Some of us treat creativity like a reward. Something we’ll fully inhabit once a major milestone is reached or when the weekend comes around. Through years of working with leaders, I’ve realized that this deferral isn’t a personal flaw; it’s an epidemic. And it may be the single biggest drag on organizational performance today.
Jess Ekstrom, founder of Mic Drop Workshop and author of the new book Making It Without Losing It, has been studying this trap and the neuroscience behind it. When I sat down with her recently, she offered three insights that every leader needs to hear right now.
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1. The gap is not the problem. It’s the creative possibility.
Ambitious people will always have a gap between where they are and where they want to be. Ekstrom argues that the gap itself is neutral. What matters is how we interpret it. We can read it as a “discouraging absence,” a net loss, proof that we haven’t arrived. Or we can read it as a field of creative possibility: endless winning scenarios, experiments not yet run, questions not yet asked.
This maps directly onto what I call the rigor of ambiguity: the discipline required to stay productively in motion without a guaranteed outcome. I’m reminded of something a dance teacher told me in junior high during an élevé, with arms extended high above my head: “You never arrive. Always extend.” Artists understand this intuitively. They don’t freeze at the gap; they build inside it. The organizational question is: Do your leaders help their teams reframe the gap as creative fuel, or as evidence of failure?
2. Dopamine doesn’t live at the finish line.
Here’s the data point that stopped me cold: Ekstrom shared that a Vanderbilt University study found that we don’t get our dopamine hit at the ribbon cutting, the launch, or the closed deal. We get it in anticipation and in the process of building. Ekstrom’s prescription follows directly: Make the process the goal. Fall in love with the problem.
This is what I mean when I argue that motivation is a form of sentient intelligence, our embodied, meaning-driven cognition that separates human creativity from anything a machine can replicate. Burnout isn’t primarily a time-management crisis. It’s a meaning crisis. When people are only oriented toward outcomes, they hollow out the very process that replenishes them. The leaders who sustain high-performing teams aren’t the ones who celebrate only at milestones. They’re the ones who make the work itself worth showing up for.
3. Audit your success fingerprint—then ask if you actually want it.
Ekstrom names our largely unexamined beliefs about what success must look like the “success fingerprint.” We inherit it from watching parents, absorbing social media, or internalizing career day messaging. Her challenge is deceptively simple: Audit where those beliefs came from. Are they still accurate? Are they even yours?
I call this building your inventory of courage: the accumulated evidence of small acts of agency that compound, over time, into a willingness to take bigger leaps. But Ekstrom adds a critical third question beyond comparison and inspiration: “Do I even want this?” Not every metric of success you’ve inherited belongs on your list. And as a leader, the most powerful thing you can do is extend that same inquiry to your team.
A Penn Wharton School study she cites found that call center employees doubled their numbers simply after meeting the scholarship recipients their work had funded. Meaningful work isn’t abstract. It’s knowing who your work makes better off and making sure your people know it too.
The takeaway
Creativity isn’t waiting for you at some future finish line. The Imagination Era demands leaders who can help their teams find meaning, build inside uncertainty, and author their own definitions of success—not inherit someone else’s. As Ekstrom puts it: There is no “done.” There’s only the endless, generative question: What’s possible from here?
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