Daily Endeavor Blog

In an interview with New Work City, Kaomi Goetz at WNYC makes the case this morning that “co-working” offers community to solo workers. I’d like to take the case even further. Coworking can be a literal life preserver, not just for entrepreneurs or freelance contractors, but also anyone actively conducting a job search.

As Dan Gilbert points out on This Emotional Life, one of the root requirements for happiness is connection with other people. We are not a solo species. And yet one of the dark spots shared by starting a company, working freelance and navigating a professional transition is the swift and surgical removal of a daily flow of social interaction.

Coworking offers an alternative to the social starvation. Like the barcamp movement, coworking recognizes that the expertise you seek is sometimes in the room around you. Coworking spaces allow individuals pursuing their own path to also fill their work life with people.

Free Agent Nation

Over 10 years ago, Daniel Pink wrote a seminal piece in Fast Company that chronicled more and more people beginning to work on their own terms and schedule. The widespread web enabled this shift to start to occur.

By the early 00’s, lightweight, inexpensive tools and web services (e.g. weblogs, wikis, skype) started to kick in to make working remotely even easier. Bootstrapping new companies began finding the best people wherever they lived and happily funded bandwidth instead of office space. For years at Socialtext well over 70% of the company, including myself, lived thousands of miles away from our High Street home in Palo Alto.

With the rise in remote working came the rise of solitude. When Brad Neuberg, Chris Messina and Tara Hunt began promoting coworking a few years back, they gave voice, and a beginning antidote, to working alone. Check out the video for more backstory.

Job Search is Social

One of the most difficult parts of making a professional transition is keeping your social game fresh. Conversation is at the heart of any job and any job search. When you’re working, there’s a constant stream of conversations every day. When you’re in between jobs, the stream can become a trickle.

Consider becoming a member at a coworking space to keep yourself out of the social cave. Most have lite plans where you can go once per week or a few hours per month. The routine of getting up, going to the office and working at a desk can help the search feel more like an explicit project you’re undertaking (which it is). Given how most opportunities come from other people’s networks, you’re likely to meet new people that can help, if not directly meet people who are hiring.

Most importantly, working somewhere consistently, even if on a limited basis, will give you the opportunity to have real conversations with people. This is the most valuable experience of all to keep active.

As Peter Chislett, Deputy Mayor of New Work City says, “it’s not the space, it’s the community. It’s the connection with other people.” I believe it.

Coworking resources

For other coworking spaces, check out:

• Coworking for a global listing

• New Work City

• HubSF

• Hub Berkeley

• The Network Hub in Vancouver

• Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto

• Affinity Lab in DC

• Conjunctured in Austin

• C3/Cambridge Coworking Center

Amidst the upheaval and real economic uncertainty, some people are asking the big questions that often get swept under the rug in go-go times. Questions like: what’s important to me?

Today Mark Hurst’s Good Experience newsletter arrived with a great pull-quote from David Byrne on this very topic. From Mark’s column:

Finally, for more listening: throughout the month of March, David Byrne streams old school gospel. He writes (and I agree):

Byrne…

With the economy and people’s finances in free fall, this is a time when many of us pause to reassess our values — what is important to us, what really matters and how we might restructure our lives to reflect those values. …

Whether you believe in the geezer upstairs or not, you might enjoy these tunes. They’re also the structural foundation upon which a lot of popular music was built — a strong foundation, I might add.

http://www.davidbyrne.com/radio/index.php

It’s the line in the middle that I hear people asking more and more:

what is important to us, what really matters and how we might restructure our lives to reflect those values….

The opportunity cost has never been lower to explore what might be right for you. It’s great to see people doing it.

It’s more than a Pepsi pitch jingle. It’s true in countless ways. Young folks try more new stuff than anyone else. And the world is better off because of it. If only we could increase the percentage of people trying out something new at every age.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled about what Generation Y is and is not, who it is, how it’s different from Gen X and The Boomers, and so on. Dealing at the generational level is always risky business because of the inherent generalizations at work.

