I simply couldn’t make the entire drive by myself. So I invited everyone I knew, via Twitter and Facebook, to join in. An experiment, recapped.
A Day’s View, Alabama
Last week I drove from Washington, DC to New Orleans, LA. One day. 18.5 hours. 1,108 miles. Give or take a couple miles, of course.
I wasn’t planning on driving the entire way in one shot: I just wanted to make it pretty far, to leave a manageable morning’s drive for the next day. I knew I would get bored pretty quickly; I’d already had some travel time for quiet contemplation, I was itching to jump back into “creating and publishing” mode, and I had a lot I wanted to do.
Without my DJ, there was no way I could do it alone. So I invited everyone I knew, via Twitter and Facebook, to join in my drive, to call in, to chat, to say hello and catch up, and gave everyone my phone number. I’m sure many didn’t understand, but I knew some would, and they were the ones I wanted to talk to.
And what happened?
Caller #1 called within 10 minutes of the initial Facebook post. And he asked me an interesting question:
How many people have been truly successful in business without employees? Instead of making my goals simply to “be successful” at what I want to do, maybe my goal should be “employ other people to be successful at what they want to do”.
Thoughts?
And then, throughout the day, as some people sent me texts asking me if I was really taking calls from strangers (“yes, if they call”), more people called to chat, to catch up, to discuss things personal, professional, thought-provoking, mundane, irreverent, practical and impractical. And I loved it all, because even through the dropped calls, traffic jams and long stretches without visual stimulation, I was there, talking to the people that I was meant to talk to that day.
11 calls later, many hours on the phone, and 18.5 hours later, I was back in New Orleans. I couldn’t have done it without every one of you that called to chat. Thank you.
#longdrive
Thanks Nicholas for giving me the green light on this social art experiment. I love friends that say yes.
