Our special, wise guest, Anita Stubenrauch, is one of the most creative people I’ve ever met. She’s a writer, speaker, podcaster and entrepreneur. Our paths crossed when she delivered the keynote speech at a conference I attended last November in Austin, TX. Immediately after her presentation, I knew we had to have her on the show.
Anita is a former Apple creative professional who spent a significant chunk of her career at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. While working at Apple, Anita was tapped to write the Apple Credo. She also created presentations seen by Steve Jobs and other members of his executive leadership team.
Life After Apple – finding those sparks
After leaving Apple, Anita founded a retreat space nestled in the mountains of California. It’s called the Land of Make and Believe. She publishes a high-voltage podcast called “Hyperactive Imagination.” Anita also runs a creative consultancy known as Cause Effect Creative, where she provides guidance to brands and brand builders, executives and entrepreneurs.
In this enriching episode, you’ll discover the main thing Anita has learned in her lifetime. Plus, you’ll learn about:
- the power of storytelling;
- what it’s like to work for one of the world’s most storied and admired technology companies;
- and how a creative powerhouse finds her spark and navigates through the wilderness when that spark eludes her.
Anita Stubenrauch joins us today from her home in the hills of Murphys, California. Now buckle up and get ready for a high energy whirlwind experience. Over the next 25 minutes, you will discover why Anita Stubenrauch is one of the wisest people I know.
Resources
Link to Anita’s website Cause:Effect Creative
Link to website for The Land of Make and Believe
Link to podcast site for Hyperactive Imagination
Credits
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Episode Chapters
[0:03:06] – How Skip and Anita met; the power of story
[0:05:20] – A fateful visit to the Apple Store in Arizona
[0:10:13] – How Anita was chosen to write the Apple Credo
[0:13:43] – The Apple Credo, read for us by Anita Stubenrauch
[0:16:38] – Anita shares her Main Thing; a time for replenishing
[0:19:35] – Anita’s new venture – The Land of Make and Believe
[0:23:45] – Anita shares a closing thought to encourage us
Episode Keywords
Wisdom, Apple, Anita Stubenrauch, Cupertino, Creative, Intuition, Professional, Creativity, Transformation, Storytelling, Healthcare, Technology, Emotional, Connections, Narratives, Authenticity, Identity, Possibilities, Spiritual, Self, Discovery, Depletion, Existential, Anxiety, Rejuvenation, Personal, Growth, Rural, California, Arizona, Gathering, Place, Inspiration, Healing, Energy, Spark, Energies, Truths, Redefining, Emotion, Feeling, Influence, Reflection, Genius Bar, Apple Store, Credo, Communications, Keynote, HCIC, Austin, Texas, Murphys
Episode Transcript
0:00:58 – Skip Lineberg
Welcome to the Main Thing Podcast, your wisdom podcast. I’m your host, Skip Lineberg, coming to you today from Parkwood Studios. I’m delighted to welcome you back into this learning space where, twice a month, we package up a concise, high-impact wisdom lesson from one of the wisest people around. Today, that wisdom comes from one of the most creative people I’ve ever met.
Anita Stubenrauch is that person. She’s a writer, speaker, podcaster and entrepreneur. Anita is a former Apple creative professional who spent a significant chunk of her career at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. While working at Apple, Anita was tapped to write the Apple Credo and design presentations for Steve Jobs and other members of his executive leadership team.
After leaving Apple, today she runs a retreat space nestled in the mountains of California. It’s called the Land of Make and Believe. She publishes a high-voltage podcast called “Hyperactive Imagination.” Anita also runs a creative consultancy known as Cause Effect Creative, where she provides guidance to brands and brand builders, executives and entrepreneurs.
In this enriching episode, you’ll discover the main thing Anita has learned in her lifetime. Plus, you’ll learn:
- how to harness the power of storytelling;
- what it’s like to work for one of the world’s most storied and admired technology companies;
- and how a creative powerhouse finds her spark and navigates through the wilderness when that spark eludes her.
Anita Stubenrauch joins us today from her home in the hills of Murphys, California.
Now buckle up and get ready for a high energy whirlwind experience. Over the next 25 minutes, you will discover why Anita Stubenrauch is one of the wisest people I know.
