How to make the world better through creativity; a day in life of Sasha Markova
Sasha Markova is the Executive Creative Director at Impossible Foods, a plant company with a mission to eliminate animals from the food chain by 2035 by making the most delicious meat from plants. Here she writes about her life and how creativity can improve the world.
I wake up very early. Around 5am. It’s a genetic hand-me-down from being raised in a family of writers. When I was a kid at my grandmother’s house, two family members were always shut in different rooms writing novels and another would be ‘resting’ in another room due to the stress of writing. It was a world where people wrote day and night.
Those first few hours of the day are vital. I love the quiet and the possibility of them and the night before I am always very ambitious for them. I don’t ever really end up doing too much. I write some small things, read the papers and talk on the phone a lot to other creative friends who get up early. All of us have had the same conversation for years – one though, that at the moment is gaining a lot of steam – how do you use creativity to create a nicer world?
This is all before about 7am.
I then walk my dog, Echo, through the hills of my neighborhood in LA, Echo Park. Dog walks have been responsible for some of the great meetings in my life, often full of creative advice. Once I met the former head of a major US TV network. ‘You’re nobody until you’ve been fired in LA,’ he told me.
I’m a huge believer that creativity is not 9 to 5. It is a constant 24 hour job. And when you’re involved in a big project you have to be out in the world, exposed to meeting all sorts of people and seeing all kinds of things non-stop. When you do that, all these great synchronicities begin to happen – you get plugged into a cosmos of creativity and the ideas gain the momentum of inevitability.
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