There's a version of Ryan Rodrigo that ended up behind a desk at a bank. He knows exactly who that version is — because he watched it happen to someone else.

Ryan is 25. He's the Head of Brand & Marketing at Pepper Street, one of Sri Lanka's fastest-growing fashion labels, with its own manufacturing operation and a brand identity built on local story, local models, and a campaign shot outside Independence Square. He joined and helped scale the brand significantly within his first six months. Before Pepper Street, he founded CapitalReach — a startup development agency he built during COVID, ran with a team of three, and lost to financial mismanagement. Not to bad work. The work was good. The structure wasn't.

In this episode of The Creative Odyssey Podcast, recorded at Hatch — Sri Lanka's startup and creative technology hub — Sheran and Ryan talk through what it actually costs to build something real as a creative person. And what the systems around you will do to stop you from finding out you were capable in the first place.

What they cover:

- Why products are more or less the same — and why brand story is the only thing that actually differentiates
- How the Freedom Drop campaign (shot outside Independence Square with one and a half weeks of permission negotiations) became Pepper Street's early growth catalyst
- What 13 years of the Sri Lankan school system does to a creative kid who wins best singer 12 times and still gets told they're failing
- The mentor who said four words that changed the direction of Ryan's life — and why Ryan only started because he trusted that person on faith alone
- Why CapitalReach really closed — and what creative people need to understand about money, working capital, and the pace of creative output
- What authenticity actually requires — owning every flaw, out loud, on camera, without flinching
- Why every mediocre company copied someone, and what separates the ones that didn't
- How Ryan manages creative teams without killing their ideas — and why letting the first draft come in is non-negotiable
- Why a creative is not supposed to be constantly creating — and what happens to the ones that are forced to be
- A suicide note written in Sinhala about workplace pressure — and what it means for everyone listening to this podcast

This episode is for anyone who was told their creativity wasn't a career. And for anyone who believed it for longer than they should have.

Keywords: brand strategy Sri Lanka, authenticity in branding, creative entrepreneurship, startup lessons, building a brand story, creative burnout, healthy creative, managing creative teams, Pepper Street Sri Lanka, Hatch Sri Lanka, Ryan Rodrigo, Sheran Ranasinghe, The Creative Odyssey Podcast, Odyssey House Media, creativity podcast, Sri Lankan podcast, brand growth consultant, creative identity, school system creativity

The Creative Odyssey Podcast explores the inner lives of creative people — why they create, what it costs, and why creativity might be the most important thing any of us can do. Hosted by Sheran Ranasinghe. Produced by Odyssey House Media. Recorded at Hatch, Sri Lanka.

📩 [email protected]
🎙️ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/12SGsSsLz4DqlLFwxigjXX
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/pl/podcast/the-creative-odyssey-podcast/id1750306317
📸 Instagram: @thecreativeodysseypodcast
📸 Follow Sheran: @sheranstories
📸 Follow Ryan: @jryanrodrigo

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Nobody told you what you were actually built for. They handed you a list. You picked something. And then spent years wondering why it never quite fit.

Yusuf Hussain nearly quit university in Florida because the way he studied — the only way he had ever been taught — was the worst possible method for how his brain actually works. A campus psychologist identified him as a kinesthetic learner. That one conversation gave him two degrees instead of zero, sent him back to Sri Lanka, and eventually led him to build a practice whose entire purpose is making sure no one else has to wait until 19 — or 40 — to find out who they are.

He is the Country Head of Brain Checker Sri Lanka, a certified counselor, and a Human Potential Strategist working within a framework built by over 40 PhD-level psychologists — and calibrated specifically to South Asian cultural baselines, because the tools most of the world uses were never built for us.

