Hello dearest reader, How are you? How are you feeling? Are you busy growing? Trying to grow up? It’s ok to stop... How do you feel about the future? It’s ok to feel down… Does the future scare you? Do you prefer to think about the past? Or are you chilling right here right now in the present moment? It’s all good, fall is good for reflection in every direction. Up, down, inward, outward, sideways. Look at your leaves before you let them go. Come spring we’ll continue to grow. 🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂 This is a newsletter about how we accidentally became children in our attempt to grow up. It’s Emma speaking, writing to you from a café in Barcelona. I was supposed to write this a week ago, but editing it while being away from the studio actually feels pretty good. It’s always a little easier to reflect on things once you have some distance from them, don’t you think? 🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭🔭 Last summer I took a trip with my dad, with a similar goal: to reflect on life, together, from a distance. We discussed various topics: work, money, art, love, the past, the future. I love my dad, we share a sense of humor and playful creativity, even though he has worked in offices most of his life as an executive consultant. He values hard work, family, comfort and stability, and although he is a chill and supportive dad, I sometimes worry that he might sometimes worry about my future, and what will become of me. I have no steady income, no partner, I do not own a house and I have not birthed any grandchildren yet either…when he was my age, he had all of those things. When will I grow up?
When we talked about XP, dad the consultant asked me things like ‘where do you see that going, exactly?’, ‘have you guys figured out a way to make money yet?’, ‘what is your vision for Extra Practice?’ and suggested getting more serious and structured (his expertise is in leadership). I see his point, structures and systems can definitely bring clarity and make things grow and move faster. But what is the point in growing or moving faster if you’re not sure what direction you want to grow or move in? That’s why last week, with this question in mind, I prompted every XP member to prepare a 15 minute mini-workshop, in preparation for the Grown Up Business Trip were about to take. Our ‘XP Away-Day’ would be a perfect moment to think about the future together, from a distance: what we want from it, what direction we want to grow in, and how. And so we all met in Culemborg on October 31st and cycled through the dark to the attic we rented in a farmhouse next to the Lek (Leak) river. 🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦🔦
After settling in and staring at AI generated autumnal ambient jazz videos that were auto-playing on the TV for way too long, we started with the first mini workshop, led by Elliott. Here are the instructions, so you can try it out yourself, maybe with some friends or colleagues:
So we all sat there pondering, waiting for memories to come up - both individual and collective experiences, trying to write them down. I struggled at first, feeling like entering a gigantic library and having to pick 5 books from miles and miles of shelves, from ANY possible genre. But we all picked some, and after extracting the nice things from them and sharing those, we ended up with a very nice list of words that, even though they were harvested from the past, can tell us something about what we want from the future. Some of the words: Curiosity, Adventure, Rest, Initiation, Trips, Connection, Surprise, Learning, Play, Spontaneity, Love, Simplicity, Risk, Other-worldliness, Nature. 🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠 Next morning we realized this trip was too short if we were going to go through 5 more workshops that day, so we decided to spontaneously book another night in a tiny forest house 1,5 hours away. We stopped for lunch in a restaurant on the way and drew on our placemats like children, swapping every few minutes to complete each other’s drawings. We were not growing up but our imaginations were definitely growing in many directions.
Elliott scanned all the placemats. He said we might be on to something here. Are these subconscious maps to our future? |
