Earlier this week I went to a non-conference: Interesting People 4 was three days of hanging out with 150 incredible people. I felt genuinely humbled to be there.
The experience left me with many things (including a number of new friendships). But the biggest takeaway might have been that creating new friendships is more important than I realized. And the act of pursuing new friendships can be very intentional. Maybe most extroverts know this already, but as an introvert, it’s a fairly novel concept. Andrew Wilkinson, creator of the event, sent me this article he wrote on the topic.
The other day I heard my eight-year-old son’s karate coach tell the class: “If you’re not sure what to do, just do something: practice decisiveness.”
At Interesting People I spoke with authors, artists, and other creatives about creative practice. How they find ideas, focus, create.
One author named Tom Junod told me he spent nine years writing his latest book, at one point completely discarding 500 pages and starting over.
All these people had this moment in which they committed to a new project. Their decisiveness, braveness, and resolve to pursue something without certainty struck me.
When our design studio takes on a new project, there is a moment where we have to apply a timeline and scope to the creation of something that is, in many ways, very abstract and uncertain. We can’t know what we’re creating because it does not yet exist.
A house exists in various forms. If we’re creating a new house, we know already what many of its attributes will be. These are its constraints: it will have a door, windows, and so on. Ideas, however, often have fewer constraints, making the creation of them more uncertain. Maybe it will take one week, maybe it will be nine years.
Decisiveness is a thing I talk and think about often with our team. But seeing the spectrum with which others are practicing it leaves me feeling humbled and inspired to practice decisiveness in bigger and bolder ways.
Words — excited to read this book by Tom Junod
Words — also met Rafi Kohan and looking forward reading his latest book
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