Beware of Borrowed Light
On empathy, originality, and staying unapologetically thoughtful in an oversaturated world
A dear, deep-thinker friend of mine, years ago, threw a phrase my way I've never stopped thinking about—I bring it into my client sessions on the regular: Unapologetically Thoughtful. It caught me off guard—obvious, and yet not just a slogan or a mantra. It points toward a whole way of living, more ethos than hot tip. It’s rooted in kindness and concern, while also being completely grounded in self-awareness and earnest discernment. I didn't understand how deep its power ran at the time —I was young, wild, and still figuring out who I was. But after a lot of life livin' (and self-reflection), this phrase has shaped me. It's entrenched in how I walk through the world and how I work. Lately I've been thinking about what it actually asks of us in a moment when so little of what's slopped onto us feels genuine, earnest, or regenerative.
Unapologetically Thoughtful means owning your decisions completely—the follow-through, the accountability, remembering that what you built is what you actually wanted to build, even on the days you might resent maintaining it. It's an opportunity to ask ‘does this need to exist’ before ‘can I make this,’ and actually prioritizing time to sit with the answer instead of steamrolling past it because momentum feels better than doubt.
There are two answers to where our motivations actually come from, and most of us never sit still long enough to notice which one is shaping what we call inspiration.
The first: internal.
Attention, as in active focus. The innate curiosity creatives are lucky enough to have. Deliberate, occasionally boring work. It's not always clear where our own material comes from, but it takes as much processing time as active searching—we seek out tactile experience to ignite inspiration, and it's almost always a representation of our own curiosities and where we choose to direct our attention. And then, perhaps, we stare at walls. This is a gift! Not everyone affords themselves this indulgence, or even has access to it ( in all the meanings of that word.) It's almost alchemical, in that it can feel mystical and mysterious. The aha! moments when we crack something open we might not have even known we were workin’ on.
The second: external.
Attention, in its most passive state, most often algorithmically imposed, fed to us by systems with a specific interest in what we do/buy/watch next, not who we are (or will become.) Especially these days, when online life can outshine or overtake our literal lived experience, as well as our work.
Both are real. Both, at different moments, are even useful. But only one can be depended on no matter what, because only one is actually, authentically yours. The other is borrowed, and borrowed light can be switched off by whoever lent it to you, without warning.
Talk to enough creative entrepreneurs and a pattern emerges: everyone wants to live at the front end and the finish line of their business—the vision, the reveal. Nobody wants to live in the unglamorous middle, where staying original once the thing your heart desired is finally built is the actual job.
Social media makes that middle harder every year, and it's worth naming plainly what's changed. As marketing consultant Rachel Karten put it recently, social media isn't ‘social’ anymore, or at least not mostly—it's entertainment media. There are no permanent gains: content has to work post by post, with no credit for what you built yesterday. TikTok itself calls this a “cold start”—if your account doesn't have a recognizable niche or format, every post starts from zero, regardless of how many followers you already have. What actually travels now is a recognizable format—the same opening, the same hook, every time, so a stranger who's never seen you/your stuff before knows instantly what they're watching. Brands have caught on: In Style now runs a recurring series with its own writers’ room, and the job title showing up in people's bios is showrunner, borrowed straight from Hollywood, because brands have realized they need to be entertaining, not just… there. Non-follower interest now matters more than the audience you spent years earning. And the whole apparatus keeps professionalizing: amateurs get quietly gentrified out of the feed, budgets follow whoever's already winning, and staying on just one platform isn't viable anymore. Karten's own note to herself is a good instruction for the rest of us too: be algorithmically ungovernable.
BECKONING VS. CHOICE
Stated plainly: choice comes from limitation, constraint. Beckoning pulls from unknown territory—raw, unbounded, not yet mapped. Choice works from what's already sitting on the table— the finite menu of pre-existing paths, deciding strictly from what’s present. That's not a criticism of choice. It's just what it structurally is. Which is exactly why so much of what gets made under "choice" looks the same—built entirely from pre-existing content, recombined and reordered, but rarely expanded upon.
The middle column matters just as much as the two ends—maybe more. Mediation is the actual site of the work: the translating, the recognizing-a-gap, the selecting-criteria-from-the-unknown. It's not beckoning anymore—you're no longer just receiving—and it's not choice yet either, because you haven't narrowed down to the finite menu of your own making. It's the effortful in-between where raw inspiration either gets shaped into something genuinely new, or quietly collapses into whatever's easiest to categorize and execute upon. Most of the actual work of originality happens here, in mediation, not in the beckoning itself—which is probably why it's also the stage most people skip.
