Brandy Cerne

People join communities for benefits, not belonging.

They want to learn something new, to achieve a goal, to grow status, to be entertained, to have fun, etc.

They only find and value belonging after they've been a member and formed relationships.

Hyper-individualism leads to tribalism. People eventually rebel against the isolation and meaninglessness of hyper-individualism by joining a partisan tribe. This seems like relation but is actually its opposite. If a healthy community is based on mutual affection, the tribalist mentality is based on mutual distrust. If a healthy community is based

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These struggles are not against other people. The line between ego and soul runs down the middle of every person. Most of us, from time to time, buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for relationship. Most of us, from time to time, hew to a code of privacy that prevents us from actually knowing the people who live right

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Find out their wins above replacement. Through the stories they tell, look to see if the end result of the thing they did would have been significantly worse without their involvement. Try to separate their actions from those of their team or the circumstance. This quality should both highlight their talents and their sense of agency and

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Few things give me more of an instant seratonin boost than discovering a new metaphor, and Headlands Center for the Arts recently served up a lovely one. The multidisciplinary arts center just north of the Golden Gate Bridge (where, on another tangential note, I had my 8th grade graduation party) shared that 2023 Artist in Residence Daniela Rivera... See more

Theory for excellence. "Excellence" is a surprisingly generalizable skill. People who've been great at *anything* are more likely to have the drive and self-discipline to excel even at something unrelated. In 2015, we hired a number of ex-Juilliard musicians with no engineering experience with the assumption that “people who know how to be

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Brand sustainability comes down to two things:  relevance and differentiation.  Something either affects a brand's relevance; is it meaningful to my life today? And its differentiation; is it unique and can I identify that uniqueness? Everything falls into one of those two buckets as it relates to brand.  The goal is to be high on both. 

There are

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