In Chapter 5 of 19 in his 2011 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller talks about how he finds inspiration by pursuing information beyond the obvious. He finds it easy to quickly get overloaded with general information - too many tabs - and too little knowledge gained. As a result, he pushes himself to go beyond general news and information consumption and find more challenging content and story. Pfortmüller is co-founder of Sandbox Network (www.sandbox-network.com). He also co-founded an innovation think tank, Incubaker (www.incubaker.com), and is part of the group's first spin-off, Holstee (www.holstee.com), an apparel brand for people who would like to wear their passion. Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its School of General Studies.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: What do you mean when you say that your interests lie at anything beyond the obvious?
Fabian Pfortmüller: I believe we live in a world full of information and you know when I open my computer in the morning and I make up a browser, I suddenly have opened twenty tabs, I’m sure you know what that feeling is and I think the interesting information today, at least for me, are the ones where I learn something, where I kind of get inspired and where it goes a little deeper, it goes beyond the obvious information where you read it and it’s kind of ‘Oh, okay I consumed that information’, but I haven’t taken anything out of it.
And I think the obvious takes the information that far but I feel that the good – the gold nuggets can be found in… especially people who are willing to take some risk when they write stories and are willing to really go deeper and kind of push it a little bit the ball further and that’s what I really love.