At Tracking Wonder, we’ve baked collaboration into much of what we’ve created.

Our free international community of entrepreneurs and creatives fosters alliances, partnerships, and networking.

I’ve collaborated with other brands to produce events. I’ve built Tracking Wonder’s own team around true collaboration. I’ve facilitated business artist meetups around the world based on the idea of collaboration.

And I’ve helped business leaders, entrepreneurs, and creatives finesse how to develop effective collaborations.

Collaboration – be it through conversation, community, or working with another person – can be electric, offering a powerful stimulant for your creative brain.

Conversely, there will be times when collaboration is a drain, and what you need most is solitude.

The careful balancing act between collaboration and solitude looks differently for different people but there are a few universal principles to help you decide when to collaborate, and when it is you might want to sit alone with your thoughts.

And there is one surprisingly simple, yet vital, ingredient that’s needed in order to make either collaboration or solitude effective.

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Every month we bring you the best articles we find in brand, innovation, and creativity.

In the digital age, how do brands demonstrate authenticity? How do companies set themselves apart from other brands? What inspires customer loyalty? This month’s digest answers these questions and explores solutions. Some of these solutions include utilizing psychology in branding, exploring behavioral economics, accessing functions of the brain to inspire customers and more. We look into new findings on creativity and are offered answers on how to promote creativity within ourselves – it may just mean working differently. And good branding demands creativity, but now it also requires culture. Read more to learn what customers are expecting out of companies. The answers are situated within these questions.

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A sense of purposeful, meaningful work is one of the most vital ways that high-achieving creatives and creative entrepreneurs deal with the daily challenges that they face.

Plus, research has shown that now, more than ever, people are hungry for brands that are driven by purpose.

I discussed the pursuit of purposeful work in episode 2 of the Tracking Wonder podcast “Do We Find Purpose or Test It Out?”, with podcaster, blogger and, author Katie Dalebout and with executive coach, speaker, and author Caroline Adams Miller.

We talked about the value of journaling when it comes to self-awareness, making meaning of our lives and healing, and some advice around taking care of yourself in the pursuit of a purposeful life.

To help encourage and motivate you to show up and be true to your purpose, I have curated some further ways you can live with the question: Do we find our purpose or test it out?

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Once there was a girl who learned to say “yes” to her mother’s requests to please her and “yes” to her friends so as not to make waves and “yes” to her teachers to get good grades.  

As a business owner she learned to say “yes” to every opportunity to speak for free and “yes” to all possible clients who asked if she could do something for them different from the previous client and “yes” to every shiny online object that someone said would save the day and make her an extra 6 figures in 6 months and “yes” to her child’s every demand and “yes” to her partner’s every request.

By the time she was 37 she was “yessed to death.”

I know this woman well, and what I’d say to her is the same as I’d say to you: To fly, leap, or wisely grow, you need to learn how and when to say “no.”

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Andrii Nikolaienko on Pexels

Every month we bring you the best articles we find in brand, innovation, and creativity.

It’s simple. Just be human. That’s this month’s advice given by experts who are studying the shifts customers and other businesses are desiring to observe within companies. More than ever, customers want brands that are authentic about their values. And people are supporting the brands they believe in while speaking out on social platforms about the ones they don’t. To provide some insight on focusing efforts on genuineness we spotlight articles about acculturating brands through storytelling, why employees are the best word-of-mouth marketers, who is driving this cultural shift in branding and more. We leave off this month’s digest with a tip about the psychology of sensory branding to create meaningful experiences for your customers.

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In our work with numerous professionals, CEOs, and creative entrepreneurs, we hear a common tension: They want to take charge of their brand but they do not want to appear fake. You probably know that feeling.

In this engagement economy, you likely know that a signature online presence can distinguish you or your business from others in your field. Your signature brand and brand story can captivate ideal prospects, leads, and community members. Yet, there’s the downside.  You can get distracted by the glittery online personas and assume that in order to take charge of your brand you have to follow suit. It can feel daunting to distil the essence of your work or business into a cohesive branded message without sounding slick and corporate. In short, you want to own your brand but avoid the ick factor.

The ick factor – that discomforted feeling when something seems less than genuine – can hold back otherwise talented professionals and businesses from taking agency of and owning their brand.

There’s good news: You can brand without the ick and brand with integrity.

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Consider this scenario.

On Week 1 of an experiment, I sent a book to Person A that they love, and a book to Person B that they did not love.

On Week 2, Person A got a book they liked less, but Person B got a book that they loved.

When I asked each one of them to rate their happiness with the experience, which person would rate the experience as happier?

Probably Person B, whose last experience was a positive one.

An often overlooked reality is that the last impression matters more than the first.

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Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

Charles Baudelaire

When it comes to the idea of the Young Genius, it can be easy to dismiss as an ethereal, intangible idea. But the most influential and the most fulfilled people somehow do, ultimately, let this force of character, this young genius as it were, lead them—whether they’re aware of it or not.

So what if instead of dismissing the idea, we use the idea of the Young Genius as a tool that can help you to show up, and bring your best efforts to bear.

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Every month we bring you the best articles we find in brand, innovation, and creativity.

This month is all about individualizing your company, your personal life and even your wardrobe. An award winning journalist pushes companies to pick a side – no matter how divisive. Writers dive into the importance of personal branding. And a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology challenges people to dress for empowerment.

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It took me 42 years to make a podcast.

A fantasy surfaces when you’re a child, and maybe you follow it. You want to be a fierce warrior or a wood fairy. Or both. More than likely, you don’t follow that fantasy. And you forget about it.

The funny thing is, if we’re paying attention, fantasies to create new worlds or lives surface among some of us grown ups, too.

You know what I’m talking about. That new business, book, persona, performance piece, workshop, PhD, or whatever it is you spend time trying to envision.

Do you follow it? Now, later, never?

Maybe pieces of those childhood dreams secretly have been laid out like hidden breadcrumbs for you to follow – and you don’t even realize it.

It took me four years to launch the Tracking Wonder podcast, but I suspect the podcast’s origins started when I was 11 years old if not younger.

I thought I’d let you in behind the scenes since many readers and clients have asked about starting their own podcasts – and I know that you’re likely at some stage in advancing your business or project.

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