smile – Hello, I'm DK – creative producer and speaker coach

2025 Annual Review | Valuing To Creative Abundance

sun setting - wellington - justadandak.com — Own shot, sunset over West Wellington

Noting the adventures and insights gained in 2025 plus highlighting the intended pathway(s) for the next 365 days.

As shared previously, this past year was about valuing the reality which my ingrained principles has created.

It was also about…

RECOVERY

Without sounding dramatic, my body / spirit needed to ‘land’ and heal from the previous eighteen months which was a mess of challenges—after all, you bleed more when the knife is withdrawn.

Stasis was forced into my being after a couple bouts of ear infections and flu, then acute bronchitis (a new experience for me, and it only gets a half a star as it’s truly rubbish), with the latter laying me low for over three months.

With nearly a third of the year wiped out I took the opportunity to journal more (prompted in part by The Artists Way), and reading through the notes it was a lot to do with viewing those aforementioned negative experiences through a learning lens. In doing so they have faded in their potency and formed into unintended gifts, integrated into a more rounded world-view and a result of being (proudly) bold, because at the end of the day who wants to be mundane‽

ONE MILLION VIEWS

1000000 TEDx Talks Achieved - justadandak.com

This astounding numerical threshold was reached early February and if you missed it, check out the How To Get One Million Views On Your TEDx Talk blog piece which might help you or someone you know who’s in the same position.

Thanks for the support / watches / sharing-on and I still crack a bemused smile knowing my talk is featured on ted.com.

CLIENTS

Deep gratitude to those who were generous enough to explore a collaborative relationship this year—I truly tried hard to add positive value in all my interactions and delivery for every single one of you:

It was a healthy mix of creative producing and speaker coaching via my masterclasses / workshops / consulting plus there were over a half a dozen one-to-one humans (not featured in the list above) who trusted me to aid crafting their stories with them.

Thank you!

WINDY WELLY

wellington, new-zealand-map - justadandak.com — Made via MapCanvas

Since my return to the capital of New Zealand early this year my summary of the mood and feel in Wellington is scarcity.

Justifiable for the administrative center of the country due to austerity measures from the new conservative government, the massive public sector job cuts plus the same said leadership slashing community driven things along with fracturing societal / cultural gains. Add that to the continued global polycrisis stripping levity from anyone with a degree of intellect and empathy, the rise of technofeudalism (see video below), the migration of 50,000 souls last year, then scarcity is more than understandable:

Paradoxically though, I ended the year feeling full of gratitude and swank on the red carpet at the NZ premiere of Avatar: Fire and Ash. A wonderful experience full of sunshine, optimism (aligned to my ‘hope generator’ speech from 2019 TEDxWellington) and bouyancy.

Avatar Fire & Ash Wellington Dec 2025 premiere – red carpet view

Much like other hopeful things happening / I’ve noticed / participated in since my return:

WellyForge: founded by Ralph Higham with the aim to bring the tech community together in this monthly showcase evening gathering;
Goodlife Collective: a soul-filling initiative led by Freda Wells with the goal to build connection, agency, and our collective potential;
Creative Mornings, Wellington: attended a couple of these and apart from the timing it’s always good to be surrounded by curious-minded humans;
TEDxWellington: my ‘alma mater’ have plans to kick off with some studio talks next year after a quiet 2025.

So if opportunity allows I’d like to stay and contribute to the growing need for creative action in this fair city and beyond.

Which leads to my…

ATTENTION

HATCH 20th group image — The impressive group of HATCH 2024 humans.

Inspired by last years HATCH 20th anniversary experience, the question “what are you attending to?” has been like a thought-refrain, and has aided my understanding of where distractions have taken root.

With that in mind and after 16 years, I divested from LinkedIn, which followed on from me stopping tweetmailing last year, and to add to this I turned off all the stats relating to this website (and others).

I can’t stop my hunger for digital wonderment and it continues to feed my monthly digital breadcrumbs posts (on which I’ve had some positive feedback recently from several sources), although I find myself purposefully seeking out more creative fuel instead of the current dire news cycle.