0:02:56 – Skip
Anita Stubenrauch, welcome to The Main Thing Podcast.
0:03:03 – Anita Stubenrauch
Thank you, I’m excited to be here.
0:03:06 – Skip
Anita, you and I met in Austin, Texas. I was attending the HCIC Healthcare Internet Conference, so I’m in a group of about a thousand folks that work in healthcare. And you came with this spark and this burst of creativity, and you told us to focus on creating meaning and feeling. Not focus on the technology and the features and the speed and the bits and bytes and clicks, but to focus on the meaning and the feeling, and that would create inspiration for folks to use our service. And I just thought that was such a unique and timely message for our group.
0:03:44 – Anita Stubenrauch
It was a privilege to get to be there. You know, a lot of times when I talk about storytelling, especially in a business context, it sort of gets kind of dry and folks want like the 10 tips or like the three hacks or the way to do something right. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that doesn’t speak to my soul and I have a hard time doing things that don’t really speak to my soul. Story is so powerful and I don’t want to diminish it or try to contain it or even just like reduce it to just a transactional kind of thing, when it can be so transformational, and especially in the service of something like healthcare. We’re talking about people’s lives.
0:04:34 – Skip
Yes.
0:04:35 – Anita Stubenrauch
And the quality of their lives. Yeah, and you know … I can’t pretend I understand why we’re here on this planet, but while we are, and as we figure out what it means for each of us, right, like, what does it mean to be able to live that life fully? And if we can tell stories of people you know who encounter the struggle along the way to be healthy, to live fully, to be able-bodied, whatever that means and be able to tell it in a way that connects other people with empowered solutions for their own lives, right, what can be better than that?
0:05:20 – Skip
You spent a chunk of your career working for Apple. After you had left and you were in Arizona visiting your dad. You had an Apple product with you, an iPad, that was broken, and you went to the local Apple store.
0:05:36 – Anita Stubenrauch
I had left Apple after 13 years, so I left in 2018. And I think this is about a year later. Around Thanksgiving of 2018. So I had been away for a while, and the way in which I had left, I didn’t feel great about.
0:05:56 – Skip
How so?
0:06:00 – Anita Stubenrauch
I had left with a health crisis really, and not just it. It was like a mental health crisis and and a health one, kind of rolled up in a hot mess. I had left when I absolutely needed to, when I couldn’t, I couldn’t stay anymore, and that meant, though, that I had left and didn’t really get to say goodbye or experience goodbye in the way that I would have wanted to, especially after having been there for 13 years.
And so where I am—I’m in Arizona. The day before Thanksgiving, I’m visiting my dad. There’s literally an Apple store, like in the mall, kind of across the street from where his neighborhood is, and my iPad is broken. I’m like, well, I guess I have to go to Apple.
0:06:49 – Skip
First time back?
0:06:50 – Anita
First time back after leaving, so there’s like a little bit of awkwardness there, a little bit of like I don’t want to like face Apple because there was sort of guilt and shame over how I left. And so I go to the Apple store. I mean I knew there were going to be no appointments available. It’s literally the day before Thanksgiving, it’s like like halfway through the day already. Yeah, so when I show up and Martha’s there to check folks into the Genius Bar, you know, I asked like, hey, I’ve got a broken iPad, can you get me? And she’s like, oh, sorry, no appointments.
And I was like, yeah, I know I used to work at Apple, so I know sometimes you can find a way to squeeze people in. And so that piqued her interest. And she’s like, oh, you know, where’d you work, what’d you do? Work on anything that I might have known about. And I was like Cupertino, communications, cred, communications, credo, skip. I was unprepared for her reaction, because she started to cry and she told me that, uh, she’d had a really rough night the night before, um, and that she had pulled out the credo and that reading it had lifted her up and given her hope.
0:08:12 – Skip
Oh my gosh. Wow.
0:08:15 – Anita Stubenrauch
Um, so I started to cry, yeah of course. Um and uh, and she went on to say, like that she couldn’t be the only person in the store who got to know that I was there.
And you know there’s a cultural thing at Apple when um employees leave, you know they have everyone line up around the edges of the store or the office and as you make your final exit they give you a standing ovation. It’s called a fond farewell and because I left during the holiday party, I more or less snuck out.
