The role of professional peers in my perception of my work and in finding inspiration has always been important, but over time the connection to those peers changed, removing that important effect. I feel I need to add how it originally was back into how those connections are now.

In my work to recover from burn-out and reorient myself on things that provide energy rather than drain me, I have identified three things to help me align my activities better with the way my mind functions.
Those are:

• Substance and exploration come first
• Peers for quality of work and being challenged (this post)
• Ideal end states as source of creativity

This post looks at the the second of those three, the role of professional peers in assessing the quality of my work, finding inspiration and be challenged.

Back in the day, starting a few years before I started blogging, when I was active on professionally oriented community online platforms, I quickly gained an emerging network of professional peers. Blogging on this website from 2002, and then meeting other professionals with blogs at conferences strengthened that network. We first had in-depth conversations distributed over blogs, platforms, languages and time, and then gave them more depth, also personal depth, by meeting up at various events and conferences. Visiting the Reboot conference in 2005 and subsequent years was a key catalyst in shaping both the level of inspiration and the level of personal connection of those interactions. Often I phrase it as ‘chasing the Reboot feeling’, when I think about finding inspiration in conversations through personal connections with professional peers.

Professional peers over time became friends, and there is a significant group of people that me and E have been interacting with for two decades or more now. We’ve shared life events, and these contacts are very dear to us. When people come from all over Europe, Canada and Indonesia to share your birthday to talk about stuff that interests us and them (and vice versa), it moves beyond just inspiring conversation, the shared context and road travelled together becomes meaningful in its own right at a deeply human level, and that fills me with awe, humility and emotion.

Births, deaths, break-ups, grief, loneliness, illness, marriage, happiness, moves, changing jobs and countries, founding and leaving companies, they are the stuff of all our lives, and sequences of such life events and sharing them make up our human lived experience.

However I’ve realised that through that, professional peers have often fully moved into the ‘friend zone’. I mean a different ‘friend zone’, one where we hardly talk about the topics and work that inspire us. Even if that is the source of our original connection.

Last year summer my psychologist, while working on my burnout, asked me about who I turn to when I want to gauge the quality of my work or my thinking, where do I go to feel inspired by challenge? I mostly work in situations where I’m the ‘oracle’. Not that I know everything or even a lot, just that I’m often early in spotting patterns and connections. In my own company, I was shocked to find out last April, it’s been dubbed the Ton-principle, where if I say anything it will be mostly spot-on, and for most things at some point people will look at me to see if I nod before something happens. Finding inspiration, getting intellectually challenged, having the quality of my work discussed, it’s a rare thing, a thing to cherish. And yet I’ve let a wide group of highly intelligent and widely experienced people move into the ‘friend zone’ exclusively, allowing ourselves to fall out of the habit of talking ‘shop’. I miss and crave the inspiration, challenge and energy of the natural highs they create.

It used to be I’d talk shop with people regularly, out of personal interests of the participants. For instance for a time we had monthly or so calls with people from around the German speaking parts of Europe to talk about our open data experiences and ongoing projects. I used to compare notes a few times a year with a Swiss colleague. Right next to at times sharing a beer in the evening sun on the banks of the river Limat and catching up on our personal lives. It is from those type of conversations, at conferences and 1 on 1 or in small groups, that I have taken so much inspiration, energy and curiosity over the years.

Ever since the psychologist asked me about it, I kept thinking about her question and suggestion to think of people I have in high professional regard and to reach out and talk shop with them. A bit like what Austin Kleon means when he talks about drawing your ‘family tree’ of people that inspire you. When Peter and L visited last year from Canada that was a fun mix of the personal and professional and artisanal (all knowledge work imo is artisanal) interests. It was awesome to take a course last April with our entire team with Bev and Etienne in Portugal who both have been sources of inspiration for me over decades and knowing them personally as well is such a meaningful thing to me. Some weeks back Jon in Copenhagen reached out to me, and just talking about our interests for a planned hour turning into two effortlessly next to catching up was a breath of air. Last week I took the opportunity to have a coffee with Alberto as I visited Brussels taking an earlier train than necessary, and after catching up on our personal lives talked about the connections between his work and mine. How come I’ve not talked about his experience, interests and current pursuits as an economist for such a long time? I came away with energy and notes for further exploration. I recently had dinner and drinks with my brother in law Siert, for the first time in ages talking about our nerdy interests like we used to do, and not just about our family bonds. I think it took us a year to even set the date.

Yes, I do want to share our life events, but yes I also really want to talk about the questions that energise you, the interests that inspire you, the issues that confound you, and how they connect or clash with mine. I love that professional peers turned into friends over time, but I also need you ‘back’ as professional peers.

Hit me up, let’s talk shop.

After I return from taking this summer off that is 😀