In this conversation, Yusuf and Sheran go deep on:

- Why traditional education was never designed to find your talent
- The three learning styles — visual, auditory, and kinesthetic — and how to identify yours
- Why Myers-Briggs and standard career aptitude tests are insufficient on their own
- Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences and what parents actually need to do with that framework
- Why there are over 4,000 career choices and most people were shown five
- How psychometric assessments work for children from age three
- The Tycoon Entrepreneurial Assessment and what it tells business owners about themselves
- Why investing in your strength produces multiples compared to fixing your weakness
- Emotional intelligence — what it actually measures, and why it consistently predicts success
- What it takes for someone stuck in a victim narrative to finally move forward
- The construction business legacy story — a father, a son, and the assessment that saved both

This episode is for the person who always suspected the path they were put on wasn't the path they were built for. It is also for every parent who wants to stop guessing.

🎙️ Host: Sheran Ranasinghe
🎨 Guest: Yusuf Hussain | Human Potential Strategist | Country Head, Brain Checker Sri Lanka
📍 Recorded at: SpaceHub Studios, Malabe, Sri Lanka
🌐 Brain Checker Sri Lanka: linkedin.com/in/yhussain
📩 Contact: [email protected]
📸 Instagram: @thecreativeodysseypodcast | @sheranstories
Produced by Odyssey House Media

The Creative Odyssey Podcast explores the inner lives of creative people — why they create, what it costs, and why creativity might be the most important thing any of us can do. Hosted by Sheran Ranasinghe. Produced by Odyssey House Media. Recorded in Cleveland, Ohio.

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Art was beaten out of her as a kid. At 30 — after a bad breakup, no roadmap, no plan — she sat in front of a teak almirah door and started painting. A month later there was a phoenix on it. Someone bought the almirah a month after that. She didn't even know she could paint until the moment she picked up the brush.

That's who Michelle Therese Alles is. And this conversation is about what it actually costs to become who you were supposed to be.

Michelle is a journalist at the Daily FT in Colombo, Sri Lanka — a radio presenter, communications specialist, brand voice developer, and model who walked into Roxanne Dias's class to get enrollment information for a friend and signed up herself. She left an eight-year airline career one promotion away from security because something told her it was time. It took three years to know she was right. She doesn't regret a single day of it.

In this episode:

• Why creativity gets suppressed in childhood — and how it finds its way back
• Leaving a stable job when everyone says you're crazy
• How she built a writing voice so distinct that editors identify her work without a byline
• Why your inner child doesn't always need comforting — sometimes she calls you out
• The difference between being and doing — and why high-output creatives lose themselves in the doing
• Victim mode as a creative block — and what it takes to climb out
• Why metrics can bury you and authenticity is the only strategy that compounds
• What curiosity looks like when you're in your 40s and still going

This is one of the most honest conversations we've had on The Creative Odyssey Podcast. Recorded at Hatch Works in Sri Lanka as part of Sheran's 20-episode Sri Lanka recording series.

🎙️ Host: Sheran Ranasinghe 🎨 Guest: Michelle Therese Alles — Journalist, Radio Presenter, Communications Specialist | Daily FT, Colombo, Sri Lanka 📍 Recorded at: Hatch Works, Sri Lanka 🌐 https://medium.com/@michelletheresealles 📩 @myrunwayrecords Contact: [email protected] 📸 Instagram: @thecreativeodysseypodcast | @sheranstories | @thisluckymichelle Produced by Odyssey House Media

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How to think like an innovator starts with one shift most people never make: stop building the solution you love and start falling in love with the problem in front of you. This episode is a masterclass in exactly that — from a quantum computing founder who has been doing it since he was 14 years old.

Adhisha Gammanpila is the founder of Feynman, a quantum computing AI platform making advanced science accessible to researchers worldwide. He is one of Sri Lanka's earliest published quantum computing researchers, a former assistant lecturer at Jadavpur University's Computer Science department, and a serial entrepreneur whose platforms have served over one million users and processed 700 million rupees in revenue. He built his first app at 14 — a mobile encryption tool called TED (Text Encrypt and Decrypt) — to hide messages from his parents after getting caught with a crush. It spread to 50,000 downloads across Sri Lanka and India and won second place at Oracle Silicon Valley. He has a self-reported success rate of 1.1% — one success out of roughly two hundred attempts. He is still building.

