Life in a Cup / Penny Universities
"Henceforth is the tavern dethroned..."
Last week on LinkedIn I officially climbed aboard the euro-bandwagon. The ladder to hop aboard is exquisitely British, the make - German, and the good lad who helped me aboard - a Swede in stereotypically scandi-good form. This particular (pending) European age of enlightenment is on the back of startups and AI - and it will be fascinating to watch it unfold.
More on this to come - but all that to say - place matters.
I spent much of my time as a young man away from home. It was necessary. Like Kevin Kelly in New Jersey in the 70s, it’s hard to describe how parochial my time and place was. Sure, Canada is in the G7, has energy and minerals, and is still held in high-esteem in the Netherlands for our bold effort in WWII, but we’re a relatively small population, with an often overlooked economy and subtle reputation. Especially where I come from, on the rocky shores of the Maritime provinces.
As you grow you go out into the world and act. You do things. You create things. You make decisions, build relationships, you have to figure things out, and you start to understand what things mean (insofar as that’s possible).
Investor Mike Maples Jr., calls these revelations earned insights. That term stuck to me like glue - not only because I work daily with the people that he was talking about. What great startup founders do is pair earned insights about the world with inflection points happening in parallel in the world at large. Think Uber being possible because of GPS-nativity of smartphones.
According to Mike, insights are earned through action, and the more empowering the insight is, the better. I wish I could tell you that my earned insights growing up led me to a natural love of exploration and travel. They didn’t. I wasn’t. Wasn’t what? I don’t know, but I wasn’t that.
What I was, and am, is a writer, communicator and a learner. The latter, a predisposition for curiosity and big feelings, and the former, my only God given gift (I believe we all get one - and only one - true gift. Perhaps if He didn’t need to rest on the 7th day, He might have had capacity for more, but it is what it is).
As a kid, I would pour over old encyclopedias and make strange lists, ranking and categorizing things like mammals and capital cities. I was trying to bring a sense of order to a world that felt too big for me, my time, and my place. Sheltered doesn’t begin to describe where I grew up - I was left to roam and run more than most in my context, and I’m grateful for that, but we were average in every conceivable way.
I left home for the first time at 18, and I didn’t do it because of a Shoe Dog like desire for direct contact with the wider world and the spoils of grand adventure. To set sail for Greece and Turkey - an entirely new world - at 18 sounds noble. I would very much like to tell you that it was. That I wanted to explore like Amundsen or Theroux and bring back stories from the road. To know the real world and for it to know me. I can hardly claim any of that.
Did I leave in pursuit of adventure, worldliness, and international intrigue? No. I left - me being an 18 year old boy - in pursuit of a girl. From the mighty Mediterranean, to the Great Lakes region of Africa via the classic Western European air transit routes, to the long-gone South Pacific, and to the border region of Ecuador and Colombia. That was me in my early 20s.
I wasn’t doing anything particularly productive in my adopted global homes, but I was doing what I do best - building relationships. I need to remind myself often of the words of my namesake - we all need to be in the business of using our gifts. I was building new relationships with a sister University to my own, on the East Coast of Canada, and I got to meet many people and understand what they do with themselves on a day to day basis. One peculiar fellow (an endearing term if you’re reading this) had been there nearly his whole adult life, married a Latin woman, and yet didn’t speak a lick of Spanish! Putting aside my confusion at this state of affairs, I was grateful to him for agreeing to take me around and for showing me some of the natural resources sector in mid-South America.
I wanted to write an essay here about how natural resources are extremely underrated (Hi David!) and how they mirror on to economic development in a way that almost nothing else does. If you put energy in this category (which I do) than literally nothing else does. Revisit this post if you’d like to be reminded of what I’ve come to learn is the foundation of economic development, with my colleagues at the University of Waterloo.
We can understand this best - perhaps - via the power of place.
Please enjoy.
“As long as there was tea, there was England.” - Erik Larson, from The Splendid and The Vile
All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time. I hope that in this post you revel in the power of place - how the world unlocks if we only pay attention.
Here are 5 Tools used in this post.
Coming Into the Country, from the ubermensch John McPhee
The best business memoir ever written - Shoe Dog
The Pattern Breakers by Mike Maples Jr.
Perhaps the best title we’ve ever seen - The Splendid and The Vile - from the frustratingly good Erik Larson
Are you interested in getting access to all of the tools used in every post on People & Place? Let me know in the comments and I’ll build something new and interesting for this community.
