Do Interesting – Notice. Collect. Share

If you’re nervous about events, it’s often because of their unpredictability. Will you know someone there? When’s a good time to arrive? Will I be expected to do something? The best way out of this is to organise your own. These problems disappear. Other problems arrive but we’ll solve them below.

Rules also make your event feel like ‘a thing’ and that is half the battle. If you give an event a name (even something as boring as Coffee Morning), make it regular and invent some rules, it will become ‘a thing’.

The best presentations don’t just tell people something—they tell them the same thing again and again but in different ways. They use analogies to help people understand.

If you haven’t got a thing, you need an excuse. Most social occasions are just chats around an excuse. If you ask people to come over to your house and talk, they’ll think you’re strange. If you say it’s for a dinner party or poker or Grand Theft Auto, they’re perfectly happy.

I’ve chosen to write up the things I notice each week. And by keeping a digital note, I can open it on my phone, on the way to the office, or on my laptop, when I get to the office. That way, everything is kept in the order it happened. That’s just what works for me.

A tiny creative act, repeated, gets powerful, quickly. Look at a tree. Take a photo. Could be a good photo. Might not be. It’s just a tree. Take a photo the next day. It’ll be different. Different light. Different weather. Different mood. Now you’re not just noticing the tree, you’re noticing the differences.

Data collection is inherently creative. Depending on the data you choose to collect from the world, you can begin to see the world from a different perspective. Being a data collector means observing the world with curiosity.