Chris Guimarin

Culture Is What You Tolerate

2026-01-31T00:00:00Z

There's a line that keeps rattling around in my head: your culture is defined by the worst behavior you tolerate.

It's usually aimed at organizations. The idea being that your team's values aren't what's printed on the wall. They're whatever you let slide. The standard you accept becomes the standard you have. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals. What you do reveals what you actually value. Everything else is just a story you tell yourself.

But I keep thinking about this on a smaller scale. Personal scale.

What if your life is what you tolerate?

Not your goals. Not your aspirations. The minimum you're willing to accept from yourself on any given day.

Take taste. We talk about it like it's something you collect. Galleries visited, books read, influences absorbed. But taste is really just what you're willing to tolerate visually. The kerning you won't let slide. The color pairing that makes you wince. The misaligned element that gnaws at you until you fix it, even though the client would never notice.

Taste isn't your best work. It's your minimum acceptable work. The point below which you refuse to ship.

Two designers can have the same ceiling, the same theoretical capacity for excellence, but wildly different taste. The difference is the floor. One tolerates more. The other simply won't.

This applies beyond design. A person who can't get to the gym three times a week won't suddenly finish a marathon. An organization that can't run a meeting on time won't pull off a company-wide transformation. Did you close that ticket or let it roll into next week? Did you send the note or just think about sending it? Did you move your body or tell yourself you'd start Monday?

The floor matters more than the ceiling.

Most of the time, we tinker at the edges. We adjust the numbers, tweak the routine, buy a new app. But the high-leverage moments are rare. They're the ones that let you change the rules entirely, not just the parameters.

In organizations, this looks like layoffs, restructuring, a new vision, an existential threat acknowledged out loud. Blunt instruments that reset expectations.

In life, it's the moments that shake you awake. A death. A birth. A diagnosis. A job lost or a job that finally breaks you. The realization, sharp and sudden, that you aren't living the life you want to live.

These transitions are where new patterns form. The slate feels clean, even if it's painful. The old habits lose their grip because the context that held them in place is gone.

But here's what most people miss: the shock is just the opening. It's not the change itself.

After the dust settles, after the grief fades, after the novelty of the new job wears off, you fall back. That's the gravitational pull of who you've been. The shock only matters if you use that window to institute new standards. New expectations. A higher floor.

You have a window. Use it or lose it.

This is where the small things matter. Not because any single one is impressive, but because habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. Small deposits, made consistently, that stack on top of each other until the total dwarfs what any single contribution could have been.

What helps me: imagining myself as a new person. Not who I've been, but who I'm trying to become. What would that person's floor look like? What would they refuse to tolerate? What small things would they do without thinking?

Then I work backward. I don't try to convince the old version of myself to change. I just start acting like the new person would act. Small steps. Consistent steps. The kind that compound.

I've seen this play out beyond my own life. I've been a co-chair of the NextGen Advocates for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS for years. We've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've spent the last two years thinking about how to step back. Not just handing off tasks, but making sure the good things we built into the culture persist. That the fundraising relationships carry forward. That the creative vision stays sharp. That the values we established become the values the group holds, not just the values I held.

Because things stop happening when the person driving them leaves or loses interest. Apple after Jobs didn't collapse. It fell back on its culture. The systems he built and the standards he embedded carried forward. Some things persisted. Others drifted. That's what happens when the floor rests on a single person.

The question isn't whether singular people can drive momentum. They obviously can. The question is whether you're building something that survives them. For groups, this means distributing the floor instead of concentrating it in a single point of failure. For individuals, it means building habits that don't depend on willpower or circumstance.

Lately I've been running a coding streak across personal projects. Some days I ship something real. A new feature. A fix that's been nagging at me for weeks. Most days I ship something small. A tweak. A cleanup. An incremental improvement nobody would notice but me.

But the streak holds. And the streak is the point.

Each day's work becomes the foundation for the next. The interest earns interest. The muscle builds on itself. It's not about being great every day. It's about showing up every day. And when something big does come along, the muscle is already there.

So, here's the question I keep coming back to: What's the worst behavior I'm tolerating from myself? What's the lowest-quality work I'm letting out the door? What small thing am I letting slide?

Because that's not the floor beneath my ambitions. That is the ambition. That's who I'm actually becoming.

