It’s been a minute since I last wrote one of these newsletters. I took a break over the holidays and then went into 2026 with a specific plan: execute the fourth iteration of my January "DAILYS" challenge. Each day, working off the given Genuary prompts, I would produce a short song snippet in Ableton and a corresponding visual in TouchDesigner, and then post the output to my Instagram Stories.

For context, this tradition started when I was living in the Yukon. Back then, it was a low-stakes sandbox, combining Super8 film with audio loops just to keep the winter blues at bay. It was purely experimental play. It was actually during those low-pressure sessions in 2022 that I first discovered TouchDesigner, which changed the trajectory of my life (a story for another time perhaps).

But January 2026 felt different.

I’ve recently finished my Master of Digital Media. I’m building a creative life in Toronto. I have "career goals." Somewhere along the way, I stopped viewing these dailies as experiments and started viewing them as auditions.

I told myself that every daily output had to advance my career, dazzle a potential employer, or go viral. I compared my sketches to the TouchDesigner and #Genuary pros that I look up to.

The result? The fun evaporated. The work became heavy. I fell five days behind, paralyzed by the gap between what I wanted to make and what I thought I should make.

To borrow a term from the world of hockey: I was gripping the stick a little too tight.

The Fix: The 5x5x5 Challenge

To break the paralysis and catch up on the 5 days I had missed, I forced myself to embrace a "perfectionist's nightmare" (which was actually one of the Genuary prompts I had missed).

I set hard constraints for myself:

- 5 minutes to record each audio track.

- 5 minutes to generate each visual.

- Hard stop. Live with the results.

I literally set a timer. It was terrifying and chaotic, but it worked. The outputs weren't masterpieces, but they existed. I re-learned that finishing is a skill distinct from perfecting.

I even recorded and posted the whole thing to Youtube so others could potentially learn from my process and mistakes:

The Pivot: Tiny Experiments

Shortly after the month and the challenge ended, I watched this talk by Anne-Laure Le Cunff and then promptly read her full book on Tiny Experiments (which I highly recommend).

It clicked instantly. I had been trying to force a linear path, expecting every daily sketch to be a step on a 10-year plan.

But creativity (and life in general!) is circular, not linear. You make, you learn, you iterate. Over and over again.

From building up my arts practice in the Yukon to working through the messy middle of research-creation during my Master's thesis, I realized that my happiest, most productive moments happened when I allowed myself to be wildly experimental and focused more on the process and learning than the output or the outcome.

So, I am reaffirming my commitment to experimentation. I’m letting go of the pressure to be the "most sought-after freelancer" by Tuesday, and getting back to the iterative, shifting process of just making things and seeing what happens.

I feel lighter already.