Hopes for an intent driven world

I’ve got a problem with LinkedIn: it says who I am and what I do. Now you might think that’s actually an awesome thing; after all, people still hand out business cards. Mine is black with a design we came up with ourselves. It has gold foiling. People often tell me it’s an incredible business card. I tell them that’s where all our profits go. They laugh. It’s peachy. I can’t tell you how it’s changed my life because I don’t know; which is a spin on “not at all.”

What’s missing from LinkedIn and my business card is intent: what I actually want to be doing professionally. And then that’s only half or a third of the story. The real reason I want to be alive is to get shit done personally.

So I was super intrigued when I was contact by the team at LinkyBrains for an ex-Googler meetup; although I found it ironic that a platform driven by fulfilment of intent was purposefully marketed/spoken about/organised with a distinct lack of it.

For me, what’s critically important is that a platform like this has a mission. There’s only so much faith people will have before they write this off and stop engaging; for me, I’m an Atheist — so there’s no afterlife for me after this. Time is too short to fuck around at Nero coffee shops navel gazing about our existence. The real golden thread is organising people based on intent. For example, one of my big life missions is to get 100 South African kids adopted; there are currently over 1m kids available. If I can state that intention and get people to rally around it in an effective way (and by this I mean a way that achieves my intention — not to be confused with crowdfunding!) then I’m winning at life. I don’t think we need “principles” or “key focii” or anything like that. Having a broad yet defined mission galvanises people and creates direction.

It wouldn’t have been a ex-Googler meeting if we didn’t talk scale. The current format isn’t scalable; and I think if we want to have a massive effect, we need to produce a platform and have a process that scales. There’s only so much Doug and so much Alex (the co founders) etc that can go around. The site at the moment is also a little laissez faire; it needs a lot more meat and bones in terms of functionality to get people to engage.

We spent 1/4 of the meeting talking about who we are. But it’s not who I am or what I do, it’s what I want to do that’s important. I think this was the big mistake in yesterday’s meeting: we spent 10 minutes talking about everyone’s dogs etc. That’s not as helpful as knowing what people want to achieve and if you want to achieve that too.

I feel like we start to win at life when we rally together behind causes linked to our intent. We figure out what our mission is and we find other people with the same mission and we put our heads together and make magic happen.

Does this resonate with you? Let me know.