If you don’t see it, make it | career creative

Tsilli Pines
I think it was hard for me to see everything I was doing as connected earlier on. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized even this stuff that I'm doing now, which is very business-focused, is a form of design. You know, design really is just looking at a problem and coming up with a solution. So it's all part of the same practice. It's all part of the same creative practice.

[intro]

Dave Weich
Hi, I’m Dave Weich, and you’re listening to Work-Shaped Life.

If you were part of Portland’s creative community in the aughts or the twenty-tens, today’s guest needs no introduction. First, Tsilli Pines founded Portland’s chapter of Creative Mornings. Then, with Eric Hillerns, she co-founded Design Week Portland.

As Tsilli makes a point of saying, those events thrived thanks to Portland’s uniquely collaborative spirit and the collective energy of hundreds of creatives across the city. She’s being modest, yes, but also she’s right: Neither event would have gained as much traction without contributors in fields as diverse as architecture and urban planning, apparel, graphic design, brand strategy and emerging technology.

And yet, Tsilli made the events possible. She built platforms that empowered the rest of us to gather, share, learn and succeed. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that before, during and ever since those marquee events, she’s been designing an impressive creative career of her own.

[interview]

Dave Weich
How do you describe what I assume is a bit of a complex job to people who don't necessarily come with a lot of education in that field?

Tsilli Pines
I would describe what I currently do as a creative business whisperer. Essentially, together with my business partner, Ami Pascal, I advise founders, leaders of creative businesses like studios and agencies, or teams within larger brands, on their toughest organizational and business challenges. Ami and I both came up through these kinds of organizations for our entire careers. For me that looked like starting as a designer, becoming a creative director, and ultimately being an executive in a larger design agency.

Dave Weich
Okay, so you started as a designer. You went to school for design. Did you understand at all then that ultimately your interests were broader than what a traditional designer does?

Tsilli Pines 
No. I went all the way through an academic bachelor's degree and got spit out during the first internet boom—and that was my introduction to this as a practice, just getting content online and realizing, Oh, there are people who create the visual content for all of this, and that's a job.

So that's when I went back to school just to get really core skills, you know, typography and layout and basic building blocks for that practice. But I learned a ton on the job, and it was a different time then. You could find a job because the internet was in its growth phase. And I left school—I left Parsons to take a job, which is just not the experience most students have now.

So yeah, when I started, I was very focused on putting in my time as a designer, learning the craft, and I did that for over a decade. I really was just learning how to do this and then how to lead projects and lead teams that did it. And I didn’t have in my mind anything else.

It never really occurred to me that there was also this whole other world of, you know, business that drives the companies that deliver this work, until I just started getting more involved in that side of things as a leader, and then ultimately in building my own organization when Design Week Portland became a big part of what I was doing. That really gave me a lens on How do you galvanize a community? How do you erect an organization and steward what it's doing over time?

And then I ultimately combined my experience as a designer and as more of a community organizer, I guess you'd say, into an executive role where I got to do both of those things.

Dave Weich
Where does the drive to focus on these kinds of pursuits come from, and where did that… Was that 11-year-old Tsilli? Because I’m going to ask about Design Week: What kind of person has a full-time job and starts that massive a festival? Thank you on behalf of Portland's creative community, but where did that relationship to work germinate? Where does that come from?

Tsilli Pines
Hmm. Well, I think that from a young age my parents instilled in me the sense that I should always be able to earn a living and not depend on other people. And so I always was very focused on: I have to find a career that does sustain me financially.

Then I also, like I said, from a young age, had an interest in the arts and in culture and in things that I wasn't sure paid the bills. And so, from also a young age, I always kept up side interests and side projects, where I thought, Being able to sustain myself doesn't have to also cover all the bases, but I have things that I want to do and interests and people that I want to collaborate with, and if you have some foundation for how you make money, there's a lot less pressure on all the side projects. You can make those anything that you want, and you can actualize a lot of your passions through those side projects.

So I think from a pretty early age I understood that there are things that you have to do, and you want to make those as enjoyable as possible. You want them to be as close to your avocation as possible because it keeps you really intrinsically motivated to improve and grow and stay engaged in the work over the long haul. And it was very important to me, also, to be doing it with people that I respected. I always wanted to be surrounded by people who I considered better than me at things, you know, smarter than me, more talented than me, people I could learn from. And design really provided that.

