#01 | On digitalising serendipity
#01 | On digitalising serendipity
🖇 Chance favours the connected mind
Welcome to the 1st edition of One Day - a newsletter designed to cultivate your curiosity and bring humanity back to entrepreneurship. Thanks for being here! If this email was forwarded to you, get your own here 💫
Tomorrow I'm kicking off a new adventure 🚀: I'm joining Founders Factory London as an Entrepreneur in Residence. This represents a big step towards my personal mission to generate positive impact and empower people through technology. I chose to launch this newsletter along this new role for 3 main reasons:
I've heard a lot of people misjudging entrepreneurship: either because they idealise it, or because they have a (sometimes irrational) fear towards it. I want to use this newsletter to inform, educate (and yet, entertain) people through the realities of this path.
Writing things out builds an incredibly effective feedback loop: first, with oneself (as writing = thinking) and second, with others (you!)
I've strongly believe in community, and see this Newsletter not as a one-way communication but as a conversation channel. Please feel free to add any thoughts or questions in the comments, or simply appreciate your support liking and/or sharing it with your friends. If you have any feedback or suggestion, I'm all ears! Simply reply to this email or DM me @katsommerkamp
I hope you enjoy the read! 🤓
👭🏾 Some things just feel better in person
Lately, I find myself wondering about how we might replace the unplanned moments of serendipity and unstructured hallway conversations - now that we're not going to be located in one space (and not even in the same country, for the near future).
Serendipity is making cool discoveries by accident. It's what happens when we bump into someone in the office kitchen getting some coffee, and 5 minutes later leave with a brilliant new idea 💡 or angle instead. It's precisely this concept of connecting over protecting, that Steven Johnson (author of Where good ideas come from - and a great TED talk, too), argued is essential for humanity's development.
"Chance favours the connected mind" - Steven Johnson
Matt Ridley agrees as well: it's the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them (which he calls idea sex), that is causing technological progress. In fact, in his TED Talk, he states that what's truly relevant to society is actually how well people are communicating their ideas and how well they're collaborating with each other. He calls it the collective brain 🧠.
Now that we've been accelerated towards a more digital work environment, these random connections are haltered. Sure, there are creative attempts to replicate this phenomenon:
Slackbots like Donut, match you up weekly with another user (selected at random)
Tandem and Pragli - both, virtual offices, allows you to create a watercooler zone to hang out at
some companies are going as far as creating SimCity-like virtual workspace
But when it comes to virtual interactions, there seems to be a fine line between a free space to share ideas and yet another awkward work-related obligation. After all: won't virtual office spaces offer employers another way to track their employees throughout the day? 🔭
Further reading: The Mathematics of When Remote Work Fails
🥑 We are what you eat - and this applies to information, too
Did you know, world data is predicated to reach 175ZB in 2025? To give you some perspective: every minute, we view 4.7 million videos, upload 60,000 images and conduct 4.2 million search queries. The real scarcity isn't content anymore - it's attention. Lately, I've been ruminating on this thought: how do we better manage our attention? how do we focus on the signal and reduce the noise? 🎧
I say reduce the noise (and not block it) because unplugging completely from the world and its stream of time-sensitive content would be unnatural for most of us. What we need is balance. Information is, ultimately, of two sorts:
🌳 Stock - the static, durable and kind of timeless content that is as interesting in 10 years as it is today (sort of like this article from 2010 that first mentioned this analogy)
🌊 Flow - the ephemeral feed of information that comes and goes without leaving a long-lasting impression (like most of our Instagram feed)
"...The real magic trick is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. The hybrid strategy" — Robin Sloan
So, how might we create this hybrid strategy?
A few things I do to strive for better information balance:
🙅🏻♀️ Marie Kondo your flow. I recently did this with Twitter and my Newsletter subscriptions - and feel a lot lighter. But beware of our own biases when cleaning up your sources: the set of things we would most likely read isn't necessarily the things we need to know.
⚙️ Build a system that works for you. Our brains have limited capacity to retain information. For this reason, every new piece of online content that sparks my curiosity, first shows up on a content Inbox to review. I revisit this list every morning: if I still think it'll bring me value, it moves to my resources. This first filter helps me manage my clipping sprees!
👓 Make more out of what you read. Hoarding content only gives us the illusion of knowledge. To internalise new content, we need to create our own version of it (as writing things in our own words = thinking things through). And to expand it, we can activate the collective brain by sharing it!
Over the summer, I spent time researching and testing out ideas and tools to build a knowledge management system that would allow me to organise and build upon interesting ideas I find online. I wanted a system that was flexible yet structured and, well, also looked good - and chose to join the Notion cult, as it allowed me to not only organise what I found online, but also create my own version of it (and actually, share it publicly, too). But what works for me, might not work for you - so this might help you make a decision:
Here's another thing and it's important so I'm bolding it: writing things down is just one step in the process. Notes that are abandoned and forgotten live a very short life and won't contribute to new ideas.
To foster the discovery of new surprising connections that spark new ideas, we need to be able to find the information we have stored. When thinking of file storage, we automatically think of category folders and tags. Almost every technology uses this same "file cabinet" format:
🗂 We file something into a specific folder, which is good, because we love to compartmentalise stuff. However, most stuff could actually be filed into more than one folder. Let's take Anne-Laure's article as an example: it could be filed under productivity but also under knowledge management.
🏷 We add tags, which is good, because it allows us to connect several ideas through a common thread. However, they are one-dimensional and often require us to guess our tagging structure before getting started. Back to Anne-Laure's article, lets say we tag each tool she mentions, as well as adding how to and note-taking. Cool. But: what if, after 6 months, we decide that it's also important to tag time commitment: we'd have to go through everything we have added and tag it accordingly - or risk not finding this note again when we filter for it.
Sure, most of these tools also allow you to search function to locate it - but what if you don't really know yet what you're searching for? It boils down to serendipity: we’d need a system that allows us to leisurely explore different ideas without them being linked to a specific hierarchy of tags and folders. That’s part of what the guys over at Roam Research are working on!
Further reading: Mindframing for world curation with Roam Research
☕️ Curiosity snippets
VC's war for talent. If you're thinking about jumping into an entrepreneurial journey yourself, this article by @mario_gabriele_ provides a great overview on potential structures and their risk vs ownership trade-offs.
The Pinterest Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity. In my view, negationism (not accepting there's a bias) degrades a firm's brand. This is the (viral) story of @FrancoiseBr, ex-COO of Pinterest.
What Rock-Paper-Scissors Can Teach Us About Our Decision-Making. Following a win, we tend to remain logical. But after a loss, we rely on the win-stay lose-shift heuristic, leading to poor decision making marked by hastiness.
From Online Tribes to Coalitions. I love how @rahafharfoush visualised the impact of global communities on global digital culture.
Curators are the new Creators by @gaby_goldberg. As the amount of information grows, we are seeing the rise of curators: people that will pick and choose what's important to certain market.
💫 Thank you
Thank you so much for reading. If you have thoughts/feedback or any interesting content to share, I'd love to hear from you! And if you believe a friend might enjoy this edition - I'd very much appreciate you sending it to them by sending them this link or clicking below. Thanks for being there! — Kat