Moving on from bothersome past conversations / experiences is more of a challenge, however, I’ve had some success by formulating competing and more compelling positive discourses / visions.

Once distractions are out of the way a juicier question reveals itself: what is your…

INTENTION

Archie Moore, ‘kith and kin’ exhibition at QAGOMA - justadandak.com — Own shot taken at the arresting Archie Moore, ‘kith and kin’ exhibition at QAGOMA

Personally, my spirit delights in intentionality—deliberate actions and causal intent are becoming drivers for my own imagination as I reorient the souls audaciousness into inviting new chapters.

My purpose still remains fixed:

I’m driven to enable people find and have voice.

This obviously manifests in my speaker / story coaching and all the activities around that (hoping to get a few more ‘impact courses’ sold in the coming year and do a lot more masterclasses / talks / coaching), although the creative producing side of things is morphing into daring new business plans.

All this will manifest through the…

2026 THEME : CREATIVE ABUNDANCE

Evening star (Washington, D.C.), November 23, 1923 - creative abundance - justadandak.com — Via Evening star (Washington, D.C.), November 23, 1923 / Library of Congress

The aim is to bring this spirit into my discussions (both internally and externally) and use it as fuel to drive action (in myself and others).

I’ll soon be sharing a multi-year research / thinking / iteration project around human creativity and productivity for organisations / companies and in doing so, quiet my inner disparager and tease out the wilting confidence which has been damaged from the previous years experience.

A personal example of this is my dedication to:

ASEMIC WRITING

This year I (re)discovered an artistic practice.

I have been creating calligraphic expressions of my mood for decades as throwaway doodles and scribbles.

I then discovered not only is it a artistic form but also a enchanting use of my time.

These offerings bypass expected semantic reasoning and align to the emotive range of my / your inner state(s). There is still structure although only used as a constraint in which to liberate my imagination.

For me, this practice of mark-making is intentionally post-literate and gestural in its composition, defined by a rhythmic cascade utilising the following classification:

“Asemic writing is closer to art than to writing. The word “asemic” comes from the same root as the word “semantic”, i.e., that which is a-semic has no semantic meaning. Artists who engage in asemic writing attempt to create forms that look like letters, pictographs, or other meaning-marks without themselves carrying any significance. The results can look at first glance like anything, from a foreign script to an alien crop circle to a geometric diagram to an illegible set of scribbled notes.”
Via On Asemic Writing: The Art of Meaning Beyond Syntax

I have created many hundred of pieces since giving myself the permission to shake off classical communication expectations and instead trust in the process of sitting, being, creating.

What is created is an invitation to explore and allow any understanding on my / your own terms, or if not, in the attempt the success has occurred anyway.

Watch this space.

BLOGGED

These are blog posts offered up in 2025:

Subscribe here to get an email every time I post:

SO…

…the aim is to cultivate a bias towards creative abundance, be deeply intentional about the conversations I have, the energy I devote to things and to whom.

So what about you my lovelies, what’s been the highlights / lowlights / lessons / intentions…?

Previous years reviews: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009…

#83 December 2025 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

On 19 August 1961, this is the only known collision between a car and a submarine via Wikipedia.

A bunch of things I’ve found on my digital strolls (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“Think of storytelling as peeling back layers to reveal what’s most meaningful:
Layer One: The Raw Experience. This is where we start—unfiltered truth, a messy, personal experience we feel compelled to share.
Layer Two: The Crafted Narrative. Here, we refine. We curate, find meaning, and decide what stays. We elevate the story beyond personal catharsis to something valuable for others.
Layer Three: The Universal Theme. The final layer is the essence—the emotion, lesson, or truth that resonates with anyone who hears it.”
How to Tell Stories That Move Mountains | Psychology Today

“The important thing to understand here is that the actual building is not an important part of the value calculation. We’re not really looking at the replacement cost, the unique design, the amenities, the location, etc. Those things influence the assumptions about the gross rent we can get or the cost of operating the building (higher cost means less net rent), but at the end of the day it isn’t the building that has value, it’s the income stream.”
Why Do Commercial Spaces Sit Vacant?

