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His mission: Meet 10k people, one at a time, for an hour at a time
- ALittleLight 7y agoSeems like a strange mission. The fact that he's unemployed, lost his girlfriend, lives with his parents, and must monetize his efforts via 22k Instagram followers makes the exercise feel a bit sad to me. Perhaps he will learn and grow from this and it'll be worth it. I hope so.
- ebiester 7y agoThen again, few people are able to do this, and if his parents are willing to subsidize his project, he might gain valuable insight that he couldn't do at... say, 40 and a family. This feels like a project I have planned with programmers the next time I'm in between jobs.
- deweller 7y agoAfter 10,000 hours of meeting people, I would think one would have some well-honed skills required for managing people. Of course being a good manager requires more than just understanding people. But that level of empathy and instincts are valuable skills for anyone who wants to work with people.
- wolco 7y agoBetter for interviewing related jobs.
- mettamage 7y agoI just asked 3 friends for fun to fly to the US to meet him. I'm half joking, half serious. I think I want some variety in my life :P
- b_tterc_p 7y agoThis is the kind of thing that one may get shamed for calling garbage, but it seems like he is just trying to make a clone of Humans of New York and make money by hiding ads in what’s supposed to be heartwarming human stories. Yes, this post and his brand is full of “humble” values and what not. He may be genuine, but I don’t think it’s praiseworthy. It feels like a tool for virtue signaling.
- skybrian 7y agoAnd why shouldn't more people try to do what Humans of New York does? If that's what he's trying to do, I'm for it. Originality is overrated, and even so, I'd expect someone attempting this to find their own way of doing things.
- omosubi 7y agoWhile I agree that it has a strong HONY feel and that monetizing the project via Instagram or corporate sponsorship cheapens it, I wouldn't call it virtue signaling by any means. He's dedicating 10 or 15 years of his life to the project. I think he would give up pretty quickly if it was all a tool to just say "I'm more woke than you". While he obviously comes from a privileged background, at least he's not just becoming a corporate clone like so many of us, myself included. Props to him for that
- tasty_freeze 7y agoCalling it virtue signaling is a cheap way to dismiss something. Virtue signaling is when a person trumpets their moral stance without a willingness to make any significant investment in it. This guy investing 10,000 hours into the project disqualifies it from that moniker.
- criddell 7y agoSo people who buy a Prius are never virtue signalling?
- pwinnski 7y agoConversely, are people who buy a Prius always virtue signaling? Perhaps the appellation is an empty way to dismiss someone without engaging them?
- criddell 7y ago> are people who buy a Prius always virtue signaling? Of course not. I was simply responding to the idea that a significant investment is all it takes to counter the claim that some activity is virtue signaling.
- Theodores 7y agoCouldn't he just get a job where he gets to help out a lot of people? Sales? Anything customer facing. This would be a good way to 'monetise' the meeting thousands for an hour 'dream'. You could use this approach to get into elected office, if you actually started now for an election four years hence then you could get in without party affiliation. As it is there is something peculiar and narcissistic about this project, how can you build real friendships if you are spending all of your time doing these ten thousand one-off meetings.
- michaelt 7y agoHe wants to spend an hour per-person with 10,000 people, rather than meeting 10,000 people in a single hour.
- Theodores 7y agoSo he could do 10,000 eye tests, teach 10,000 people first aid, try to sell 10,000 cars or fleece 10,000 people out of their pensions, all on a one to one basis. He is not rock star enough to meet 10,000 people in an hour.
- skybrian 7y agoSales is business. It would be weird to spend an hour with each potential customer talking about their personal life. If you can do that, you must be selling something expensive, and that's going to limit who you can talk to.
- rland 7y agoHe mentioned this. He wanted to do something that was detached from sales as it cheapened the experience.
- j7ake 7y agoSounds like this man could make real impact working at a senior person's home.
- 3stripe 7y agoStartup vanity metrics transposed to real life interactions.
- dredmorbius 7y agoOne way to consider this is in terms of attention, the ultimately nonfungible resource: you can pay attention to only one thing at a time, seach moment must be experienced, none can be called back. If you live to 80 and devote your adult life from 20 onwards to meeting people, if you meet 10,000 people, you can devote about 50 hours to each of them -- a little over two days. That's sleeping or waking, working or resting. The US House of Representatives has 435 members (add the hundred senators -- and 3 DC electors -- to get the famous 538 electoral college votes), each representing something like 720,000 citizens. Given a 2 year term, this means that each representative can devote a net total of ... just under 90 seconds per constituent. If you wanted to dedicate your adult life to meeting everyone currently alive on Earth, 7.3 billions, you can dedicate just over a quarter second to each. At the same time, in every second, there are 215 years of human experience lived, 14,000 years per minute, 830,000 years per hour, and 20 million years per day. Rounding somewhat. How much of that experience can be distinct and individual, how much is shared? What are the consequences of forced attention, as with advertising, or with forced isolation? How much can we know, and pass on, culturally? Is there a net effective intergenerational knowledge transfer bandwidth limit, and how close to that (or exceeding it) are we? How is that shared between culture, personal, technical, and poetic knowledge?
