Artifacts: Content is Easy. Meaning is Hard.
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Welcome to Reculture.
This is a podcast about better messages.
Messages that don’t just tell us what to react to, but help us understand where we are. Messages that don’t just pull us in or grab our attention, but point us somewhere.
Because whether we're navigating a brand, a team, a family, or even just our own lives, we're all living inside stories—whether we’ve chosen them or not. The real question is how we navigate the story we’re becoming.
When Messages Don’t Carry the Way We Expect
If you lead anything—a team, a company, even a family—you know this feeling. You say something once, and then six months later you realize what people heard isn't quite the thing that you meant, or worse, they are executing something you never actually intended. We've been trained to think of what we make as content. Artifacts teach people what to pay attention to. Artifacts scale. They don't need the originator to keep telling the story; the story is now embodied and can travel on its own volition.
How Most Brands Think About Content
Welcome to Reculture. This is a podcast about better messages. Messages that don't just tell us what to react to, but help us understand where we are. Messages that don't just pull us in or grab our attention, they point us somewhere. Because whether we are navigating a brand, a team, a family, or even just the world around us, we are all living inside these stories, whether we've chosen them or not. And the real question is how we navigate the story we are becoming.
A Simple Story About What People Actually Keep
So if you've been listening to the podcast, I've got this seven-year-old boy at home. He came home from school one day, and like most days, I'm just doing a brief check through his folder. This day, I found this carefully curated list made out in pencil. It seems to be a packing list for a camping trip that he and his buddy Caleb are apparently planning. I'm not really sure where they're going or how they're going to get there, but judging by the list, they seem to have some things very responsibly figured out. Let me call out a couple of items to your attention: Fishing rod (smart, a good item), cake (obviously), meat (maybe in case the fishing doesn't work out), very important item, ketchup (if you've got young kids at home, you know how important this is, especially if there's meat involved), music, chess (they’re very cultured), and my personal favorite, plate.
Can you just imagine these two boys writing this in the middle of class? I mean, this is the perfect encapsulation of what adventure looks like in the eyes of a seven-year-old boy. And like a lot of parents, we've got one of those memory boxes at home. You know, one of those Rubbermaid bins that just sits up high on a shelf, full of construction paper and cards your kids made throughout the years. Then you've got to do this dance where you feel like an awful parent because they want everything to go in the memory box, and you're like, “Okay, but we’ve only got so much room,” and “I love you, but we’ve got like five finger turkeys already. It was cute the first Thanksgiving, but your early stuff was great, you're starting to get a little derivative.” (You don't say that, but) then there are these pieces that, thankfully, instantly get fast-tracked to the memory box. This was one of those pieces for us, because to my kid, this was just another activity, another game.
What Makes Something an Artifact
It was an artifact. It was the story left behind from childhood. It was something we wanted to make last forever and have the pages get yellow and be legible years and years later. Whether we like it or not, we are always leaving artifacts behind. And not everything we say becomes an artifact, by the way. If you lead anything—a team, a company, even a family—you know this feeling. You say something once, and then six months later you realize what people heard isn't quite the thing that you meant, or worse, they are executing something you've never actually intended.
The Difference Between Content and Meaning
That’s because artifacts are more than conversations. Conversations move meaning, and they're more than decisions. Decisions aim meaning. Artifacts do something different. They do something unique. Artifacts anchor meaning. And once something actually anchors meaning, it can start to travel without you having to be there. The things that we make and fund and publish and platform—those are all things that have the ability to travel. And we've been trained to think of what we make as content, but that word has also trained us to think about output, distribution, and performance, when what's really at stake is something much older and much more human: formation. Artifacts are formative. They tell a story. They signal what's important. And most importantly, artifacts outlive the people who make them. Artifacts are what gets left behind. They're the thing that keeps teaching us long after the conversation is done. Artifacts teach people what to pay attention to without really ever having to give specific instructions, because artifacts show; they don't tell. People don't follow what gets said. They follow what seems to matter based on what they can see.
This is really the major thing. I'm big on myths, right? Artifacts are the myths we tell each other, brought to life in a way that people can understand and come back to. The business-y way to say this is: artifacts scale. They don't need the originator to keep telling the story. The story is now embodied and can travel on its own volition.
Why So Many Teams Feel Burned Out on Content
This is really good news, by the way, for any of us who feel exhausted at just the thought of churning out more content. At some point, I just got really, really burnt out at the idea of constantly trying to feed the content beast, the algorithm. But I got really excited at the idea of leaving behind artifacts. First of all, that just sounds cool—very Indiana Jones. It's time capsules and clues and all that stuff. But second of all, and more seriously, I realized the goal of my work was less about making sure I was omnipresent everywhere and really more about being legible, identifiable, memorable, and clear. If I don't have those things, going viral does not matter at all.
Why Making Something Doesn’t Make It Real
And speaking of memorable stories, there's something I've always loved about Pinocchio—the Pinocchio myth, the Pinocchio story. Pinocchio is made carefully, intentionally, with hope. But being made doesn't make him real. What makes him real is that over time, the values he've been told start to show up in him: courage, honesty, responsibility. Not because someone forced them on him, but because he slowly begins to embody them. That's what makes the story work. Making something doesn't make it real. Publishing something doesn't make it true. A story only becomes real once it's been lived into. That's why artifacts matter. They are value embodied. They're when a story stops being something we say and becomes an expression of who we are. There's also the story, "The Velveteen Rabbit". My mom used to read this to me as a kid, and there's a quote a lot of us know: "Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen to people who break easily or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all."