But I will say, I did spend a long time with my head down just being like, hey, I gotta put in my 10,000 hours, I gotta learn how to do this. There wasn't a lot of side project activity going on for a solid decade.

But at a certain point you're like, Okay, I'm pretty good at doing this. Now what? You start to get a wandering eye. You start to think, What comes next? I just got curious and restless. And I'm not a very good joiner, so the way that I explored that was by starting things and showing up in the community by providing something for the community. And that I think was the driving force for me.

I guess to get to the real core of what you're asking, where does that drive come from, I always felt like there was something I was trying to actualize and I was never quite hitting on it until I really started doing more of these ambitious side projects that allowed me to cross paths with interesting people doing interesting things and seeing things in ways I didn't see them and enlarging my worldview and in just making connections. And when I say “connections,” I don't mean networking. I mean connecting the dots between different practices and different types of people, and making something that felt like it was larger than the sum of its parts.

That turned out to be the most satisfying work for me. So when you ask, Who in their right mind would be working a full-time job?—which I did because you know, you gotta eat—and then also, I mean, I was spending probably a thousand hours a year working on Design Week, which is a lot. The reason was that that work was the culmination of all of my interests and had this pull for me, this real satisfaction to it that you don't get just doing your job.

Dave Weich
Can you imagine, or have you imagined, a world in which you didn't do that and you never did Design Week, and what that might actually look like? Or was it just a force that was not… you sort of got thrown down a path, and I mean, I'm just curious because you—

Tsilli Pines  
I can imagine.

Dave Weich
—you could have made the decision not to do it. It could have seemed overwhelming. Oh, my god, I can't take a thousand hours of doing this thing, even though it sounds great.

Tsilli Pines 
If I had known from the beginning what it would entail, I probably wouldn't have signed on. So it's a good thing I didn't know ahead of time what it was gonna be. And it did snowball beyond my wildest imagination.

If it hadn't been that, it would have been something else. It might have been a little bit different, but I think that my engagement with work—work broadly, not just the work that you do for money, but work generally—has always been driven a little bit by, you know, my jealousy, I guess, is the word. You look at something and it makes you feel like, I want to be part of that. Or you look at someone's work and you're like, How did they do that? I want to be able to do that. It is a drive that comes from within that I think has something to do with your life force. You know, what you are called to do.  And it would have found some other expression, I think, if it hadn't been Design Week.

Dave Weich
When you think of something, that kind of jealousy or whatever the word is, what's the first thing that comes to mind that you experienced out in the world, and that was the feeling it gave you?

Tsilli Pines  
A lot of it was, in the beginning, visual culture, seeing something that I just thought was great and I had no idea how someone did it. That's what led me into design as my first major excursion in my work life because I would just see these things that people were doing, some of which were graphic design and some of which were much more interactive experiences, and I would just think to myself, How? How does somebody produce something like this? I wish it were me.

I mean, I think every designer relates to this thing where when you see a great piece of work and you're like, I wish I had made that. But it's a bigger feeling when you aren't even part of the practice yet, and you're just like, What is this? This is so interesting and so amazing that someone can have this idea and produce it in this way that connects with me in an emotional way that makes me understand what they were trying to say, differently than if they had said it with words.

So I was extremely… I was burning with jealousy in the beginning, looking at work like that. You would look at these expressions and think,  I want to be able to do that. It gives you, yeah, a hunger, a goal. You know, they say, I think that saying that's like “stay hungry” is really relevant when you're making creative work because there is really a visceral feeling of that, of just wanting it so bad, and trying to figure out how to get the skills to be able to do something like that.

Dave Weich
Do you feel and have you always felt an urgency around it? Is part of it too, that every day, month, year that goes by that you're not, for lack of a better word, producing these, you know, analogues to the stuff you're seeing out there that you want to be part of… Does it feel urgent?

Tsilli Pines 
It did for a long time. I'm not sure where the feeling came from, but I had that sense that was like, Am I going to be able to achieve something that I'm proud of? I mean, I was doing it a little bit in a frenzied way for a while.

When I started Design Week Portland with Eric Hillerns in 2012—that was one year before I had my daughter, and doing this thing where you have a full-time job and then a half-time job with your side project and then a baby is not sustainable. There were a number of years there where it felt like I was burning myself to the ground a little bit. And it wasn't the smartest balance of things, but I also felt—and I think even in retrospect, rightly so—that you don't choose the timing for things.

