Create Without Permission was originally performed at Playgrounds Festival in Eindhoven, and later presented again at Playgrounds Berlin.

I gave this talk with my longtime friend and creative partner, Banks Boutté, to a room of more than 10,000 artists. At the time, we were building KitBash3D and We Are Fuzzy, and we wanted to share the practical lessons we had learned about taking creative ideas seriously enough to bring them into the world.

This talk is about what it takes to move from imagination to execution. It covers creative ownership, building momentum, making minimum viable versions of ambitious ideas, embracing failure, finding the right collaborators, and setting goals that are clear enough to actually achieve.

At its core, Create Without Permission is a message to artists and creative people who are tired of waiting for someone else to say yes. You don’t need permission to begin. You need ownership, discipline, resourcefulness, and the courage to make something real.