Good advice, though not exactly what I wanted.


Being a strong believer in serendipity, I'm also happy to find something that doesn't exactly fit what I'm looking for, but is worthwhile just the same. So I certainly couldn't complain when a search on "searching as a way of life" brought me to a book by Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, with the advice (in chapter 6):
Searching as a way of life. In the network economy, nine times out of ten, your fiercest competitor will not come from your own field. In turbulent times, when little is locked in, it is imperative to search as wide as possible for places where innovations erupt. Innovations increasingly interfect from other domains. A ceaseless blanket search — wide, easy, and shallow — is the only way you can be sure you will not be surprised. Don’t read trade magazines in your field; scan the magazines of other trades. Talk to anthropologists, poets, historians, artists, philosophers. Hire some 17-year-olds to work in your office. Make a habit to visit a web site at random. Tune in to talk radio. Take a class in scenario making. You’ll have a much better chance at recognizing the emergence of something important if you treat these remote venues as neighbors.
Frankly, this advice is rather outside of the idea of searching that I wanted to investigate in this column. After all, I tried to suggest here that because we really can find answers, we've become compulsive searchers, while Kelly tells us that we should search not for answers, but for new, unexpected, possibilities. Of course I agree.



Go to: How shall we put it?, or
Go to: The internet saved my life, or
Go to: I search, therefore I am?