If your job is stealing ideas…
…it helps to be surrounded by interesting people from everywhere
I love this line from Simon Kuper of the FT, within a broader paragraph, itself within a long piece called “How I made my perfect office“, about his “work apartment” in Paris, the vibrant city he moved to two decades ago.
Much of the time I am not writing about France, yet I think that living here benefits my work. Lots of news commentary in English is written by people in north London or Brooklyn. Many of them are cleverer than me, so I try to compensate by being in a different place, meeting different people, reading different stuff and absorbing a slightly different worldview.
True, I too am in a big city, but I think commentators need to be. If your job is stealing ideas, it helps to be surrounded by interesting people from everywhere, with foreign visitors constantly passing through. I meet those people in their offices or in cafés, but not in this flat. It’s my place of solitude, the room of my own.
I moved to London six years ago from the small island of Grand Cayman. I love Cayman deeply and it will always be home, but there came a point where I needed to be in a big city and around so many more opportunities to meet “interesting people from everywhere”. When I arrived in this city I had visited so many times but where I had never lived, I simply asked the few people I knew in London to please “introduce me to interesting people doing interesting things”.
Today that remains my request, as I am endlessly curious about people and ideas (and what they do with those ideas, I love people who take ideas into action!), and I am a practitioner of “connecting the dots”, first listening then “pattern matching”, often connecting people to other people they may not know (and who are often “at a tangent” to what they do or who they know) and/or joining the dots from the ideas they share to perhaps evolve, iterate, redirect those ideas from the insights that come forth from my mind after listening.
As to my own space to work from, like Simon, I have recently focussed on creating a new space for myself, and like him “I feel so at home in this space that I have to push myself to go out and meet people”, but I do. I make sure to go up to central London often, plus I love it when people choose to take the c30-minute journey to meet me for a walk on the North Downs near my home.
In closing, am not that keen on the phrase “stealing ideas”, as I believe in abundance. I don’t “own” any of my ideas, I share what I learn (hence nearly 2,000 posts on this site to date), but I do love to hear the ideas of others (such as Simon Kuper) and then connect some dots.
How about you, what do you do to ensure you are able to meet interesting people and hear new ideas? What else could you do?