The table above maps two very different processes for making anything, and they're easy to conflate because they can look identical from outside: something arrives, uninvited, and takes hold. Real inspiration gets metabolized—recombined with your own material (and creative spirit) until it's no longer separable from the outcome. Influence, left unmetabolized, just collapses into replication: same shape, same conventions, marginally adjusted. And nowadays most often algorithm-friendly and optimized for our attention-starved, manic moment—but not originality, per se. Inspiration produces illegibility, much of the time; great stuff takes work to produce and work to consume. Influence-as-replication produces immediately salable, easily-recognized junk food that goes down fast and disappears without a trace.
The hitch isn’t where the material came from—almost nothing creative comes from nowhere. The test is whether beckoning was ever actually afforded room to exist, or whether it got crowded out entirely by everything else already taking up your creative brain space. If beckoning was simply answered on arrival, my bet is the output will be the same ol' thang dressed up differently, and called your own. Knowing the difference isn't a soft virtue right now—in a world where every industry and market is this oversaturated, it's the actual difference between a business that's still contributing something and one that's just adding to an already-tall pile.
In a world that moves so fast and is filled to the brim with so much unnecessary stuff, I encourage you to free yourself, and your calendar, so you can reconnect with the magic that comes with making room for beckoning. As creatives, we must remember: the world needs what doesn't already exist. Things and ideas that will add true value, solve problems, innovate (not in the tech sense) and disrupt so that more beautiful, meaningful futures can come to fruition.
EMPATHY IN AN OVERSATURATED WORLD
Speaking of oversaturation… here's what all of this is actually asking of you, underneath the tactics: empathy. Not the soft kind, though I am a fan of that too—the disciplined kind. Empathy for yourself, first. To say it again: I implore you to trust your own creative process enough to protect the time it takes, instead of letting the modern world's hunger for content and crap decide what counts as done, or ready to bring to market. Also, I want you to channel empathy for the work itself, both process and output—whether that output is a product, a service, an experience, or a post—treating what you make as something that deserves to be metabolized, not just produced. And empathy for the people receiving it: your customers, clients, and audience alike, who are drowning in more content, more options, and more noise than any generation has had to sort through, and are, understandably, exhausted by it. This applies as much to what you sell as much as how you sell it. A product or service built without empathy for the end user is often just replication with better packaging, no matter how original the marketing around it might look.
That last kind shows up in small, concrete ways, and it isn't limited to what happens on a screen. The content (now morphing into little micro TV shows) and formats that actually work online start the same way every time, so an anonymous viewer recognizes them instantly, and each piece can stand entirely on its own while still feeling like part of something larger. This is important to remember because you have to remove yourself from the equation at this point and focus on the end user. We may make our work for ourselves first, but at the end of the day our work has to work for who buys it. Embracing their needs—including familiarity—is about taking care of them, not you. What might feel like redundancy to you builds trust and loyalty in the consumer, full stop.
That same instinct shows up off-platform(s) too: a signature scent walking into a shop, the same first five minutes of a client onboarding call, the same care taken in how a shipment gets packed. Rachel Karten, again: we don't have short attention spans, we have short consideration spans. Familiarity often makes something feel worth stopping for—a character, a format, a feeling you already trust. I'd argue that's just as true for a brand, a storefront, or a service business as it is for a piece of content selling any one of them. That's empathy, functionally speaking. It's not asking your audience or customers to have done the homework of following you for years before a product, a service, or a post suddenly makes sense to them.
Given that everything is becoming TV again, it's also why disclosure matters: telling people plainly, brought to you by X, when something is branded, when it's editorial, who's actually behind it. This might feel a bit esoteric depending on the scale of your business, because not all of us are operating at the cutting edge of sales and marketing strategy—that's okay! But it's time to start thinking about it, because digital marketing is still marketing, and that marketing is frequently entertainment media, since, like we said, the social side of it is fading away. And it isn't only a content problem. The same expectation is showing up around what you sell and how you make it—where something is sourced, who actually touches it before it reaches the end user, what the real process behind it looks like. That's not a DEI checkbox or a sustainability statement buried in a footer. It's something closer to radical transparency—a phrase I'll be coming back to properly in a future issue, because it deserves its own space. Undisclosed content isn't just a legal gray area. It's a failure of empathy dressed up as marketing — its own quiet form of borrowed light, wearing someone else's brand, budget, or agenda without ever admitting whose light is actually on, whether the thing being obscured is a paid post or a supply chain.