Why Imperfect Work Still Matters
"Because once you are real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." Please hear this: The artifacts that you make do not need to be perfect or polished in order for them to work. They need to be understood and loved by those who need to understand and love them. And that's usually the disconnect we feel, right?
How Meaning Gets Lost Over Time
The more mature we get, whether we are a person or an entire organization, the story we tell ourselves gets muddy between us and others, especially downstream. That's not because we're dishonest. It's because that intent tends to thin out when it never hardens into something people can actually hold. It’s usually wrong because clarity decays when it never pauses to actually take form. Creating an artifact is actually a great way to test whether a story either survives or breaks. This is where meaning gets stress-tested. This is where myths start to show their cracks. It's where adventure becomes believable or not.
Brands Can Test Stories Like Products
I see a lot of companies, for example, that are really good at testing their products constantly, but I've seen very few test the stories they're trying to tell. The beautiful thing about living right now in the 2020s is we have all these amazing quick ways to prototype and test this stuff we eventually want to leave behind and resonate with people. I think one of the bravest things you can do before sharing a story publicly is let it take shape inside the room first. At Reculture, one thing we've learned over time is when we prototype ideas internally with brands, we can see where those ideas wobble and hone them in before they're out in the public. Because if a story can't survive becoming something, it was never ready to be shared in the first place.
A Story About Discovery and Memory
Okay, this is a very ordinary suburban dad story, but I think it fits if you'll allow me to tell it. We have this 125-year-old house in a village that used to be part of the Underground Railroad, and it was actually the headquarters of the pro-abolition movement. Needless to say, this place has seen a lot. It's on this really long, narrow half-acre, so imagine it's like the front of the house and then a long strip of land as the backyard. It was probably a little farm or something at some point. When we bought it, about half the backyard was landscaped, and the back half was just trees, weeds, brush, and lots of poison ivy. We heard it hadn't been touched in like 50 years. So this past year was the year I decided to go full-on suburban dad Rambo and just tackle this thing for my family and friends. I went out there with saws and shovels and ropes and axes. I literally put blood, sweat, and tears trying to make this thing inhabitable.
I found out that after getting an uncontrollable amount of poison ivy, by the way, that steroids make me super focused and also irrationally angry. So, who knew? But one day towards the end of the project, we had some guys come in and grade the land with a skid steer. I had a moment of mental clarity and decided that me operating heavy machinery on steroids was probably not the best combination. But after they were done, I'm walking around and I notice this small little metal piece sticking out of the ground. It couldn't have been more than an inch wide. So I went to go dig it out with my finger, and I realized this thing is way bigger than an inch. I had no idea what it was or how big it was, but I thought, "Okay, I'm going to need more than my finger to unearth this thing." This was the most exciting thing that happened all week. I mean, come on, a chance to play archaeologist, to make a discovery.
So I go back in the house, I get some tools, and I tell my son, "Hey, come on, come out with me. I made a discovery. I"m going to need some help investigating this thing." He loved that, by the way. So he got his sneakers on and he joined me. Well, about half an hour later, we had dug this thing out.
(My Son: We found this metal thing. Dad found it first, and then we were investigating it, and then we dug it up. It looks like the letter A, and it's probably from a long time ago because it has a little ridge.)
Why People Hold Onto Certain Experiences
I still have no idea what this thing is. It looks like a big letter A. It's bigger than my son, about four feet tall by four feet wide. It's made out of steel. It's heavy as all get-up. Some people think it might be like a trailer hitch or a part of a farm plow. I was talking to someone who knew the history of the town really well, and he actually thinks it could be a corner piece of a railroad track. Two things are for sure: It is old and it is ugly, and I desperately wanted it out of the new yard that I'd worked so hard to clear.
So fast forward to a week later. I'm taking out the trash. I've got the trash bins, and I've got this thing near the trash bins. My son goes, "Dad, what are you doing?" I said, "I'm taking out the trash. This is something I would like you to do very soon for me. This is why I had you." (I'm just kidding.) But he's like, "You can't throw that out." And I tried to reason with him because I'm not a clutter guy, I hate clutter. I'm telling him, "Dude, it's ugly. It's going to take up space." And then I just kind of watched his face drop. And I realized this thing isn't meaningful to him because it could be a piece of a train track or a hitch or a plow. It's meaningful to him because he enjoyed discovering it with me. There's a memory associated with it.
What Artifacts Actually Do
So I bought myself a chiropractor visit and I carried the heavy thing back all the way into the garage. So there it is. Now it's taking up space. It's collecting dust probably forever because it embodies this myth about curiosity and adventure and time well spent together as a family, sweating and laughing and living to tell the tale.
The Question Worth Asking About What You’re Leaving Behind
And the irony is, they'll probably bury me in the backyard while that thing is still sitting there unearthed in the garage. Because like it or not, that thing is an artifact. And artifacts don't just communicate meaning, they carry it forward when we're no longer in the room. And the question isn't whether you're leaving artifacts behind—you are. The question is whether they're carrying the story you meant to tell.
