I Am User Generated

As conversations move from, “what did you get for Christmas,” to “what’s your New Years resolution,” I’m forced to think on the later. My trite answer has been, “drink less, eat better, workout more.” This seems to satisfy most people but that’s not really the answer. The real answer is that my New Years resolution is to, Paddle, Paddle, Paddle!

Let me back up and explain with an Indian parable.

I’m sitting on an 8′2″ longboard in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Southern India with some of my best new friends. We’re all waiting for that nine am set to roll in as it’s done so many times before at Shirley’s Beach (I still don’t know why we called it Shirley’s.) I’m feeling a bit nervous, everyone else are way better surfers and I’ve been on dry land for two weeks with a re-dislocated shoulder. Sure enough, beyond the fishing boats and jumping dolphins a nice set starts forming up. I look down the line-up at my friends and all eyes are on me.

“James, that’s your wave.”

“Next one is yours mate.”

“James, paddle, paddle, paddle.”

I size up the wave. Damn it looks pretty nice. I spin around.

“Paddle, paddle, paddle.”

Maybe I’ll grab the next one.

“Paddle, paddle, paddle.”

I think I’m too low on my board or maybe too high…

“Paddle, paddle, paddle.”

And I’m off, paddling as hard as I can, bum shoulder be damned. The wave passes underneath and I watch two friends pop-up and carve down the gentle right-hander.

I spent the next hour catching the odd wave, trying to keep my feet together, but mostly getting tossed around like a tennis ball in a washing machine of salty Arabian sea water. We packed up the boards and headed back home but I was still thinking about that one wave. The wave itself was nothing special but it was my approach to it. That wave was my life. I looked at it, analyzed it, feared it, fantasized about it. But I knew I should have just, paddled, paddled, paddled.

Yeah maybe if I paddled straight away I still wouldn’t have caught it but at least I picked a path and gave it my all. Or maybe I would have found myself inside a barrel of a double overhead or maybe I would have been tossed around on the shore but I would have popped back up and headed right back out knowing that at least I risked the unknown and went for it.

We don’t know. We don’t know anything about life or the living of it. In my work life as a planner and strategist I’ve helped some of the biggest brands and tech companies manage and engineer their success online and this is also how I approached my life. What’s the plan, what’s the plan to stay on plan and what’s the plan to get back on plan if we happen to get off plan?

That work and life strategy has served me well, no complaints but this approach leaves little room for the unknown. This fear of the unknown can be paralyzing. This fear can leave you floating in the line-up too scared to paddle into that next wave. This over-engineering of the future to avoid the fear of the unknown can exclude little life surprises that can turn your life around for the better. We don’t know what life will bring any more than we can predict the size, strength, or close-out of a wave 40 feet away. But sometimes we just need to spin around and paddle, paddle, paddle and let life propel us forward.

In the past couple of weeks some beautiful sets have been rolling in for me in love, work and finances. I don’t know where these waves are going and where they’re going to take me but in 2012 I’m not going to hesitate, I’m going to paddle, paddle, paddle!

Bathroom stall graffiti, although funny, is neither visual cohesive nor interactive. I made a site where people can print off QR codes that link to bathroom humour .GIFs. I hope these are used to replace jiffy markers and etched scrawlings. Thanks.

An iterative poem inspired by a collection of hip-hop similes and metaphors.

Brief: Get James more dates
Insight: Girls love cute animals
Solution: Start a cute animal blog and syndicate it across my personal channels
Outcome: Dates increased 300%

As regular readers of my blog you’ll know that a few months ago I start Sabbatical Saturdays. The premise being that I wanted to find the time for some concentrated thought on a discipline outside of my current employ. My Dad is doing a sabbatical now but it’s right at the end of his career. Stefan Seigmeister does a sabbatical for a year every seven years. I decided simply to take every Saturday off to throw myself into reading, reflecting, writing etc. After seven years I will have taken a whole year off.

Well I’m a few months in and it’s been great, but what I’ve been reading is about making ideas happen. I’ve been reading the Scott Belsky book on the subject as well as a raft of creative and innovation management theory. Everyone has great ideas but few can make them happen. I set out to spend more time thinking and what I ended up thinking about was about doing less thinking and more doing. The irony is not lost on me. I’m very fortunate to have a career where I get paid to think and do all day with the help of a great team, so this concept isn’t foreign to me.

In short, I’m not abandoning Sabbatical Saturdays I’m just declaring Sundays “do day.” Saturday is for thinking and Sunday is for doing. So what have I done you ask? Well I’ll save that for another post but it has often been said of Creative Technologists that we sketch with technology so I will be publishing some of my “sketches” shortly.

Bill Bernbach said, “Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed—but dull?” This quote has inspired me to not worry about making everything look perfect (this is hard for me, I’m a perfectionist) but rather just make my sketches interesting. “Do day” is for doing and making not always for perfecting the perfect idea that will cure cancer and make your toast. In other words I’m putting my sabbatical thinking and experiments online in beta for other to participate with and hopeful make better. There’s no grand goal with this, just an experiment in thinking and doing. More to come.