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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: thecreativeodysseypodcast@gmail.com 📸 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: thecreativeodysseypodcast@gmail.com
📸 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

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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: thecreativeodysseypodcast@gmail.com 📸 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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