Remarkability is shifting from execution to ideas

I see technological progress as paradoxical in the creative professions. On the surface, better tools make better work. A ruler straightens our lines. Software expands our control. Cameras capture detail with fidelity once unimaginable. This is the rhythm of innovation: each new tool unlocks sharper articulation, smoother workflows, faster outcomes. And yet, the work doesn’t disappear—it shifts. Mastery still requires time and friction, just redirected. The learning curve may be shorter, but it still demands the climb.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners (...) For the first couple of years, you make stuff, it’s just not that good...” 

It took Ira Glass, creator of This American Life, years to develop the storytelling voice he imagined. As he describes it, the gap between your taste and your ability only closes through sheer volume—by making and remaking until something finally aligns. For many, he admits, that gap never fully closes.

The same is true across art and design history. Remarkable work was often the result of deep time—craft honed through focus, frustration, and repetition. This is the essence of the 10,000 hours: not just effort, but intention sustained over time. But in a culture of instant output, that kind of slow mastery is becoming rare.

What happens when technology compresses the time it takes to do something extraordinary?

When Jonas Salk was asked who owned the patent to the polio vaccine, his answer was, “Could you patent the sun?” It took him 7 years to make the vaccine. The vaccine transformed polio from a terrifying, paralyzing disease into one that could be prevented with a simple injection. By refusing to profit from it, he reshaped how the world viewed medicine, not just as a field of discovery, but as a force for equity and compassion. 

Does the effort and time it takes to solve a problem add value to the solution?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, AI helped identify viable vaccine candidates, simulate immune responses, and optimize clinical trial designs. What once took 5–10 years for traditional vaccine development was compressed into under a year. 

What happens to the value when it’s no longer so out of reach for many?

If you remember your design history, Modernists attempted to democratize "good taste," but something unexpected happened when they did. Access to good taste came at the cost of individuality.

The flattening of taste also led, paradoxically, to uniformity masquerading as universality. 

For example, Helvetica’s rise to global popularity turned the typeface into a symbol of modernity, neutrality, and—paradoxically—visual sameness. Its neutrality, once a strength, became a default aesthetic; a safe, impersonal choice. 

Much like Helvetica in the 20th century, today’s algorithm-favoured aesthetics are forging a new kind of sameness—clean, legible, and endlessly forgettable.

The tools we use today allow nearly anyone with taste and intention to design what used to require years of technical mastery. Traditionally, technical skill is often a proxy for value—the sheer ability to translate vision into form conferred authority. Now that our tools can erase that friction, less hard skillls are required to achieve sophisticated production.

Suddenly, the field is saturated with visually “brilliant” work. The bar for remarkability is shifting—not upward or downward, but sideways into the realm of narrative and meaning. What once took 10,000 hours of deliberate practice can now be approximated in seconds.

So then… what happens to remarkability?

For years, we’ve defaulted to the notion that “good things take time” and “practice makes perfect”, but now, maybe it’s different. Anu Atluru recommends we “Make Something Heavy”. She writes, “We’re creating more than ever, but it weighs nothing.” In a world where tools can generate beauty on command, the challenge isn’t making—it’s making something that matters. 

Maybe it’s not execution that distinguishes the remarkable now, but rather conviction. A sense that behind the pixels lies a person who chose, resisted, reconsidered, and cared. In which case, what gives work its gravity begins to orbit around ideas, not execution. If anyone can make beautiful things, what sets your work apart might not be how it's made—but why.

Food for thought

Stories, not content; because the world doesn’t need more obscene digital landfill

Why we refuse to degrade our stories to ‘content’ and how good stories are the antidote to this epidemic of meaninglessness

Every time we get a commission inquiry for ‘content creation,’ I have to swallow the nauseating feeling before patiently explaining why we don’t do that. Because what they probably mean by ‘content’ is, in fact, much more than that.

Let’s be clear: content wasn’t always this despicable. The term emerged innocently enough during the early days of the internet, used to describe anything published online: text, images, videos. But as digital spaces evolved, and businesses began hiring marketers to fill endless feeds, the word ‘content’ became a catchall. Its meaning flattened. And with that flattening, came a normalisation of meaninglessness.

‘Content’ now refers to the endless digital detritus churned out to satisfy algorithms, not audiences. It’s a word that makes no distinction between a lazy meme, a heartfelt documentary, a research-based article, or an empty carousel of brand clichés. ‘Content’ strips intention from information. It assumes that everything we put online is just there to fill space.

And that is obscene.

Because silence is not a gap to be filled. It’s a necessary part of life. Infants find solace in it. Animals retreat into it. The idea that businesses must constantly post for the sake of filling the silence; adding to the noise of the world is a symptom of our deeper discomfort with stillness.

And it’s not harmless. Everything we post has an ecological cost. Yes, your post about the cupcake you ate does cost the planet. This is the reality of our digital excess. It’s not just overwhelming. It’s wasteful.

The antidote to this is not more content; it’s meaningful stories.