The answer isn't to strive harder. It's to raise the floor.

Marks on Blank Pages

2025-12-31T00:00:00Z

This year: a relaunched personal website, backed my first Broadway show, a promotion to Associate Director. Each one started as a mark on a blank page.

Some became real things. Some are still becoming. All of them taught me something about momentum: how one act of creation leads to the next.

I got promoted to Associate Director of Design at Blizzard.

Leading design for Battle.net across accounts, checkout, game services, support, and developer platforms. Our team shipped meaningful updates to our paths to pay and play, plus hundreds of refinements that work so well players don't think about them. Which is the goal. Good design eases into the user's intent. That Edward Tufte line keeps proving itself: "Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual."

Real Women Have Curves, the Musical opened on Broadway.

The story mattered: working-class Latina immigrant women trying to achieve the American Dream, navigating dignity and belonging. Backing this show meant being part of something by helping creators realize their vision, watching performers make their Broadway debuts, and fulfilling my own dream of investing in my first show.

I will always remember the standing ovations night after night. The sound filling the room. The joy on faces. The energy in how people stood. I am so proud to have invested with family and friends and it all started with a friendship: Jack Noseworthy, the co-lead producer, who opened the door.

Now when the cast album plays, those feelings comes back. Entertainment Weekly ranked it #6 on their "Best of Broadway" Top Ten list, and people are still resonating with it. Read more in Entertainment Weekly → and Listen on Apple Music →

NextGen Spotlight sold out and raised over $20,000 for Broadway Cares.

As the chair, I helped raise more than $500,000 together for Broadway Cares through the NextGen Network over the past few years. It's time to pass the torch on leadership, but I'll be staying on to produce Spotlight going forward. The lesson keeps proving itself: we stand taller in ensemble. Read more in Playbill →

I taught myself to build for the web.

ChrisGuimarin.com is live. Learning git workflows, optimizing fonts, setting up RSS feeds. Not polished. But for the first time, architecting and structuring the site based on imagination, not constraints. No other builders dictating how their tool gets used, no product managers making decisions upstream. The site is my personal playground.

I started positioning for board advisory work.

Still early. Taking courses, figuring out how design becomes strategic counsel. When design gets brought in early to something thorny, where users have to learn a new concept or navigate an unexpected flow, design can soften the experience. When design arrives late, it's handcuffed by prior decisions. Clarity often doesn't emerge until thinking becomes visual. I want to be the voice that asks "is this viable, trustworthy, and delightful?" before decisions lock. More to come.

I got back behind the camera.

Taking more photos. Flowers, nature, life's moments. See below, a lily pad on a garden walk with Vincent and friends at the Madoo Conservancy. A sliver of time, captured.

Looking to 2026

A backlog is waiting. First iOS app: a design quotation app for sharing favorites like that Edward Tufte line above. Not to make money, but to learn, to practice. Physical products to make. 2026 is the year talk becomes shipped work.

Follow along at ChrisGuimarin.com.

Change isn't one big leap. It's the accumulation of showing up, the code commits, the creative attempts, the community work. One mark on a blank page, then another, then another.

To more of it.

Chris

📚 Added to shelf: Thinking in Systems

2024-12-07T00:00:00Z

Added Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows to my shelf.

Chris Guimarin

Culture Is What You Tolerate

Marks on Blank Pages

I got promoted to Associate Director of Design at Blizzard.

Real Women Have Curves, the Musical opened on Broadway.

NextGen Spotlight sold out and raised over $20,000 for Broadway Cares.

I taught myself to build for the web.

I started positioning for board advisory work.

I got back behind the camera.

Looking to 2026

📚 Added to shelf: Thinking in Systems

📚 Added to shelf: The Information

📚 Added to shelf: Steve Jobs

📚 Added to shelf: The Secret Lives of Color

📚 Added to shelf: Product Design for the Web

📚 Added to shelf: Paul Rand

📚 Added to shelf: NASA Graphics Standards Manual

📚 Added to shelf: The Making of a Manager

📚 Added to shelf: Interaction of Color

📚 Added to shelf: In Praise of Shadows

📚 Added to shelf: Designing Programmes

📚 Added to shelf: Designing for People

📚 Added to shelf: The Design of Everyday Things

📚 Added to shelf: Design for the Real World

📚 Added to shelf: Atomic Habits