This conversation is not about quantum computing. It is about what happens when a deeply creative person decides to treat every problem they encounter as an invitation — and never stops asking: can we do it in this way?

In this episode, Sheran and Adhisha go deep on:

▸ How to think like an innovator — the mindset shift from solution-builder to problem-lover that separates people who build something real from people who keep building the wrong thing beautifully
▸ Creative problem solving as a daily practice — how divergence thinking, solitude, and long garden walks generate better ideas than any brainstorm session
▸ How to deal with rejection as an entrepreneur — the exact mental reframe that turns a professor saying "I have no value in this" into a product pivot and a new market
▸ Inner child and creativity in adults — why keeping your inner child alive is not soft, it is a competitive advantage, and why the most creative leaders Adhisha has met are the ones who never stopped playing
▸ Using AI for self-awareness — the 16Personalities method and personal app Adhisha built to predict his own future mistakes before they happen
▸ Ego, Carl Jung, and the Sinhalese rice stalk — a proverb from a former CXO of Hemas that reframes humility as the mark of real value, not weakness
▸ Where real confidence comes from — and why it is not confidence at all but trust in the inner voice, built by looking back at what actually worked
▸ The teacher who said "you somehow made it" — and why that one line still plays in Adhisha's mind every time he hits a wall

This episode is for the creative person who keeps building what they want to build instead of what the problem actually needs. If you have felt the gap between your vision and what the world is telling you — and you are not sure whether to push through or pivot — Adhisha's framework will change how you read that signal. You do not need to know anything about quantum computing to get everything out of this conversation.

🎙️ Host: Sheran Ranasinghe
🎨 Guest: Adhisha Gammanpila — Founder, Feynman | Quantum Computing Researcher
📍 Recorded at: Future Ink Graphics, Cleveland, Ohio
📩 Contact: [email protected]
📸 Instagram: @thecreativeodysseypodcast | @sheranstories
Produced by Odyssey House Media

Keywords: Adhisha Gammanpila, Feynman quantum computing, The Creative Odyssey Podcast, Sheran Ranasinghe, Odyssey House Media, how to think like an innovator, creative problem solving, divergence thinking, inner child creativity adults, how to deal with rejection as an entrepreneur, fall in love with the problem not the solution, entrepreneur mindset, imposter syndrome, self-awareness, quantum computing Sri Lanka, personal development podcast, Sri Lankan entrepreneur, creativity and innovation

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Nobody told Haritha Naurunna he was allowed to build a game studio. He just started building.

He graduated with a computer science degree in Sri Lanka at a time when the games industry had made big promises and kept almost none of them. The jobs weren't there. The infrastructure wasn't there. Nobody was going to hand him the career he'd been told was possible. So he gave himself a job instead.

Four months ago, Rivertune Games was one person. Today it's six — four developers, two artists, a funded game in active development, and a studio that just showed work at Sri Lanka Comic Con and Disrupt Asia. Haritha is twenty-four years old and moving too fast to process any of it.

This conversation goes deeper than the startup story. Haritha talks about what actually keeps a creative person going when every reason to stop makes complete sense — and it's not passion or discipline. It's five people who don't have a job if you do. It's a father who kept taking calls for his employees from an ICU bed. It's the specific relief of staying in motion so fast you don't have time to overthink.

He burnt out. He almost left game development entirely. What brought him back was his own Goose Game — a dating simulator where you play as a goose, made at nineteen, made for nobody but himself — and the reminder that no one was stopping him from making exactly what he wanted to make.

