Welcome to Issue 43 of A Good Reputation, a newsletter about how to use storytelling to grow your brand. (Did someone send you? Subscribe here.)

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Hello Reader,

It doesn’t matter if you’re in middle school or approaching middle age, hearing someone say “butthole” will always be funny.

While the word rarely makes an appearance in our house (unless there’s a medical emergency like butt worms, which ripped through first grade earlier this year), it came in perfect timing last week.

It was just after dinner, and I wanted to do something fun with my two girls to lighten the mood. Things have felt heavy in the world and online, and we've all sensed the tension.

To reset, I suggested we play exquisite corpse—a group storytelling game where each person writes for one minute, folds the paper to hide their part, and leaves just a sentence visible for the next person to continue the story blindly.

Lucia, my 10-year-old, kicked it off with a story about a girl who couldn’t find a pair of shoes that fit her size 100 feet and embarked on a quest to look for a suitable solution. (A classic hero’s journey.)

I got the paper next and saw only the last line, which read, “She went where no one else would look.”

Naturally, I continued with “...the butthole. It was dark (and kind of smelly), but someone had to do it.”

Mila, my 7-year-old, didn’t understand the assignment and wrapped it up with a question: "Wat is happining? Is she going rock klimbing? I am confyoosed. Watever. The end.”

The resulting story about a girl who couldn’t find shoes to fit her absurdly-sized feet that led her into a butthole resulted in absolute nonsense, belly laughs that gave us cramps, and a lightness we hand’t felt in days.

In that moment, I realized how much I’ve been neglecting (and desperately needing) more play in my life.

Not rest—play.

Play to be silly, reconnect, and reignite that creative spark that gets snuffed out by the serious business of building a business.

A Good Perspective

I say this to my clients and peers building brands all the time (and I truly believe it):

Burnout doesn’t happen because we work too hard and don't rest enough. It happens because we lose interest, desire, and delight in the things we’re working on.

As Jasmine Bina recently put it, "It’s no coincidence that people who manage to align 'how they earn' and 'how they love to play' are the ones we point to as living the dream."

As products of our culture and modern-day society, many of us spend our working days powering through instead of striving for ways to make things more enjoyable.

Our obsession with productivity has stripped play from our purview. And societal expectations of what it means to be a “responsible” adult has us all taking ourselves so damn seriously.

Play, as we think of it, is considered the opposite of work. It’s what you get to do after you’ve wrapped up with getting down to business.

But actually, plenty of studies have shown that play can have a profound impact on our well-being and productivity.

One particular study passed around in my branding community by McKinsey & Co. found that executives who engaged in play were up to five times more productive in their work—a powerful signal that play can be a catalyst for performance, not a distraction from it.

Why? Because play in work feels like flow.

If you’ve ever experienced that state of flow, you know it’s when you get your best work done. (And, more importantly, actually enjoy it.)

I've talked to a lot of creatives about how and when they get into a state of flow. For some, it just comes, and they capitalize on the moment. For others, they create a time and space to do deep work, and after farting around for several minutes (sometimes hours) they're able to get into it.

For me, it happens after reading, watching, or engaging with content or people that are entirely out of my regular realm of consumption. Or opening up a blank document with no plan.

But beyond getting into a state of flow, I've noticed that the more playfully I approach work, the more creative and engaged everyone around me becomes.

For instance, when I started my last client meeting with a quick game of two truths and a lie, we broke the ice in record time and got right into a flow of stories that brought her brand to life. And when I played storytelling games in my cohort, the stories they shared were near perfect without overthinking a thing.

When I look around, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that more people are not only craving play, but they also understand the necessity of it in business.

I’d argue that the whole #WeirdLinkedIn movement is a pledge to play more in the ever-so-serious realm of B2B. And communities like Creatives Mornings, which thrive on playful learning and engagement, continue to grow.

Just like human-centered content, authenticity, and moving slowly, we're all craving some lightness and fun.

Ultimately, play in these spaces looks like breaking the rules and making space for ideas that don’t serve an obvious outcome but might lead somewhere new and unexpected.

A Good Takeaway

So, in the spirit of summer, flow, and fun, here are three storytelling games I love to play to shake off the pressure and unlock new ideas.

1. Exquisite Corpse: The one that kicked off this whole story. Each person writes a sentence, folds the paper to hide all but the last line, and passes it on. No one sees the full story until the end, and that’s where the magic (and chaos) lives.
2. 3-2-1: One person throws out three random words. You pick one, have two minutes to think of a story, and one minute to tell it. I used this with my storytelling cohort as a final exercise, and it was a perfect way to practice story structure on the fly with zero pressure and plenty of laughs.
3. Backward Stories: Start at the end. Begin your story with a final sentence like, “And that’s how I ended up with a shaved eyebrow and a goat named Kevin.” Then work backwards, inventing the chain of events that led there. The weirder the ending, the better the story.

You can play these with your kids, your clients, your team, or even just yourself. (Post-it notes and voice memos count.) No stakes or metrics, just a little narrative freedom to remind you why telling your story is fun in the first place.

And whether or not you practice storytelling this summer, I hope you let your brain go barefoot, write the weird thing, and break your own format.

You might just find that this is the very thing that brings your best work to life.

A Few Good Resources

1. I love this resource from the New York Times to "feel happier and less stuck" by taking a daily creativity challenge.​
2. This breakdown on the four conditions necessary for play are super interesting.
3. If you want a playful place to work on your LinkedIn content, my friend Stacy is starting a thing.
4. I'm also starting an intimate community to explore brand building, storytelling, and the art of ethical persuasion in the most fun way.

Hope you have a good one,
Renee