7
OPINION
The creative void
When the engine stalls, take the pause to reset, refocus, and get ready for what comes next.
F or 30 years, I’ve driven the marketing machine, leading teams, streamlining processes, and polishing proposals until they were bulletproof. Then a few weeks ago, bam! Nothing. No meetings cramming my calendar. No RFPs screaming for edits. No fire drills. Just … quiet.
For someone who’s been working since I was 15, that silence felt like walking out of a crowded theater into an empty one. It shook me. But then, relief hit like a coffee break after a deadline sprint. That was my wake-up call. THE VOID. They call it the void. That empty stretch where ideas ghost you, and your drive hits the brakes. I’m no novelist, but I get why J.K. Rowling holed up in Edinburgh cafés, scratching out Harry Potter when her life felt like a stalled project, or why Stephen King admits to staring at a blank screen for days, waiting for the spark to return. It’s the same for us in the AEC world. Marketers slump after churning out a dozen proposals in a month. Architects stare at blank screens after a client meeting. Engineers go quiet after a multi-year plant
expansion wraps up. We grind through 60-hour weeks, merger fatigue, tight budgets, and endless change orders. Then the engine stalls. Maybe it’s a job change. Burnout. Something you can’t name. Suddenly, you’re asking: Who am I without the daily chaos? Take me, for example. I had a box in my office filled with old proposals and recordable CDs (remember those?). One was from a major airport’s new parallel runway proposal in 2002 that took three all-nighters to polish. We won it, and the template and boilerplate I built for that pitch became the firm’s go-to for a decade. Those folders are my scars and wins, proof of a life spent making things work behind the scenes. When the grind stopped, I thought I’d lost my edge. Spoiler: I didn’t. I’m still in my prime.
Kraig Kern, CPSM
See KRAIG KERN , page 8
THE ZWEIG LETTER NOVEMBER 17, 2025, ISSUE 1610
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