The Tapestry and The Hustle

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The Tapestry, Six Years Later

Six years ago, I used the tapestry to explain why all the apparently disconnected things I did actually fit together (“The Hustle and the Tapestry”). I think I had a pretty good sense then of the tension between building a tapestry and pursuing the hustle, but I understand the metaphor differently now. The tapestry gives me a center of gravity. It helps me decide what to pursue, what to connect, what to let develop slowly, what to pass along to somebody else, and when the old hustle is trying to disguise itself as opportunity.

It has been a busy six years, to say the least. I finally completed my dissertation, though it took ten years total. I have changed jobs a few more times—first from Brandeis to Harvard, then College Unbound, and now Northeastern. I have continued to blog here, albeit erratically, and I started a second blog in the form of a Substack. That one has been a little more consistent and has gained a much larger audience in three years than this blog has in fifteen. I still love this blog, though. This has been a space to play around with ideas, write about the different things I am trying to make sense of, and share work in ways that have mattered to me for a long time.

Some things in life have stayed the same. Six years ago, I was always looking for ways to work with other people, connect people, and present with colleagues. I still enjoy creating and fostering community. But the scale has changed. My work has become more widely known and sought after, and a whole new part of my professional life has grown around doing two or three talks or workshops each month with colleges and universities around the world. I am also regularly writing and publishing with friends and colleagues on different subjects, as well as consulting and providing insight and support to institutional leaders.

So, as I look back at that original essay, the tapestry and hustle metaphor has continued to guide me. But I have a clearer sense now of what the work of the tapestry looks like. What does it mean to weave it? What are the practices that help it come together? What I’m finding is that the tapestry is the evolving pattern of a life and body of work organized around particular values. Weaving is the practice of discerning, connecting, cultivating, and sometimes relinquishing the threads in that pattern.

Compound Interest: Why the Tapestry Get Stronger

I have been thinking a lot about the compound interest of practice—the habits and ways of showing up that become part of who you are. The more you do it, the more natural the movement becomes. You get into a flow. Early practice makes later practice more effective, not because you have figured everything out, but because you have built enough muscle memory to recognize what might be possible.

This blog is probably the clearest example for me. I started blogging here more than fifteen years ago, and while I have waxed and waned in how frequently I post, I have kept coming back to it. There are now more than 2,000 posts here. That is a lot of thoughts, insights, experiments, presentations, resources, and probably a fair amount of stuff that I would phrase differently now. But that is also the point. This has become a practice. It is something I do because it is important to how I show up in the world.

I have long been in the habit of sharing things I have published and presentations I have given. When ChatGPT was released, I did what I normally do: I started writing about it here. Those posts led to requests, in part because many folks in education were also trying to figure it out and not that many people were writing about generative AI in higher education in December 2022. The talks and workshops created more opportunities to share back what I was learning, and then, after about 10 months, I started the Substack.

The contrast is interesting to me. I have been doing this blog for fifteen years, and I do not expect I will ever give it up because it has been so important to me. But when I started the Substack, I took what I had learned here and applied it differently. The Substack focuses on AI, but the practices of writing, sharing resources, making sense of emerging questions, and turning presentations back into artifacts had already been developed here over the prior 12 years. The newer space became much more attended and engaged with than this one, but it did not come from nowhere.

That is what I mean by compound interest. I could not have predicted that AI and higher education would become the work that took off for me. There was every chance that it could have gone by the wayside. But I had the practices ready when the opportunity came along. Practice is working those muscles so that you are ready for an opportunity: not necessarily to take every opportunity, but to recognize what you might do with it.

Over time, the threads increasingly reinforce one another. A framework I develop for a workshop can become a blog post. That post can become a conversation with a colleague. The conversation can evolve into a course, and the course can turn into an article. Each piece can build upon another piece, sometimes in directions I could not have anticipated at the beginning. With each repetition, I get better at seeing how the threads fit together and how different threads might be blended for different effects. The metaphor starts to have its own internal rules.

