A Summer Challenge: Get in the Way of New Ideas

How do you stay sharp?

Last week, my kids ended the school year and brought home packets of math problems and reading prompts to “prevent the summer slide” and stay sharp, lest they devolve into puddles of popsicles and Bluey episodes.

As adults, though, we have the opposite problem. Kids default to all fun and no work…but working adults can lean more toward all work and no fun.

Let’s chase sparks this summer

What if we made our own “summer slide” challenge — to stay interested in the broad world around us beyond our must-complete deadlines and full calendar of meetings? What if we challenged ourselves to chase some sparks this summer?

Here’s why this matters for thought leaders: Interested people are interesting people.

The best storytellers don’t just give you the facts without any extra padding. Instead, they pull details and inspiration from unexpected places: an ancient fable. A little-known baseball player’s path to fame. How photosynthesis works. A personal memory from their first concert.

Any of these seemingly random sparks of inspiration could infuse a story with meaning, weight, and memorability.

Sharing these little sparks is a key part of being interesting. But we don’t gather sparks when we sit at our computers on Zoom calls all day (sorry). We have to go out and find the sparks.

Or, as I sometimes describe it, “get in the way of new ideas.”

Your summer challenge

Here’s your challenge: Get in the way of new ideas this summer.

Make a list of 20 sparks to explore. You can use my list below, or add your own ideas. Every week, pick a spark to go chase.

1. Go to the public library and choose a few random books from different sections (cookbooks, business books, poetry, travel, fiction). Flip through your finds and see what pulls you in or makes you want to keep reading.
2. Talk to a neighbor you don’t usually engage with. Find out what they’re doing this summer, what podcasts they’re listening to, or their favorite local coffee shop. Borrow from their slightly different perspective on your shared hometown.
3. Buy a print magazine and read it cover to cover. Bonus points if it’s about a topic you don’t know much about.
4. Download a new-to-you podcast about a topic you wouldn’t normally explore. If you’re a dedicated sports fan, seek out a news show. If you’re a political junkie, try listening to a fiction podcast. If you can’t get enough true crime, scroll through the science section.
5. Work somewhere different for a few hours. Take your laptop to a coffee shop, or even move into a different room in your office space or house. What do you see and hear in that new space?
6. Take a silent walk. No music, no companion, no podcast. Just you and the noise of the world around you. What do you notice?
7. Research a plant. Learn about what grows in your area. What’s native? What’s invasive? What’s a plant you see every day but don’t know the name? Do a little digging (ha) and see what you find.
8. Try a phone break. I’ve been experimenting recently with re-wiring my habits around how I use my phone. One week, my rule was that when I was at home, my phone had to live on the kitchen counter. I could go stand next to the counter and use the phone as a tool (to look up something on my calendar or send an email) but I couldn’t take it anywhere, couldn’t sit down with it on the couch, and couldn’t spend any time on my phone that wasn’t purely utilitarian. That week, my screen time decreased 75% 🤯. Because I couldn’t default to being on my phone, I read a paper book, I got a ton done around the house, I talked to my family without a screen lurking nearby. Try taking a break from your phone and see what happens.
9. Learn a new game. Some suggestions my family likes: SkyJo, Tapple
10. Ask a child all about their interests. Kids are great at soaking up everything they can learn about extremely niche subjects. Interview a child in your life and see what they can teach you.
11. Try a new sport. Tennis? Pickleball? Surfing? Frisbee? Mini golf? Ice skating? Ballet? Try it, even though you’re probably going to be bad at it, and notice what you learn and what’s unexpected about the experience.
12. Brush up on your language skills. If you took French in high school but haven’t used it since, try Duolingo and see what you can learn in 10 minutes a day.
13. Read a newspaper from a different part of the world. I recently got sucked into a Reddit thread where people from all over the world shared news happening near them that wasn’t covered in U.S. headlines. There’s so much happening beyond our own bubbles — seek it out.
14. Go to an art museum. What do you notice? What artists do you want to learn more about? What colors and imagery are you most drawn to?
15. Learn about someone else’s job. This is literally my job, and I can’t recommend it enough. Interview a friend about their work, and ask all the stupid questions you might usually be too self-conscious to ask. Go deep. Ask what they love about it, what’s hard, what they’ve learned that’s surprising, what they still hope to accomplish.
16. Journal. 
17. Go back to the library and find new, different rabbit holes. When you return the books you checked out, grab new ones. Keep reading and exploring.
18. Plan a day trip. You don’t have to travel across the world to learn something new. Even if it’s just a jaunt a different neighborhood, putting yourself in a new environment (a taco spot you’ve never tried or a park you’ve wanted to visit) can open your aperture.
19. Read job descriptions of the jobs you wanted as a kid. What did you want to be when you were 5? 10? 15? Go read about those jobs and what they actually entail. What time do ballerinas wake up every morning? What kinds of training do firefighters have to go through? Where do marine biologists actually work?
20. Clean out your email. I’m convinced there are two kinds of people in the world: those who keep a perfectly clear email inbox, and those who have 27,956 emails bloating the server (I’m the latter). If you fall in the first camp, you might not have anything to clear out, but if you have an email account bursting at the seams like mine, going way back in time and cleaning out old emails can be both cathartic and fascinating. I recently took a tour all the way back to 2015 in my Gmail, and seeing the things I was buying, reading, stressed about, and celebrating was a mind-bending walk down memory lane.

The challenge is simple: Keep chasing sparks. Get in the way of new ideas. Experiment with your own summer slide into the unexpected.