On Safari with Oldupai George

I had a big blog entry drafted - OK, well, outlined, by which I mean I had a bunch of nonsensical bullets written to remind me of some things to write about - that I thought would be really scintillating and insightful. Not a chance, but here’s a quick rundown of the things that travel has seemed to force this week.

• Rest: I collapsed on the bed multiple times on this trip intending to think, but brainfog prevented it. I probably could have avoided this impact in Amsterdam if I had stayed at a hotel in the center of town - could have gone out and walked around or gone to a museum - but alas, not this time
• Sometimes the brainfog of jetlag actually enables the most important things to rise to the surface… in this case, some random completely unfocused prodding at the laptop yielded an interesting James Dixon piece of writing on “commercial” and “organic” open source concepts, which happens to be really near and dear to my life right now.
• Focus - in a weird way, in that I never get as much done on trips as I think I will, but have gradually learned to do the most important things first. Actually, I take this back, as this blog posting is a counter-example.
• I had the sense at one point that the slightly manic, thoroughly exhausted jetlag feeling might have some opportunity to it, the ability to unleash some crazy highly creative thinking about really deep important stuff. It’s a kind of focus without focus (or pharmaceuticals) but it didn’t stick - likely needs to be a practice built to really tap into that.
• I always think, while traveling, “next time, I’ll be focuses; next time, I’ll have a plan for jetlag and day 1″. Never happens.
• I also always blog way more when I’m on the road…
• I had the thought that if Dopplr ever really got going (or I got more friends on there) that it would be really rad to randomly meet up with people you know (or sort of know) for dinner in random places would be cool. Also, I suspect that Dopplr would be a fun company to run, apart from the whole business model thing. Wanna bet their strategy is “get lots of users, and then get bought by Google”?

TTFN