A story is not something made to fill a calendar. A story has reason to be. Stories deliver new insight, a sensory experience, transformation, discovery, amusement, inspiration, leadership, compassion, caring, understanding, empathy, or to liberate the audience or solve a problem for them. A story engages your intellect and emotions, and we don’t mean this through the terminology of engaging equalling commenting, liking, or sharing on social media. To engage is to think about and allow space in your mind, regardless of whether you hit that like button. A story considers its audience, their state of mind, their mental space, their world and its current situation.

The term ‘content’ became more mainstream as businesses cut budgets and turned to marketers to produce creative work. But that’s also when the trouble started. As social media platforms pushed more advertising space into our lives, the volume of content exploded. The result was what some called “content shock”, a tipping point when there was simply too much stuff and too little attention.

Many who weren’t truly equipped for the creative work of story-making still stepped into these hybrid creator-marketer roles, underestimating just how much it takes. It seemed easy; just post something, anything. And so, meaningless filler became the norm. But authentic story-making isn’t easy. It demands craft, insight, originality, and emotional intelligence.

Marketing and story-making are never the same thing; too often, they require two very different kinds of thinking and creativity. That’s why we don’t substitute our work for a marketer’s, or vice versa. We always partner with exceptional marketers and don’t pretend to be them. And when clients come to us without in-house marketing, we collaborate with experts from our carefully chosen circle of affiliates. Because meaningful connection doesn’t come from either side pretending to be both.

And now, as audiences begin to retreat from the noisy public squares of social media, into private, quiet, curated digital spaces like DMs and group chats, there’s, hopefully, less room for meaningless noise. People are becoming extremely intentional about what they give their attention to. We think that’s a good thing because it’s an obvious preference for stories over ‘content’. 

So, no. We don’t do content. We do better than that. We do stories; good stories that exist for a reason other than the inability to sit with silence.

The Mango (Part 3): histories shaped under the mango tree

Two instances when the mango tree became iconic in Sri Lanka’s stories

In Sri Lanka, myths, faiths and histories are often woven around some kind of tree. From sagely Banyans, serene Bo’s to Neems and Jaks that bridge to the netherworlds, trees have often been made into icons and symbols of ideas close to local culture.

Among them, the mango tree appears again and again—not as a sacred shade, but as a witness. To sermons. To ships. To the tides of transformation.

Local artists and craftspeople depicted mango trees in art, wall paintings, and jewelry, as well as motifs on textile borders.

One of the oldest stories begins in Mihintale, Along the hundreds of granite steps that climb toward Mihintale, mango trees still grow where they were iconised as witnesses to a historical philosophical exchange between a monk and a king.

You see the mango forest periphery along the stone stairways going up the now sacred rock—rooted in granite, branches reaching across the old sky, offering brief shade to pilgrims and wild monkeys alike. It does not announce itself; but the mango forest has always been here.

Mihintale is where King Devanampiyatissa met Arahat Mihindu—emissary of Emperor Ashoka, monk, teacher—and was asked to think, before he was asked to believe. The two men, at two extreme poles of secular and spiritual paths, met through an intellectual exchange.

According to Sri Lankan chronicles, it was in a mango grove on this very hill that Mihindu Thero posed a series of riddles to the king to assess his capacity for logic, reflection, and comprehension—the tools necessary to receive Buddhist philosophy. The King passed. The exchange marked the formal arrival of Buddhism on the island.

And the mango forest became a witness.

That mango forest is not remembered in marble or bronze, but the living forest itself. Its presence here was never ornamental. The trees bore fruit, gave shade, and anchored one of the most important philosophical encounters in Sri Lankan memory. And so they were left alone.

To this day, the mango forest of Mihintale remains.

Its canopies have sheltered centuries of thought. Its cycles of fruiting and falling have marked time outside the calendar. And in June, as pilgrims ascend those stairs for Poson Poya, it is not only the shrine they come to honour—but the path itself, lined by the forest that once overheard a new way of thinking take root.

The mango forest is still part of that rhythm. Quiet. Bearing witness. Offering stories to the ones who remember to look up.

The young leaves of mangoes take shades between tender orange and deep brown. Then, they grow into a vivid green before maturing into deep green. Areas like Mihintale in Sri Lanka, where mangoes grow in large groves, and are left untouched due to their historical significance, the tree tops take on colours from orange, brown, and vivid green to sombre green.

Another historic story took shape under a mango tree.

The origin of Colombo’s name, according to one etymological thread, points to a mango tree that never bore fruit. Kola-amba—meaning ‘leafy mango’—described a great mango tree near the mouth of the Kelani River. Vast and evergreen, yet never yielding fruit, the tree became a marker for seafarers for its sheer size. Kolamba thota—the port of the leafy mango—eventually became Colombo. To be named after a tree that offered no mangoes, yet remembered by every ship tracing the routes to riches; quite fitting for a city that barely a few can call home, but so many reside in.

Mangoes were among the most commonly documented trees by early visitors to Sri Lanka. 1656, the mankó, Michał Boym

The mango tree marks both a spiritual turning point of a nation and its colonial threshold. Trees do not pick sides, after all. They hold memory, not judgment. And in their shade—where faith began, where names were made—we are reminded how trees hold the stories of who we are, and where we’ve been.