James Hurst · Output 5 · 29 October 2026

The future called.
It wants its glue stick back.

Hello,

For someone who can word salad anything — this has been a few weeks of lots of talking.

At Left Lane Capital’s Fast Growth Summit, that meant talking brand, creativity and the limits of paid growth with Chris Taylor and Adam Harrison. Adam brought the clever stuff. I brought the cheap gags and my increasingly well-travelled line: use your product to build your brand; don’t use your brand to sell your product.

At CMO Inspired Summit in London, the argument was about thinking, risk and craft. At In-House In-Focus in Chicago, it was about weirding the normal—and normaling the weird.

In the Q&A it hit me — we need to define some key things that people can do to actually act on this thinking.

Because the world is anxious. Another presentation telling everyone to “embrace uncertainty” is probably not the intervention we need. We’ve embraced it. It’s moved in. It doesn’t pay rent.

So I went looking for small signs of people doing something else.

Not optimism as a brand colour. Actual things people can join, touch, mend or laugh at.

1. The hottest new feature is a box for your phone

Back in August, The Guardian’s reporting on Britain’s switch-off gatherings described the Offline Project: screen-free walks, collage classes and supper clubs, with phones put in a lockbox. Not breaking news, but an idea worth coming back to.

The interesting bit isn’t the box. It’s the collage class.

“Stop scrolling” is a telling-off. “Come and make something with us” is an invitation.

That feels like a useful distinction for anyone making a product, a place or a brand. Don’t just remove the thing people lean on. Give them something worth leaning towards.

A table. Some paper. Someone else looking faintly concerned about their glue stick.

2. A club with absolutely no homework

Silent Book Club is a beautifully unthreatening proposition: bring your own book, read alongside other people, talk if you fancy it.

Mercury News describes Manga & Matcha meetups and audiobook walks. The format has travelled as far as Antarctica. Apparently even the end of the world could use a quiet reading hour.

The same report offers an important wrinkle: these clubs may mostly be serving people who already read. That doesn’t make them pointless; it makes the claim smaller and more honest.

What if more experiences started there?

You don’t have to become a more impressive version of yourself to take part.

Familiar gets you in. The interesting work is what you change once people feel comfortable.

A book club without the performance of having understood the book. A social event without a compulsory personality.

That’s “normal the weird” to me: give a strange idea a recognisable doorway.

3. Your jumper doesn’t need a replacement. It needs a plot twist.

At this month’s Dutch Design Week, Studio Karavan’s programme put visible mending inside a mobile textile studio: a 1974 Piaggio Ape that used to belong to a bakery.

From bread to thread. Finally, a pivot I can get behind.

The programme included darning and patching with Sam Bennett. Last year I so enjoyed SFMOMA’s Creative Mending event. It offered a similar invitation: bring damaged clothing and learn to repair it—free, with no museum admission required.

The invitation wasn’t “arrive with taste.” It was “bring the thing with a hole in it.”

I like the shift from hiding a repair to making it visible. The evidence that something has been used becomes something you add to, not something you apologise for.

This is where my line about perfection being fear in a tuxedo stops being a slide and becomes a practical question.

Are we making the first attempt easier—or making people feel they need permission, equipment and an unusually photogenic kitchen before they begin?

A little less doom. A little more doing.

I don’t think a glue stick fixes the housing crisis. These examples aren’t evidence that anxiety is falling, or that everyone can afford the time, travel or ticket.

The WHO’s work on social connection is a useful reminder that access matters: income, disability and the places available to us shape whether “just join something” is remotely helpful.

But there is something worth noticing here. People are making room for participation without perfection. For being together without performing. For leaving with something more tangible than a notification.

If you’re building a brand, that’s a better brief than “make us culturally relevant.”

What could your product help someone do with another person? What could you make free, easier to enter, or less intimidating? Could you cook a great meal ;)

Use your product to build your brand. Give people a useful experience before asking them to believe a useful-sounding sentence.

My modest challenge: make one small thing this week that somebody else can join in with.

A reading lunch. A repair table. Ten minutes of making something with no ambition for it to become content.

It can be a bit wonky. That may be how people know they’re allowed to have a go.

James

P.S. This is the territory behind my book, Weird the Normal / Normal the Weird: one volume, two front covers, two ways into the same question. You’ll find it at Rogue School.

Next up: BOLD festival. I’m looking forward to talking at BOLD festival in Brno, Czech Republic.

And The Business Show. I’m also looking forward to talking at The Business Show in London — although with a very early flight into London on the 12th, do bring me coffee!

--- You’re receiving Output because you subscribed at Hurst World. Read or share this edition online · To unsubscribe, use the link in your own copy of the email.