I pulled a card from my Aha! design concepts tin this morning. It said "Vibrancy."

Immediately, I thought about enthusiasm—how it turns up all the colors in life. As a teen and later in corporate environments, I developed the habit of muting my excitement. A safety mechanism. But tamping down enthusiasm never protected me from anything except genuine connection with others.

There's a difference between motion and meaning. Between busy and alive.

We know this intuitively. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified this phenomenon decades ago in his research on "flow"—that state where challenge meets skill and time seems to disappear. Flow isn't frantic. It's focused, energized engagement. The opposite of busy.

In design, vibrancy describes something energetic, full of life. A sense that something is happening. That's the nuance—you can take lots of action, check all the boxes. You can be busy. But vibrancy comes from the energetic quality you bring to your actions.

I think about Annie Dillards word "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." When we move through our days in a state of perpetual busyness, we're just going through motions—not truly experiencing them.

This matters especially in our era of isolated knowledge work. Sitting alone at computers, it's easy to mistake activity for achievement. To confuse busy with productive. We know they're not the same, but busy work is the path of least resistance—looking at our feet instead of the horizon as we walk.

Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh observed this modern paradox: "We're very busy, but we don't know what we're busy about." Why do we rush from task to task when we know this busyness will not bringing us closer to what matters.

Perhaps the path forward is simple: we should stop muting our colors. Let our enthusiasm sparks our curiosity and lean into creates work that's vibrant, not just busy.