Monday memo #78
Recycle.
The Monday memo is food for thought to fuel your week.
Hi everyone,
As a creator, everything in your life is material. Every conversation, every book, every photo, every outtake. What doesn’t make the cut today might be tomorrow’s breakthrough.
The process of making something new almost always creates leftovers: deleted scenes, unused sketches, scattered thoughts, quotes, fragments, forgotten drafts. Don’t throw them away.
Nature doesn’t waste. The breath you exhale becomes fuel for a tree. Waste in one system is nourishment for another. Our creativity can work the same way.
Recycling isn’t just about reducing trash — it’s a mindset. It means re-seeing what was once discarded. It’s about collecting, sorting, cleaning, and reworking the scraps into something fresh and valuable. That thing you wrote off as a failure, that lost idea from ten years ago, might hold a spark that could be useful today.
Van Gogh and Picasso reused old canvases — not just to save money, but to find new meaning in what was once deemed a false start. Yesterday’s trash might be today’s treasure: raw material for creating something new.
When you feel stuck, stalled, or uninspired, try dumpster diving in your own archive. The past version of you left a message in a bottle. Open it. You might be surprised by what you find.
Exercise.
Open your “creative junk drawer” — old notes, sketches, ideas. Choose one or two things you’ve discarded or abandoned. Clean it up, rework it, remix it, or just sit with it. See what happens.
Connecting in real life!
I’ve picked a date and location for our summer real-life Possibilitarian Potluck Pop-up. We’ll be meeting in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, June 28, so mark your calendars! We’ll be hosting this at a local venue, and lodging for Friday and Saturday nights are available if you decide to join us from out of town.
I want to give members first dibs on rooms (Members, see below). So if you’re a member and you want to join us, book before Friday! I will release the venue to all subscribers on Friday.
More information for members is below the fold.👇