He was trying to disappear into the landscape. One afternoon, driving down a country lane in the middle of nowhere, he saw a hitchhiker. As he got closer, he realised the kid was wearing a Kurt Cobain T-shirt.

That was the moment. Grohl realised he couldn’t outrun it. The past always catches up to us. The only way through it was to make something new. He went home and started the Foo Fighters. He let the curiosity of “what’s next” win over the fear of “what was.”

I know that tension intimately. My first official date with my wife, Nicola, was supposed to be at the Foo Fighters concert. But that night never happened. My best friend, Corey Doyle, had chosen to end his own life. His wake fell on the same night.

I ended up taking Nicola to Corey’s wake as our first date.

It was a heavy, surreal way to start a relationship. We were skipping a band whose lead singer had chosen to end his life, because my friend had chosen the same. But in the middle of that tragedy, something shifted. At the wake, Nicola met Corey’s dad, Peter. It turned out that my wife (who is from London) knew a bunch of Corey’s friends, and Peter had gone to school with my now father-in-law.

It was all by chance. It was the connection that drew us together. Through the cracks of a massive tragedy, a new future began to blossom.

I have a tattoo on my wrist in memory of Corey. I think of him all the time. But that experience taught me that life isn’t happening to us; it is happening for us. Even the hard parts. Especially the hard parts. When we lean into that belief, we find abundance in our relationships and in our communities.

Fast-forward to yesterday, I was sitting at a lunch with a client, Katie, eating Japanese King Prawns. We were talking about this exact thing, the struggle to move forward when the path isn’t clear.

“Creativity is a new path to a known destination,” I said.

Katie paused. She looked at me over her chopsticks, holding a very large sweet-and-sour King Prawn. “Who said that?”

“Who said what?” I asked.

“Creativity is a new path to a known destination,” she repeated. “Who said it?”

I smiled. “That was me. I said that. It’s in my book.”

“Nice,” she said. “Very nice.”

I didn’t say it to be clever. I said it because I believe it is the only way to navigate the tension. We usually know the destination we want to connect, we want impact, we want to feel alive. But the old paths are blocked by fear or paved over with kitsch. Creativity is the courage to bushwhack a new trail. Imagine a moment where you have an idea, a rough, unpolished thought, and you consider sharing it with a friend. It’s a small step, but for most, it’s a giant leap over fear. This simple act of sending it out into the world, unsure of the reception, is what I mean by creating a new path. It’s the first step towards exploring the unknown and igniting a spark of creativity.

Steven Johnson calls this the ‘Adjacent Possible.’ He argues that at any given moment, the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen. We can only open the doors that are right next to us. Imagine it like levelling up in a video game; you can’t jump ahead to the end without first unlocking and exploring the adjacent, interconnected rooms. You can’t teleport from the cave to the skyscraper; you have to invent the mud brick, then the arch, then the steel beam.

Fear tells us to stay in the room we are in. Fear tells us the next door is locked, or dangerous, or that we aren’t smart enough to open it. Curiosity is just the willingness to turn the handle.

When we exist in that middle ground that messy, uncomfortable space between the fear of failure and the curiosity of the adjacent possible, we find Creative Confidence.

And let’s be clear about what that means. Creative Confidence isn’t about being an “artist” in the gallery sense. It isn’t about painting a masterpiece or writing a symphony. It is simply the belief that we have the right to create in the first place. It is the audacity to stop consuming the endless reel of other people’s ideas and contribute one of our own.

When we find that confidence, the fear dissipates. We realise that the scroll is just noise. We realise that the “one-armed drummer” isn’t just a piece of trivia, but a testament to keeping the beat going when everything falls apart. We stop wearing the T-shirt as a costume, and we start living the life it represents.