Disruptive Proactivity

For the last couple of years, I’ve run a little tumblr called interestingAgain.com which is interesting or any talks/ideas that I’d like to be able to find again and really engage with again. I’m not entirely sure that I would put the entirety of the Do catalogue on the site, but it would all fit.

Do is the physical embodiment of what I was going for with InterestingAgain, and the ability of Team Do to get those speakers to come to the event for free is a real testament to what the Do Lectures actually are.

Do is unlike pretty much any other event I’m aware of – 4 days long, in the middle of nowhere, and full immersion therapy designed to rewire your brain.

Documentally has covered in detail his thoughts on Do, and I’ve put up a load of photos on flickr – which cover some bit of the event. But describing the Do Lectures as Talks in a Tent, is a bit like describing Glastonbury as Music in a Tent. It’s accurate, concise, and misses out all the bits that people don’t know unless they’ve been and had the same rich and deep experience. While I didn’t manage to chat to everyone at Do, I’m pretty sure that, if someone from another Do event sent me an email and asked if I’d lend a hand with something, it’d happen. The curation by the Do team assures that level of quality (and I did spend a bit of time while traveling there wondering why they let me in at all).

In that spirit, enforcing downtime after the immersion of ideas, friends and motivation and time to process it. When the videos from this year go up, I’ll probably post again about specific ones, with reflections that go from total silence at Chido’s talk (I have no idea what to say), to a really bad doodle inspired by Tom Fishburne’s talks.

The thing that’s bouncing round my brain right now, is, again, that actions have consequences. Various ones that have proven to be right; and some which were clearly proven to be unwise (which I knew already). Talking to Nhu, Araceli, and others, it was surprising how many of us had made very similar decisions. Nhu, leaving her job in SF after watching this video; and what happened when the maker of that video got up to talk about why he made it. That could have been pure coincidence, but there were so many of them over the days. That’s curation as much as it is coincidence.

On the train back from Do, I did wonder whether I should actively say that I’d like to do enough to be invited back in 2 years as a speaker; but I think Dave Hieatt just gave me an out on that one.

Many of my very quick “Little Do’s” have already been done (I hope the card reached there ok), now it’s the big ones. Shaking off this bloody cold probably needs to happen first… I wonder when I’m next in London…