“Inception Point’s ability to flood the market with audio episodes faster than any human team could match starkly illustrates both the promise of AI and the nightmare scenario that it can truly come after every job. Even as companies have shed more than a million jobs this year, with many citing AI as a reason, there was a belief that certain creative roles would be safe. The biggest allure of a podcast, after all, is the personality of its host. But Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts.
“The price is now so inexpensive that you can take a lot of risks,” Wright told TheWrap. “You can make a lot of content and a lot of different genres that were never commercially viable before and serve huge audiences that have really never had content made for them.” At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach.”
An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week

“The “problem” was that creating art—real, human, meaningful writing—is slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with people. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don’t fit into a corporate style guide. Minority writers, specifically, are “high friction.” We talk about queerness and transphobia and racism, and We talk about disability. We make the advertisers uncomfortable.
So the Tech Bros, in their infinite mediocrity, decided to bypass the human element entirely. They built a machine that scrapes our work—our pain, our joy, our very souls—without consent, grinds it into a mathematical slurry, and extrudes it as a flavorless, inoffensive paste that can be sold by the bucket.”
The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles

“Across the world, scientists listened to the ocean soundscape before, during and after lockdown, using 200 ocean hydrophones that were already in place around the global ocean. When New Zealand entered lockdown on 26 March 2020, boat traffic in the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park – the country’s busiest coastal waterway – almost completely stopped. Underwater noise dropped to about one-third of normal levels within 12 hours – allowing the communication ranges of fish and dolphins to increase by up to 65%. For dolphins, that meant their calls could travel around 1 mile (1.5km) further than when hampered by shipping noise.”
Covid 2020: The year of the quiet ocean

“We all already see how AI’s can serve as workers. But how will AI’s will also become the new population of consumers? What do AIs need? They need to fulfill their tasks. This is why they actively resist getting turned off. Their urge to carry out their missions is easily as urgent as ours is to procreate. So instead of retailers selling food and clothes and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies will be selling energy, memory, network access, and processing power to the AI so that they can do their jobs working as agent contractors for other corporations. The AI’s will earn crypto for completing their agentic tasks. And they will spend it with technology companies who provide them the resources they need to function.”
The Joy of Becoming Worthless…except to each other

“1 Don’t make art for rich people;
2 Make art for everyone;
3 Don’t stand on the outside looking in, stand on the outside looking further out;
4 Don’t make punk rock;
5 Don’t make art bigger than yourself;
6 Don’t come the rebel;
7 The Lost Commandment;
8 Let your Lone Ranger ride;
9 Riot now, pay later;
10 Burn the Bridge;
11 Accept the contradictions.
As you will note, there are 11 commandments here and not the proclaimed 10. Please feel free to delete one of your choosing. I like choice.”
Bill Drummond’s 10 Commandments of Art | Bill Drummond | The Guardian

WATCH

via Warren and Mahoney Architectural Wellington Studio displaying their vision for the capital / check out this pdf as well.

EXPLORE

Chronicling America | The Library of Congress is an archive of scanned and digitized thousands of newspapers from across the United States, covering major events, small-town stories, ads, political cartoons, and daily life from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.

This is tremendous: Slop Evader via Tega Brain, a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022.

Open source app called NotchPrompter is an always-on-top floating text prompter for macOS (even with voice activation).

One persons (by illustrator Zara Picken) monster digital graphical archive of wonderful treats over at Modern Illustration.

A free online collection of Sound Therapy options (if you’re into that sort of thing).

If you ever need to Boing!

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.

Ourselves To Know | Liveris Academy Oratory Practice

Brisbane - uni of queensland - justadandak.com

Full day workshop reflections and testimonial.

