I Created A Poem You Could Only Read By Destroying It.
I created a poem you could only read by destroying it.
We often think of poetry as static words on a page, but part of the point of making art is to innovate on what the medium can be. That’s the same challenge I bring to my work as a keynote speaker on creativity and innovation: helping audiences see familiar tools—and themselves—in new ways.
When my art collective hosted a gallery exhibit with "erosion" as the theme, I took that constraint as a creative challenge.
The result was Ruin to Read: a black slab with a poem cast into it, barely visible under most light. The only way to reveal the poem was to scrape the surface—eroding it—and watch the words beneath emerge.
Some attendees scraped so eagerly they accidentally obscured the words they wanted to reveal; others hesitated to scrape at all because interfering with the art felt “wrong.”
The delight for me—as both an artist and a motivational keynote speaker on creative risk—was that the text of the poem invited attendees to embrace this tension: the reality that intimately connecting with anything causes us to change and possibly ruin it, but also to better appreciate and miss it when it erodes beyond recognition.
That initial constraint led to a “poem” that wasn't words on a page, but the experience people went through in order to read them—just as the best breakthroughs in any field are often less about what we make, and more about how we engage.
The biggest breakthroughs often begin with a constraint. When we treat limits on our tools, time, or materials as an invitation to expand our imagination instead of shrinking it, we find entirely new ways to shape the world around us. That’s the heart of every innovation keynote speech I deliver: showing that limitations don’t block creativity—they unlock it.
Whatever medium feels most alive to you right now—be it work, a passion project, or something else—don’t wait for perfect, unrestricted conditions to try things out. Think Inside the Box, and you might surprise yourself when you discover what’s possible.