I found this list on a trip earlier this year, away from the counter and the inbox and everything that usually fills a morning. Eleven rules for creative living, numbered like a manifesto and set in a serif that suggested someone had thought carefully about how it should feel to read.

It had the weight of something much older than it probably is. Eleven lines that read less like advice and more like a standard of living, the sort of thing you'd expect carved somewhere rather than found on a screen. Philosophical without being pleased with itself and beautifully simple in a way that most writing about how to work never manages.

I lost my entire morning to it. And I'm fairly sure that if I'd come across it on a normal Tuesday in my own environment it would have gone straight past me. Travel does something to how you read things. You're already in a reflective state, already slightly removed from the version of yourself that runs on autopilot at home and things land that would otherwise bounce.

I've no idea who made it. I've looked.

What got me first was what wasn't in there. No optimisation language anywhere, nothing about systems or morning routines and not a single word that would survive in a productivity newsletter. Every item is about how you exist around other people and how you treat yourself while you're doing it, which is a different conversation to the one the industry usually has about what makes someone good at this.

I've been creative commercially for twenty years. Before that, another fifteen where it was just what I did, with no career attached to it and no one paying for it. Being creative is the default setting for most people before the world talks them out of it. The ones who keep hold of it, turn it into a passion and then find it's become a career, are usually the people already doing most of what's on this list without ever having seen it written down.

Some of them I'd already earned without thinking about it. Curiosity about the world has never been a problem for me and collaborative spirit is most of what Open All Hours actually runs on, given the whole thing was built between two people in two different hemispheres who had to trust each other to get on with it. Empathy and active listening are the reasons the relationships that matter to me have held, in business and everywhere else.

Which is why the gaps are interesting. I don't know a single creative who could look at all eleven and honestly say they've got every one in check. If you're reading this and you're that person, come by the house and the first shot's on me, because I'd like to hear how you've managed it.

Everyone else has blind spots and they're not character flaws. They're just the areas that got less attention while other areas got more.

Two of mine stand out.

Rest without apology is the obvious one. The apology is the part that gets me, because the rest itself I can just about manage. It's the running commentary that comes with it, the sense that stopping needs justifying against everything not being done. Building brands is a job with no natural end point and the excuse for working through is permanently available.

Nobody takes rest away from you. You hand it over voluntarily, one evening at a time and call it commitment.

Boundaries are the same problem wearing different clothes. The list frames them as a form of self-love, which I'd have found soft a few years ago and now think is exactly right. Every boundary I've let go has been for a reason that made sense at the time, whether that was a conversation that couldn't wait or an inbound too good to park until tomorrow. Momentum makes a compelling case for why this particular exception is worth it and the exceptions accumulate until there's no line left to hold.

Neither of these is about the work. They're about the conditions you're in while you make it. Get them wrong for long enough and the work suffers anyway, just later and less obviously than you'd expect.

I come back to this list a couple of times a month. Not to fix anything and not as part of some plan. It just recalibrates where I am, which is worth more than most of the frameworks I've been handed over the years.

Three questions if you've got this far.

Grab a seat and give yourself the morning to take it all in. I'll be at the bar when you're done.

Shot of the good stuff.