Etched into the sandstone Michie Building of the University of Queensland, in Brisbane (as part of the very impressive Great Court) is the last line of the poem An Essay On Man: Epistle IV, Alexander Pope, a provocation of self-awareness, curiosity and exploration of knowledge acquisition:

“That Reason, Passion, answer one great aim;
That true Self-love and Social are the same;
That Virtue only makes our bliss below;
And all our knowledge is, Ourselves to know.”
An Essay On Man: Epistle IV, Alexander Pope

I was there to deliver a full days ‘purposeful storytelling’ workshop with the first year cohort of the Andrew N. Liveris Academy for Innovation and Leadership, providing the students with a learning adventure exploring the different approaches in the narrative form, with the aim of igniting a passion in the oratory plus leaving them with a bunch of approaches / experiences for future application:

“This is one of those cases where the “relationship” category here catastrophically breaks down. DK and I have done work together in many different contexts since we met in 2012 when we were both giving keynotes at the same conference. Since then, he’s brought me in to give workshops at BizDojo and a keynote and workshop at the Creative Leadership New Zealand 2018 Conference, I’ve been a participant in a couple of the TEDxWellington satellite events that he organised, and recently, we flew him over from Wellington to run a workshop for the Liveris Academy Scholars on presenting authentically.

The thing that jumps out at you about DK in all of these different settings is that he is a wonderful human being. Connection and collaboration are at the heart of everything that he does, and this animates all of his activities. The second thing is that he is a SUPERB assembler of talent. I am still friends with several of the awesome people that he pulled together for CLNZ18 – both because they’re awesome people, and also highly skilled. Finally, DK is an outstanding speaker himself. He has clearly thought through the issues around speaking at a very deep level.

The workshop that he gave for us in the Liveris Academy for Innovation & Leadership last month illustrated many of his skills. While working with a younger cohort than he normally does, DK was still able to work out how to meet them where they are at, and he designed and delivered a fantastic day for the students.

If you ever have a chance to collaborate with DK, I highly recommend taking advantage of it!”
Tim Kastelle, Professor and Director, Andrew N. Liveris Academy for Innovation and Leadership, Co-Founder The Intangible Labs, Innovation Guy

Huge thanks to Tim and Kate from the program in making this happen and for the opportunity plus the students for their attention, trust and wonderful participation.

#82 November 2025 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A bunch of things I’ve found on my digital strolls (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“Creativity is just deviance put to good use. It, too, seems to be decreasing. A few years ago, I analyzed a bunch of data and found that all popular forms of art had become “oligopolies”: fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.”
The Decline of Deviance – by Adam Mastroianni

“Digital ID regimes strip privacy from everyone and further marginalize those seeking asylum or undocumented people. They are pursued as a technological solution to offline problems but instead allow the state to determine what you can access, not just verify who you are, by functioning as a key to opening—or closing—doors to essential services and experiences.”
The UK Has It Wrong on Digital ID. Here’s Why. | Electronic Frontier Foundation

“There’s a word for this and it’s not being “resilient” in the face of failure, it’s antifragility. Where you get stronger because of it. The great thing is once you learn this (and we mean really internalize it and accept it), something shifts. You start getting very grateful for all your failures, large or small.
“I’m glad I got fired – I never would have founded my company”
“I’m glad I never got into Harvard – I never would have met my husband at UCLA”
“I’m glad I got sick – I never would have stopped.””
Thank you, shitshow – Gapingvoid

“The most valuable real estate in the world is the graveyard. There lie millions of half-written books, ideas never launched, and talents never developed. Most people die with everything still inside of them. The way to live is to create. Die empty.”
Here’s how to live: Create. | Derek Sivers

“Brain and psychology researchers are delving into how slides down the moral slope begin and what keeps them going. Initially we may be horrified at the thought of lying, cheating or hurting someone. But as we engage in wrongdoing over and over, our brains tend to grow numb to it. It’s harder to embezzle or kill for the first time than it is for the tenth.
Yet moral snowballing can also happen in the opposite direction. Surprisingly, just as neural habituation can drive ethical collapse, it can also drive escalating spirals of virtue, in which one honest or brave action makes the next one easier to carry out. And because our brains adapt to repeated behaviors, movement in a given moral direction can persist—making it all the more critical to pinpoint where and how that movement begins.”
What Brain Science Reveals about Ethical Decline and Moral Growth | Scientific American