How My Work Ended Up at a Funeral
What Are Artifacts & Why Do They Matter?
A few years ago, I found myself in rooms with people near the end of their lives, helping capture their stories for MGM.
One of the men we met was Mr. Peach. He told us about how, during the height of segregation, his shop became a kind of Main Street sanctuary for the Black kids in his neighborhood. If the world outside got dangerous, or if anything went wrong, these kids knew exactly what to do. They ran to Mr. Peach.
Several years after we wrapped the project, Mr. Peach passed away.
A few days later, his daughter reached out. She had a question: could she play the interview we’d filmed at his funeral?
It’s a strange thing to realize something you made for work is going to be played in a room full of grieving people.
In that moment, the way I saw my job fundamentally shifted. We hadn’t made content, something you scroll past and forget. We had made an artifact.
An artifact is simply something people hold onto.
When you hear a story about a man like Mr. Peach, it does more than entertain you for a few minutes. It changes what you do next. You hear about someone building a sanctuary in his shop, and you pause and think: “Yeah… I want to be like that.”
It gives you a direction.
You see this same dynamic playing out in culture right now. It’s why shows like Shrinking and Ted Lasso have hit the nerve they have. People don’t just watch them. They internalize them.
These shows model how to apologize, how to lead, and how to show up for people. They do more than show us how to be a decent person, they operate like blueprints for how to move through the world. They signal what’s acceptable, who we belong to, and what we actually have permission to do.
That’s the difference between content that performs and meaning that prevails. Content is easy. Meaning is hard.
At some point, distraction isn’t enough. We all look for a blueprint, meaning we can actually act on.
If you’re responsible for a brand, a team, or a company, you’re likely feeling the friction of this right now.
Generating noise is basically free these days (yay?). And because of that’s true, it’s incredibly easy to fall into the exhausting trap of just competing for visibility. We start to operate under this assumed rule that if we can just capture enough eyeballs, people will naturally know where to go.
But in the rush to stay visible, it’s worth pausing to ask: which messages are actually making people do anything differently?
Capturing attention isn’t the same as offering direction.
When a shared story starts to lose its shape—whether it’s a brand losing relevance or a team starting to drift—it’s rarely because people weren’t listening. It’s because something got named, but nothing became an artifact people could actually take with them.
That’s what I’m unpacking in this week’s podcast episode: how to go from capturing attention to making something actually mean something…because that’s where things either move or stall.
It starts with me finding a secret list in my son’s backpack and ends with me completely covered in mud.