Today I wanted to share with you the deepest magic I know, a kind of alchemy: the nerd club.
You might also think of these as a secret garden on a rooftop.
Our day jobs are like the hustle and bustle of the city: urgent, finite.
Moments of shared reflection are like wandering in a garden with loved ones: important, infinite.
The magic is to create a secret garden on a rooftop, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the city, but outside of it.
Steps to create it:
1) Create a secret, optional group called something like "Navel Gazers."
When people hear the name they should say "That sounds like a lame club for nerds."
To which you respond, "Yup! …Do you want in?"
This makes sure that the only people who join are intrinsically motivated to participate.
2) In the group, set a fundamental "Yes, and" norm.
It's optional and secret, so none of the discussions matter for the surrounding context.
If someone says something you think is uninteresting and not worth exploring, you are free to not engage.
But if you do engage, you should build on the idea.
If you want to engage with something you don't like, you should say something like "Oh, that's interesting! For these kinds of problems I often apply the FOO lens. I wonder if that applies here?"
That makes it about you, not them.
That is, not forcing someone to fit their seedling idea into whatever frame you have.
This helps keep the risk of sharing new ideas very low, and encourages people to do it.
The worst you might get is crickets.
This is something that everyone who participates should do.
This norm should be maintained and refereed by a very active and visible gardener.
3) Trickle in a small number of new perspectives, continuously.
Aim for perhaps 1 to 3 new perspectives added a week.
This helps make sure it doesn't get stale and also the norms don't scramble with an influx of new people.
The people you add should:
1) Be very unlikely to ruin the vibe.
It only takes one person to poop a party.
This is a bar to satisfice, not maximize.
2) As different from the other people currently in the group as possible.
Have a lot of engineers and a salesperson wants in? Great!
Have a lot of senior people and someone junior wants in? Great!
This helps give a kind of "novelty search" of perspectives.
This is a thing to maximize.
Make sure to encourage people to engage, and have signals of fun things happening that keep participants who are paying less attention want to pay more attention.
Make sure there's a bit of indirect offgassing of the group that will allow motivated adjacent people to sense the group and discover it.
You'd think that this pattern would result in only frivolous discussions, but it actually does exactly the opposite.
The discussions are some of the most profoundly rigorous you can imagine.
It's optional so participants only invest in ideas they think are interesting, and because it's a diversity of perspectives it finds disconfirming evidence (or viral resonance) in ideas quickly.
This means that ideas that gather energy in the group are very likely to be viral and game-changing.
That is, interesting and novel to a diverse set of people the ideas will collide with in the surrounding context.
The result is a self-catalyzing meaning-making machine that participants find valuable for its own sake (an infinite game) that regularly spits out, on a stochastic basis, miraculous, game-changing ideas for the surrounding context.
This is the kind of magic that you won't believe until you've seen it (and felt it) yourself, but once you have you won't be able to forget it.