I didn’t get that. And that was part of the grief that I was carrying over the way that I had left Apple.
0:09:04 – Skip
You had probably participated for others, as they were departing and you were standing around the edge of the room clapping yeah.
0:09:10 – Anita Stubenrauch
I mean certainly many, many times over 13 years.
0:09:13 – Skip
Okay, and you slid out the side door quietly and you never got your ceremony.
0:09:19 – Anita Stubenrauch
Yeah, and I. I did learn later that that’s called an “Irish Exit.” I had no idea. And I’m half Irish, so I’m like … I’m true to my people, I guess.
But yeah, it was kind of beautiful, because here I am in Tucson, Arizona, at a store I’ve never been to before, surrounded by people that I don’t know, and one by one, Martha brings people up to me to say, “Thank you.”
0:09:45 – Skip
Oh my Gosh
0:09:45 – Anita Stubenrauch
And so I got this fond farewell there like out of nowhere, and it was this beautiful. How often do we get to have those kind of moments in our lives where, like you, experience appreciation from strangers?
0:10:00 – Skip
The impact of your work.
0:10:02 – Anita Stubenrauch
Yeah, the impact of your work. Like you do something and you think maybe this had a good effect. But I don’t really know.
0:10:08 – Skip
You hope it did.
0:10:09 – Anita Stubenrauch
You hope it did.
0:10:13 – Skip
How did you get picked to write the credo? How in the world did you land that assignment? That’s, I mean the credo, I’m going to guess, is like a charter document. It exemplifies the Apple culture.
0:10:25 – Anita Stubenrauch
But it was a random Thursday at like 2:30 in the afternoon when my boss’s boss stepped by my desk and he asked me what I was doing in half an hour.
I knew enough to say, “Something I’m not expecting?!”
0:10:43 – Skip
That always means you need to come to a meeting, or you’re going to get an assignment dropped on you with a tight deadline.
0:10:52 – Anita Stubenrauch
Always, a hundred percent, always, yeah.
Yeah. So I was like, okay, well, what’s about to happen? So suddenly, you know, I’m now over at One Infinite Loop, which was the main campus of Apple at the time, and in a boardroom, like surrounded by all of these top execs across Apple, like across many, many departments, not just within retail, and Angela Arendt, who was a senior vice president of Apple retail and the online stores, the contact centers, is heading up the table and you know, more or less they’ve been doing research for the past year on what about? The Apple credo mattered to everyone. This meeting was basically like what is going to happen now?
And so they’re kind of tossing all of these ideas around, Like are we going to create a song? Are we going to hire Lin-Manuel Miranda to write something from Hamilton? I’m just like sitting in this room, you know … there’s two other very large groups outside of the conference room waiting on Angela for other very important meetings that require her approval or direction. Angela sort of stops this meeting and turns to me and she says like: “Tell me about you.”
And I was like, well, I grew up loving Apple. My dad quit working nights at the post office and sunk all the money he had into an Apple computer and started his own business and my very first job in college was working at the Apple computer lab. I won a fellowship award from college on a movie that I made on my very first personal Apple computer. Starting at the Apple store in Chicago changed my life, yeah, and you know she took the time in that meeting to get to know who I was and why my perspective might matter in creating something. Because I was sitting next to a guy from Apple’s Marcom team—marketing communication—and he was a very talented writer who had teams and teams and teams of writers underneath him. And I was just an individual contributor on the retail communications team.
At the end of that meeting, we were both given a chance to write something. When we came back and we shared our drafts, what he wrote was cool and it was fun, but it felt like an ad. And what I wrote made people cry.
0:13:39 – Skip
Mm-hmm, will you share it with us now? I’d love to hear it.
0:13:43 – Anita Stubenrauch
Yeah, absolutely.
We are here to enrich lives, to help dreamers become doers, to help passion expand human potential, to do the best work of our lives. At our best, we give more than we take From the planet to the person beside us. We become a place to belong where everyone is welcome, everyone. We draw strength from our differences, from background and perspective to collaboration and debate. We are open. We redefine expectations, first for ourselves, then for the world. Because we’re a little crazy, because good enough isn’t, because what we do says who we are.
We find courage to try and to fail, to learn and to grow, to figure out what’s next, to imagine the unimaginable, to do it all over again tomorrow.
