Scholar George Myerson has recently written a study of happiness. After 250 pages tracking moments of joy throughout history, he concludes that humans are happiest hanging with friends, gathered around tables with good food and conversation and laughter. If as you dine together you can also provide help for others — then, according to Myerson, you’ve won the lottery of life.

Leonard Sweet, From Tablet to Table: Where Community Is Found and Identity Is Formed

“How epic would it be if we could have huge family meals with all our friends every week?”

“To have all OUR friends, we’d need the biggest table in the world.”

“You know what I mean 😜”

“Hey, I’m not ruling that out.”

“Go on….”

“Well, our apartment is only 550 square feet so we’d need to make some drastic changes. To seat, say, 24 people we’d have to replace half of it with a dining room.”

“Will that work?”

“Let me get my measuring tape….

It’ll fit but this is audacious.”

“We’re audacious. Let’s do it”

So we did.

We took apart the apartment we loved.

And we went to the woodshop.

Two weeks after that first conversation we’d put half about half our things in storage and were lifting 16’ (4.8m) boards up the back balcony and through the 3rd story bedroom window to assemble in our new dining area.

The reason this was so easy for us to jump on is because it is a fundamental expression of who we are as Whitney and Ricky. We are hospitable, extroverted and adventurous.

Let me explain each of these:

When Whitney was in college she started making pancakes in her room for her friends once a week. Her hospitality quickly drove up attendance to the point where they had to have volunteer security guards to manage the parking problems that arose. She recounts a day when she knew it had reached critical mass when someone she had just met invited her to her own party. These pancake night are still going on years after she left.

I grew up with a mother who had a degree in home economics and was schooled in all the fine details of hosting well. My family was huge on entertaining both friend and stranger, the cared for and the lonely. I also worked for the biggest hospitality company in the world during the FIFA World Cup.

Once Whitney and I joined forces these passions compounded and we quickly became semi famous for hosting parties and dinners.

We are both very social and easily make new friends. We love being in large groups of people we love as well as complete strangers.

We’re adventurous- not just when traveling abroad, we explore in our home town and our careers. We find joy in the discomfort of trying new and hard things.

So we were thrilled by the idea of turning our comfortable home inside out so we can have people we don’t know well over to eat our food.

Not only is this an expression of who we are, but it is the result of something we believe in. Gathering around the table is what families do. Gathering friends and strangers around your table turns them into family. Research show that when people eat the same thing at the same time they build trust in each other. (Shankar Vendantam http://www.hiddenbrain.org/)

“I haven’t had a table in my house in 15 years” — good friend of mine.

Sadly community around the table is disappearing. Sales of dining room tables and serving dishes is declining. One in four millennials reports never eating at a table at home. For thousands of years eating meals together was how relationships formed but modern lifestyle is corroding that tradition.

This is why we decided to be audacious and take this bold step. We are intent on building community around our epic table.

We don’t know exactly what this is going to look like but we’re committing to do it. We know we’ll be doing this weekly and we want to make sure we invite as many friends that we already love as strangers we want to learn to love.

Sometimes we might cook something elaborate (sorry, not sorry, it’s in our nature) and sometimes we might just have grilled cheese and board games.

What we do know is that we want to create this thing with our friends and family. We want guests to bring friends. We want feedback and we want help. Sometimes that might be help cooking or cleaning up. Sometimes it will be help bringing ice or wine.

We’ve built it, hope you will come.

http://epic-table.com

6 things our interns added to the culture of innovation.

The second week of August is a very strange time at Barkley. Suddenly over one weekend the total energy level drops perceptibly. I walk around the building and things are a little quieter. There are a few empty desks around. We ask for help from people who are no longer there.

The end of our paid summer internship program is the saddest time for me. After 10 weeks of twenty-two extra college students running amok, it feels like I’m going to get “back to school blues”.

There are a lot of social and corporate benefits to an internship program (helping students, finding potential talent). There are 6 traits of an intern, however, that are especially beneficial to the culture of innovation that we try to foster through Moonshot Lab:

They bring a lot of energy.

Summer in our company is way busier with the noisy interns who are willing to volunteer for pretty much anything. They are a catalyst to the rest of us, making us more reactive and innovative. Creating space and time in your culture to be high energy will certainly lead to more innovation and creativity.

