My 30 day challenges, day 25 – by Philip Dodson

Today is day 25, I’m now well and truly on the home straight.

I’ve started reading this morning a great book on serendipity, which is so relevant to the whole concept of co-working.

So today’s picture is from the hub at 18:30 this evening and there have been many examples today of why the ‘friction’ points that occur in a community environment, are so vital for entrepreneurs, free-lancers, self-employed and for the corporate nomads.

pic 25

For a large majority of the people I listed above, isolation is an issue, particularly if you are basing yourself at home. Home is great place to work for the odd day or so, or if you work for a corporate, or if your business is reasonably established. However, if you are in a start-up or pre-start-up, then you run the risk of getting demotivated, isolated and losing focus.

At the very time you need to be testing your ideas, gaining new contacts, and getting out there making it happen, you are at home.

The chance meetings that happen at the hub, will increase massively the opportunities for you to grow yourself and your business. The other thing that starts to happen in co-working spaces is the trading of social capital. They start to become pools of talent, that the community members can tap in to.

The reciprocal nature of humans means that if you adopt an attitude of being a giver of your skills, then you find it comes back to.

Therefore, as a start up, you will give yourself a big edge by immersing your new business in the eco-system of serendipity and sharing.

True collaboration really is the only way forward and way of corporate getting access to a freelance talent and for small start-ups getting access to the skills they need to grow.

My 30 day challenges, day 23 – by Philip Dodson

Day 23, the challenges are being done almost on auto-pilot now, although starting to do my blog at 10.05pm having been up since 5.45 am is a slight struggle today.

So it’s short and sweet tonight. Today’s picture is taken towards Tower Bridge from London Bridge.

day 23

London is a great city, I have lived and worked in many different countries and spent time in some great cities. But London tops them all for me.

However, what struck me about walking through the City Of London, from the shiny tower that is Heron Tower, all the way over London Bridge to catch a train, is what is going to happen to all these giant corporate ‘shards’ of glass and steel?

The world is changing, we are moving away from the old school large corporations, to the brave new world of small, start-ups, freelancing and self-employment. The never ending increases in the cost of commuting and technology, that means we can now work anywhere, what will happen to our city centres? We’ve seen the death of retail on the high street, we will in my opinion see the decline of large corporations.So may be The Shard or the Walkie-Talkie building, will be the last of the corporate ‘trophies’, built for the ego’s of the old school world.