Creative Ways of Living: Josh
Creative Life Portfolio: A creative entrepreneur building a venture-backed business, while crafting an authentic life in Virginia’s remote Blue Ridge Mountains.
At Out of Office, we believe in the importance of diversifying our lives. Unlike a strictly work-centric life, a diversified life makes space for a vibrant mix of things that we build our identities on.
One of our goals for 2024 is to help you widen your aperture around more creative (and gratifying!) ways of working and living. Ways that allow us to build our identities around all of the vibrant – and varied! – different parts of ourselves.
To make living a more creative life a reality, we need to better understand ways of working and models of work that allow for a broader variety in our lives.
In our book “Reimagining The Nature of Work,” we’ve dedicated a whole chapter to different models of work – or as we called them “Rhythms of Work”. With this year’s new series “Creative Ways of Living,” our goal is to not only showcase different people who’ve modeled novel ways of working and living but to highlight a growing movement of individuals who are redefining what it means to work and live in our modern world.
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In this first installment of our “Creative Ways of Living” conversations, we connect with Josh Greene, a creative entrepreneur building a venture-backed business called Groove, while crafting an authentic life in Virginia’s remote Blue Ridge Mountains.
In our conversation, Josh highlights the importance of creating a life and community that’s independent from work. He also shares his experience finding ways to integrate different parts of himself, such as his spiritual practice, while navigating through seasons of work. We also talk to him about the importance of consistent rituals around work and non-work, nature as a teacher, as well as the challenges of balancing remote living with the need for in-person connection.
Josh’s unique Creative Life Portfolio:
Alice Katter: What does living a creative life mean to you?
Josh Greene: A creative lifestyle means fostering a life that allows me to express myself through the way I live and the things that I do. Since I was a teenager, I've always strived to do that, often going against the currents around me.
AK: Do you think of your work in seasons of working and not working?
JG: Before starting Groove, I tended to work in seasons of two to three years. That was an amount I could focus on, and then I would take a break. After I left my last corporate job, I took nine months off and really didn't do anything work-related.
When I started Groove, I decided that the next decade or so at least is going to be focused on one thing. I had to rethink all of the ways that I do most things in my life, not just how I schedule time but also how I think of the other parts of myself that are really important, like mentoring or coaching friends or giving support.
How have you maintained those things?
While I'm building Groove, those other parts of me that need to be fulfilled have to come within Groove, either with the community or with the team. A lot of my Life-Pie now is within Groove and Groove moves through all parts of my life. For instance, in my Pie, there's a whole thing on inner work and spiritual practice, which is central to my life. And a lot of that right now comes through being in founder cohorts.
Do you think it’s important to have a distinction between work and personal life?
I live in a community where we don't talk about my work very much. I make sure that there are environments where I'm nourished by other things in my life. And that lifts my identity or diversifies my identity, so it’s not just built by work as opposed to being scared that I'm gonna become work, and therefore I'll put up really high boundaries. I don't like to have that fear-based mentality that I can't fully jump into my work (which I love and gives me so much energy), because of the fear that it's going to become too much of my identity.
I think the challenge for so many people is how do you protect your identity? But, Josh isn't Groove and Groove isn't Josh. I see that a lot of people take the approach of “I'll just have really hard-line boundaries of separation.” But that doesn't speak to me.
What do you love about your set-up?
I just love that on the whole, my very full life constantly either nourishes me, entertains me, allows me to be in service, or forces me to grow in big ways. It's not like an easy path to navigate. It's definitely challenging and extremely rewarding.
I think the move to remote work or to remote living allows for a very different kind of interaction in my day to get onto the land, to get off of my devices and to have an interaction with people that are in relationship in the land in a deeper way. When I lived in London and Hackney and I worked in Shoreditch, the best way to get outside and connect with nature was to go to the park in the summer where there's 5,000 other people sitting there eating their lunch that they bought a Pret, you know…
What are the hard bits?
One of the things that's hard for me is the fact that it does mean I travel more than I want to. I end up going to New York or to LA just to have that in-person connection and inspiration, which I feel is just really important and I miss out on by living here.
What did you have to let go of to live your creative life?
Letting go of conventional social structures. That’s something that I've constantly had to relinquish over time because they never really served me.
The security and sense of safety that comes from a more conventional career path.
The traditional milestones that showed progress in life.
What does “out of office” mean to you?
I associate the office as an ongoing iterative process of making people work well in a capitalist industrial system. That's how I relate to it. Fundamentally, there's a systemizing of process and flows to help the company more than the individual.
So, “out of office” for me is a re-finding of what works for me. It means working and living differently, in ways that are more attuned to the individual and what's going to help people thrive rather than trying to push a square peg into a round hole.
Can you tell us about one or two rituals that make you feel inspired and connected throughout your workday?
How could I not mention Grooving? Spending time checking in with my work crew throughout my day; hearing about what everyone else is working on, supporting each other and getting my work done always leaves me feeling good. I tend to Groove in the afternoon. Normally, there's a good energy as I come into the day and I'm pretty focused. And then the afternoon becomes the time where I want social energy. I want to feel connection. And I know that I have an energy lull between two and four. So, I often just ride that wave with Grooves.
My daily listening practice with a close friend makes sure I start my day with some high quality presence and connection. It regulates my emotions and sets me up for the day. It’s a simple practice, we listen for 4 minutes to each other (without responding) and then have 2 minutes of silence.
One of our favorite things about living a more creative lifestyle are the serendipitous moments and connections it brings into our lives. Tell us about one of those… a Creative Field Trip, a connection you made, a lightbulb idea you had?
I think these dynamics are interesting, to surround myself with people that are working in very different ways from me. I was on a farm, speaking to one of the farm team, it was the end of 2023, beginning of 2024, and she'd had a really tough year, and lots of people had had tough years, I'd had a tough year, and she said, sometimes we just need to look at the trees, because the trees are the best teachers for us. And she was like, look, they let go of the leaves. What are we letting go of right now? They're going to grow new leaves in the spring. It happens. The new season comes. It made me think, what are we giving space to grow?
Are you working remotely and are curious to try Groove?
Out of Office Subscribers now get one month of Groove for free! Check out Groove here and use the code OUTOFOFFICE 🌐
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That’s it for today! Please let us know in the comments if you have any additional questions you’d like us to ask, or any model of work and live you’re especially interested in and we’ll consider these for future conversations!
Also, an extra thank you to our new partner Dana for shaping this interview, we’re excited to have Dana on board and are cooking up some fun things, more about that soon! ✨