On Monday we hosted our first ever Insites: The Xmas Special, a sort of pre-Christmas party with everyone doing unprepared, slide-less, six-ish minute talks summarising what 2012 meant to them, bookended by a massive Italian lunch beforehand and a load of great beers in the evening. The day was a success and far exceeded our expectations, and that was exclusively because everyone who came along decided to be very open and honest.
Some talks were so personal, they prompted a few watery eyes in the room. Sarah’s in particular set the bar extremely high for what can be shared ‘on stage’, with most of us concluding that her talk was the best we’d ever seen. But I’m not going to talk about it here, because we promised that ‘what’s said in The School of Life, stays in The School of Life.’
The overriding theme that came out from every single talk was that personal happiness is not necessarily found in working day in and day out, and that time — particularly time spent with loved ones, or time spent doing what we really want to be doing — is the most valuable commodity. This is not ground-breaking news, perhaps, but it did illustrate that we all go through the same problems, trying to find what makes us genuinely happy. In a way, the afternoon session became a kind of support group for web professionals! In a good way, though. Chatting to everyone in the evening, it seemed that everyone felt remarkably close as a group, having collectively broken the ice with such personal stories.
This is the essence of our ‘Insites’ brand, distilled to its simplest form: gathering a good bunch of people together, and opening up to each other and offering advice by sharing what’s gone well and what’s gone not-so-well.
Valuable lessons were learned and we’ll be doing it again next year. Thank you so much to everyone who came. Personally, I’m still on a massive high.
(My apologies to Keir, whose body in the photo above has been oddly distorted as a result of my dodgy iPhone Panorama-ing skills!)
Update
Laura and Tom both wrote about the day on their personal sites, well worth a read.