You don't choose when something is needed that you can provide. And the timing got pretty compressed on a lot of stuff for me, but I knew that it was the time for it. That was the time.

So, yes, it felt for a long time, and I really remember having the thought that, Well, the more you do, the more you can do. And it was very intense, but it's true once you are on this ride of that level of productivity, the ability to put out a lot into the world is in a way paradoxically easier than when you're trying to ramp up to that level of productivity.

But there are seasons in life, and I think I see now much more clearly than I did then that that was a particular season. And it was a very productive season. And now I have a much more sane flow in my life than I did at that time. But that was the right time to do all of that.

Dave Weich
I would ask one more thing about Design Week Portland, because I think that's how I first met you. I think it was through that, an event that we hosted.

What was the driving force there? I mean, in retrospect, it's like, cool event, but what was lacking and missing that made you and Eric say, “We need to create this”?

Tsilli Pines 
We came upon it pretty organically. Eric had actually been in Portland for much longer than me when we started it. I moved to Portland in 2006. He had been here for many years before and had seen some efforts at organizing some sort of, you know, citywide design week effort.

I was hosting Creative Mornings at the time, which was a monthly lecture series that was founded in New York and had chapters all over the world. At the time that we founded the chapter in Portland, it was maybe the 16th chapter, I think. So a lot of people in the design community had seen videos from the events in New York and LA. It was very early on. And I happened to know one of the organizers, the one that was running the chapter in LA, and got connected to that and pitched starting the chapter here, even though I had no business doing that. I really didn't know a lot of people. I had no connections at venues to host us. I did not know what I was doing, but I felt again like that was the time where I was lifting my head up after the 10,000 hours and going, What else is going on in the creative world? This is a way that I can contribute, and just believing that I could do it.

And in order to run that lecture series, I realized quickly, I gotta see what else is going on in town because one event that happens in a city does not exist in a vacuum. It exists next to every other thing that happens. Especially in a city that is the size of Portland, which is not the size of New York or, you know, San Francisco or Tokyo. You don't wanna be programming in a way that is gonna overlap weirdly with other things that are going on. You want to be aware of what else is going on in order to curate properly. So I really made it my business to go around and meet everybody who was doing creative programming in Portland.

Ultimately Eric and I just realized, hey, there's a lot going on right now. And that was an era where a lot of programming was happening in the design community and in the larger creative community. And there's already enough here going on. If we just have everybody point their program at one week that they're already doing, we can market the whole thing together and get people to go to each other's events. That’s really where it started. And it was, you know, maybe 10 events that we knew of. There were so many cool things happening at that time already. Just collected all those folks and just said, “Can we all agree in five months, we're all gonna do our monthly or quarterly event or what have you during this week?” And that started the ball rolling. Once we did that, it was like, who else can we get? And what else are we doing? And in five months we pulled together a hundred things for a week, which is wild.

But I think it also showed how much pent-up demand there was for this and for the kind of cross-pollination that you get by pulling the creative community together during one time so that everyone is primed to cross paths and see what everybody's working on and talk about stuff and collaborate on projects. And we were stunned by the scale of it. It took us a year to just catch up to it and say, My gosh, we need an entity to run this thing. At the beginning we were like, whatever, we each run our own event. Why would we need infrastructure? We already have infrastructure for our own events. And it was like, wait, actually if you're gonna gather all this, it's probably an organization of some kind that needs to produce a festival every year if we're gonna do another one of these. So Eric and I really built the plane while it was flying.

And yeah, I think the reason it was as impactful as it was is because Portland really wanted it. The community here was ready for it. And that's what I was feeling at that time, which was, we cannot slow down.

This is the era… I definitely had during that period I had this feeling where I was like, you know, this was when the food scene was popping. This was when, you know, everything was cooking in Portland. And I had that, I was like, is this what Paris used to feel like? You know, you're like, My god, there are so many amazing people here. Amazing food and work and vibes and you know, people were so excited to collaborate on this thing.

And it was authored by the collective. I do not take responsibility for all of the amazing things that happened. That was something that… we created a structure for it. We sort of made a space, but everybody put in on that. I mean, you put in on that. So, you know, it really felt like it was a reflection of the diversity of what was happening in the city.

Dave Weich
So you've been here 20 years. Why Portland? Portland became your home, not just your home for you and your family, but your professional home. Why is that? What is it about this place?

