Hi there Informational Interviews,

This newsletter now has over 100 subscribers!! I don’t know if that seems like a lot or a little to you, but to me it seems like 100 people on their way to fulfilling their particular, personal, idiosyncratic dream! I love it! Next stop: 100,000 informational interviewers!

Anyways, thank you all for being here. I’m so excited that you are!

Stay Dreamy!

Emma

How to catch a glimmer

Your brain has a lot of good ideas in it. And a lot of little sparks of potential ideas that you haven’t been willing to pin down and concretize. I call these glimmers. They are the seeds of your potential. The problem is, you have strong scaffolding in your mind that is keeping you from capturing and making use of your glimmers.

But glimmers are the fairy lights guiding you down your path. They will keep flickering in the periphery of your mind until you notice them. They will linger waiting for your attention. Even if you self medicate with alcohol, social media, or fast fashion, the glimmers will remain just out of sight like Nemo’s dad hiding in the anemones. They’ll come out as soon as soon as the water seems free of predators.

Here are some glimmers you might have had recently:

• It would be beautiful to start my own artists colony

• Maybe I should ask my aunt Jenny about her friend Jan who became a slam poet

• Venture capitalists sound so baller…. I wonder what they really do?

• It would so cool to be in the room when one company buys another company. How do those kinds of deals even get made?

• My ideal life would involve at least two months of backpacking per year. I wish that were possible.

All of these glimmers have implied or stated questions. Some are dreams and the question is simply: is this possible? Others are just expressions of pure curiosity: I wonder what this craft, job, corner of the world is like?

Glimmers are important because they tell you where to focus your informational interviewing. They help you understand what questions you are trying to answer and who you should reach out to. The trick is catching the glimmer. Because for most of us, as soon as a glimmer flickers into view, we dump a bucket of bummer sludge on it. We think things like: “it’s not possible,” and “I don’t have what it takes,” and “what a foolish idea.” This bummer sludge puts a stop to the exploratory process of informational interviewing before it even gets started. You can rely on your spirit to bring the glimmer back later, or generate new glimmers, but the whole process can become extremely slow and full of suffering if you don’t develop a process for catching and safely storing glimmers.

So how to catch a glimmer? Well first of all, it’s important to be aware of when glimmers are most likely to appear. For me its when I’m walking, showering, journaling or right after I turn out the light and am lying in bed. For many people, glimmers are most likely to appear when their bodies are in motion. This presents a problem, because the second key aspect of catching a glimmer is making sure you have a glimmer entrapment device handy. Fortunately, though, most of us have such a device in our pockets at all time. But whether it’s an iPhone or a notebook, it’s essential that you document the glimmer. You could even do a voice memo, if you don’t like writing. Some people do really well just muttering their glimmers into their phone and saving them for later.

Whatever your preferred method of glimmer entrapment, you have to make sure you pin it down immediately, before it flits away. Of course it may come back later, but as David Allen, author of the seminal productivity tome, “Getting Things Done,” once wrote, “The mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” You should not count on your mind to safeguard, tend to and act on your glimmers. Your mind is full of bummer sludge and nefarious scaffolding that is designed to prevent you from doing anything unexpected. You need to safely store your glimmers away from the minefield of your mind, on the nice clean pages of a moleskin notebook for example.

Once documented, a glimmer is safe and can be evaluated for its potential at a later date. You can use it to identify what you want to be exploring and who you want to be talking to. You may feel very silly writing down your glimmers, and you may feel like your ideas aren’t worth much, but the sooner you start catching them and taking them seriously, the sooner you will get where you are going.