I'm so inspired at the moment.
Yes, the world is a bit wild at the moment. Depressing. Yet, where I'm right now feels pretty good. It's not because things are going great. Everything still feels tough and I often still wish for the pre-2020 simple times. Hindsight reflections are so easy to give yourself a hard time over.
But still. The great reveal. Every day I show up in community I become inspired by what we can achieve. A massive part of this is because we are building our own thing.
We get to play with the data. With the code. With the design. The lot of it.
In the past we could do that, but now, it feels so much easier. It's not because of AI, we're not there yet, but maybe soon we will be.
However, part of it is the potential of AI, so there is that. The dreaming and working towards new possibilities.
The great reveal shows up in the work we've been doing. In the progress we've made. In the shared vision that becomes clearer and more exciting by the day. The more we create, the more we see the possibilities.
We show up every day. We know we can do better, yet we're not always sure how. The answers do reveal themselves though. And often it's glaringly obvious solutions that we should have thought of before. Othertimes it takes work.
But this is the community systems work. Or emergence. And, the part that most people miss out, the graft of showing up every day. To observe. To listen. To care. To get knocked down, then you pick yourself up again.
We can say, how beautiful it all is. How everything just seems to happen. But it doesn't. There is intention, action and care at every point. There is commitment to progress. We mess up, learn from it and then create new boundaries, that help us grow, whilst also creating a layer of care and protection.
As we do this, the things are revealed. We are sparked with new ideas and opportunities. It can be because of a conversation. Or a bit of data. A behaviour or experience. The reasons are endless. But when we combine it with our vision and what we see happening, then the solutions naturally arise.
And I got back to the idea of being inspired. I'm so inspired right now, because I keep seeing new things revealing themselves. They help me rethink community. Or what is possible.
In some senses, nothing has changed and this has always been possible. In other ways, this can only happen properly when we have full view of the system. And yes, I'm advocating for building your own thing, again. Because it is beautiful, and because it reveals what is truly possible.
When you can't surface the data. When you can't see how things truly flow. When you can't build features (relatively easily) to help you do things. It's like building community with a straightjacket on. It's suffocating. It's limiting. It's depressing.
I can't go back to how we use to do community. We've found joy in the efficiencies. In the productivity gains. In the ease of how things are happening. In the ability to make our ideas a reality. We do so much more, with less.
I realise this is very high level, and it's hard to put into words, or give you specific ways to learn from this.
The biggest tips I can give are:
- build your own - start small, find a way
- own it - especially data, it's essential for the AI world we live in
- observe, listen and experiment - no one can give you the answers, you have to find it yourself
- community in a silo doesn't work - the nature of community is that it should be everywhere, therefore, whatever you build needs to touch the whole business, which leads onto...
- the platform is the business - I wish we had started earlier to push for many of things we have been doing, but our mindset is that everything needs to be done via our platform. Whenever we use another tool or spreadsheet, it's a signal to consider how we can start build that into our platform
The more you do this, the more is revealed. And I can't explain how beautiful it is, but it's up to you to observe and find it. I can't unsee it. And I can't go back to how things were.
🐌
