On Creating Something That Outlasts You

Why Art & Mortality Go Hand in Hand

The other morning I asked my dad for a sign.

Since his passing, my sister and I have come to believe he visits in the form of hummingbirds. In some traditions, they carry blessings from those we’ve lost. I can’t fully trust in signs, but a large part of me will always hope that those we lose don’t leave forever. Less than thirty seconds after I asked, a hummingbird hovered outside my patio doors.

I’m no dad. But perhaps this will be your hummingbird.

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When I was fifteen, my dad passed suddenly. I’ve now lived more years without him than with him, and still, I find myself wanting to call him almost every day. He was only 56. That number still makes me angry.

He was a passionate musician. A talented drummer, curious about any instrument he could get his hands on. But he didn’t pursue it. He chose stability instead. Built a successful business. Provided for his family in a way that gave me opportunities he never had.

I’ve spent a long time holding both of those things at once. The gratitude and the ache. The life he built for us and the life he set aside to build it. He gave me everything. And I’ve spent the beginning of my thirties wondering what he would have made, if he’d had more time.

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We’re all going to die someday. Most of us know this and promptly file it away.

It’s easier that way. The fear of suffering, of the unknown, of what gets left behind, is easier to manage from a distance. So we keep it there. Somewhere between the things we’ll deal with eventually and the things we’d rather not deal with at all.

But here’s what shifts when you stop looking away: it becomes the most clarifying fact of being alive.

A hundred million people have come before us. They are gone, and yet nothing around us is untouched by them. Every idea, every object, every tradition carries the fingerprint of someone who no longer exists. They shaped the world from the inside and then stepped out of it. What they left behind stayed.

We will do the same. The question is just what we’re leaving.

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For the last ten years I’ve built a life around stability. Safe roles. Strong companies. A career I’m genuinely grateful for. And still, a question keeps surfacing. What is all of this for? How long am I going to keep choosing it?

I built C’est Cool because I couldn’t stop thinking about the people who chose differently. Founders who walked away from the predictable path and built something that could only have come from them. I told myself I was doing it for them, to give underrepresented creatives a platform, to tell the stories that should be told. And that’s true.

But I was also doing it for myself. Gathering evidence. Watching to see if it was possible. If someone like me could step off the edge and build something that lasts.

My dad built his life so that I could have choices he didn’t. I think about that constantly. The weight of it and the gift of it. That the most loving thing he ever did was hand me time he never got to keep.

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You and I are not going to last. But what we create might.

Not because art is more noble than other work. But because it’s where individual perspective becomes something that can travel further than a single lifetime. What you noticed, felt, survived, loved, been confused by: translated into something someone else can hold, long after you’re gone.

My dad did this without ever calling it art. He shaped how I see the world in ways I’m still discovering. He is gone, and he is not gone. The people we love have a way of outlasting themselves, through everyone they touched, and everyone those people touch in turn.

That’s what making something does. It’s just a more deliberate version of the same thing.

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You don’t have to quit your job. You don’t have to call yourself a creative or a founder or an artist. You don’t have to have it figured out.

But it’s worth asking, deliberately and honestly: when it’s over, what do you want to have left? Not the title. Not the resume. The thing that carries something of you into the lives of people you’ll never meet.

Mortality is not a sentence. It’s the condition that makes the question urgent. That forces us, if we let it, to stop deferring and start deciding who we actually are and what we actually want to make of the time we have.

I don’t know for certain that hummingbirds carry messages from the people we’ve lost. But I know that what we make does. Put something into the world that could only have come from you, and it will reach people after you’re gone. Shift something in someone you’ll never meet.

That’s not optimism. That’s just how it works.

Make the thing. You won’t be gone forever.

Speak soon,

Kelly