I met a stranger. What happened next was the highlight of my week
Last Friday I came through the door, in a rush from a walk that had taken longer than expected, autumnal leaves now giving meaning to the expression ‘breakneck speed’. As has become the rhythm of 2020, I ran upstairs to the office, just in time for a Zoom. But unlike any Zoom I’ve ever had, I had no idea who I was going to meet.
Kris is my creative friend from Antwerp. He been part of the team behind some of the most incredible ad campaigns — ones you’ve seen and shared on social media:
He had asked earlier in the week if I’d be up for a new idea: he’d arrange a Friday afternoon Zoom with someone I didn’t know, and wouldn’t know until I clicked “Join Meeting”. And the someone wouldn’t know who I was, either.
So as I walked in the hour beforehand, I started to get genuinely nervous. What on earth was I doing. “It’ll be great” I texted him. But honestly, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t uncertainty that he’d have picked a dweeb friend who I’d have to pretend to play nice with. But that I’d be that dweeb friend.
Every insecurity I’ve ever had, but successfully buried under layers of work, social media and professional verve, was surfacing:
— I’m a teacher: Kris’ friend is likely from his über cool world of advertising, telly or copywriting.
— I’m in Edinburgh: his friend is in LA or San Francisco (I knew this from the time zone request) and is bound to be vicariously cooler.
— I’m bound to be boring: this (I hope) is completely irrational, but I know the trait I‘ll never rid myself of is a continual need for approbation. Which in itself is a very boring thing to need.
And so I joined the meeting on the dot of the hour. And seconds later, someone appeared.
A woman, artists’ brushes nonchalantly in a steel paint pot on the shelf behind her. And then we smiled and said ‘hi’.
What followed was 90 minutes of fascinating discussion. We didn’t record it — that felt weird. And we didn’t even take that many notes, until we were about an hour through and realised we should have. But it was fascinating enough for me to remember a lot, seven days later. I can’t say that about many formal meetings I have, where I normally scribe verbatim notes for future reference:
- wasn’t our friend Kris actually the weird one for setting this up?
- don’t we just love what Kris does: crazy creative stuff that gets people thinking?
- is this not the first Zoom meeting you’ve ever had, maybe the first meeting you’ve ever had, where you haven’t been able to follow the Google breadcrumbs of someone, and know pretty much everything about them before you get started?
- isn’t is strange that we actually do that kind of investigative work on people, and then think that what they project (professionally, personally) is anywhere close to the reality?
- why do we care so much about knowing everything all the time, when we can just concentrate on whatever is right in front of us right now? Most of life’s interestingness comes from UnGoogleable experiences.
- that’s how negotiators work: just deal with the words and person in front of you now, and then work out what they need (rather than trying to “make” them say whatever you want them to say).
- isn’t it interesting that FBI and KGB negotiators used the same techniques, even though they were on opposite ‘sides’?
- isn’t listening hard with all that stuff of the professional world? We’re so busy second-guessing because of our acquired ‘knowledge’ of the individual that we don’t really listen to what they’re actually saying.
- friendship, when you can’t travel and meet new people, is an odd concept. Imagine making a new friend every day, over the course of a year: that’s what she did, and documented the whole thing.
- randomness creates joy.
- everyone can do something that noone else in a room can do, but they’ve probably never thought of it.
- that uniqueness makes or breaks the ideas they come up with.
- why do all firms need to hire people who don’t fit, ‘wild cards’, who linger in meetings they shouldn’t be in so that they can point out the blindingly obvious and make the breakthrough?
- isn’t sunset ridiculously early in Scotland in November?
- railways make amazing walkways (once the trains have gone…)
- isn’t the idea of repurposing industrial areas into beautiful places to live something that you can apply to offices and schools, too?
- the best schools, the ones we seem to admire the most, at least, are the ones who get students succeeding in their life as well as their career: ones like Bergh or the School of Communication Arts, or the one I’m trying to help build in a beautiful spot in Romania.
- creative processes are so hard to describe in a way that sounds like you actually make a difference in anything, because the impact happens down stream from the initial design work.
- this is why our mothers may have no idea what we actually do.
- but it’s also why creative people don’t learn as fast as they could about how to make their processes even better, more efficient and effective, and more fun!
- it’s also why public mission statements, particularly for public institutions, are normally so useless, and just express psychopathic denials, when they could be so inspirational given the simply profound work they do.
We talked about the virtues of Friday night martinis or gins, the incredible cities in which we live (Venice, CA, in the end) and all the weird things that make them so great.
The one thing we never did was ask this:
“What do you do?”
I think that’s testament to the power of friends who know their friends. There’s so much more to us than what we do, and say we do online. And there’s so much more to life than programmed slots.
One of the reasons I stopped teaching in one school was time: not not having enough of it (I was young, child-free, and loved preparing and doing the job), but not having control of my time was so frustrating. Some of my favourite time was taking students on trips, where time was fluid, or the gap between the end of the school day and a parents’ evening, where colleagues and students would drop by for informal chats, podcast-making sessions or project completions. Unplanned, unscheduled time has always been something I’ve enjoyed more than schedules.
My biggest concern with 2020, is that for many people working at home, life has become much like that of a teacher. Most of us have no control of our time because our various calendar systems insist that things take an hour. Add to that the need for people to coordinate overly charged calendars and you have a day full of interruptions.
For kids at school, the bell is an interruption at least some of the time. Other times, it’s a welcome relief (I remember quietly smiling in some lessons when the bell finally screamed out). No wonder it took me three years at university to learn how to make the most of the unprogrammed time I did have on my hands.
And the other massive thing I’ve learned through my happenstance call is that randomness disappeared this year along with travel to new places and meetings with new people over new foods.
So thanks to Kris, and to Maria, I’ve not only made a new friend, a genuine friend, but I’ve also realised that I need to say ‘no’ to adding even more programmed meetings, and ‘yes’ to more random chats on the phone during my daily walks, and ‘yes’ to more (engineered) happenstance every day.