- kuu 7y agoIs there a net effective intergenerational knowledge transfer bandwidth limit, and how close to that (or exceeding it) are we? Yes, there is. I came to realize about this when my nephew born and started to grow. You need to teach him everything, literally. And there are so many things...
- dredmorbius 7y agoAnd that's general information. When you look at all the specialist information, and the degree to which it's mutually incomprehensible even within organisational chains (let alone in widely separated disciplines), things get frightening.
- hollerith 7y ago>add the hundred senators to get the famous 535 electoral college votes Add the District of Columbia's 3 electors to get the even more famous 538 votes.
- wjossey 7y agoI’m doing my own version of this through my mentoring program for managers. I’m at 80 since February, and it’s been a real joy (best part of my day). I’ve had a chance to talk to managers from over a dozen countries, some of whom call me at 2AM their time (dedication) and share with me their stories of managing people all around the world. Sometimes the sessions are energizing. Sometimes they’re sad. Sometimes they’re deeply thought provoking... However, they are always worth the hour I put into them. My calendar is booked up this month, but September is still mostly clear :) Hope some of you sign up for a session. https://freemanagermentor.com https://freemanagermentor.com
- burnaway 7y agoi've booked a slot.
- travisfischer 7y agoI spent a couple hours the other night lying awake in bed dreaming of spending one year trying to help someone new every day. I was thinking it would be cool to dedicate each work day of the year to meeting someone new and offering my hours that day to help them in whatever way I could. The help could range from washing their car, running an errand, to picking up garbage on their street, to writing some code or spinning up a website for them. I thought it would have a really nice dual effect of pushing me to get to know a bunch of people and also teach me something about serving and helping others. Then I started thinking about how to leverage social media to pivot it into meeting more and more interesting/important people and monetizing it. Quickly realized that would undermine the original intent of the project and make it into something else entirely that I did not like. I don’t understand the appeal of meeting 10,000 different people as that sounds like too much quantity and not enough quality time but to each his own. It is super interesting to see someone else living out a version of an idea that at 2am sounded like a pretty original concept.
- jamestimmins 7y agoThere's a lot of cynical takes here, but I like to think of this as the type of art project that can only take place on the internet, because there has to be some kind of funding involved. It's easy to decry him for having sponsors, but that is a bizarre standard. Michelangelo had sponsors/patrons, but nobody disregards the Sistine Chapel because he was paid for it. Personally, I really want people to use the internet for weird, personal art projects that are shared with the world. Getting sponsored by WeWork instead of the Medicis doesn't change anything.
- geophile 7y agoMy dude. This is not the Sistine Chapel.
- omosubi 7y agoThe difference is that when being sponsored by a company you have to wonder whether the content is influenced by the brands using it to advertise. If WeWork wanted him to show how great their spaces are or take down posts that denigrate them, we have no way of knowing. I suppose the Medici family could have done the same for Michaelangelo, but I doubt it
- wolco 7y agoAll content is designed to influence you. Just the brand association should be evil enough. Subconsciously, you are being told whatever feeling you have about the content to associate with this brand or idea.
- adarioble 7y agoThis is not particularly new concept, but the internet is a huge market so the cake is big enough I guess. His project reminds me of Marina Abramovic “The artist is present” she held in MoMA (https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/marina-abramovic-marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present-2010/ https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/marina-abramovic-ma...).
- mikekchar 7y agoI wish I remembered the person's name, but there is a guy in London who did a start up and made a fair amount of money. Since then he spends his time talking with different people to get ideas. He'll buy you a hamburger (at one of the upscale hamburger places no less) to talk to you for an hour. I never ended up chatting with him (I got busy), but a friend of mine did and said that it was quite a good experience. I thought this article might have been about that guy. It's a bit different, though. The person I'm thinking about is independently wealthy and thinks this is a productive use of his time. I think he's gathering data for a new startup, but unfortunately I didn't get a chance to talk to him about it.
- bkohlmann 7y agoI had a buddy in business school who insisted on meeting every one of our classmates for a coffee chat (~400). By the time he got to me, it was the middle of our second (and last year). I was skeptical since I thought it was kind of weird, plus most friend groups had formed by that point. Turned out to be one of the most intriguing conversations I ever had. We became very close friends after that. No short cut to friendship. Sometimes you just gotta get face to face and see how things go.
- jrgifford 7y agoI was #2163 - I responded to an instagram post he made as he was passing through town, and we were able to make something work. I really enjoyed talking with him for an hour!
- cstrat 7y agoPretty cool to have been part of the mission. I actually scrolled through his IG to find your post - so cool! Good on you for taking part. https://www.instagram.com/p/BpRwd9HnfGU/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BpRwd9HnfGU/