Tsilli Pines  
This place is really unique from the perspective of the creative community. I've lived in larger cities, you know. I lived in San Francisco, in LA, in New York. Those are great cities, and there's a lot to experience in those cities, in design and generally in the creative industries, some of which have more concentration in certain aspects of the creative industry.

But the thing that Portland has is truly a spirit of collaboration and collective success that is harder to find in those cities. I felt it from the first moment that I started hosting Creative Mornings, the way that people show up for things, the fact that, you know, amazing, talented people who are working at an international scale will give you time, will meet with you, will collaborate on something, will contribute back to the community. That is unique. And also certain aspects of the creative ecosystem here are unique, right? I was stunned by this experience that we had the first year that we hosted Design Week, where we brought Felix Ong from Singapore to run his design film festival during the festival. And he was just beside himself looking at what we consider to be kind of the basic things that we produced for the festival in terms of its material incarnation, right? Like signage, printed matter, etc. Because there's a ton of small-scale manufacturing in Portland. And so the people who design things are very close to the people who make things. And you can go there and see it being produced and give feedback as it's being produced.

This apparently is totally non-existent in Singapore. So it was a novelty to him and it was interesting to see it through his eyes and be like, wow, we almost take for granted the design/build culture that we have here and how many creative people are shipped into this ecosystem through sort of the larger players in the industry here, whether it's Nike or Wieden, but then stay and start their own studios, and then there's all these millions of two, three-person studios doing incredible work. The architecture community is huge here. We have more architecture firms per capita than I think any other American city. There's just all this stuff happening here. Fashion was interesting at that time, too. There was a ton of activity with independent designers.

So this, you know, conversation between all those practices and the way that everybody was really down to show up for those happy accidents that happen when you have all of that in one place.

And complete side note, but recently PSU opened a new building for art design and art history. I was really moved by seeing all those studios next to each other that have been separated into different buildings all this time and just being like, wow, the fiber arts is next to photography, is next to social practice and graphic design and studio art and everything's in one place. You almost can't create a physical incarnation of my belief system that is more accurate than this. This is it. Those people are all working in that space now. They share common space, they cross paths, they look into each other's studios, they see what's happening. And that's a metaphor for what Portland's creative community has felt like to me from day one, is just that.

But apparently there aren't that many people that are pretty good at a lot of things. And so that generalist mindset that I have and the way that I really believe in combinatorial creativity, and I think that goes back to my origin story of, you know, being an immigrant and seeing the world through two lenses constantly. I think I've always had a mind for that. So much of my own lived experience has informed the way that I think about design. So I think I just clicked in, basically. I really clicked in with the way that this community works.

Dave Weich
Yeah. I think that's very true of Portland. The most talked about or most tangible example might be farm to table, where you have that immediate connection between, literally, the creation of something to the manipulation of it into some beautiful, desirable, sustaining product. It's easy when you look at, you know, food coming off a farm and into a restaurant.

But I think it's true, too—we talk to all sorts of business owners who say, I was starting out and I didn't really have anything or know what I was doing, but actually these people just volunteered to give me a space in their warehouse because they weren't using it. And then I was in the warehouse, and they were there every day. And so, you know, we started having lunch together, and I had questions. And then I met a guy who was an expert and he was visiting from… I hear that all the time. And I do think it is probably more common here than it is in many places. That's certainly the vibe I get. 

Tsilli Pines
It really is. You know how a lot of the larger creative companies, I think of Pixar, designed their offices to create those happy accidents of people crossing paths in common spaces. There's this whole school of thought around how you design buildings to achieve that. This is back when everybody worked in the same space, kids. Portland is almost just set up for that. And that is a result of a lot of conscious urban planning. and also it is I feel that every place has a little bit of magic to it too, of why things happen the way that they do. But Portland is that. And I think the vibe here is that, is people being really excited to cross paths with you and to grab that lunch with you and introduce you to that expert and unexpected things come from that.

Dave Weich
I was looking at your website and you list five guiding principles of strong client partnerships for better business. And I kind of cracked up a little bit because I think my list would have been almost the same. Starting and really most focused on number one, which is “act like a human.”

Obviously, you are providing levels of professional, organizational support and direction that go far beyond “act like a human.” And yet, I do think it seems like the most obvious… Most things in life, to me, are ultimately about relationships. Most things, not just work.

Tsilli Pines 
Absolutely. Yes.

