As part of my continuing effort to revisit transparency as a general practice in my life and work, I share here an overview of the various puzzle pieces I see somehow one day converging into a more singular, focused, highly impactful effort.
It kills me not to know how to fit them together, so I am working to stop trying to figure it out all by myself. In a very short conversation I once had with Simon Sinek, he sized me up so quickly that he was able to cut me off mid-sentence and advise me to stop trying to do it all myself. So, really, I’m just trying to do what Simon says!
Here’s what I see:
- We have our own coworking space in NYC. We can do anything we want with it (so long as it’s legal!)— daytime, evening time, weekends.
- We’re friendly with other coworking spaces in NYC. And around the world. We have a growing number of like-minded neighbors whose higher purposes are in alignment with ours. We have so much to gain by joining forces, if only we can find the proper impetus.
- We’ve got a big lovely Meetup group. Coworking Community NYC Meetup has over 1,800 members on it and it’s growing every day. We could be having more people host more Meetups.
- We’ve got some really handy constructs. Work Sprints and Cotivation in particular are really handy tools people can use to externalize some structure and accountability in local communities. We also use this idea of To-DONE lists to share what we’re getting done and get a mutual sense of accomplishment.
- We’ve got this sticker-based social network idea. Dubbed “underground laptop mafia,” the idea is to manufacture semi-anonymous stickers that people could put on their laptops, so people could discover each other in cafes and elsewhere, look up their profiles, and see if they want to connect in real life. It could let us essentially build a distributed coworking community. Plus, it would be really cool to have a neat secret-society-looking sticker.
- We’ve got this new coworking network forming. My friends Drew and David, who run Conjunctured in Austin, are building Nomatik on top of the Seats2Meet platform, which allows people to broadcast where they are and find people to connect with. This could naturally fit in with the Underground Laptop Mafia idea above. But how does it fit into the bigger picture?
- We’ve got a new spot for charting out new ideas. I’m calling it Project Bossless. It’s a clean slate that could evolve into a more well-formed entity once these pieces start coming together better.
- I’ve got this crazy idea that I can’t get out of my head. The idea centers around a fictional company, dubbed Bossless Industries, that masquerades as a traditional industrial employer, but is in fact the opposite of one behind the curtain. It would serve as a vehicle for those used to full-time employment to transition into independent work without it being too much of a popped-out-of-the-matrix experience.
I’ve got countless of ideas for projects: winter retreats, mastermind groups, consulting projects, unconferences, books, and so much more. I would think the obvious answer is to “just pick one and focus on that,” but I feel like I could use a little something more. I want to feel like I’m making the right choices amidst a wide array of options.
What does this look like to you?
If you caught the very subtle Groundhog Day reference in this post, many points to you.
