#meaningful
Having just experienced Meaning Conference for the 6th year running, I’m back with fizzing thoughts, a beating heart and a richly-fuelled soul.
It’s a special thing, Meaning Conference. Many repeat visitors, year-on-year who make the pilgrimage to Brighton whether they be in property, publishing or people. Many new visitors too. Which is always encouraging. And an expertly curated, smartly positioned experience. Call out conferences if you like, but this is where people come alive in an environment of talks, talking and taking stock.
The now-disbanded “next stage” agency Nixon McInnes started Meaning Conference in 2012. The one I missed and watched from afar as I mulled over my own destruction of meaning — the job I had that I broke apart — and was embarking on my new meaning; self-employment and the adventures and challenges of doing your own thing. With meaning, of course.
That Meaning Conference survived Nixon McInnes brave and somewhat unexpected disbanding, is a testament to what it stands for and has created. Nixon McInnes — from my view — chose to disband because they’d lost what they had started out to be: Different and Purpose-led. They became like most smaller businesses, chasing the revenue to pay everyone who’d joined the good ship. They could have carried on surely? Well not with their hearts in the game perhaps and that was a brave thing to admit to and do.
The good news appears to be that the people displaced by this have all found their thing in other ways. No-one appears destitute from the former mothership. And Meaning is perhaps its best and most enduring and loved legacy; and continued vehicle for what Nixon McInnes stood for — different, alternative views, a challenger spirit and most of all people and their souls.
We’ve had radicals, optimists, journalists, protesters, business folks, artists, rebels, pioneers, academics, freedom fighters and pirates.
And we had more of it this year too. A journalist reminding us of the power in grassroots and how broken our political machinery is leaving people on the fringes of a decent life. We had powerful people from academia and practice who mapped out what meaning really is and how we’ve lost it yet can always find it. We had sport, smartphones and simplified healthcare, thrown into the mix to prove the orthodoxies we see as norms are tired, lacklustre and incapable of serving us well into the 21st century’s next decade.
We saw that recklessness towards our planet will “get” us sooner than we think. We must act in any way possible to reverse this and regenerate ourselves and our ecosystems of life.
We were reminded that there is a form of capitalism that can be good — conscious, profitable and humane.
We saw that in adversity, you can give people their sense of meaning and a living just enough to survive even in the most segregated, harsh and violent parts of the world. Via Olive Oil.
Mostly we saw love, care and kindness. Words not associated with work, business and commerce.
But words that make the word “Meaning” mean something.
We saw the truth in disorder. We saw a heart in enterprise and we saw the spirit in creating things that matter. To people.
Meaning Conference may be a day with speakers, coffee, networking and books being sold. So on the outside, it might seem like just another event promising to change the world.
But this place is so special people quite literally describe it (me included) as the place to charge up for another year ahead.
That, cannot be underestimated in a sea of depleting attention spans, time and effort towards good.
It changes the world alright.
It has to be said to Louise Ash and everyone who makes this happen for all us who really do give a shit: Much love, respect and thanks for making our meaning explode in our hearts and feed our very souls.
Meaning Conference does more than it sets out to do. It has become the epicentre of all that’s needed in the world of work, commerce and business.
Meaning Conference is the tiny star of hope as we all try and navigate our way through our crazy messed up world.
We, good people of the world, with more meaning in our hearts and lives, have work to do.