They have a bright view of their future.

Starting out their career, interns haven’t heard the word “no” so many times that they’ve gotten jaded; they are excited and see opportunity everywhere. Innovation is killed by cynicism. When you expect everything to go poorly you fail to see the potential in the unexplored spaces. Sure, they might not see the gravity of the consequences, but we must learn to nurture that sense of wonder and excitement if we want to be truly innovative.

They are willing to take risks.

Since the interns have never made egregious mistakes, they don’t know how bad it could be. This leaves them wide open to find how good it could be. If channeled properly, their willingness to fail and learn opens up a world of innovation opportunities that we might miss due to our natural tendency to be careful. Use your experience and wisdom to choose to take calculated risks you can learn from.

They are more willing to exist way out of their depth.

Everything the interns are doing for the summer is new to them. When you ask them to do one more thing that is unfamiliar they don’t resist because it is only an incremental shift. When a partner who has been doing the same thing every day for the last 5 years gets asked to attempt something new it might be pushing them twice as far into discomfort. The best innovative ideas are in that space beyond your comfort zone. To find them you need to get familiar with how it feels out there.

They are very flexible.

Since interns are already out of their depth and are trying to impress you they are willing to get out there and try new things. They get into situations where they come up with great ideas because they are willing to try something new. An effective culture of innovation requires you to be flexible and to be willing to do things differently every time.

They are disruptive.

There is nothing quite like a 20-year-old asking you why you do things a certain way to make you question your methods. An innovative culture in your company will be disruptive and noisy, but the results will be worth it.

Investing in young talent is a great opportunity to be inspired by the energy that they bring.

Ricky

Thanks for reading! Check out more here.

Innovate like an intern. was originally published in Moonshot Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Being obsessed with testing and iterating in our lab, we now have feedback sessions every month. These are two-way in nature–I get feedback on how I am doing and I give feedback to my boss.

Last week he was asking me about how he is doing and I chatted to him about how within our team of four we throw ideas around like they are worth pennies, but when we want to talk to him about ideas we have to develop them into half-baked prototypes.

This was initially meant to be a bit of constructive criticism, but the more I think about it the more I realize that he is enriching us by forcing this practice on us. Those pennies are still a valid currency, just like ideas are still valuable, but we don’t measure in pennies, we measure in full dollars and prototypes are the dollars of the innovation space.

We have always had a very strong bent to making our ideas quickly, cheaply and early. This is part of the value the lab adds to the agency. We deal in made things, not in descriptions of things, and in doing so we affect the culture and mentality of the rest of our partners.

The process of turning our ideas into objects shows us so many things about our ideas and often sparks new better ideas. Moving from paper and words to objects early lets us develop the concept into the best possible form before we have traveled so far down the path that it is too late to go back and rethink.

We also spot the points where out things are likely to break soon (see our post about exploding pinwheels)

We build with the view of throwing away once we’ve tested. Not being precious about how we make has also revealed another interesting truth: The people you are testing against are far more likely to poke holes in your concept if your prototype is not polished and pretty. If you are in the testing mindset, this is a huge win.

To this end we also tend to use materials we find lying around or can pick up cheaply at the hardware store (see our post about Bricolage). Presenting objects that are clearly not presentation quality tends to make you feel less bad about all the details not being fully fleshed out and make you more likely to get it in front of the people who need to look at it.

We had an idea that needed visualization of the swing of a bat. Five minutes later we had taped LEDs to a stick and were shooting long exposure shots.

20 minutes after that we were on the roof hitting water balloons with a 2x4.

And just a little later we popped in at Walmart to pick up a bat, threw some ice in a blender and managed to shoot this kind of picture that got us a green light on the idea.

“I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.”
U.S. Congressman Willard Vandiver -1899

Somewhere in the process of growing up we learned that talking about ideas is more valuable that making things. Maybe it comes from the fact that you tend to do less art and more writing as you grow up. Maybe it is because they are so separated–no talking in art class and no drawing in English class. Whatever the cause, not making things has hampered the progress of innovation. It has robbed us of the ease in which context is so much easier to communicate with things and places than with words.

Congressman Vandiver (quoted above) was from Missouri and this is the “Show Me” state. I believe that Moonshot Lab and Barkley also being based here has added to this mentality we have to use actions over words.

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

Ricky