Embrace the Shake: What a Trembling Hand Taught Me About Creative Agility
By Shannon Steven, founder of Wonder Wander.
“We need to first be limited to become limitless” (https://ctsblogofdoom.wordpress.com/opinions/embrace-the-shake/)
Every creative journey (and every entrepreneurial one) has a moment when what you planned simply stops working. For artist Phil Hansen, that moment came in art school. He had devoted himself to pointillism, the painstaking technique of building images from thousands of tiny dots. Then a tremor developed in his hand. The very tool he relied on had turned against him. His neurologist delivered the news plainly: permanent nerve damage. No more precise dots. No more pointillism. Hansen was devastated. He stopped making art altogether. Then his neurologist said something that changed everything: Embrace the shake.
The Box Is Not the Enemy
Instead of fighting his limitation, Hansen leaned into it. He began building intentional constraints around his work. Constraints like using only $1 worth of supplies, painting with his hands instead of brushes, tattooing a banana instead of stretching a canvas forced him to see differently, move differently, make differently. The result? A body of work that has reached millions. A TED Talk with over 6 million views. A book, Tattoo a Banana. Commissions from the Grammy Awards, Disney, and the Rockefeller Foundation. A community of people he calls, simply, "the People." As Hansen puts it: "We need to first be limited to become limitless." I think about this often, especially now, as I navigate my own version of the shake.
My Shake
After 30 years as an art teacher, I took early retirement in 2026. For three decades, my work had a clear container: a classroom, a curriculum, a cohort of students. I knew what success looked like. I knew how to measure it. Founding Wonder Wander blew that container wide open. Suddenly there was no lesson plan, no bell schedule, no built-in audience. There was only a mission: to make public art accessible and inspiring, and the terrifying freedom to figure out how. I was building a weekly newsletter ( Weekly Wonder ), developing a public art discovery app, launching art workshops, and consulting for schools and organizations, all at once, all from scratch. The shake, for me, wasn't a tremor in my hand. It was the loss of the structure that had always held me.
Agility Is Not Abandonment
What Hansen's story has taught me, and what I keep returning to in this fellowship, is that agility doesn't mean throwing away what you know. It means trusting that your constraints can point you somewhere new.
When Hansen lost pointillism, he didn't lose his eye for detail, his commitment to portraiture, or his belief that art should move people. He just found a different way to express it all. The shake redirected him. It didn't erase him.
For social entrepreneurs, this distinction matters. We often arrive at our ventures with deep expertise in our fields and then feel pressure to shed that identity in favor of "entrepreneur." The pivot feels like abandonment.
But the work I did for 30 years wasn't just teaching. It was building belonging. Helping people feel seen. Proving that creativity belongs to everyone, not just those who call themselves artists. That work is exactly what Wonder Wander does, just with a different container.
Leaving the classroom didn't erase my purpose. It clarified it.
What Shifting Focus Actually Looks Like
“Daudi” Graphite on Cups, 30 x 20 inches, 2007
There's a piece Hansen created that I keep coming back to when I need a reminder. He asked for 50 cups at Starbucks, combined them with pencils he already owned, and drew a graphite portrait of a boy named Daudi living in Uganda. The proceeds support poverty relief through World Vision. One dollar's worth of supplies. One face. One act of community.
That's what creative agility looks like in practice, not a dramatic reinvention, but a willingness to ask: What do I already have? What constraint, right in front of me, is actually an invitation?
For me, that invitation has been the newsletter, the classroom energy I bring to workshops, the 30 years of watching students discover they had something worth making. None of it wasted. All of it redirected.
The Invitation
If you're in a moment of disruption: in your venture, your industry, or your sense of self, I'd offer you Hansen's neurologist's advice: Embrace the shake. Not as resignation. As strategy. The tremor in your plan might be the very thing that points you toward work you couldn't have designed on purpose.
Shannon Steven
Shannon Steven is the founder of Wonder Wander.
ADVANCING CULTURAL LEARNING AND CONNECTED COMMUNITIES
Wonder Wander turns public art into an accessible, place-based learning experience. Through its mobile app, SEE SAY DO prompts, Weekly Wonder newsletter, and partnerships with cultural institutions and cities, Wonder Wander helps people slow down, look closely, reflect, create, and connect with the art already around them. By bringing an art educator’s guidance into everyday public spaces, the company makes cultural learning more approachable while deepening people’s connection to the places and communities they move through. Follow along on Instagram and Facebook.
Image Credit:
Daudi, graphite on Starbucks cups, 30 x 20 inches, 2007 — Phil Hansen ( philinthecircle.com )
“We need to first be limited to become limitless” (https://ctsblogofdoom.wordpress.com/opinions/embrace-the-shake/)
Sources:
Hansen, Phil. "Embrace the Shake." TED2013.
Hansen, Phil. Tattoo a Banana: And Other Ways to Turn Anything and Everything into Art. TarcherPerigee, 2012.
Phil Hansen biography, Premier Speakers Bureau. https://www.premierspeakers.com/phil-hansen