We recently connected with Rob Lawless and have shared our conversation below.

Rob, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?

I started my journey to spend 1 hour, 1:1, with 10,000 people on November 11, 2015. I took a picture with everyone I met and shared their stories through the captions, connecting with just over 100 people over the course of 8 months. At the time, I was also working full-time as a sales rep at a tech startup; however, at the end of those 8 months, the company I worked for was acquired and I was laid off.

So in July of 2016, I jumped into my project full-time and started meeting 5 new people every single weekday. As a result, I started receiving local press and my following began to grow. Like many people, I figured I’d eventually leverage my audience to take on partnerships with brands that valued human connection. I just didn’t anticipate how those partnerships would actually come about.

On March 8, 2017 (almost a year later), I met Kris Hunsicker, the owner of a local pharmacy (Fishtown Pharmacy). We grabbed beers at the nearby Standard Tap for my project and during our conversation, he said, “This is so cool! I wish I could support you in some way.” I replied that I was actually planning to do partnerships where I’d tag my sponsor in every post for the month. And given that it was already the 8th of the month, I told him we could do something for March, maybe for $200. Kris replied, “How about $300 and we’ll call it a deal?”

For the rest of that month, I tagged @fishtownpharmacy in all of my posts, kicking off what would become a random assortment of partnerships in the years to come, fueled by the people who were actually part of my journey!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am on a mission to spend 1 hour, 1:1, with 10,000 different people. Since November of 2015 I’ve met over 5,900 people across 90+ countries, documenting their stories on my Instagram, @robs10kfriends.

A lot of people think I studied something like Journalism or Sociology in school, but I actually studied Finance and minored in Entrepreneurship. I graduated from Penn State in 2013, and afterwards worked as a Strategy & Operations Consultant at Deloitte Consulting. I spent just over a year there, and then joined the venture-funded RJMetrics as their 80th employee to help grow their sales team.

I’ve always wanted to forge my own path, though, and I missed the feeling of authentic connection that I felt in college (everything was so agenda-driven in the real world). Therefore, I decided to meet 10,000 people to learn about their lives, see what comes of opening doors for no particular reason and create more empathy in the world.

I began my mission in November of 2015 in Philadelphia and took it full-time 8 months later after my company was acquired and I was laid off. I started meeting 5 new people a day in July of 2016 and a year later became bicoastal thanks to my college roommate, who hosted me in LA. I met 3,259 people all in person – mainly in Philly, LA and Hoboken/NYC, but I’ve also driven across the US 6 different times, connecting with people in cities along the way. Then in March of 2020, I took my project online and met over 2,000 more people from countries all around the world.

Now, I continue to meet about 4 new people every single weekday, and when I’m not meeting people I’m speaking about the value of intentional connection – how we can leverage it to engage talent, promote belonging and reduce turnover in the workplace. I’ve shared my insights at companies like Amazon and Shell, universities like Pepperdine and Auburn and in locations ranging from Oregon to Alabama to India (this November)!

I know there are a lot of connection-related accounts on social media now, which I think is a wonderful thing. But to my knowledge, I’m the only person spending a dedicated 1 hour, 1:1 per person with a focus on the connection rather than the content it produces. As a result, my project has been copied (which I love!) everywhere from Boston to Canada to Germany to India to Ethiopia!

This November will mark 8 years since I started and I think it’ll take me another 8 years to finish, so all-in-all this will be at a least a 15-year journey, but one I never get tired of working on!

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

Throughout my journey, I feel like my project has been much more easily understood by creatives rather than business people because they didn’t look for a specific ROI.

Whenever I connected with business people, they’d struggle to understand why I would meet with people without a set agenda or outcome. I think because in their world, most things are done for financial gain. I understand from my consulting days you’re always looking to increase the bottom line.

Whenever I connected with artists, they’d appreciate my project for it’s genuine nature. They understood that there was more to the mission than monetary success. There’s the feeling of an increased sense of belonging, there’s the growth of knowledge and expansion of perspective and there’s the opening of doors to new, novel experiences.

Now, I try to explain to other people that based on what I’ve seen in my 5,900+ meetings human connection should be treated like an experience rather than a transaction. When we stop treating each other like stocks to invest in when they’re hot and stay away from when they’re cold, and we start treating people like humans, the world becomes a much more beautiful place.

As a former corporate person myself, going on this creative journey has helped me understand that people can be more driven by passion than financial success. Of course, it’s wonderful when you achieve both, but I now understand why for example a musician could be perfectly happy playing bars as opposed to the Staples Center. They’re passionate about what they do and sometimes simply surviving off of it is enough to fill their cup!

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Books: – Shoedog by Phil Knight, the Founder of Nike – We all look at a company like Nike and think of course they were going to succeed! Of course, Phil Knight had it all figured out from the beginning! But through his story, you learn that he had to put in his time to make his dream come true. He worked for PwC after college. He traveled internationally when it seemed like the irresponsible thing to do for a young professional. He teetered on the edge of failure and success multiple times, which helped me better understand the creative journey. We’re all always teetering on the edge of failure and success in our early days, and more than anything, our achievements rely on our willingness to keep going.

Video:
– In & Of Itself by Derek DelGaudio – Derek is a performer / mentalist who ran a one man show in NYC for 500+ days. This film beautifully captures how important it is to make people feel seen and heard, and how deeply this action can impact them.
– Sonder by Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows on YouTube – the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.
– Onism by Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows on YouTube – the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience; the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die-and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

Calendly:
– I waited 5,800 meetings before I ever used Calendly to start scheduling my connections. This was a really dumb move on my part. I could’ve saved hundreds and hundreds of hours if I started using it earlier.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.roblawless.com, www.robs10kfriends.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robs10kfriends/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-lawless-robs10kfriends/

Image Credits
All photos are my own