Building the Land of Make+Believe

Anita Stubenrauch has a wonderful way with words. Her ‘Thunder Story’ – the name she gives her origin tale – has all the drama of a category-five storm. With such talent for wordplay, it’s not surprising that she worked her way to a creative career in the upper echelons of Apple.

But getting there was not inevitable. Raised in a working-class family in Kansas, Anita spent all her energy as a teen, plotting her escape.

“I was fixated with getting the hell out of there.”

Seeing education as her ticket to ride, she became laser-focused on getting the scholarships she required to leave and start a new life elsewhere. It was a time she deems ‘The Bewilderness’.

Her plan was admirable and ambitious. Although according to her school guidance counselor, a little too ambitious. The counselor advised Anita to ‘reduce her expectations’ and ‘formulate a backup’. Anita ignored the advice, putting every egg she had into her ‘great escape’ basket.

And then it didn’t happen. She got accepted by Rhode Island School of Design – with hardly any financial assistance. She got into SAIC – The School of the Art Institute of Chicago – but needed a lot more money to make it work. Kansas City Art Institute wanted her and suggested a big scholarship, but ultimately it went to someone else.

Time was running out for Anita. Graduation was approaching, but without the scholarships, her escape plan was doomed. And she had no Plan B.

The Clearing

Anita loved her life at Art School in Chicago. She describes this period as being in ‘a clearing’.

She was living exactly the present she wanted to live. She found friends, enjoyed her studies, and even landed a job in the computer lab on campus, thanks to her experience of playing with her Dad’s Mac back home.

Amongst various creative projects, Anita started writing a blog she named ‘Indoor Boys’, as a way to talk to interesting guys. It was a place where like-minded people could get their fix of ‘smart, sexy guys’. Through this, she hit the jackpot, landing an opportunity to interview Adam Savage of the US TV show: MythBusters. This interview would later be key to her career.

In the meantime, Anita got a job at an Apple store, and for two years worked the shop floor before getting hired by corporate – full-time. She then spent the next four years as a ‘one-woman creative agency for the store design team’, art directing photography, designing presentations, and making movies. All the while she kept her Indoor Boys blog going.

Eventually, the right person caught wind of her blogging expertise, and Anita got offered a job at Apple as a writer. As a super-fan – it was a dream come true.

“It was so awesome in so many ways. And really hard in others. Especially as my career progressed.”

Anita went full throttle (and then some). She was determined to prove that she could make a successful career in the world’s most valuable tech company. And she did. Anita rose the ranks, eventually designing presentations given to Steve Jobs, speechwriting for top exec Angela Ahrendts, and authoring Apple’s Credo – which is still in place today.

The Land of Make+Believe

Running several projects simultaneously (see: The Anitaverse), Anita is as high-functioning as ever. But now she’s doing it on her own terms.

Her brand vision agency - Cause:Effect Creative – helps purpose-driven leaders and organizations ‘express visionary ideas with poetic power’. Anita has run numerous courses, for example, ‘Build-a-Bio’ which helps people ‘see and describe their own awesomeness’. Indeed, it was building and sharing course materials in Craft that first got her excited about it.

Anita has also recently launched a podcast - ‘Hyperactive Imagination’ – a ‘high-voltage channel for creativity’. It’s a highly-produced show, carefully sound-scaped, with moving and inspirational real-life stories.

But her most ambitious project is The Land of Make+Believe, a fourteen-acre event and retreat space in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. It’s here that Anita resides with three Babydoll Southdown sheep, two Angora goats, two Suri alpacas, two Potbelly pigs, two dogs, and one cat.

“My vision is to create a place where people can come and experience various healing and creative modalities; anything that might connect you to meaning, purpose, and joy. That could be an entrepreneurial experience, it could be bodywork, writing, art making, or things we haven’t even imagined yet.”

The scale of the project is beyond anything she’s ever attempted before. But five years in, Anita has already achieved a lot; designing how the area will be used, planning and building new structures, and conceiving how the entire project will operate as a business.