When I got the journal in my hands I knew this was an awesome project. I don't know a lot of people outside London but I was sure anyone I talked to would be interested in getting it.

I sent a couple of messages as soon as I got it, and surprisingly I got a response of "Thanks, but I'm not interested". I also got another response of "Sorry but I live in Spain now" (should have been more in touch). Maybe it was my fault not "selling" the idea well but the worst would have been to give up. Since my plan of moving the journal a few miles out of London had failed, I started looking further out.
To my luck I was able to find someone in Oxford who was willing to continue the journey. The journal is now in the trusting hands of Royal Mail and should be there soon.

Let's see what will happen to it :)

Harry

This is a difficult life lesson to learn.  It's so tempting to keep looking forward and plan and think a few moves deeper, trying to work out what the strategy should be and what other people should do, will do, might do in response to what you're doing. 

And yet in some (many?) (all?) circumstances all you have to do is what you need to do and you only really need to focus on the next right thing that needs to be done.  You can only deliver the current step after all, but we can only ever live in the present and that doesn't stop our minds racing off after all sorts.  Just try three minutes meditation and see where your mind goes.

I found myself, and continue to do so, wondering what's happening to the journals next. Trying to choose the best person to give them to, going over and over  the instructions to think what might happen and even trying to work out what to do if something "goes wrong" - all pointless.

There's another lesson in here about elaboration, which I'll write about another time - but simply it's making up that there must be something else to do, the desire to make something simple complex.  I've seen this in other areas but in this project it's come in the form of questions from participants: "Does it matter if...?" It's really really hard to accept that the rules you've been given are the only rules there are - it's enormously tempting to add new stuff in (and *whispers* actually that's creativity in action!).

If you get a journal, try to remember that your job is simply to write in the book and pass it on to someone else who's closer to the destination and maybe record the fact on twitter or in an e-mail to this blog.  That's all.  No, really.

 

 

I'm thinking about how I do what I do and was going to launch into what I'm already learning from this project, but then realised that there's something that should come first, because it's the reason I'm doing it this way in the first place.

I try to work on a cycle of "Have an idea - try it out - see what happens - see what ideas it evokes - try one of them out"... etc  If I'm lucky, along the way I will get to make something useful that people want to take part in, or pay for. 

What I used to do, when I worked in a big organisation was have an idea and then say to people around me "Have a think about this and tell me if it will work" and if enough people thought it would work we'd do it.  Of course there were lots of other people having ideas and asking me whether I thought they would work too.  The result of that was that we did relatively little except think and have meetings about whether things might work.

There are two main reasons why I can't work like that any more.  One is that I don't sit in a big organisation with lots of people paid to do thinking.  The other is that I just don't believe that thinking that much before you do something will tell you as much as just doing something.

That's why I treat everything as a prototype for something else. 

We're often told that we have to have a vision and to hold onto the delivery of that vision no matter what.  I see it a little differently. 

The trap I try to avoid is thinking that the something else you're working towards is more important than the thing you're doing right now.

Tuttle started as a prototype for a social coworking space.  It turned out that it worked very well as a meetup in it's own right and branched out into our consulting work, my own social art practice and arguably paved the way for C4CC.

So when I started thinking about this year's American trip and got the idea from Al to also have journals travelling the country alongside me, I had a choice between thinking really hard about how to do that and just trying it out here beforehand to see what I learned.  And now I feel like I'm learning lots, more quickly than expected, that I'd otherwise have had to wait for until I was on the road myself.

What's the alternative?  I could have written the instructions and then run a workshop (subject to people turning up) to simulate the exercise and run through what people thought might come up.  But how long would it take to set that up? And would the thinking really improve the experience?  Or is the point of the exercise the things that we learn along the way?

On Friday, I gave out three moleskine notebooks, labelled with their intended destination and including a set of instructions from the original post over here.  Each journal also comes in a stamped addressed jiffy bag so that they can come back to me at the end of the month.  They went to two people who were working in #C4CC that afternoon and one person who I had coffee with later.

There was a wrench to giving them up - I felt very responsible for making sure that they got on their way OK and that the people I'd given them to understood the instructions.  It's a surprise to me whenever this happens.  I make a great deal of the importance of "letting go" but when it comes down to it, I don't find it that easy myself.

So now i have nothing to do but wait for them to come back.  I shall also keep an eye on the hashtag. And I expect I'll also add some posts here as I learn stuff - this is an experiment to find out what works, after all.