About this article:
The Side Project is a reflective, personal essay about the people, places, and passions that keep marketers creatively alive outside of work — and what those pursuits give back in return.
I think about noise constantly.
From the moment you wake up, there are at least twenty calls to action competing for your attention. Your toothpaste tube wants you to sign up for something. Alexa always has suggestions. Your inbox is already full before you’ve had your first sip of coffee. There is branding and messaging everywhere, and most of it is asking you to act with incredible urgency.
What marketers sometimes forget is that we are operating inside that ecosystem, not outside of it. We tend to frame competition in narrow terms — who else is in our vertical, who else is launching this week — when in reality we are entering a space where our audience is already being pulled in a thousand directions that have nothing to do with our industry.
So the question becomes less about how to get attention and more about why we deserve it.
When I talk to my team about email marketing, I remind them that taking up space in someone’s inbox is not neutral. We are interrupting their day. If we are not offering clarity, value, or perspective, then we are simply adding to the noise — and noise erodes trust far more quickly than it builds awareness.
That editing instinct — the constant questioning of whether something needs to exist at all — didn’t emerge solely from my day job. It sharpened because I needed perspective.
Working in social justice is meaningful and urgent. The conversations are high-stakes, and the intensity is real. But when you stay inside one ecosystem long enough, urgency can start to feel universal. It becomes easy to assume that the issue you are focused on occupies the same mental space for everyone else.
But in reality, it doesn’t, and it took stepping outside of my own bubble to fully see that.
If I’m being honest, taking on side projects was also a form of trauma response. When you work in environments where the stakes are always high, it can start to feel like every decision carries enormous consequence. I needed something that didn’t. I needed a space where I could create freely — where I had permission to experiment, to fail, to try again without guilt or the feeling that something catastrophic would follow.
My side projects have become a way of stepping outside that intensity and that increasingly narrow view of the world — spaces that give me the autonomy to experiment, stretch, and create without the weight of consequence.
They aren’t an escape from the work, rather they serve as a recalibration. Consulting for small businesses, designing interiors, creating travel content — all of it forces me into rooms where people were thinking about entirely different priorities. These experiences are what keeps me grounded, and offers regularly scheduled reminders that most people are not navigating their day through the lens of policy and civic engagement. They are thinking about their families, their businesses, their homes, their next vacation.
And once you realize that, you begin to understand noise differently. Your message isn’t competing with apathy; it’s competing with real life.
The first time I felt something shift creatively was during a trip to Ghana. It was my first time in an African country that wasn’t Nigeria, where I was born and raised, and the experience expanded me in a way I didn’t anticipate. I filmed pieces of the trip almost casually, stitched them together, and uploaded the video. It eventually reached 70,000 views.
What stayed with me wasn’t the number, instead it was that people were feeling an emotional connection to my story. They wanted to understand what it actually felt like to be there.
That trip was also when travel became more than a personal experience for me. It became a creative side project — a way of translating what I was seeing and feeling into something emotional, accessible, and relatable for other people. I wasn’t just documenting a destination; I was learning how to curate perspective.
And that changed how I move through the world. Since then, whenever I’m somewhere new, I ask myself a simple question: am I traveling, or am I on vacation?
Traveling means I’m immersed and curious. I’m observing how people behave, how they consume, how they communicate. I’m noticing what feels different and why. Vacationing means I’m resting, allowing myself to experience without analyzing every detail. Both are valuable, but they serve different purposes.
That distinction has shaped how I think about marketing.
There are moments when you need to be in travel mode — analytical, observant, strategic. And there are moments when your audience needs space to exhale rather than another demand for action. Not everything has to shout. Some things can invite.
If travel expands me, interior design roots me.
I grew up in homes — in Nigeria and later in the U.S. — where there was always a “don’t touch” room. A pristine sitting room reserved for guests, preserved like a showroom. You could admire it, but you weren’t meant to live in it.
The best feeling in the world, to me, is coming home and closing the door behind you. I don’t want that space to feel staged. I want it to feel layered and alive.
I’ve always considered myself a maximalist, and my house is no exception to that philosophy. I consider this sacred space to be a living, breathing museum of my life’s experiences.
There’s a Kente cloth from Ghana that I had custom-framed and hung as a focal point. There are coasters from Egypt that I nearly missed a flight bargaining for in a market. Serving spoons from Zanzibar. Pieces from my parents’ home. Some things are from Restoration Hardware. Some are from Marshall’s. Some are thrifted. Some are from markets you won’t find online. When people walk in, they say it feels personal — because it is. Nothing is there by accident.
When I design for clients, I always start the conversation by unlocking a core memory. What did home feel like growing up? What do you want to feel when you close the door behind you after a long day? Only after we talk about feeling do we talk about color, or other striking trends that will matter to each individual.
That instinct — to design for lived experience rather than surface impression — mirrors how I approach my professional work. Are we building something people can actually live in? Or are we staging something that looks impressive but doesn’t function?
Recently, I showed my sixth-grade cousin a TikTok dance that I thought was everywhere. I asked him if he’d seen it.
He looked at me like I was ancient.
“We’re not on TikTok,” he said. “We’re now on YouTube Shorts.”
The speed of that shift was humbling. Platforms rise and fall quickly. Consumption patterns evolve. Attention migrates.
What feels culturally central one year barely registers the next.
That doesn’t mean we chase every shift. It means we stay aware. It means we remain curious enough to notice when the ground is moving beneath us instead of assuming it’s still solid. If we build inside an echo chamber long enough, we start designing for audiences who no longer exist the way we imagine them.
Brand consulting began almost by accident.
Friends would send me their résumés and ask me to take a look. My mom would forward emails and ask me to rewrite them. Someone once asked me to help launch a dating app, which I politely declined.
I was curious about whether my skills could travel beyond one institution, especially having spent nearly my entire career working for the NAACP. I didn’t want to become so specialized that my expertise only made sense in a single ecosystem.
What surprised me wasn’t that I could translate, rather it was who I was translating for.
The small business owners, creatives, and founders I began working with cared about equity and justice. They shared many of the values I work on every day. But they were not thinking about policy eighty percent of their day — not even twenty. They were thinking about taxes, grant deadlines, their kids’ schools, or even whether they could afford a vacation.
That level of awareness shifted something in me. When you work inside a mission-driven organization, it is easy to assume that your issue occupies the same mental space for everyone else, and that is just not the reality we live in.
If we talk to people as though our cause is the only thing that matters, we lose them.
My litmus test now is simple: if my group chat — my friends, my consulting clients, the people I actually know — wouldn’t show up for this campaign or event, then something is misaligned. Not because they lack conviction, but because they are human beings navigating full, layered lives.
It’s actually more essential to capture the emotional attention and trust of my audience during the rest of the year, the ordinary months, than it is in November.
If there is one practice that has strengthened me more than any tactic, it is this: I leave my echo chamber on purpose.
I design spaces that have nothing to do with quarterly goals. I travel in both modes so I can remember the difference between immersion and rest. I spend time with founders and families whose priorities look nothing like a campaign calendar.
Those experiences don’t distract me from my work — they deepen me as a person. They remind me that the world is bigger than any one issue, any one platform, any one room.
In a world this loud, side projects are not indulgent. They are grounding.
And sometimes, the most important thing they give you isn’t a new idea — it’s perspective.