Dave Weich
How did those kinds of very basic principles, which is to say principles that apply really to life as opposed to, you know, creating a business or running an agency, how did that all come together for you? Is that something you've always just sort of thought or was it more of a kind of over the course of the years?

Tsilli Pines 
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because Ami and I have slightly different paths but ended up in the same place at Instrument. She comes more from the discipline of producing and rose to business leadership through that. And I was coming from a background in design. She was one of the earliest employees at Instrument and helped grow it from ten people to over three hundred. I came in when it was already a hundred and eighty people, and I had been for a much longer period with another studio called Fine.

But despite having slightly different entry points and years in orgs, we both really somehow had fundamentally the same experience of the industry, which is reflected in those principles that you saw in one of our articles. We all worked with people that we respected, and we worked with clients that we respected, and we brought a belief that business and life do not have to be necessarily in conflict, and they can enable each other, and that you can run a good business and also be a great place to work. Profit and humans don't have to be at odds. There are a lot of decisions that you have to make in the way that you run a business that force trade-offs, certainly, but these were just obvious principles to us because of the way that we came up in the industry. Which frankly was lucky.

And I wanna also say a word about that because I think luck is wildly undercredited by most people about their success, their career, whatever. I think luck is probably the biggest player and you being ready for luck going your way is the other part of it, certainly, but it is a huge part of it. And I think I've been enormously lucky in my life, in my career.

But I think yes, to answer your question, we both came at the sort of philosophy of the work in the same way. And were fortunate to work with other people that shared that view and shared those values. And that's a lot of what we bring to the work now is to say, you know, every decision that you make in your business, even when it's hard—and it's hard most of the time—is going to force this human element of: How do you survive and build a sustainable business while staying human? That is the brief. That is the goal. That is the assignment, you know?

Dave Weich
Within that context, what do you feel like are the most common challenges that your clients face? What are they ultimately needing from you?

Tsilli Pines  
Well, a lot of times our clients are leaders in either, you know, studios or agencies, or of teams inside of larger brands. And that can be quite lonely, first of all, because you're making a lot of really hard decisions. You don't often have peers with whom to make those decisions, and they entail everything from what is the offering of the business and how is it changing over time to what is the design of a team that can do that to how are we getting clients, building relationships that create return business to, my gosh, a big change needs to happen, how do I do it without basically alienating the people who need to come along for the ride?

Also you're often reacting to a lot of things that are coming at you at a hundred miles per hour, and they're very urgent, and the time and mental capacity to step away from that and look at the larger picture and think, “What collective set of actions will get me where I'm trying to go?” is enormously difficult to engineer by yourself. So we're really often supporting leaders through that process.

Dave Weich
There are probably areas of your work that I would imagine are more prescriptive in terms of, “We've seen this happen at companies and here's what tends to work versus what doesn't.” But how much of your work is that, is bringing the experience in a more nuts and bolts sense versus bringing the experience in a human sense?

Tsilli Pines
It's both. I will say though, what's interesting about the creative industry is that there's a lot of sharing about craft. You can go to a design conference and people will be talking about how are they evolving their practice now with this whole new set of technologies. Or here's a case study for how we got this really ambitious project done. Let me show you the whole behind the scenes process for XYZ.

What people never talk about though in this industry… We like to call it the black box of business. You know, you're delivering work. That is what is seen by the world and your clients and that's sort of above the water line. Under the water line is your organization and your business, and people don't share a lot about that.

If you have founded a design business and you've been working in it for the past 20 years, you probably haven't seen how other people are making the kinds of decisions that you're trying to make, and you certainly haven't seen at different scales of business what needs to change about the way that you run that business.

When we started doing this work, we talked a lot about how what we're trying to do is be the people that we needed when we were in those shoes and did everything the long, hard, stupid way. Sure would have been helpful to have someone say, “Hey, you know, now that you're at this size, you can't do things this way anymore. You have to do it that way now.” Right?

So yes, we're asking a lot of questions and we're doing a lot of diagnosis. When we engage with a client, we're doing a deep dive. We're looking at your finances, we're looking at your account structure, we're looking at your team structure, we're looking at everything about your business. And the patterns start coming forward to us pretty quickly because we've seen a lot of businesses. And so, yes, we're trying to really get to know the business, and every business is at a different place, has different goals. We're really trying to deeply understand all of those things because a plan is influenced by where you're trying to go and what you're working with.