At our core, we believe our soul is our people, people who recognize themselves in each other, people who shine a spotlight only to stand outside it. People who work to leave this world better than they found it. People who live to enrich lives.
0:15:31 – Skip
That’s just beautiful and powerful, so emotional.
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0:16:38 – Skip
Anita Stubenrauch, what’s the main thing you’ve learned in your lifetime so far?
0:16:45 – Anita Stubenrauch
Skip, the main thing I’ve learned in my lifetime so far is the deepest transformations come from trusting what I can’t yet understand.
0:16:55 – Skip
Wow, there’s a lot in there. Would you walk us through that and unpack the meaning of each of those parts of that main thing?
0:17:03 – Anita Stubenrauch
The biggest example in my life of starting to experience this trusting. What I can’t yet understand really was, you know, my start to find my way back to meaning and purpose and joy—separate from work, separate from anything else. I was starting to ask myself, like when was the last time I was happy? And it was me looking back to art school, when I was making things and, you know, being creative and all of that. And I was like—I need more of that in my life. How do I get more of that in my life?
0:17:46 – Skip
You had given up so much of your soul to generate output for Apple that you had to have something to build that back up … to fill your soul … after you had emptied it out for so many years
0:18:04 – Anita Stubenrauch
There was so much that had been depleted over time, and part of it was also this awareness and this kind of like existential anxiety around the awareness that I’ve been given a lot of creative gifts, and one of the questions I was asking myself was, if I died today, will I have done what I was born to do?
While I was at Apple, the answer was just no, and there was sort of this like burden around, feeling like I was gifted with all of this stuff. I’m not using it. Like what is my life without me using it? And that’s what you’re talking about like replenishing your soul, like, for me, the part of replenishing my soul is using those gifts. I had, you know, a creative sort of outlet for hire, but it’s not the same thing as like generating that which is moving through me.
0:19:01 – Skip
Yeah, yeah.
0:19:02 – Anita Stubenrauch
In service of inspiration, transformation, whatever that is. Yeah, I mean, you know, if I use kind of the metaphor that’s part of the show and it feels like a recurring motif in my life, that sort of like energy, that sort of lightning bolt kind of thing that spark that spark, you know. And then there’s times where, like it feels like I’m not getting replenished with any of that energy.
It’s just being sort of drained out of my feet into the earth around me. And it had been getting drained out of my feet for too long.
And I love these rolling hills in California and these big twisty trees, and so I was like, okay, I feel kind of called there. I don’t know why. But I do, so I’m going to chase that. So I started to look for these different properties in rural California.
Murphys is like a tiny gold mining town, about three hours east of San Francisco and halfway between Tahoe and Yosemite and the Sierra foothills. It’s beautiful.
0:20:01 – Skip
That’s a great location. A couple hours from a lot, of, a lot of places. Remote, rural, wooded, lush.
0:20:12 – Anita Stubenrauch
Yeah, lush. And before we saw it, I decided to watch “The Money Pit” on Saturday night, just to sort of get myself in the right frame of mind for what I might be getting into.
0:20:27 – Skip
Let’s ground ourselves here. [laughter]
0:20:31 – Anita Stubenrauch
Let’s ground ourselves!
We put in an offer on Monday. We were in contract on Tuesday. That was the beginning of The Land of Make and Believe.
We’re on 14 acres, sort of gently sloping terrain. There’s a huge rock formation that the property is built around. This limestone, marbleized limestone. There’s probably about 50 chaw’se, which are these grinding basins where the Miwok people, the women specifically, would grind acorns into the rock.
So historically like this was a gathering place, long before the gold miners came to the area. And there’s this crazy home. It was built as a single family home in the 70s with like 26 foot ceilings in this great room with glass all around. It’s ridiculous.
Hard to believe it was made for like a family. It feels like it was meant to gather people and that was part of the like I can’t believe this place is is even more perfect than I could have imagined.