Churchill, Roosevelt, and a 20lb Grouper
I’ve long argued - at least 7 years worth of arguing - that on a long enough time horizon, the only relevant genre is biography. The reason is simple - most good things in life are about doing the fundamentals well, over a long period of time, and letting go of everything else. After you’ve read your 35th book on health, for example, you come to realize - rather curiously - that true human health, for the average person, could be summarized in a word - walk. That means that most new-age advice is nonsense at best, a grift at worst, and that the oldest, most trite wisdom is often the most true.
But what happened - how it all went down - that is the truly interesting thing. A human life could never be summarized in a paragraph, like a technical subject so often can be. It’s too deep. Too much time has passed. The possibilities are infinite because each human being is a 1 of 1 - a nonfungible melange of DNA and micro-stuff. People need a lifetime to write biographies and they need to have lived an entire lifetime to figure out what they’re going to write. That’s the real stuff.
Follow me on Goodreads for my full list of recommendations.
After countless thousands of biographical pages you realize that, although the details are infinitely possible, there is a way things go. There are patterns. A process. And if there wasn’t a process, there ought to have been a process.
You’ll have noticed, if you’re an inkfinger like me, that place factors into almost every biography of consequence. Nay - every biography of consequence. Place is a decidedly underrated tool to discovering your life force and to doing great work. To doing your work. Where we choose to live, how much time we spend in the natural world, and our connection to it is inextricably linked to who we are. We are of the world and the world is of us - that’s just how it works. Place shapes us into who we are.
Brunello Cucinelli is Solomeo.
We wouldn’t have Joan Didion without Southern California.
Bourdain couldn’t possibly have been Bourdain without the Kowloon Ferry.
And we would never have Buford without Bob’s boulangerie.
Browsing my archives I realized that this was just as true for me as a writer - even in my early years. My reflections on my time away at 18? “The Greek Isles, Sick With Love.” I didn’t lead with the people I was with. I didn’t talk about the subject of my youthful sickness. I talked about the place. “The Greek Isles…” Whatever comes next would be entirely bound up by the fact that it happened there and that it only happened there.
And so it is true in Erik Larson's The Splendid and The Vile (probably the greatest non-fiction title we have). Erik is unmissable - so good that it beguiles other writers (myself included) and serves a meal of equal parts envy and gratitude. That’s a short list - and he’s on it.
In December, 1940, only days after the German operation Moonlight Sonata over Coventry, Churchill was busy courting Roosevelt. He knew that American engagement in the war was essential to defeating the Germans and restoring European stability. He also knew he ought to be strategic, and if his letters were "...painted too darkly, elements in the United States would say that it was useless to help...If too bright a picture was painted, then there might be a tendency to withhold assistance."
Churchill wrote a long letter that eventually reached Roosevelt aboard the U.S. Navy cruiser Tuscaloosa. He was on a ten-day cruise through the Caribbean, on to the British West Indies to, among other things, fish. Hemingway had sent Roosevelt a memo, telling him that "...large fish could be found in the waters between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and recommending that he use pork rind as bait."
We don't know about Roosevelt himself, but his fishing companion and confidant Harry Hopkins, who was travelling with him aboard the Tuscaloosa, reportedly hooked into a twenty-pound grouper, and thought it important enough that it made the letters. Hopkins, apparently suffering from an illness at the time, was too weak to reel the fish in, and had to pass the rod to someone else to finish the job. We don't know if the rod was passed to Roosevelt, and we don't know if they took Hemingway's advice to use pork rind as bait, but we do know that it was aboard the Tuscaloosa that the President of the United States "...suddenly came out with it - the whole program.," for Europe.
Now why would Larson find it so essential to include these details in the The Splendid and The Vile and why did Roosevelt think it so important to be fishing while debating whether or not to call in the cavalry and ride for Europe?
It’s because place is essential. The natural world helps us see the world more clearly. A raw reality defined by physics that we’re beginning to understand, and a whole bunch of things we can’t - and may never - understand. It calms us - steadies our hand - and offers a common sense that is hard to access in daily human life. It provides an intuitive sense for what I call Life Math - somehow we know what to do. We know the next best decision, and the next first track. If you think I’ve been misled here, go for a quiet walk in nature the next time you find yourself stuck, and report back when you’re done (I’ve yet to meet a something that a walk couldn’t cure).
We need not look far for the perfect example of what the natural world is capable of, and to see how it shapes us. It’s a steaming hot, ink-black liquid in the very cup you sip from while you read this letter.
