Modern Compass Newsletter

Hello there,

Most of us don’t realize how much creativity we’re spending at work until we realize we have nothing left for ourselves.
Our jobs take the best hours of our day, the sharpest parts of our thinking—and often leave little energy to build something of our own. A job pays the bills, does provide the grounds for skill growth, and ideally supports a good life, yes—but that’s not the whole story.

Here’s the shift: when you create for yourself, even in small ways, that effort compounds—through both success and failure.
Your skillsets can grow through your career, and those do become part of your creative equity (more on that later), but the job itself often resets. Last quarter might’ve been great, but now it’s “What have you done for me lately” or now it’s time to start working on the next project with little breathing room in between.

That’s not bad intent—it’s business. Companies have to turn a profit. If they don’t, it’s nothing to no one. However, realizing that what you create for yourself never resets is a powerful shift. One that can fuel you to do more—with more clarity and purpose. We’ll dig into this and more on this newsletter on creative equity.

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Featured Insight: Creative Equity

Creative equity is all about the ongoing accumulation of value from your creative efforts and personal growth. It’s not so much about selling yourself as it is about recognizing and nurturing the value that you create over time. It’s a way to measure and appreciate how your creative endeavors continuously add to your personal, professional, and/or entrepreneurial life. When I talk about creative equity, I don’t mean equity in the diversity or representation sense. I mean the equity you build by consistently creating—your growing body of work, and every time you create, you make a deposit into your creative equity. Don’t think of this equity as something thats just written, painted, or sung, this can be far more than that. Creative equity can be skillsets, content creation in various forms, owning a business; to something as simple as being an athlete and beyond.

An athlete is actually a great example of demonstrating creative equity for 2 reasons:

1. To be a star athlete you need to dedicate time to creating endurance, mindset, strategy, and a body that creates the ability to win. You have to create constantly, in and out of the game to be a star athlete.

2. Creative equity in a physical form can be simply thought of as a trophy room or awards hanging somewhere for all to see. That is a display of creative equity (minus the participation awards).

The Problem

We’re more overworked than ever—spending our best energy inside jobs that reset every month or every quarter. When we’re finally off the clock, we’re often not building—we’re consuming.
I know because I did it too before I got married. I’d work all day, then scroll, watch, or game till I went to sleep because that felt like all that was left of me to do. That was the cycle.

To make things even tricker, AI is accelerating everything. While this has limited impact to the athlete example, AI is already replacing tasks and reshaping some industries—and it’s just getting started. Over the next 5 to 15 years, many knowledge worker jobs (mine included) will shift dramatically, potentially vanish entirely.

We’re pouring our energy into roles that not only reset, but may not even exist in the future. So the question becomes: why haven’t we started to create for ourselves yet?

The Insight

The simplest answer is this: we need to start creating—intentionally for ourselves, and one way to do that is through habit or tracking that growth.

Not because it’s trendy, not because it guarantees income, but because the act of creating is one of the few things that compounds over time, regardless of where the society or your job goes next.

This doesn’t mean quitting your job or launching a brand tomorrow. It means giving some of your energy—not all of it, just some—back to yourself. Into a project, a skill, a habit, a story, into something you can look at months or years from now and say, that’s mine, I made that happen.

In fact, many self-starters at work—those who volunteer for the hard stuff, lead projects, build internal docs, or step up to own a topic—are creators in disguise. They may not call it that, but they’re chasing the same thing: growth, ownership, reputation. At the heart of it, they’re building creative equity. The question is whether they’re only building it inside the company—or also finding ways to apply it beyond.

Key takeaway: Jobs pay for output and that resets. Creativity builds equity, and that grows. Creative equity may not pay the bills yet—but it might one day.

Personal Anecdote

To that last point—about being a self-starter—I’ve realized that every product launch, every presentation, every well-run meeting (or rough one), every marketing plan, and every piece of feedback has given me something I can use for myself.

I want to be the best in my career so I can be the best outside of it. Not just for performance at work, but to bring that same focus and effort into the things I’m building—like Modern Compass.

The truth is, I didn’t fully make these connections until this year. Now that I do, I can’t unsee it, and I hope you can’t unsee it either.
Every skill I sharpen, every piece of clarity I gain—it’s not just for my job. It’s part of something I’m building that belongs to me.

Interactive Activity

Creative Equity Review

Instructions:
You should not be able to edit the shared version I linked, but if you can, do not edit the shared version.

• Download the file (using link below)

• Delete my examples

• Start typing in your entries (always start with oldest first)

Helpful Tip: This file is best used in Excel or Google sheets, I’ve noticed issues with the chart when using Numbers on Mac so avoid using in Numbers.

Start by looking back over the past week and logging what you’ve created—big or small. This is your creative equity in action.

If you find the activity valuable (or even fun), feel free to go further back in time. Just be sure to enter the oldest entries first, so the cumulative chart tracks correctly.
⚠️ Sorting by date after entering data can break the cumulative equity formula, so it's best to keep the sheet in chronological order.

Want to keep going?
Try doing a quick Creative Equity Review every week to track your growth over time. That’s how I intend to use it myself.

Amplified by AI:
You’ll also notice a tab labeled GenAI Prompts. This is optional, but if you're curious, you can drop the file into any generative AI tool and ask it to summarize trends, patterns, or wins based on your data.

Your Compass in Action

What’s one thing you’ve created in the past month that still feels meaningful to you?

It doesn’t have to be polished, public, or perfect. Just something that mattered to you.

Hit reply and let me know—I read every response, and your answer might inspire someone else to keep creating too.

Modern Compass Book Updates

• Completed one more chapter so with reducing the newsletter to once a month I seem to be clocking in a chapter a month. I’d prefer to be doing more but I’m splitting time with TikTok growth so that I have community or platform building of folks interested before book is published.

• TikTok quest continues. Currently at 430 followers and still doing weekly ad boosts there for consistent growth. I think in my last issue I mentioned I was targeting growing beyond my existing network but my ultimate goal now is just hit 1000 followers which unlocks ability for me to add my newsletter subscribe URL as a clickable link. Sounds silly, but that clickable link is a pretty big deal for getting more newsletter growth through TikTok and/or directing folks to a website which I have but not built yet until I’m done 1st pass of book, gotten some beta reader feedback, and going through round of professional editing.

• Needless to say, clear next steps ahead and for the most part I only have 8 chapters left to do, although some of these will be the most complicated to write. …..onward!

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And always….follow your compass