A quiet lake in northern Maine is supposed to be where ideas go to rest. You go there to turn your brain off, stare at pine trees, and escape the noise of professional life.
So why did fishing with 48 strangers in canoes leave me buzzing like the kid who found Willy Wonka’s golden ticket? And I mean, BUZZING! It was four straight days of discoveries, fresh ideas, and deep, unexpected conversations. The experience created a perplexing paradox. As someone who has spent a career surrounded by big personalities in corporate settings, I had to ask: why was fishing in the wilderness with strangers so productive for idea generation?
The first thing that came to mind was the people. Most of the guests were highly established professionals in their fields. But I’ve been surrounded by Type-A professionals throughout my career, and I had never experienced this level of raw ideation in a corporate context.
I wondered if perhaps the ideas clustered around a specific topic, if maybe we were all just talking shop. But as I ran through my mental notes, the breadth of ideas was vast. Here’s a sample, in no particular order.
Idea: AI is humanity’s greatest creation since fire and stone tools, and it is likely the last thing we ever create on our own. (Thanks, Eric)
Idea: Silicon chips actually stopped shrinking twenty years ago, so now engineers get more compute by stacking them. (Thanks, New Barry)
Idea: If you buy CDS insurance that pays out if the US Treasury defaults on its debt, the environment where the US defaults is probably the exact same environment where your insurer defaults, so good luck. (Thanks, David)
Idea: War is becoming like software, cheap, distributed, and iterative, where a $1,000 drone can take out a $10 million tank and upend the traditional procurement process. (Thanks, Jim)
Idea: You can make delicious, silky coffee over a campfire by mixing raw eggs directly into the grounds to trap the sediment before pouring. (Thanks, JR)
Idea: When you travel the backroads of America in a vintage sports car, a surprisingly large number of locals will open up and tell you their entire life stories. (Thanks, Marshall)
Clearly, there was no single theme. There were also more than a couple of discoveries that seemed highly unlikely, but surfaced, nevertheless.
Consider: As a kid, I fished on an obscure lake in St. Donat, Quebec, the summer that Elvis Presley died. I’m talking about a super-obscure place that I hadn’t thought about in years. As it turns out, my canoe-mate in Maine visited the same lake that same summer!
Consider: I mentioned that I earned an MBA at Fordham University at night while working on Wall Street. Surprisingly, my fishing partner admitted those specific details also described his background!
These little episodes reminded me of the Birthday Paradox. “How many people need to be in a room before there’s a 50% chance that at least two share the same birthday?” The answer is just 23. Look it up! When you throw diverse individuals into a shared space, the mathematical surface area for accidental intersections expands exponentially.
But why did fishing in Maine spark these connections? Diverse people congregating in a shared space is not uncommon. This dynamic broadly describes many office environments. Yet, in my experience, the amount of ideation in the corporate environment is not nearly so robust as it was in the canoes.
Could it have something to do with our mindset? We spend most of our professional lives in a rigid, left-brain framework. The environment is typically linear, task-oriented, and heavily curated. Meetings have agendas. We engineer content to direct other people’s attention, and we consume content engineered by others to direct our attention.
Staring into a lake for several hours does something different. It’s like our ancestors staring into fire. The view is not curated. It’s constantly moving, constantly changing. It’s not directed attention; it’s involuntary attention. It invites the mind to wander.
Sitting in a boat with strangers isn’t thinking, in the workplace sense. It’s more like pondering. More like processing. Like metabolizing information.
Contrast the forced focus of algorithmic feeds on your smartphone with the soft fascination of water. Watching water (or watching fire or clouds or rain or a passing highway) is an activity interesting enough to keep the mind engaged while leaving plenty of mental bandwidth available for other activities. It lowers your intellectual defenses.
Idea: There’s a direct parallel between trying to catch a fish and creating a discovery.
The fish are down there under the canoe; you know they’re there, but you can’t force them up. You have to show up, bait your line, and drop it in. Do you use a standard worm, or do you try something weird, like a bright pink bubblegum lure? How deep do you drop it? How fast do you reel it in?
Idea: A good question to a stranger is like dropping a bright pink bubblegum worm into deep water. Instead of relying on a standard lure like, “What do you do for work?”, you drop an offbeat line like, “What did you believe ten years ago that you now think is totally wrong?” You don’t know what’s down there in the dark, but the act of dropping a unique line can produce an extraordinary strike.
The typical workplace optimizes for efficiency, familiarity, and expertise. Blah blah blah. It deliberately aims to eliminate variance to avoid risk. But in doing so, it creates echo chambers and groupthink that can stifle discovery.
By contrast, the fishing trip primed the discussions for exploration. The random pairing of fishing partners ensured there were no pre-existing office politics or canned professional personas. Because we were strangers, we were forced to find fresh common ground. We shared a low-stakes purpose: to catch fish that we could all share for lunch. The goal was simple, with no social friction.
Combined with a relaxed-brain state for free association, the boat became an accelerator for ideas that would have been pruned away in most boardroom settings.
Even the evening discussions acted like inoculating a petri dish with a spore colony. A topic casually floated over dinner, like whether modern war was turning into software, became the central debate floating between our canoes the next morning. It gave the next day’s idle hours a rich medium to grow in.
We live in an era of smartphones and LLMs where factual information is commoditized. Facts are table stakes. They’re not scarce. You know what’s scarce? Curiosity is scarce. Unstructured time is scarce. Environments where diverse ideas mingle and mate to form idea-babies are scarce.
You take novel perspectives and psychological openness and time for exploration and environmental support, and then you minimize the social friction, and — poof! — you have created an idea factory.
Taking a step back, I don’t think the magic sprang specifically from fishing. I think the canoes just provided the pretext for a bunch of strangers to get together. It was about creating an environment where diverse people could gather, exchange, and explore together. I think the setup accidentally hit the textbook formula for breakthrough thinking.
While most of us can’t spend our lives in northern Maine canoes, we can certainly build these dynamics into our daily lives. We can deliberately create unstructured time, conversations with strangers, and uncurated ideation.
I am grateful for the trip, for the opportunity to share ideas with fascinating people on the water. Fishing with strangers allowed me to discover the ingredients for discovery.
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