After 15 years of running creative businesses, I have come to believe that the success of any creative business is directly correlated to how many heads you have.This is my theory of heads.Running a business is often hard. You might think there are many historically complicated and context-heavy reasons that have led to this hardness, and that you have to grin and bear it, push through; it’s what you signed up for.Actually, almost all of the time, I’ve come to think the reason something is hard is just because you don’t have the right heads in the room. You may be missing your head.Heads do things for glory, not money. They know that with glory comes money. They want money because it allows them to be more free and to do more things. They know money without glory is hollow and disappointing. If they had to choose (at garden3d, they don’t), they would rather have less money and more glory.Heads are obsessive. They read widely outside their field. They have niche interests and can speak for hours about their curiosities. They are in relentless pursuit of better questions. They don’t “dabble”; they have persistent fixations. They stick, return, redefine, refactor.Heads are sensitive. They are emotionally intense. They have strong responses to beauty, dissonance, meaning. They are acutely aware of context, nuance, subtlety. They don’t do things for craft, they do things to express their identity with action.Heads are specific. They have deep reference stacks in their field and adjacent fields, and also completely unrelated fields. They are naturally oriented toward what’s proven durable rather than what’s trending. Their taste is not rote pattern recognition but a deep understanding of cultural symbols, historical reference points, human signifiers - what they all mean, and how they combine.Heads aren’t satisfied with the status quo. They know haters are the real lovers. They believe the world should be a better place. The reject conventional norms and question authorit