A Tapestry Made With Other People

While I am talking here about my personal tapestry, it is deeply connected to and made more meaningful through other people’s tapestries. Much of what makes up my work is relational: the interviews I do through the Substack to better understand the field; the mentoring programs I participate in, not simply to share but to learn; and the different ways I try to co-present or co-created with folks who are doing fascinating and powerful things. This connective work is meaningful unto itself because I believe it can be mutually enriching, but it also helps guide the tapestry work.

Over the last six years, I have continually looked for opportunities to connect. For me, that is always powerful because other people help me learn how to show up differently and how they make sense of their own work and the world around them. I increasingly see mentorship as a collaborative experience that enriches both people in different ways. The same is true of collaboration more broadly. The work is not only about what I can make or accomplish; it is also about who I can learn alongside, who I can amplify, and how all of that changes what becomes possible.

Following the Adjacent Possible

I am incredibly grateful for Steven Johnson’s work, particularly his explanation and exploration of the adjacent possible. It has helped me understand my work and much of my life as a series of decisions that were not necessarily made with a big-picture plan in mind. Instead, I have often understood enough about the next step to know that it was the right step—and trusted that getting there would reveal opportunities I could not yet see.

The adjacent possible is, in the most watered-down version of it, the idea that you cannot see beyond the horizon. But when you move toward what looks like the horizon, you are met with a new landscape of what is possible. That has been a hallmark of my professional life.

For somebody who has spent the last fifteen years deeply involved in instructional design, where backwards design is one of the central practices, I have not really done that with my career. In backwards design, you start with the outcomes you want and work back toward the assignments, activities, and learning content that will get you there. I have rarely had that kind of certainty about where I was going.

My first job out of college was meaningful and interesting, and I enjoyed the work, but I did not enjoy the culture. Eventually, that culture started to gnaw at me. It became harder to be myself there. So I left for a position that was not necessarily seen as professional and paid about 50% of what I had been making. But I knew it was the right choice, and what I did not know was that, because it was an overnight job, it would make it possible for me to teach in college during the day—the time when there was the widest range of adjunct courses available. Making that move to overnight counselor opened a pathway that eventually leads to where I am today.

The same was true when I left Harvard for College Unbound. Harvard is obviously a prestigious institution, and I was in a role that many people would have seen as significant. I took a substantial pay cut (five digits) to go to an institution few people had heard of or understood. But at College Unbound, first as Director of Digital Pedagogy and then as Director of Faculty Development and Innovation, I had far more possibility. It was a young college that was growing and trying to become more established, and I had the opportunity to help create some of the central pieces it needed.

It also meant that, when AI came around, I could engage with it, think about it, and participate in the conversation in ways that would not have been possible for me at Harvard (for a variety of good and less-good reasons). There is something not always appreciated about leaving a place with more prestige, more pay, and more obvious forms of capital for a place that might be seen as having less of all of those things. Yet that new space gave me room to explore, grow, and do things I would not have been able to do before.

That is what feels so powerful to me about the adjacent possible. It is not necessarily about knowing the whole pattern. It is about recognizing that a transition might be right, and then being open to seeing what the new terrain makes possible. That is why the tapestry works better for me than a map or a plan. It only becomes fully legible in hindsight, but there can still be intention and thoughtfulness in every weave. You can have some vision, but you may also need to see how it gets developed thread by thread.

When the Hustle Takes the Wheel

One of the things I explored in the original essay was the move from hustle to tapestry building. That still matters, but I still recognize it is not something everybody gets to choose or work toward in the same way. There are a lot of complicated, nuanced, frustrating, and unfair reasons for that. Scarcity is not imaginary, and neither are the pressures that push people to keep saying yes.

And even when I feel like I no longer need the hustle, the hustle does not necessarily go away just because things are going well. In fact, it can become louder. Over the last three years, I have done more than 120 talks, keynotes, and workshops around AI, teaching and learning, higher education, leadership, and related topics. Those opportunities often come with pay, and it can be incredibly hard to say no because it feels like saying no to money that I may not get again.

