About this article:
Borrowed Thinking is a personal essay on what happens when you stop drawing from the same pool and find inspiration somewhere nobody expected
Last fall I attended an influencer dinner in Chicago hosted by author and behavioral scientist Jon Levy. It wasn’t a marketing event. Nobody was there to talk about conversion rates, brand positioning, funnel optimization, or AI workflows. In fact, for most of the evening, nobody was allowed to talk about work at all.
Twelve strangers showed up to cook dinner together.
No titles.
No last names.
No networking agenda.
No “what do you do?”
Honestly, when I told my daughter I was going to a stranger’s house in Chicago to cook dinner with people I’d never met, her immediate response was, “Please share your location.” Which, in fairness, felt like reasonable advice.
But somewhere between chopping vegetables, setting the table, and passing ingredients around the kitchen, the whole thing stopped feeling strange. It felt strangely energizing & equalizing instead. Comfortable, even. Like we were all part of the same school of fish moving in the same direction. We talked about books, travel, family, creativity, and curiosity. For a couple of hours, nobody was their professional title and the preconceptions that come with knowing that PRIOR to walking in a room.
Then came the reveal. One by one, we finally shared who we were and what we did.
Around the table were CEOs, top-tier attorneys, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a James Beard-recognized chef, and even a former Supreme Court nominee. I remember sitting there realizing I was the only marketer in the room (and maybe more importantly) the only person who spent most of their professional life surrounded by other marketers.
And honestly…that realization has stayed with me.
Because marketing has a tendency to become an echo chamber. We often attend the same events, follow the same thought leaders, consume the same case studies, reference the same campaigns, and increasingly train ourselves against the same algorithms.
In many ways, marketers are now consuming marketing content created by other marketers who are consuming the same marketing content from each other and slowly becoming indistinguishable in the process.
The irony is that some of the most valuable perspective I’ve gained about marketing recently came from people who don’t work in marketing at all. That dinner reminded me how much curiosity expands when nobody is trying to sound impressive. Without titles in the room, people became more human than professional. Questions became more genuine. Conversations are less transactional. And I found myself thinking differently, not because someone handed me a strategy framework, but because I was reminded there are entirely different ways of seeing the world.
Some conversations centered around how people remember emotion before execution. Others touched on the importance of listening for what people are afraid to say directly, or how over-thinking can quietly kill instinct and creativity.
None of it was supposed to be “marketing advice.” But all of it became marketing advice.
Experiences like that one have followed me back into my work in ways I never expected. And it reinforced something I already believed deeply as a leader and that is that most technical marketing skills can be taught. Curiosity cannot.
You can train someone on platforms, analytics, workflows, or tools. But it’s much harder to teach someone to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, navigate ambiguity, or know when to rethink an approach entirely. And most importantly, it’s difficult to teach someone to stay open enough to say, “I don’t know yet, but I want to find out.”
That beginner’s mindset matters more than ever right now, especially in an era where AI can generate endless amounts of average content in seconds. The marketers who stand out won’t be the ones consuming the most marketing content from other marketers. They’ll be the ones building wider mental libraries. The ones willing to sit in rooms where they are not the expert. The ones collecting ideas from architecture, behavioral science, hospitality, publishing, design, psychology, food culture, and human conversation itself.
That’s part of why I firmly believe conferences & networking events matter so much and maybe now more than ever.
Not because every keynote changes your life or because every session contains some groundbreaking revelation. But because conferences create collisions.
A throwaway comment during a roundtable that lands deep.
A random conversation between sessions.
An off-topic dinner discussion.
A perspective from someone outside your normal orbit.
Those moments have a way of traveling back into your work months later without you even realizing it. In fact some of the strongest ideas I’ve brought back to my team didn’t come directly from marketing presentations at all, but from observing how other industries approach creativity, trust, experimentation, and human connection.
That dinner also challenged something else for me as a leader – that we all should think about and that is whether people actually feel safe enough to be/stay curious.
Because curiosity requires the willingness to be wrong sometimes. To ask questions before you have polished answers. To experiment before certainty exists. Over the years, I’ve spoken with people at all kinds of conferences and events, and I hear the same thing repeatedly: people often don’t feel safe to make mistakes, suggest unconventional ideas, or openly wonder out loud. And that worries me for the future.
Because when people don’t feel safe enough to question, they don’t stop making decisions they simply outsource judgment to the status quo. They choose the safer, more familiar answer. Momentum quietly gets traded for comfort. Originality gets replaced by consensus. And eventually, real progress slips away and we all know the cost of that kind of choice is never zero.
That realization has shaped how I hire and lead teams.
I’m honestly far less interested in the most impressive resume than I am in demonstrations of curiosity. Platforms change, tools evolve and tactics expire. But curiosity and the ability to rethink assumptions, seek perspective, adapt quickly, and remain teachable all compounds over time.
I look for people who are comfortable learning out loud, in public. People willing to say, “I don’t know… yet.” People who can sit in uncertainty long enough to discover something better instead of rushing toward the safest answer. Because in a world where AI can generate average answers instantly, curiosity will become a competitive advantage.
I still attend marketing conferences (Digital Summit is a personal favorite!) and I always will because there’s tremendous value in gathering with people who understand your work and how they apply it in different industries and verticals. But I’ve also realized that some of the most important professional growth happens when you deliberately stop swimming in the same waters all the time, which is why I often attend discussions, networking and events OUTSIDE the marketing space.
Because sometimes the best thing a marketer can do for their marketing is spend time somewhere marketing isn’t happening at all.