And also, yeah, there are things that work and there are common patterns. There are certain sizes that are actually very hard to sustain over time. And time and time again, you see it, and you see why is because the math is the math.

So we do a lot of diagnosis, and then we actually do present a pretty strong point of view on a strategy and the actions required to execute that strategy based on what the person who came to us to engage us is trying to achieve. It's always rooted in “Where are you trying to go?” But it's not just asking questions because they really are lacking some perspective that we're bringing from having seen so many businesses trying to do what they're doing.

Dave Weich 
In advance of this conversation, what did the idea of talking about your work and life bring to mind for you? What was the thing you found yourself stewing on or surprised by?

Tsilli Pines
I actually just thought about the themes in my work that span and persist over time, no matter what it is that I'm doing. And that stood out to me. I think you bring the kind of person that you are into the work that you do. Even as it changes and even as you change, there are certain immutable truths. And I have mine. It's pretty clear when you look across everything in retrospect that they're always there. And we've talked about a lot of them, right? I talk a lot about what I believe in the work, right? That the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I think that has always been present throughout all of my work. I think surround yourself with people who are better than you—always present no matter what I'm doing. I think that sort of treat everything that you encounter with an outside eye, right? That goes right back to the origin story and is omnipresent. Being a master of none, always there, sometimes in ways that gave me anxiety, but sometimes in ways where I was capturing that and using it productively.

So I think that was the thing that surprised me was just, yeah, I'm doing different things at different times, but they're always driven essentially by the same formula or the same DNA, the same impulses and tendencies that I have just as a person. The thread is really there and you don't see it when you're living it, but it's there when you look back.

Dave Weich
Lots of people would describe themselves in a similar way to say, “I was never really that great at anything.” But it is the… “curiosity” is the word that keeps coming up for me in these conversations. As long as you're curious. And if you're super, super curious about one particular thing, great. And if you're kind of equally curious in a lot of different things, just as good. Because it really is—again, to return to a word you use—it's the hunger for learning and for growth. Where your curiosity brings you, whether it's sort of down a straight path or, you know, all over the place, is really not the point.

Tsilli Pines
Totally. Yeah, I agree. And I think it was hard for me to see everything I was doing as connected earlier on. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized even this stuff that I'm doing now, which is very business-focused, is a form of design. You know, design really is just looking at a problem and coming up with a solution. So it's all part of the same practice. It's all part of the same creative practice. And seeing it through that lens, I think it's satisfying because it integrates everything into one broader worldview and craft, I guess. Even though it finds expression in different ways, sometimes visually, sometimes through communication, sometimes through community or galvanizing something, but I just see the work that I do with people and systems now as an extension of a career-long creative practice. And that makes it make sense to me.

Dave Weich
I started thinking about postmodern literature courses and how, when you're reading one of those books, it can seem completely overwhelming and disjointed until a certain point at which it's the most, you're just like, “Everything's connected!”

Tsilli Pines 
It all makes sense now. Uh-huh.

Dave Weich
Exactly. It's like maybe you get to a certain age and if you're lucky enough and if you've seen enough, you get to that point in the novel and you're just like, Brilliant!

Tsilli Pines 
It all makes sense now. Yeah.

Dave Weich
Glad I kept reading.

Tsilli Pines 
Exactly. I know, right? I don't know, it's funny, I don't know if you feel like age also changes the way that you do the work, approach the work, but yeah, there was just a lot of churn for me in the work for a long time. And I think as you age and you're comfortable with, yes, sometimes it takes a while to figure out the thing, there's a little more of a comfortable flow to it.

Dave Weich
Totally. I think when you're younger—I mean, again, I'm just speaking for myself and from conversations I've had—but it's really, really hard to trust the process when you can't see the path.

Tsilli Pines
Yeah.

Dave Weich
Thank you very much for taking the time to talk about all this.

Tsilli Pines 
Yeah. Thanks for the conversation. This was fun.

[outro]

Bailey Cain
Work-Shaped Life is produced by Sheepscot Creative. It’s hosted by Dave Weich, edited by Michael Nipper and me, Bailey Cain, with production support from Benna Gottfried, Rosie Struve, Amelia Lukas and Kate Sokoloff.

If you’ve been enjoying this season of Work-Shaped Life, help us reach new listeners by sharing your favorite episode or leaving us a review. 

We’ll be back in three weeks with another episode. Thanks for listening.