Accidental reading and hanging out with people smarter than me
I started reading, accidentally! A group of UX and product management people at work hosted a video call to discuss Jennifer Pahlka’s book Recoding America, which I haven’t read. A couple of them mentioned that they also hadn’t read it yet, but they had reserved it in Libby, the app for borrowing ebooks from your local library. I thought I’d see how easy it was to sign up and use, and two minutes later I had borrowed Seamas O’Reilly’s Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? and loaded it on the Kindle, and downloaded the audiobook of Subtract by Leidy Klotz. Knowing I have two weeks to finish both gives me just a gentle nudge to keep at them, like there’s a point to all this.
It’s easy to start doing something, feel like you’ve always done it, and lose sight of what got you to consider it in the first place. I’d heard of Libby a ton of times, but hearing co-workers talk about it gave it a critical mass it didn’t have before. It must be something about hanging out with people smarter than yourself. Same reason I started attending the weekly Tinderbox meetup. I’m not even really working on much of a Tinderbox project right now, but I get a charge from seeing and hearing researchers use a tool for things that are over my head.