Sometimes we’d hang out with a motley-little-crew of other boats.
We’d dot our way along the islands, and see the same snail-like double-ender with fading varnish on the teak deck turn up in the anchorage, or hear Serendipity II check in on the radio when we were at sea, ranting us about the bad weather three hundred miles away.
Over time, you couldn’t help get a sense of who came from where (various tweaks of their accent on the radio), and where they were going.
You could scan the boats, see if they were a mess, if they knew how to anchor, or if they were into fishing…
If they had kids (as a 12 or 14 year old surrounded by adults, this was usually my first question), you would eventually see their smaller outlines pop up on deck.
If everything checked out after a surface level assessment, I’d row the dinghy over to suss them out a little more.
I’d come back and report on what I’d found.
Sometimes, we would become friends with the family on Serendipity II, or Vestern (the big old ship-boat used for a movie set, with a deck covered in black tar), and would keep in touch with them over time, and in different countries.
I wouldn’t say that we travelled “together,” but you definitely would see them around, and keep up to speed on current events (fish caught, health, new anchorages etc).
In any business we create, we’re bringing part of our story to life: where we came from, who’s on board (literally in this sense), what we care about and where we want to go.
We need to be clear on these things.
And, we need to communicate them.
We need to find the others like us.
While most of the boats won’t want anything to do with you, a couple of them will resonate with where you’re going, based on their own views and direction.
Then we have a fit of two stories.
We can co-create a new journey together. Something that couldn’t exist with either party independently.
This is who we are.
This is where we’d like to go and the future we can imagine.
Would you like to come along with us?
A real project, business or event is never executed alone – it’s a co-created arc in time. Understanding who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we want to go is a key part of enrolling someone to come along with us.
