delightful collisions
I heard a talk once about the early visions for the ride-sharing app, Lyft. I can’t remember if I heard this talk at SXSW, a TedTalk, or a podcast, but the premise was this: sharing a short car ride with a stranger could lead to amazing creative collisions that you would never encounter in your day-to-day life.
That idea of meeting a random stranger and something blooming from that interaction has always sat very strongly with me because I’ve seen its power. I met one of my closest friends via Twitter in 2008 and two years later she connected me with her boss who ended up hiring me, and that led me to New York City. So much of my life fell into place here, and she is still one of my dearest friends to this day. I have a few tweets to thank for all of this.
Once on a bus ride between New York and D.C. I was tweeting (I really didn’t mean to make this all about Twitter, a service I don’t use anymore, but bear with me…) about the delay (riveting content) and ended up connecting with a guy who was waiting for our delayed bus in the arriving city. We became friends and ended up collaborating on photo projects, connecting over being transracially adopted twins, and we have the topic of bus delays and the internet to thank for this.
Lately I’ve been taking yoga classes about 2-3 times a week, and because I have a more flexible schedule than normal these days, I’ve been able to start to make new friends with people who I would have never had the chance to get to know with a standard 9-5 schedule.
This week, I had the chance to curate a playlist for my friends at Super Keen Studio, a strategy and design studio headed up by the brilliant duo of Lauren Wong and Gabby Lord (who writes and you should definitely subscribe). In a past life, Lauren was a hiring manager and I was a recruiter, and we met when I was leading the search for her team’s role. I met Gabby as a part of the interview process, and then the two of them struck it out on their own to found Super Keen. There I got to continue working with them as an advisor when they developed an internal product called Culturae.
In all of these scenarios, I love looking back at the zigging and zagging that brought these people into my life. There’s something extraordinary about how things in the worlds of all of the involved parties had to line up just so for our lives to collide. These subtle shifts and chance interactions are what keep my imagination ripe and remind me to be a little more optimistic than cynical. Mostly, I love it because it creates space for the inconceivable.
I hope you enjoy this playlist I made for Super Keen this week. It’s meant to be a perfect accompaniment for a walk on an early Spring day, one that can take you from the mid-afternoon energy of the lingering sun to the coziness of your apartment after dark.
Get this week playlist here.
May an unexpected and delightful collision come your way this week, friends.
Meghan