And so here’s this space, and, and there’s a creek bordering one edge of it, coyote Creek. It’s just, it’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful, and the energy here feels very vibrant, I guess is the word I would give it, because I feel like sometimes we have to make a leap before we can believe it’s possible to do it. And that was kind of my experience with coming out here and it’s been kind of my experience with any of these like big, pivotal, transformational moments in my life. And if there is a place that can support folks going through those versions of that for themselves, whether that’s creatively, whether that’s entrepreneurially, whether that’s through something like you know, physical modality that they need to move through in terms of healing or something, this space is kind of a container for all of those things. Maybe to say, the veil feels very thin here in that regard, but the world needs more experiences like that and not just here in California, like all over the place.
I think it’s available for us, for places for discovery and for truth to be revealed energies, many, many things beyond our understanding, that influence our world and influence us as creative beings, and it’s available to us If we can tune into it, listen to it, make ourselves receptive to it. These things move through us.
0:23:16 – Skip
Yes.
0:23:35 – Anita Stubenrauch
Yeah, even get to touch it. You know, right, holy smokes and it doesn’t like incinerate me. You know, it’s amazing!
0:23:45 – Anita Stubenrauch
I’ll leave you with this thought: remember who you are.
I think that, as creative and spiritual beings, having this kind of human experience, it’s really easy for us to forget who we are in the midst of all of the kind of daily obligations. But if we can take a moment out of our day, out of our lives, and remember who we are and what a gift that is. And what we have access to, in terms of this universe and and connection to, I don’t even know what—the divine in some capacity that wants to be in relationship with us … and wants to be in relationship with other beings … that our work can connect others to … what a gift! And I do deeply, fully believe that everyone has some profound, powerful reason for being and some core, powerful truth to who they are that the world needs. So if we can remember more of who we are and bring that back into the mundane realities that we all have to face every day, I think the world is going to be better off.
0:25:10 – Skip
Anita, thank you for coming onto our show sharing your main thing, sharing wonderful stories, helping us to understand the creative process and how creativity and intuition work. It’s just been fabulous.
0:25:24 – Anita Stubenrauch
This has been a joy, so thank you for having me on.
0:25:28 – Skip
Anita, so long for now.
0:25:30 – Anita Stubenrauch
We’ll talk soon, again.
0:25:33 – Skip
Okay, that goes by incredibly fast, doesn’t it? Time flies when you’re hacking wisdom. Thank you for listening to this wisdom conversation. If you enjoyed this podcast and found the wisdom lesson valuable, then I encourage you to share it with a loved one or friend. Did you know? Podcast recommendations from one person to another remain the strongest form of podcast growth worldwide? It’s true, and we’d appreciate you helping spread the good word.
Let’s give a big, hearty thank you to the crew of the Main Thing Podcast. These are the folks who truly keep the wisdom pipeline flowing Audio engineer Bob Hotchkiss, strategy advisor Andy Malinoski, public relations and partnerships guru Rachel Bell, social media and digital marketing expert Chloe Lineberg, graphic designer Emma Malinoski, and, of course, our patrons.
Your feedback matters a lot. If you have a question or a suggestion, I’d love to hear from you. Email me at info at the-main-thing-podcast dot com. Well, that’s a wrap for this show. I’m your host, Skip Lineberg, signing off for now and inviting you to join us again next time for another special delivery of wisdom.
0:26:56 – Skip
Hey, it’s Skip, again. I popped back on to share a few thoughts on what we learned today from this wisdom conversation with Anita Stubenrauch. It was just a blast for me to collaborate with another highly creative person, who like myself, has worked in a corporate environment, I feel like Anita and I are kindred spirits in many ways. Perhaps you heard the essence of that in our recording.
When we popped into the on-screen Parkwood Studios space a few weeks ago to record this episode, we immediately just doubled over in laughter, as both of us were wearing long-sleeved, pink t-shirts—totally unplanned.
As I reflect on our conversation, I keyed in on hearing Anita discuss how we don’t have to allow our work, our nine to five, to be our identity. In fact, an identity rooted in our work is always subject to being erased or overwritten. Work will almost always take more from us than it returns to us. I also loved and just really appreciated the reminders and examples Anita gave us about enriching our stories with feeling and emotion. Those are the types of stories that touch people’s hearts and minds, make people cry, make people see what really matters—and often persuade folks to act, or to behave, differently. I can’t wait to hear your takeaways, your insights, your reflections, and I invite you to share them with me via email to info at the main thing podcast dot com. You might just hear yours read on a future episode.
Transcribed by https://podium.page
