Once upon a time, somewhere in the north, lived a boy named Jon. Jon was often mocked for knowing nothing. The poor guy was always the last one to know everything. One fine day he heard about Bitcoins and the insane amount of money his friends were making because of their timely investment. By the time he understood Bitcoin it was already obsolete and people were now into Ether. Baffled, he decided to curb his social anxiety and took up online reading.
He installed 7 news apps, created an account on every social platform with an optimism that he will stumble upon the latest innovation and be the know-it-all. He reads like a maniac now, he scrolls through his twitter feeds till he has reached the previous day’s update, he runs through every popular blog. Yet, despite this painstaking effort of his, to stay on top of his tech game, he ends up tongue tied at social conversation. Jon still knows nothing. Jon is a classic case of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).
Which brings us to the question, is it enough to just know things! Is it enough to say “I’ve heard about Machine Learning”? With the clutter of the world wide web, can the endless amount of “refresh” keep you updated? And if not online, where do you source your learnings from? Is there like a course on Udemy that one can take up and be reincarnated as the ultimate tech encyclopedia?
The problem with FOMO is that we are looking outward instead of inward. This constant fear of missing out means you are not participating as a real person in your own world. And you’ll always have that fear of not knowing enough unless you’ve talked about it. I can’t stress enough on the importance of reading. But what follows after reading is the most important thing here. It’s spelled as “C-O-N-V-E-R-S-A-T-I-O-N”.
Back in the good ole days, when the Lil birdies would tweet in a literal sense, the only way one could expand their horizon of knowledge was through conversation. Healthy, Intellectual conversations were the window to the outside world.
They say, “It is better to read a little and ponder a lot than to read a lot and ponder a little.” Read. Talk. Share. Know. It only Grows.
Thus, as a platform to bring conversations to life, we’ve built a small fortress for you, we fondly call it the “#FOMO Room”
Here’s what it looks like.
What do we do here?
- We Bounce off ideas
- We Pick on each other’s brain
- We Start with – have you read/heard/seen this?
- We Agree to disagree
- We Leave judgment outside the door – be random, be bizarre
- We Think out loud
- We Bring Reality to the “Virtual”
How do we do what we do?
- We write about the most exciting thing we’ve heard about this morning/week/month
- We leave our initials (to be traceable if someone wants to talk about it)
- We post it on the wall (cause knowledge, just like happiness, is real when shared)
That’s not it. When we see other Post-ITs with “alien” words on it, we google it, we read up. Better yet, we trace the person who wrote it. Invite him/her for a quick chat. We Discuss. We Debate. We Brainstorm.
If you haven’t stepped into the FOMO Room yet. You are Missing Out on things big time, but have no fear, it’s open to all. It takes 10 mins to find out 10 things and you’ll be amazed at how much you could learn in a day, how much you could teach in one.
Get Started
There is an empty canvas, with colorful sticky notes, and equally colorful pens waiting for you.
Foster conversations, like you would foster a baby. Cause at times holding a conversation is not enough. You have to own it.
Happy Reading. Happy Talking. Cheers.
P.S: Here’s a list of rules for the wildlings
P.P.S: Special Thanks to Sonu, Mahesh and Yashwant for helping us bring this to life. 🙂