Strands of Genius: What If The Skywalker Family Ran The Empire Like A Modern Corporate Dynasty, We Made a Game to Test Your Patience, How Alive Are You, Really?

Guest curated by Meija Jacobs, Executive & Creative Leadership Coach

Aug 05, 2025

:: A BIT MORE ABOUT GUEST CURATOR, MEIJA JACOBS ::

LOCATION: San Francisco, California

Hi geniuses — I’m Meija Jacobs, a creative leadership coach, former ad & design exec, and lifelong collector of career pivots (and pirouettes).

Today, I coach creative leaders navigating high-stakes change—helping them shift out of stuck mode and back into flow, possibility, and power. Every career move, from brand strategy to design thinking to food innovation, has been made from tiny threads (strands, if you will… I will 😉). Muscles built. Instincts trusted. Curiosities followed. Long before I realized they’d all add up to something meaningful.

The journey hasn’t been linear. But not a single step, stumble, or detour was wasted. Even my failures, and the inner critics I’ve learned to quiet, have become part of the fabric. All of it has made me a more grounded, intuitive, and powerful creative force. (Maybe that’s the dancer in me—trained early to follow rhythm and get back up when you fall.)

Lately, my coaching and speaking have centered on ambiguity and paradox, and what it really takes to lead and create in uncertain times. From that perspective, I invite you to find your own threads in the chaos… and weave your superpower cape.

Got a nonlinear origin story? A failure you’re learning to embrace? An inner critic you’re slowly showing the door? I’d genuinely love to hear about it.

Rosie and I were connected serendipitously through Christie Bishop: a fellow ad exec, career pivoter, and guest curator of this very newsletter a year ago. I’ve been cheering on Genius Steals and exercising my Strands link-stealing privileges ever since.

So read on to find three 🔗🔗🔗 to fuel your curiosity!

:: WE ASKED MEIJA FOR HER HOT TAKES ON MESSY MIDDLES ::

We love a before-and-after, but the truth is, most of life—and most of the work—is lived in the middle. The messy, uncertain, not-there-yet space. That’s where real strategy lives. That’s where brand positioning gets challenged, where creative ideas evolve, and where leadership gets tested. For marketers, entrepreneurs, and anyone building something, the middle can feel chaotic. But it’s also where the magic brews. This theme explores how we navigate the liminal spaces—when you’re no longer where you were, but not yet where you’re going—and how to find clarity, confidence, and momentum in the ambiguity.

What’s one thing about “the process” no one prepares you for?
Innovation is not a linear process.
Time and progress don’t move in tidy tandem—wouldn’t that be nice? If every workday delivered one clean unit of genius?
You can show up every day, work with all your heart, and still feel like you’re standing still. No one tells you that.
Creating something new—something that’s never existed quite like this—means taking risks, following hunches, and being wrong a good chunk of the time. And yet, that’s not failure. That’s the job. Taking risks and not sticking the landing every time is part of the process.
But here’s the beautiful part: Failure is where creative possibility gets interesting.
At IDEO, we didn’t just expect failure—we designed for it. When we were building a program to help NFL players transition out of the League, we had no playbook. Just prototypes. Messaging that was too soft. Too slick. Too familiar. We tested them with former players, knowing they’d tear them apart—and that was the point. In that rubble, we found the emotional truth. And from there, we built The Players Trust to show them they weren’t alone.
Creative work has messy middles. So do creative people.
My coachees come to me in those middles, when the fog is thick and can feel like failure. But it’s actually where transformation begins. It’s where what’s new starts to come into focus. A spark of insight. A better question. And then, what felt like a dead-end becomes a doorway. You realize you have a superpower that paints exits on brick walls…and you kick the door open like it was always there. 🚪✨

:: THE LINKS ::

WHAT IF THE SKYWALKER FAMILY RAN THE EMPIRE LIKE A MODERN CORPORATE DYNASTY?

This AI-generated short mashes up Succession with Star Wars in a way that’s both hilarious and eerily resonant. Creator @absurdonaut Justin Williams used Midjourney and Veo to replace the home-movie shots with Roy family members as their Star Wars doppelgangers. The creative team at Curious Refuge has been playing at the frontier of AI tools and narrative remix—and this piece captures both the absurdity and potential of what’s possible when we embrace experimentation over perfection. What happens when we stop waiting for certainty and just… make? (Curious Refuge)

WE MADE A GAME TO TEST YOUR PATIENCE

IDEO made a digital game where your only job is to move a circle across the screen. “Wait. Wait. Wait.” is a quickly playable experiment that has just one catch—you have to wait. It’s a creative nudge to challenge our productivity obsession, and a reminder that AI-driven experiences prioritizing instant answers over exploration can actually be less engaging. Designing for playful friction and well-placed obstacles can transform passive scrolling into active engagement. (IDEO)

HOW ALIVE ARE YOU, REALLY?

This quick 9-question quiz by Jodi Wellman is cheeky and confronting in all the right ways. It maps your current vitality on a 4-quadrant framework and helps you notice what’s missing, what’s lighting you up, and where you might be living on autopilot. I’ve used it with coaching clients to spark deeper questions about energy, agency, and how we want to feel in our work and lives. Want the existential bonus round? Try her Monday Calculator to count how many you’ve got left. (Jodi Wellman)

:: AND NOW… SOME FAST FAVORITES ::

Game :: Frisbee with my dog, Zoe (She jumps like joy on espresso and reminds me: A little less grip. A little more play.)
City :: San Francisco (sorry LA — I love you, but my heart beats by the Bay)
Book :: The Art of Possibility by Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander
Podcast :: Magical Overthinkers — Because yes, you can thought-spiral with wonder.
Song :: Every song, when I’m running. It’s the motion that makes the music.

:: IF YOU’RE NOT FAILING YOU’RE NOT GROWING ::

To innovate creatively, we have to design for what might not work—so we can learn what will.

At IDEO, we’d intentionally stretch ideas—brand concepts, products, communications—until they bent or broke. That friction revealed what mattered. Because when you’re creating something new, there is no linear path. Failure isn’t the end. It’s part of how we find the way forward.

:: ‘TIL NEXT TIME ::

This edition was guest curated by Meija Jacobs you can find her on LinkedIn or you can grab a virtual tea here. Your regularly scheduled hosts, Rosie & Faris Yakob, will be back next week!

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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.

Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. We have a distributed team ourselves, an accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.

Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)

Strands of Genius