Better Than
What I Planned

Leaving the first and only company I’d worked for since college, I knew I needed time to reset, and for me that meant turning to art and creativity. I picked up a linocut carving tool with no idea what I was doing. I sat in a figure drawing class surrounded by strangers who could actually draw. And I started a weekly hip-hop class.

The dance class was the biggest leap, and it is the one I kept. I’d never taken one in my life, and avoided the dance floor for good reason, but I had committed to doing one thing every week that was completely outside my comfort zone. I’m still the least experienced person in the room every time. Some weeks I can’t get out of my head in class, thinking about the step instead of letting my body just move.

None of it was about getting good. I had spent a career next to designers, briefing the work rather than making it, so creative was a thing other people were. It was about proving to myself that “I’m not creative” and “I can’t dance” were beliefs, not facts, and beliefs can be retired.

Not holding onto limiting beliefs is a critical aspect of leadership. I could not go after the client everyone said was out of reach, or leave the thing I was known for to find out what else I might be, until I retired old beliefs. I could not tell my team to outgrow their job descriptions until I had outgrown mine. None of that came from feeling ready. Ready is a decision.

In linocut, you cut a line, and it is gone from the block for good. The plan I started with was a single stem of lavender, minimalist and elegant. My finished carving and resulting print looked like a goddess. Better than what I planned. That turned out to apply well beyond the block.

A few months in, the creative work had sparked new ideas about what to pursue next. I felt real momentum building, and everything was pointing to starting my own company. The old version of me would have spent months researching the market and writing a plan before doing anything anyone could see.

Instead, I made things. A logo. A name. Actual work for actual people, before I had a strategy to justify any of it. I kept telling myself that momentum builds clarity, and to keep making. The strategy caught up later, built from what I learned by doing rather than what I predicted on paper.

The same is true for anyone leading inside a company. Waiting for certainty before you move feels responsible. It is also how good ideas quietly die in planning documents instead of getting tested against something real.

I also said yes to an idea I’d had brewing for years. Bainbridge Island, where I live, is full of small boutique farm stands selling bread, vegetables, and flowers. I wanted one of my own: a lumpia stand, open 11 to 2 on the weekends. I had learned my mother-in-law’s fifty-year-old recipe for lumpia, the Filipino egg roll, and I wanted to do this with my two daughters.

We could have set up a table and served on paper plates. But instead I gave the stand a real brand: Cuppa Lumpia, with a logo, a website, packaging, stickers, everything. It is the work clients pay me for, done for free, for my family, for fun. The name Make It Land came out of that same instinct. I was starting to take on side projects, and each time I would tell my daughters the same thing: “They’re hiring me to make it land.” Their idea, their product, their name.

Teams work the same way. The clearest sense of who you are, for a company or a person, is usually discovered rather than designed. The best teams I led were never the ones I mapped out on a slide. They took shape when I paid attention to what people were actually good at and what they kept gravitating toward, then built the work around that.