Even so, I’d like to make a generalization that’s particularly of interest to me — not about the differences between periods in which we grew up in (& how they shape our world view), but about the similarities of age cohorts.

Simply put, people who pass through their twenties share a lot in common with all of the other 20-somethings of years past. They have a higher appetite for learning, or said in the language of older folks, a higher appetite for risk.

This is not news. The bullet points are rattled off all the time:

• They have fewer responsibilities so they have much more time
• They have less wealth, and less to lose, and fewer responsibilities that would be impacted by loss
• They have less opportunity cost for trying something new because the thing they’re doing now isn’t providing tremendous material returns
• They have more time to adjust course, re-start, learn anew

Ok, that’s the conventional wisdom. Feels really rational and economic, doesn’t it? It’s missing the I-don’t-live-in-a-box human aspects to it.

Social, Momentum

In my experience, people are much more social (part of and impacted by the folks around them, for better or worse) and also more prone to momentum (or lack thereof). I think it’s important to add in a few more likely reasons

• They learn more because they’re recently practiced at learning, the fulfillment and sometimes rush it brings isn’t a memory out of reach, it’s a feeling that’s on hand
• They’re more willing to ask for help; there are fewer hang-ups with “should have it all together by now” which leads to more iterations, and more learning from each one
• They remember explicitly to have fun; instead of fun being a luxury now and again, it’s a must-have that’s top of mind (this one my friend Katie reminded me of recently, something she’s been doing while writing her book; she’s having fun in her job and it’s making a real impact on her life)

People in school, and people coming out of school and in their 20s, are at such a phenomenal moment. They’re steeped in learning (having just completed a hard core two decade primer), the joy of it is still coarsing through their veins, as is the craving of it, and now for the first time they have a 10x step up in freedom to explore whatever they so choose. It’s no surprise they unleash a blast of new on the world.

Some Old Dogs Love New Tricks, But Too Few

To be sure there are individuals at every age for whom the three social aspects of learning mentioned above are true (and I’d argue they’re the happier ones, or the “high performers”). However, as people turn the calendar, they on average grow less and less. Sometimes precipitously less.

Again, the common responses have become refrains:

• They’d love to have more fun and grow more if taking responsibility seriously didn’t crowd out every minute of the day
• That the same things that were fun just aren’t so fun after you’ve done them 1000 times

There’s more than a kernel of truth on both counts. But still I wonder, Really? I suspect one of the main reasons people quit growing is because they view it as optional, and once they slow doing it, they atrophy at it, then it becomes hard or even scary. Both the social and the momentum bits showing themselves again.

The Pepsi Stimulus Package

If the people who are learning and growing, led each year by young folks, weren’t refreshing the world, who would be? How would the world, or to get local, your neighbors and office mates, be different if more people at all ages kept growing like they were in their 20s?

I think it just might be a better place.

So yes, it’s a commercial for a drink with Bob Dylan and Wil.I.Am. But it adds another twist on the phrase “may you stay forever young.”

Allison Aubrey at NPR files a story this morning that happiness it turns out is truly contagious. She reports on the research by Nicholas Christakis (Harvard Medical School) and James Fowler (UCSD) that shows how happiness spreads:

What we found through a variety of analysis is that happiness always spreads person to person, whereas unhappiness only sometimes spreads.

The pass-along rate for happiness not only appears to be higher, it also continues further, spreading up to 3 hops along one’s social network. When there’s good, people tend to spread it. Given 30-50% of our waking hours are spent working, work life has a significant impact on what’s shared. If you’re doing what you love, there’s a greater likelihood you’re boat can lift others, and others may do the same for you.

Aubrey interviews Robert Provine from the University of Maryland who rightly cautions happiness, and mood at large, are often momentary and of course influenced by situational events. Nevertheless, if our days and years are filled with anything, it’s other people and a vast collection of moments. Christakis and Fowler show us one way how the people around us can impact the moments we have, for the better.