In this episode:

• How to keep going as a creative entrepreneur when the industry doesn't have a place for you
• What it really means to give yourself a job when no one else will
• How Haritha grew Rivertune Games from one person to six in four months
• The burnout that almost ended his career — and what pulled him back
• What his father's death taught him about responsibility, legacy, and not stopping
• Why good and bad are subjective — and what the real standard for creative work actually is
• How to find your passion: the only answer that actually works
• Building a support system as a young founder who is hard on himself

This episode is for the creative person who is in the hardest part of their journey right now — the part where quitting makes complete sense. Haritha is twenty-four and he has already figured out something it takes most people decades to learn: nothing is stopping you. That's not a pep talk. It's just the truth.

🎙️ Host: Sheran Ranasinghe 🎨 Guest: Haritha Naurunna — Founder, Rivertune Games | @rivertune.games 📍 Recorded at: Hatchworks, Colombo, Sri Lanka 📩 Contact: [email protected] 📸 Instagram: @thecreativeodysseypodcast | @sheranstories Produced by Odyssey House Media

Keywords: Haritha Naurunna, Rivertune Games, The Creative Odyssey Podcast, Sheran Ranasinghe, Odyssey House Media, how to keep going when you want to quit, indie game developer Sri Lanka, creative entrepreneur giving yourself a job, game studio founder, how to start a game studio with no money, burnout recovery, creative entrepreneurship, Sri Lanka startup, finding your passion, self belief, game development podcast, creativity podcast

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Sharon Joseph has been an interior designer for fifteen years. And it took her almost all of them to fully call herself one.

This is a conversation about what it really means to stay consistent, stay authentic, and stay on the creative path when the world keeps offering you easier exits. Sharon doesn't design rooms. She designs spaces where people finally feel like themselves — rooted in story, shaped by culture, and built around the truth of whoever is living in them.

Recorded in Malabe, Sri Lanka as part of The Creative Odyssey Podcast's first-ever Sri Lanka series, this episode is one of the most honest and grounded conversations we've had on this show.

If you've ever doubted whether you've earned the right to call yourself what you actually are — this one is for you.

What we cover in this episode:

• Why every space needs a story and not just an aesthetic
• How Sharon sources from Sri Lankan artisans to build culturally rooted interiors
• The slow, real process of owning your identity as a creative professional
• What fifteen years of consistency actually looks like in a creative career
• Designing within tight budgets without compromising quality or vision
• How Sri Lanka's color culture and craft traditions shape Sharon's design lens
• The difference between working in Dubai's neutral palette world and returning to Sri Lanka's vibrant visual identity
• Why the Kandyan Perahera is Sharon's go-to source of color inspiration
• How the color of your walls directly affects the way you think and feel
• Creativity as a path back to yourself when life gets hard
• Why the money follows the passion and not the other way around
• The power of asking a senior creative if you can simply tag along

Sharon also talks about singing on stage with an Australian choir of over 160 voices, why perfectionism is a career requirement not a personality flaw, and what she would tell any young creative in Sri Lanka who is still waiting for permission to begin.

HOST 🎙 Sheran Ranasinghe Instagram: @sheranstories Email: [email protected]

GUEST 🎨 Sharon Joseph — Interior Designer, Sri Lanka & Dubai Instagram: @sharonjoseph87

RECORDED AT 📍 Space Hub Studios Malabe, Sri Lanka Instagram: @spacehubstudio

PRODUCED BY 🎬 Odyssey House Media Instagram: @thecreativeodysseypodcast

LISTEN & SUBSCRIBE 🎧 Buzzsprout: thecreativeodysseypodcast.buzzsprout.com Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/12SGsSsLz4DqlLFwxigjXX Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/pl/podcast/the-creative-odyssey-podcast/id1750306317

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What happens when one person's genius needs another person's entire life to exist?

Randy Chriz Perera is a self-taught animator and visual artist based in Sri Lanka. His 2.5D animation style is so unorthodox that Adobe engineers requested his files to study how he was using their software in ways it was never designed for. Portia is his wife, co-founder, Chief Operations and Talent Manager, and the person who makes everything Randy creates possible — managing clients, briefs, the business, and their family so that Randy can stay in the creative work that defines him.

