Best Advice: Do Ridiculous Projects and Share Them With the World

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers share the best advice they've ever received. Read all the posts here.

I got this advice from Ariel Waldman, an IFTF Fellow, who by her mid-twenties has accumulated an impressive, lengthy, and variable list of accomplishments. She founded Spacehack.org, a first-of-its-kind directory that helps thousands of citizen scientists engage in space exploration. She created Science Hack Day in San Francisco, a day when hundreds of people come together to work on science projects and that is being replicated in many parts of the world, and gave the keynote address to a prominent group of scientists at the 100 Year Starship Study Symposium organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Ariel was recently appointed a member of the National Academy of Sciences committee on the future of human spaceflight, and named a Champion of Change in citizen science by the White House. Remarkably, Ariel accomplished all this without a degree in science!

When I asked Ariel how a girl from Kansas with a degree in graphic design managed to do the nearly impossible—gain respect of the august community of space scientists—without having a PhD or an academic career, she responded, “I am a bit insatiable about learning new things.” She got interested in science by watching science channels on TV. In fact she became addicted to watching science programs, particularly space documentaries. Inspired by one of them, she contacted NASA just to let them know if they ever needed someone like her, she would be interested. Serendipiously NASA did need someone with Ariel’s skills, she was hired, and this started her on her path as a science and space geek. At first a ridiculous and impossible notion — that someone with no science degree and no experience in space research would become a citizen science guru — proves that just putting yourself out there can lead to remarkable results.

Writing on a spur of the moment to NASA is not the only crazy idea Ariel “went for.” In 2008 she got an idea to combine a BarCamp format (a type of unconference where people self-organize into discussion forums during allotted slots of time during the day) with cupcake tasting. People would bring cupcakes they made or bought, write on the board which ones they brought, and then during different time slots, instead of having BarCamp–type discussion sessions, they would bring out different kinds of cupcakes and talk about them and taste them. A free, fun, but totally ridiculous idea that only a few of her friends would get behind, Ariel thought, as she planned for about 40 friends and friends of friends to show up. She rented a small room at a coworking site in San Francisco, told her friends about it, and made the event public. To her shock, three hundred people showed up for the first Cupcake Camp! Building on the success of the first event, the next Cupcake Camp was held six months later and attracted 500 people. The last one Ariel herself organized, in 2009, held 730 participants. Since that time Cupcake Camps have become a global phenomenon.

“I could’ve become a cupcake queen,” Ariel laughs. Indeed she was getting interview requests from cupcake blog writers as well as the mainstream media, including the Associated Press. Yet Ariel herself had never made cupcakes and knew nothing about cupcakes except that she liked to eat them and thought it would be fun to bring together people who are into cupcakes. “This fits the pattern of me breaking into industries where I have zero experience. By being passionate and producing prototypes you are being seen as a community leader who brings people together. People start looking to you as an expert.”

“Just put stuff out there” is her motto. “By making and prototyping things, whether it is a blog or a physical event, you are going to get so much that would not otherwise come into your line of view. When people look at your stuff, they might see the application much further than you can, or they see a unique story that would resonate with others… People will start gravitating toward you — they will want to work with you, invite you to speak, give you grant money, or maybe offer a book deal. I just do things because I want to, without caring where they will go. I get excited about them and I am lucky if there are people who also get excited along with me.”

Taking Ariel’s advice to heart means that if you have something you are passionate about, you can engage a community that is passionate about the same thing, create a platform for this community to come together, think through every detail of community design and management, prototype your idea, then stand back and see if it sinks or swims. This is the modus operandi of Ariel and many other social innovators I profile in my book, "The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World." They have not taken management or leadership classes and do not think of themselves as managers or as leaders. They are good old-fashioned community organizers, but community organizers in the digital age—empowered with tools and technologies that make it possible for them to attract hundreds, sometimes thousands of people to their “ridiculous” projects.

Such people are not new; community organizers have been around since time immemorial — they have propelled political movements, led rebellions, created new communities. What is unique is the speed, impact, and scale of what such individuals can accomplish today. Spreading a crazy Cupcake Camp idea to 60 cities around the world is impressive. Using those same tactics, you could organize worldwide protests around the country and around the globe in a matter of months or sometimes days. Passionate individuals, amplified with technologies and access to collective intelligence and the resources of their social media connections are able to accomplish previously unthinkable things at a speed and on a scale previously unimaginable.

This article is adapted and excerpted in part my book, The Nature of the Future.

Marina Gorbis is the Executive Director of the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit strategic foresight research group based in Palo Alto, California, and the author of The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World. Follow Marina on LinkedIn and on Twitter (@mgorbis).

Image: The Magic of Kids Tech, Institute for the Future, 2011.