Adam's Blog

The sudden decision by Disney, ABC, and Hulu to pull a fully produced season of The Bachelorette just days before its scheduled premiere goes beyond entertainment headlines. It reveals the system by which creative industries actually function.

If you’ve been in the creative trenches for a while—producing a film, scaling a venture, leading a seminar, building a product—you’ve felt the Standard Playbook. Be careful. Sand down the rough edges. Confuse accessibility with neutrality. Become a chameleon so everyone is comfortable.

The Super Bowl is often discussed as a game, an entertainment event, or a marketing spectacle. All of that is true. And all of it misses what the Super Bowl actually reveals.

Most creative careers do not end in failure; they end in exhaustion. People rarely stop because they lack talent, intelligence, or ideas. They stop because they built a way of working that could not carry them through time—financially, emotionally, or structurally.

Every title tells a story, even before a single page is written. It suggests what kind of conversation the reader is about to enter. When I began working on this project, I had no title, just a question that had followed me for decades: How do people keep going? I had seen so many gifted creators, artists, founders, teachers, leaders, step into their work with extraordinary vision, only to step away when the world pushed back.