This summer, I went on a forest walk at Camp Pemigewassett in New Hampshire to see mushrooms growing in the wild, and to observe their ancient structures. We went after a day of rain and I saw what felt like a vibrant coral reef full of mushrooms. Red mushrooms, purple mushrooms, orange mushrooms, slimy mushrooms and cute mushrooms. Everywhere. I’ve spent many hours walking through New England woods, but I never saw mushrooms before. One of our incredible wildlife guides, Riley McCue, said that when you're doing something like a safari or you're out in nature, you have to turn on your “seeing eyes.” Now I see mushrooms all the time.

Once the seeing eyes are on, you notice everything. Creative people have seeing eyes, because ideas can be everywhere. I think it’s a gift many anxious people have, too.

My conversation with creative leaders Penn and Kim Holderness reminded me of that mushroom walk. Kim Holderness has seeing eyes for content ideas. She's hyper-aware of what people are dealing with, noticing the small moments that make up our shared human experience. Penn pictures song lyrics, music, visuals upon hearing a few words.

What struck me most about our conversation isn’t just the fact that the Holderness family has built a sustainable content production business in a hugely fickle industry (they have over 2 billion views and are New York Times bestselling authors), but how they've structured their work life around their own tricky brains. Listen here.

Penn and Kim's creative process is a beautiful example of how different types of neurodivergent brains can complement each other. Kim, with her anxiety-driven awareness, acts as the team's observer and idea generator. She says, “I'm hyper aware. And I'm hyper aware when I go to Target and notice what everybody's stressing about. I'm hyper aware in my conversations with people about what everybody's dealing with. And I think I'm a good noticer of things. After that I can come up with a script or a sketch. For example, we were packing for a trip and I noticed we were going to be gone for 48 hours and I packed, you know, like 10 pairs of underwear. And I'm like, this is ridiculous. Why do I have so many pairs? And so I said, Penn, that would be a really funny song about how many pairs of underwear I pack. I can kind of tee him up and then he disappears and [creates].

Penn, who has ADHD, describes his brain as "Coachella" – an open-air concert taking in everything at once. But when it’s time to write a song, he can totally focus on that. When Kim brings him an observation, Penn's brain lights up with music, conversations, and lyrics.

“She comes to me with an idea and all of a sudden I hear music,” says Penn. “I hear conversations in my head, I hear lyrics and they're all welcome. And when there's something simple enough for me to focus it on-- like underwear, then my brain is able to find all of these new things that probably haven't been said, thought, heard, sung, written, whatever. And then they just kind of find their way on either into my fingers or onto a piece of paper. It’s because my brain is saying yes to everything that comes to me. And it sometimes takes several drafts. I think a lot of great ideas are already out there.” You just have to find them, says Penn.

Structuring for Success

The Holdernesses have designed their work week to accommodate their brains’ needs. They protect each others’ time so each can focus on what they do best:

* Mondays are their "rip the bandaid off" day for meetings – a deliberate choice to prevent interruptions to their creative flow later in the week

* Tuesdays are for video shoots

* Wednesdays are for editing and administrative tasks

* Thursdays are for podcasting and additional content

* Fridays are protected for brainstorming and daydreaming

This structure isn't just about efficiency – it's about creating space for their brains to work in their optimal ways. Kim needs time to observe and notice, while Penn needs uninterrupted periods to transform those observations into music and lyrics.

The workflow is usually that Kim “has the big idea: Is it a song? Is it a skit? Is there a script collaboration with all of us? We polish it. And then what's called a table read where we all sit there and I write a song and we listen to the song. And then Amory and Sam help us shoot it and imagine what that looks like.”

Penn says, “Very rarely can I do what Kim does but that's where the collaboration starts, which again is a challenge for my ADHD brain. If I’ve put all this stuff together and I think ‘my god this is amazing’ and then they send it back out into the world and people are like ‘yeah.’ I get a little sensitive about that sometimes.”

Kim adds, “We are trying to create a space where you can have ideas that aren’t bad, but ideas where they're not going to work right now. Or we need to kind of polish it a little bit to make it make sense for what we need.”

Creative Pressure, Creative Joy

Running a content business is challenging. Penn shared that he wakes up every morning feeling "unemployed" – yesterday's viral hit only buys you a couple of days in the internet economy. Kim has her scheduled creative crises (marked on her calendar for the second week of January!) when she'll declare they've "reached the end of the internet." But they've learned to trust their process and each other.

After hitting career ceilings in traditional media (Penn was literally told by an agent he'd gone as far as he could), they took a leap, starting a business without much savings. “We wanted to make something that was just us, that we weren't making for somebody else, which is what we had done for 20 years. And their first video “was us.” And it was a hit. “It was fun. … Other people were going through what we were going through. It allowed us to use some of the art and artistic skill that we had honed when we were children that was begging to come back out, I think. I think if you're an artist, it comes out. If you have a creative bone, even if you're an attorney or an accountant, if you have a creative heart, it's going to come out in that work or somehow. We feel every single day we knock on wood, that we are able to do this.... We've been able to sustain and grow, but I feel like we kind of won the internet lottery that first time around. We got really, really lucky. But then we did it again and again and again. That is very hard.”

Penn and Kim's story exemplifies what I've long believed about leadership: success comes from doing less of what's hard for you and leaning into your superpowers or unique strengths. They've built their entire business model around their strengths rather than trying to force themselves into conventional business structures or a conventional work week.

For those of us who have tricky brains, their story is a powerful reminder that our "different" brains aren't obstacles to overcome – they're assets to embrace. The key is finding (or creating) the right environment for them to thrive.

Until next time,

Morra