Nick and I have written and published a book about randomness and uncertainty. Which means we now need to do something that feels deeply uncertain and probably a bit random: get people to read it.
The unconventional format (120 stories supplied unbound) lives up to the book’s values. You can, by shuffling, read it in any order, and no two readings are the same. It costs £60 and is a physical object with no real digital equivalent. When we put the thing into people’s hands, they get it. And that means we need to take a different approach to getting word out.
Here’s what we are going to do…
We want to get the book in front of around 50 people with genuine influence. People whose engagement with the ideas might actually help spread those ideas. Not celebrities for the sake of it. People who would find the content genuinely interesting and whose reaction to it would matter to others.
And we are going to document every step of working out who they are, and then trying to reach them.
There’s a thought experiment I’ve used for years to illustrate how networks actually work.
Imagine you’ve just found out that aliens are going to destroy the world tomorrow, and you need the Prime Minister to act. You wouldn’t phone Downing Street’s switchboard — you’d get nowhere, and frankly, given recent UK political history, they might have lost track of who the current Prime Minister actually is. Instead, you’d think: who do I know who might be one or two steps closer to that conversation than I am? Who has the credibility to be taken seriously in that room?
Not cold emails. Not a publicist’s mailout. The question is whether we can find genuine human chains of connection that lead somewhere useful, and whether the routes that actually work are the ones I’d have predicted.
I have a hunch that LinkedIn will turn out to be less useful than LinkedIn would like to think. Too many people are connected by not even weak ties. But maybe I’ll be wrong on that, too.
I’ve done projects like this before. A few years ago, I had 140 coffees with people I mostly didn’t know and wrote about what happened. Some of it was mundane. Some of it was genuinely surprising. I sent my dad viral, as an example. The interesting thing was never the outcome I was aiming for — it was the unexpected things that happened along the way.
That’s probably going to be true here too.
We’ve got a starting list of names — people who’ve come up in conversation, people whose work connects to the book’s ideas, people I’d find it interesting to meet regardless of whether they end up promoting anything. I’ll share that list in the next post. But I also want to crowdsource it. If there’s someone you think we should meet to show them the book, tell us. Comments, email, carrier pigeon — any route works. Bonus points if you can also tell me how we might be connected.
The experiment starts now.
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