Will Dean's Ideas Factory: Truth or dare - two ways of bringing New York together
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Your support makes all the difference.New York copywriter Chelsea Davison had had enough of her city's famous abrasiveness. Her solution: the game used by countless horny teenagers through the ages designed to express themselves (usually when drunk) – truth or dare.
Naturally, this didn't involve heading up to strangers on the subway and truth-or-daring them. It'd take a hardy soul to try that.
What Davison did instead was to print 300 "truth or dare" cards and left them in Washington Square park. The cards asked the finder to tweet the answer to a "truth", such as "what's the craziest thing you've ever done for love" to @truthordarenyc.
If you didn't want to, you were offered a dare like "next time you speak, do it in a robot voice". Of course, the more cynical finders of the cards might – with nine peers pressuring them into doing it – choose to ignore the demand, but Davison was clever enough to film some people finding them.
Much credit then to the girl who picks up the card and almost immediately introduces herself to a stranger as "Batman". (See more at chelseadavison.com)
In other New York creative news, the team behind The Feast Conference is trying to organise the world's largest dinner party. The idea is that people invite six people to dinner, come up with an idea to change the world between them and then bring it to a giant warehouse in the city the next day to be shared. Which certainly beats talking about football over eight glasses of Chablis.
More: feastongood.com
Do you do what the successful people do over brekkie?
What do you do first thing in the morning? This writer struggles to make it into the shower before stumbling out of the house, so perhaps it's not such bad form to look elsewhere. Namely, time management expert Laura Vanderkam, whose new Kindle-published book What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast aims to show you how to make that pre-boiled egg part of the day a productive one. Good luck with that.
Vanderkam's ideas (extracted at Fast Company here: bit.ly/successbrekky) include recording your favourite late night show and watching it at 6.30am on the treadmill instead (pff); do things for personal growth – like read a religious text or do artwork with your children; gradually get up 15 minutes earlier each morning in order to build your dawn tolerance and (this is one I can work with) find an alarm clock whose noise is a bit more cheerful and it will be difficult to turn off.
All good advice, but many of us will have to wait for a more fitting sequel – What the Most Successful People Do After Leaving the Pub, maybe?
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