Communities are full of knowledge and creativity. When we take out our earbuds, look up from our phones and deeply listen to our neighbours, baristas and Lyft drivers we can gather information and insights that just might enhance our work and lives. Here are five places to find wisdom and ideation in your community.
Barbers and stylists
Chatting with my barber, Marco, is where I got the idea for this article. He’s been a barber for over a decade and figures that he’s connected with over 30,000 people while crafting dope fades and trimming beards. Every time I visit Uptown Barbers Marco teaches me something about music (he’s also a punk rocker) because I get a sampling of artists that I’d never listen to on my own, which raises my awareness and shifts my perspective.
Librarians
From recommending primary sources for grad students to making dads more comfortable reading and singing with their kids, librarians have a knack for enabling connections between knowledge and purpose. I think that librarians are good at asking questions and it’s always cool to hear them talk about some of the greatest questions they’ve been asked. Next time you visit a library try to find out what the coolest, weirdest or most interesting resource they had to find or question they tried to answer.
Kindergarteners
Okay there’s not a lot of wisdom in this crowd. That said, the great thing about kindergarteners is that school hasn’t yet killed their creativity. Once or twice a week I walk a group of neighbourhood kids to school and over the course of our 15-minute journey I always learn a new fact, gather insights about the world (last week it was traveling to Australia and the realness of leprechauns), and laugh out loud. I always leave for work feeling a boost of creativity and positive energy.
Bus drivers
Shuttling people through public transit systems requires art and science. I’ve seen bus drivers de-escalate serious situations, engage crowded riders with humour and storytelling, and take service to another level during snowstorms (I live on the West Coast so it’s a big deal when we get three centimeters of snow and often great bus drivers emerge as community heroes during such “events”). In addition to getting a bit more intimate with their routes and, consequently, the communities in which they work, bus drivers overhear and oversee ridiculous, thoughtful and deeply human behaviour. Asking their take on the world has always yielded things of interest in my experience.
Accountants
A mentor of mine was a very successful tax accountant (he’s now a very successful retired tax accountant). I still remember the wisdom he shared with a bunch of recently undergraduated twentysomethings about basic budgeting and the correlation between income, lifestyle, happiness, and debt. Great accountants, like trusted advisors of values-based financial co-operatives, lay out the dollars and cents of life in ways that K-12 educators and post-secondary financial aid professionals cannot.