Together they founded Meraki United, lead a creative collective of over 300 artists across Sri Lanka, and have produced animation work that caught the attention of Interscope Records. But this conversation is not about the accolades. It is about what it actually costs to build a creative life together — and what that kind of partnership looks like from the inside.

Host Sheran Ranasinghe sits down with Randy and Portia for one of the most honest conversations The Creative Odyssey Podcast has had about creativity, marriage, and what it means to protect someone's gift. Randy describes how he sees the complete finished image in his mind before he ever starts drawing. Portia explains what she means when she says she chisels the brief before Randy ever sees a client's request. And together they talk about the dreamscape practice they started as teenagers in parks — writing out five-year futures together — that still shapes how they build everything today.

This episode is part of The Creative Odyssey Sri Lanka Series.

Get the Meraki United Sri Lanka Creative Tour magazine here: [MAGAZINE LINK]

Topics covered in this episode: Self-taught animation, Adobe After Effects, 2.5D animation, creative partnership, husband and wife business, Meraki United, Sri Lanka creative industry, imposter syndrome, creative community building, going independent, creative life, Interscope Records, finding your creative style, creative discipline, meraki, creative couples, building a business together, Sri Lanka podcast tour

Connect with Randy and Portia: Instagram: @randychriz Meraki United: @merakiunited

The Creative Odyssey Podcast is hosted by Sheran Ranasinghe and produced by Odyssey House Media. New episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and all major platforms.

Instagram: @thecreativeodysseypodcast Join the community: stan.store/join-the-odyssey

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What does it look like when someone stops performing a version of themselves and fully becomes who they always were?

Stephanie Kluk is the founder of Future Ink Graphics (FIG) — a silkscreen printmaking studio, community gallery, and creative incubator based in Cleveland, Ohio. She has spent over 20 years working in the arts, and FIG is her most personal work yet. Built not because the city asked for it, but because she needed it. And then realized everyone else did too.

In this episode of The Creative Odyssey Podcast, host Sheran Ranasinghe sits down with Stephanie Kluk at Future Ink Graphics for one of the most honest conversations the show has had about what it actually looks like to build a creative life that is completely, unapologetically yours.

They talk about:

• Growing up as the only artist in her family — and what that loneliness taught her
• Failing a printmaking class in college — and now running a print shop
• How Covid revealed what artists were really missing from each other
• Building FIG as a truly inclusive creative space in Cleveland
• The Immortality of Grief — the gallery show she made after losing her father
• Why people of all ages are afraid to make art and what to do about it
• The Ann Kibbe Residency, the FIG Foundation, and the future of the organization
• What it means to build something that is the most true version of yourself

This episode is for the creative who feels stuck. For the person who stopped making art and misses it. For the small business owner grinding through the unglamorous parts and wondering if it's worth it. For anyone who has ever wondered what it would feel like to stop shrinking and just build the thing that is completely, fully them.

Stephanie Kluk's answer — lived out loud for over two decades — is that the most creative and courageous thing any of us can do is simply become who we actually are.

Recorded on location at Future Ink Graphics, Cleveland, Ohio.

—

The Creative Odyssey Podcast is hosted by Sheran Ranasinghe and produced by Odyssey House Media. New episodes explore the creative journey — why people create, how creativity shapes identity, and why we all should create.

🎙️ Host: Sheran Ranasinghe 🎨 Guest: Stephanie Kluk, Founder of Future Ink Graphics (FIG) 📍 Recorded at: Future Ink Graphics, Cleveland, Ohio 🌐 Learn more about FIG: futureinkcleveland.com 📩 Contact: [email protected] 📸 Instagram: @thecreativeodysseypodcast | @sheranstories

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Black artist. Creative identity. Finding purpose through pain.

Cleveland visual artist Yves Santana joins host Sheran Ranasinghe on The Creative Odyssey Podcast for one of the most honest conversations about the creative journey we have ever recorded.

