More meadows
My favorite city on earth is Oxford, England. (Sorry, Paris. Love ya.) If you’ve ever been there, you can easily imagine Tolkien and other greats taking a stroll through Addison’s Walk or Christ Church Meadows turning over in their minds the existential quandaries of our tiny lives hurtling on a rock through space. Being there, hunched over with my hands behind my back amid the medieval spires, it really hits me that we need more meadows, especially in Texas. Too bad it’s currently ninety-nine degrees outside.
Taking a stroll is one of the most productive things we can do. Ryan Holliday, a prolific writer and marketer, advocates for it as one of the sixteen habits that have made him who he is. He quotes Nietzsche as saying, “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”
In our culture, however, we don’t make time for thinking. I never hear anyone say, “Hm, good question. Can I have a few days to think about that?” I feel like I need to have a great answer as soon as I’m asked, about any topic, and it must be quippy. Being on podcasts half my week doesn’t help. Maybe it’s just me. I guess some leaders advocate for walking meetings. That sounds nice.
I’m currently sitting in Cherry Coffee in Fort Worth drinking a London fog. I’ve been coming here to think lately. I just need to get away. I’ve also been running every morning down my street, a mile there and a mile back. Zone 2 cardio. Claude says it’ll help me lower my cholesterol, but I think it also helps me think.
I’ve been writing this week that the problems we’re trying to solve in marketing these days are increasingly complex and technical. Our analyst Tyrone and I met this morning to work through some of those problems. We both acknowledged how the increasingly technical nature of our work is pushing us more to want to just sit and think or read or mull something over for a few hours, perhaps alone but perhaps on a whiteboard as a team. Ah, the pre-Covid days.
What stops me is the need to be quote-unquote productive. Sometimes I get off a client call and want to just go for a walk to process, to work toward an epiphany. Blocking my calendar with “walk” or “think” would look unproductive though, right? Do you block time on your calendar as thinking time? Is that silly? Perhaps that’s what we get paid to do.
Claude is a thought partner, but it’s others’ thought partner as well. Our Claudes are just lobbing briefs back and forth. Claude can create briefs faster than we can vet them and research whether it’s true. Isn’t that a funny thing? They say “evals” are becoming the true bottleneck in knowledge work. Claude can research, write, and build, but a human can still process information at only ten kilobytes per second. Hyperscalers may be building trillion-parameter models and two-thousand-acre data centers, but if humans can’t review any of it as efficiently, how much can we really scale after all?
A European friend of mine moved back to Europe because she couldn’t align with our culture being so tightly scheduled, planning coffees weeks in advance. Maybe Texas—America in general—needs a little more Europe, a little more meadows.
