DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY. DO DIFFERENT THINGS.

Before I had a framework or a name for any of this, before I’d ever used AI for anything, I had a seven-word motto that changed my entire life. It came from my son, of all people, during a phone call on a vacation that was going sideways.

In early 2021, my husband and I came out of lockdown and promptly went to Mexico. The plan was to decompress. Sit on the beach, read books, do nothing. We’d been cooped up for a year and we were desperate for a break. Within a few hours of getting there, we were both restless and agitated and couldn’t figure out why. We’d been looking forward to the trip for months, but now that we were there, something felt off.

We called our son that afternoon and described the weird unsettled feeling. He listened and then said something that ended up changing a lot more than our vacation: “Mix things up. Don’t do what you always do. You don’t have to just sit on the beach. Do something different.”

He was right. We’d been holed up for a year. Sitting still was the last thing we needed. What we needed was to move, to shake something loose, to break the pattern that lockdown had cemented into our daily lives. We made “Do things differently. Do different things” our motto for the rest of the trip. We met and hung out with a bunch of vacation friends, went places we normally wouldn’t go and said yes to things we normally would have talked ourselves out of. It was the best vacation we’d had in years and by the end of it, the restless feeling was gone. In its place was something that felt a lot like being awake for the first time in a while.

We came home with the motto still echoing in our heads and decided to keep going. I walked into a local art gallery, introduced myself, struck up a conversation with the owners and ended up getting my art displayed in their space. A few weeks later, without putting it on the market or even intending to do so, we sold the house we’d lived in for eighteen years, the one we’d felt trapped in for most of that time. We bought a new place in a completely different area. By the end of 2021, we were living a life that barely resembled the one we’d been living twelve months earlier.

We didn’t plan any of that. We didn’t sit down with a journal and map out a vision for our future. We didn’t hire a coach or take a course or read a book about reinvention. We just started doing things differently. One thing led to another and the dominoes fell in ways we couldn’t have predicted or controlled. The motto wasn’t a strategy. It was a crack in the routine, and everything that was waiting on the other side of that routine came flooding in.

I wasn’t in crisis when all that happened. I wasn’t at rock bottom or in a deep depression or desperate for change. I was just a little stale, a little flat and a little bored after a year of lockdown and a lot of years of doing things the same way. The motto didn’t require me to overhaul my life or commit to some massive transformation. It asked me to do one thing differently today. That’s it. And then the next day, another thing. And then another. And over the course of a year, those small differences added up to a completely different life.

That’s the thing about doing things differently. It sounds so simple that it’s easy to dismiss. But when you actually do it, when you break one small pattern and pay attention to what happens, you realize how much of your life has been running on autopilot. You’ve been taking the same routes, having the same conversations, making the same choices, consuming the same content and then wondering why everything feels the same. The sameness is the problem. And the fix is almost embarrassingly straightforward.

I didn’t understand why this worked in 2021. It took me four more years, a painful family crisis, hitting actual rock bottom in 2025 and eventually using AI to map my own patterns, before the framework clicked into place and I started writing the book. The Mexico motto was the first time I experienced Transformative Creativity in action without having a name for it.

Doing things differently is creative action in its simplest form. You are what you do. When you change what you do, you change who you are. Even when the change is small. Even when it feels insignificant. Even when you’re just saying yes to lunch with someone you’d normally say no to.

So here’s what I want to offer. Two paths into the same thing.

Last week I launched Your Move, a free AI tool that walks you through mapping the patterns in your professional and creative history. The response was great. One person used it to help with a job search she just started and prep for interviews, and said it gave her more clarity in 30 minutes than she’d gotten from months of searching. Another person used it to stress-test a brand new AI platform, which wasn’t the intended use case, but the tool held up and he got useful results anyway. People are finding things in their own histories that they couldn’t see from the inside, which is the whole point.

I also heard from people who aren’t there yet. People who are curious about what I’m doing with Transformative Creativity and want to engage with it, but the idea of sitting down with an AI tool and mapping their entire life feels like a lot right now. Maybe they’re skeptical about AI. Maybe they’re overwhelmed. Maybe they just want to start smaller.

If you’re ready for a deeper dive and you’re comfortable with AI (or willing to try it), Your Move is free. It takes about 30 minutes, it maps the patterns in your professional and creative life, it surfaces possibilities you haven’t considered and it gives you a concrete starting point. Subscribe to the newsletter and you’ll get the link in your welcome email. People are getting real results from it and the feedback has been kind of amazing.

If you’re not ready for that, or if you just want to start simpler, adopt our motto. Do things differently. Do different things. Pick one thing today and do it differently than you normally would. Take a different route. Have a conversation you’ve been avoiding. Try the restaurant you always walk past. Say yes to the thing you’d usually say no to. Don’t plan it and don’t make it a project. Just interrupt one pattern and notice what happens.

You might be surprised how much was waiting on the other side of the same old routine.

Both paths lead to the same place: you, back in motion, remembering that you have more agency over your life than you’ve been exercising. One uses technology. One uses a seven-word motto from a phone call in Mexico. Take whichever one fits where you are right now.

The point is to move.