He was driving himself to school without a license. His mom was working three jobs. And in the middle of all of it — he made a painting that told his whole story before he even understood what he was living through. This is Yves Santana. And this conversation will stay with you.

In this episode, Sheran sits down with Yves to explore what it actually costs to become a creative — and what it means to finally give yourself permission to. Yves grew up navigating two worlds at once: a high-achieving school where he was one of a handful of Black students, and a home life that included two years of housing instability while his mother worked three jobs to hold things together. Through all of it, he kept drawing. He didn't know yet that his art was documenting everything he hadn't found words for.

This episode goes deep on creativity as survival, identity formation under pressure, the weight of stability when you have never had it, what it means to take your art seriously when the world hasn't made room for it, and how community can change the entire trajectory of a life.

If you have ever felt like you don't fully belong anywhere — or like the one place you can finally breathe is when you are in the middle of making something — this one is for you.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Growing up between two contrasting worlds in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
• Quitting varsity basketball and choosing art instead
• How Basquiat became a creative lifeline
• Making a painting that depicted his life before he understood it
• Depression after high school graduation and what pulled him out
• Building community at Future Ink Graphics in Cleveland
• What creativity really is — and why it is more than a skill
• Advice for anyone who feels stuck or lost

About Yves Santana: Yves is a Cleveland-based visual artist and studio art student whose work centers on portraiture, identity, and the human differences that reveal different walks of life. Follow Yves on Instagram: @archangelsantana

About The Creative Odyssey Podcast: The Creative Odyssey Podcast explores the creative journey — the process, the identity, the cost, and the beauty of deciding to express yourself. Hosted by Sheran Ranasinghe. New episodes available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major audio platforms.

This episode is sponsored by Future Ink Graphics — Cleveland's home for creative community and production space.

Connect with us: Instagram: @thecreativeodysseypodcast Email: [email protected]

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What does it mean to stop hiding your creativity — not just think about it, but actually do it? In this episode of The Creative Odyssey Podcast, host Sheran Ranasinghe sits down with multidisciplinary artist, marketer, tattoo artist, and community builder Vanessa Eryn at Future Ink Graphics in Cleveland, Ohio for one of the most honest conversations the show has ever had about creative identity, imposter syndrome, ADHD, and the real cost of shrinking yourself to fit into a world that hands you a box and waits.

Vanessa opens by saying she stopped defining herself — and that decision changed everything. From there, the conversation goes deep: how a supportive mother created a home where even her friends could be more creative, the unspoken gravity that creative people feel about their work and why it's so hard to explain to someone who doesn't create, and how Vanessa learned to stop moderating her passion around people who didn't understand it.

She also gets candid about her recent ADHD diagnosis — and how finally having a name for the way her brain works unlocked better systems, better time management, and a deeper trust in her own intuition. She talks about limiting social media to four hours a day, relying on her planner like a limb, and finding the one thing that quiets her mind enough to keep going.

The conversation moves into Vanessa's work at FIG — Future Ink Graphics — a community-rooted creative organization in Cleveland's Clark-Fulton neighborhood that works with youth, emerging artists, and the broader creative community. It's here that Vanessa's natural ability to see potential in people who can't yet see it in themselves found its home.

She and her collaborator Carla Wagner also created The Artist Dinners — an intimate gathering for artists across different mediums and career stages, built around food, jazz, and wine instead of networking anxiety — because Vanessa believes safe environments are the prerequisite for authentic ones.

This episode closes with something both Sheran and Vanessa believe deeply: creativity is not a personality type. It belongs to everyone. The CEOs, the scientists, the athletes — anyone who brings their own style to what they do is already creating. The only question is whether you're willing to stop hiding it.

This episode was recorded at and sponsored by Future Ink Graphics (FIG), Cleveland, Ohio.

Guest: Vanessa Eryn | Instagram: @vavaeryn Host: Sheran Ranasinghe | Instagram: @thecreativeodysseypodcast Email: [email protected]

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