It is a very similar feeling to adjuncting, when you say yes to all the courses you can because you do not know how many will run or whether the institution will bring you back the following semester. I do not know whether the requests for talks will keep coming. I do not know whether the money will stay on the table. I still do not know. That unknowing has made it easy for the scarcity mindset to reappear and make me say yes more often than I probably should.

So I have had to pay more attention and develop more discernment. I have to ask: Does this belong to the work? Do I actually have time for it? Do I have care for it? Am I doing it because I am excited and interested, or because I want the paycheck? The answers are never perfect or clean, but I have to ask the questions and see what the answers bring.

Some advice Robin DeRosa gave me about a year into this work has been especially helpful. She is somebody whose work in open education, equity, justice, and learning I have admired—and, yes, fanboyed over—for years. In a conversation, she reminded me that my “no” can be somebody else’s yes. Saying no to an opportunity can create the possibility of recommending somebody else: somebody earlier in their career, somebody doing really good work who has not yet gotten the attention, or somebody whose voice needs to be in that room.

I am incredibly grateful for that insight. Discernment is part of why the tapestry remains a practice rather than an achievement. It is about building a life that can hold the work, too.

AI Can Flood the Loom

It would be strange to write this reflection at this point in my career without talking about AI. AI, or at least much of the discourse around it, is deeply shaped by hustle culture. It is so focused on productivity and the promise of doing more, faster. And that is highly seductive to a great many people. Myself included. As somebody who comes from and is still lured by hustle culture, it can be hard to resist the siren song of AI.

Where I have tried to lean in differently is by asking how I might use AI as a tool of discernment and not simply a tool of acceleration. There are places where I use it to accelerate things. I might vibe code and play around with something I am curious to create. But I also need to be mindful of creating just to create more. For me, there are ways AI can make the work slower, more deliberate, and more deliberative.

This essay is one example. I used AI to interview me, help me think through the major ideas and outline, and then provide feedback as I wrote. I probably could have made this shorter and breezier, but AI also helped me tease out key elements I might otherwise have overlooked. That, for me, is a more useful role. I want it to support the work of thinking, not replace the work of thinking.

Sensemaking is part of how I show up in the world. Could AI help me present that sensemaking more quickly and more widely? Sure. But I do not think that is necessarily the point. To me, that is often the hustle speaking—the fear that I cannot produce enough or that I am not enough. I continue to (try to) reject that way at this juncture in my life.

I do worry for folks at other points in their careers about how seductive AI can be and how easily it can lead people toward producing work that is not sustainable or even wanted. My hope is that we can come to AI differently and ask not simply, “How much more can I do?” but “What else can AI help us notice, imagine, practice, question, or make newly possible?”

That is where I think AI can fit within tapestry building. Not to make me build the tapestry faster, crank out more yarn, or make it look prettier. I am okay with blemishes in the tapestry. There should be blemishes. It is the work of a person who only gets to make that tapestry once. What I want from AI is not help making it perfect, but help making it distinct: not how much it depicts, but what it depicts.

Finding the Central Focus

If you are still here, you can probably tell that I have thought a lot about this. I started working on this piece four months ago. I promise I am not turning it into a book or seminar series—though I suppose the trilogy: Envision Your Tapestry, Seize the Threads of Life, and Weave Your Best Life might be coming to a hotel conference room near you someday.

More or less, this is about making sense of work I have been doing not only over the last six years, but throughout much of my career and maybe my life. Like much of my writing, I share it because I think it may find somebody who sees some of their own experiences or ways of thinking reflected here. The tapestry metaphor was a useful contrast to hustle when I first stumbled upon it. Years later, it has become a stronger tool for bringing values into my thinking, especially when scarcity has driven so much of my life.

In the end, I am still weaving. What the tapestry resembles is the person I am practicing becoming. I look forward to seeing what that looks like.
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