Where all of this consideration actually pays off is memorability, not virality—whether you're measuring views, repeat clients, word of mouth, in the product that becomes a best-seller years after launch, that one signature experience people describe to friends long afterward, or in becoming the name a client gives out unprompted when someone else asks who they should call. A cult product isn't the one that moved the most units in its first week. It's the one someone's still talking about, still gifting, still requesting by name, long after the trend that might have launched it has been forgotten. A practitioner's version of the same thing isn't a bigger launch. It's the referral that arrives with no explanation needed, because the work already did the explaining.
It might be hard to embrace this truth depending on how limited your platform and marketing strategy currently is (Diversify, folks! No single pokers in the fire—those days are over.) Anyone can get views right now. Getting remembered—by someone specific, days later, whether they're scrolling or standing in your shop—requires actually understanding what your audience needs to feel in order to care, and then to buy. That's not a metric. That's empathy, applied—to your process, your product or service, and to every version of how you market and sell it.
LONGEVITY, ORIGINALITY, AND SUSTAINABILITY
If a referral with no explanation needed is the smallest unit of this principle, Japan's shinise are its largest. These are centuries-old, family-run companies I've been yapping about in client sessions for almost a decade now, and they are, functionally, businesses that have been requested by name for three hundred years or more. Not viral. Not trending. Remembered, generation after generation, continuously patronized by people who need no convincing beyond the company and it’s products.
I was fortunate enough, many moons ago, to be introduced to a white paper on the Bank of Korea's research of companies over 200 years old, surveyed across 41 countries. More than half of them are Japanese. Separate research counts over 52,000 Japanese firms past the century mark. Almost none of them are conglomerates. They stay small, financed from within, and most have expanded, adapted, added—but always through the same lens, in service of the same kind of customer, without ever losing the throughline that made them trustworthy in the first place. Growth was never the enemy for them. Incoherence was.
That's the real permission in all of this. Doing it your way, in honest relationship with the people who actually buy in—your audience, your customers, your community—doesn't just serve you. It enriches the whole exchange for both sides. The more you hone your craft, your voice, the specific essence that makes someone choose you, the more genuinely valuable that becomes to the people receiving it. We don't want one more thing. We don't want your version of what someone else already does better. We want what only you can make, market, and sell—filtered entirely through your lens, because that lens is what people are really paying for.
Take the soy sauce brewer that discovered a faster fermentation method during a wartime shortage. The obvious move—the choice-column move—was to guard it, patent it, extract every advantage while competitors scrambled to catch up. They shared the technique instead. Protected the whole industry from a race to the bottom rather than capturing the market for themselves. That's not an argument against scale. It's an argument for scaling on your own terms, filtered through your own discernment. Especially when the market is, like… a frankenstein of technocracy and stakeholder value that likely doesn't relate to our work and our world at all.
Purpose is a shiny, trendy word, but that's what these companies really understand—fidelity, continuity, and trust directly inform what these businesses are for, and guide how they make choices, rather than chasing growth or attention for its own sake. My bet is you feel the same way, or want to, about your business. Call it empathy extended forward in time, to the people who'll inherit the business, the relationship, the trust, after you're gone. I said earlier that the world truly needs what doesn't already exist, and I'll stand by that. But shinise are proof of the other half of that sentence, the half that's easy to skip past: once you've made the thing that needed to exist, the work isn't over. The work becomes keeping it—coherent, honest, and yours—today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, for as long as it still deserves to exist.
So here's where this actually lands, for you, today—not in a three-hundred-year-old case study, but in whatever you're building right now.
Beware of borrowed light. Validation you didn't generate, trends you didn't choose, formats built for someone else's audience. All of it can illuminate a business for a while, but none of it is a light you actually own, and it can be switched off by someone else without warning. That's not paranoia. It's just physics: anything you didn't build yourself operates by someone else's rules, and those rules can, and will, change without asking you first. Shit, we've all experienced this and it's time to say enough is enough.
So here's the permission I want to provide, plainly: you are allowed to build the thing only you could have built, even when it doesn't trend, even when no algorithm confirms it. You don't need anyone's blessing to take that seriously. Be unapologetically thoughtful about what you make, what you charge, and what you owe the people who show up for it. Be creative, get weird, try new things. And own your process, your work, and honor the people receiving it, in that order. Depend on nothing else to tell you it's enough. That's #doingitonourterms. That's the whole thing.
#getwithit
— gJ