Coffee is Reality
In a recent post I eluded to the world of small things - the Stutzian idea that if you want to make change of any kind, start with the smallest thing possible, be consistent, stack action on top of that and work this cycle over a long period of time. It just so happens that the world of small things is also where we discover truths about the world we might have missed, if we weren’t paying attention. Macro economics is essentially voodoo - micro economics is all around us. We can reach out and touch it.
Perhaps my favourite example is coffee and the coffeehouse - that sacred place, that sacred cup, that sacred molecule: 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine.
Coffee was being cultivated in East Africa - seemingly the world’s womb - by the fifteenth century. Soon it was traded as a commodity across the Arabian Peninsula, and… ‘within a century coffeehouses sprung up in cities across the Arab world.’ By the end of 1500 they were so popular in major global centres like Constantinople - one of the great cities to be a love-drunk-tag-along - that there were several hundred of them.
The new-age coffeehouses were so successful - were such places of consequence - that they became a central hub for the news of the day, gossip-talk, and social theatre. As people do, we can imagine that conversation often turned to politics. So much so that… ‘at various times governmental and clerical powers-that-be attempted to close down, but never for long or with much success.’
We have the place - that sacred place - and we have this place because we have something uniquely good to gather around. The natural world gives us the table to sit around and the bread to break.
Inevitably, this combination of uniquely useful things - our people, our places, and our natural wonders - shapes us. It certainly shaped Arab culture and social progress at the time. So much so that Michael Pollan felt it relevant to note that German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch (amazing) argued that coffee in particular seemed to be… ‘tailor-made for a culture that forbade alcohol consumption and gave birth to modern mathematics.’
In the early 1600s the coffeehouse craze made it’s way westward, not yet fully to the Eastern shore of the Atlantic Ocean, but to the heel of Western Europe - the Italian peninsula.
“In 1629 the first coffeehouses in Europe, styled on the Arab model, popped up in Venice…”
By the mid-century it had travelled to the old-English-isle, in Oxford, in 1650, or thereabout.
“…within a few decades there were thousands of coffeehouses in London; at their peak, one for every two hundred Londoners.”
The power of the coffeehouse was undeniably viral.
“…in Europe coffee was mainly consumed in public coffeehouses - vibrant meeting places where the news of the day (political, financial, cultural) was as much the draw as the coffee.”
The rise of the coffeehouse was simultaneously the rise of… ‘a new kind of communications medium, one that just happened to be made of brick and mortar rather than electricity and wires.’ Folks of all stripes and economic rank could sit and be with each other, hearing the same news, trading the same gossip, and finding ways to do so that didn’t end in bar-bench-brawls, like at the standard English pub.
Inevitably, as groups of people gather, and as news of the day is traded freely, commerce and business emerge. That’s the natural state of human collaboration. According to French writer Maximilien Misson:
“You have all Manner of News there; You have a good fire, which you may sit by as long as you please: You have a Dish of Coffee; you meet your Friends for the Transaction of Business, and all for a Penny, if you don’t care to spend more.”
It shouldn’t be surprising that these natural congregations of likeminded folks led to developments in the real world (people gains often become productivity gains). At the time and place, those interested in the buying and shipping of goods met at Lloyd’s Coffeehouse. Over time, that same outfit became Lloyd’s of London - an insurance broker that sold policies on incoming and outgoing cargo ships. Jonathan’s Coffee-House was a popular finance and commercial hub, eventually giving birth to the London Stock Exchange.
So many organizations of consequence came out of the development of the modern European coffeehouse it led writer Tom Standage to conclude - naturally so - that the coffeehouse… ‘provided an entirely new environment for social, intellectual, commercial, and political exchange.’
The coffeehouse - and our great spaces the world over - create the necessary conditions for scenius to take root. Scenius is the etymological combination of ‘scene’ and ‘genius.’ The kind of thing that is only possible through people and place.
The natural world gives us rhythms and ritual - allowing us to be in lock step with our fellow humans. Allowing us to sense reality more clearly - to use our intuition and to do our work. So much so that when we abstain - when we lose access to scenius, we feel a sense of aimlessness and loss. We can’t remove ourselves from our places. We can’t remove ourselves from our people.
“I miss being able to take part in coffee culture, idling in cafes and taking in the scene. Even as the mind accelerates, the body slows and is perfectly content to while away the time.” - Pollan
All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.
See you on the road.
“Coffee…which illumines the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.” - Michelet
