I have to meet people. I have to stay away from people.

Being with yourself can be hard to bear. Someone (You?) put a brake in your business life. And suddenly, a lot of what defined you as a person is gone (if this is a right thing that our jobs determine who we are is a topic on its own) – probably more than 50% of our life awake is dedicated to our jobs. Sometimes even more.

Suddenly you get this 50% back. And you need to fill it. But how? Or do you need to fill it at all?

During the day at the North Sea, I realized this silence will drive me crazy. We are in the middle of a pandemic, all under lockdown. Going somewhere surfing is not really an option – even if it is possible, I have kids who need to go to school, and it would be unfair to go surfing while my family needs to stay at home and live their daily lives.

I don’t have any real hobbies. My hobby is my family and things I see and that I want to learn more about.

So it became pretty clear that doing nothing will not be an option.
But how can I use the time I have best? During a lockdown, where it is hard to meet anyone in person?

I realized two things.

1. I have to meet people.
2. I have to stay away from people.

Looking back, I realized I always feel comfortable being in the company of lovely and inspiring people. People who look positive into the future. Risk takers. People who move things. People who are there for others. People who can listen. People I can trust. People that give me energy.

At the same time, I have to select who I meet. I need to stay away, at least for a while, from those people I worked with in the past few months and years. This means basically from most of my former colleagues. Not that I don’t like them – quite the opposite is true. Even on the day after my departure, I already knew I will miss most of them.
But if I meet too often with ex-colleagues (hard to call them that way), chances are high that I will hear stories from my past (business) life that won’t have much to do with my future (business) life. And I probably have to answer the same questions over again.

But I need to meet people that will do me good. Who come from different backgrounds, who have some time to discuss anything that comes to our minds.

At the end of the day, I had an idea what to do for the next few days. Sit down and write a list of people I want to meet.

Who are the ones I remember most fondly from when I met them? Who have I been out of contact with for a long time? Who would I like to meet? Who have I been curious about for a long time and haven’t met yet?

That was my key takeaway. To get an idea of what I would like to do in the future, I need to meet as many people as possible – from different backgrounds. This will give me the foundation on where my thoughts can grow on.

So at the end of the day, I was pretty happy, as I had the first idea of what to actually do with my new “freedom.” And that’s what I started on December 2nd. I wrote down a long list of names and began to fire our emails and WhatsApps ...

More on how I built my list, my network, my approach, and what the first meetings taught me in the next update ...

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Do you have any questions? Or thoughts I should write more about? Or anyone I should meet? Just let me know and send me a mail to j@alker.io.