GOOD is featuring interviews of devoted members each week on good.is. Jonny Miller is the Co-founder of Maptia, a beautiful way to tell stories about places.
A ‘Do’ I Want to Share With The World
My big ‘DO’ would be to get people to foster a sense of adventurous curiosity for other lives and places beyond their own experience.
A good practical way to do this would be instead of asking yourself, ‘Where might I go next’ when you take a vacation, instead ask, ‘Whose shoes can I put myself into?’ Or ‘What new perspectives about the world might I find?’
Best Advice I’ve Ever Gotten
“Even if you fail, it’ll still make for one hell of a story, and what is life if not shooting for one hell of a story” —Rand Fishkin
I’ve been thinking recently about this idea that your life is like a book—with its covers being your birth and death, and that you can only know the moments in-between. There’s no use in worrying about how long the book is… the only thing that matters is that you make it a damn good story.
Book I’d Recommend
I’ve immensely enjoyed reading through ‘On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes’ by Alexandra Horowitz. It’s a quest to gather fresh perspectives on the world through exploring her local block in New York with eleven different experts. These ‘experts’ range from an artist and geologist to her child and a canine companion. I loved the idea of hacking our selective attention, consciously choosing the filters through which we comprehend the world and viewing the seemingly mundane in a new light of fascination.
My Favorite Teacher
My economics tutor was a mad, endlessly energetic Italian who I approached with a slightly controversial idea for my dissertation. I knew that most professors would have completely dismissed it but he took a chance on my idea and me. I’ll never forget talking with him after graduation and him saying that:
“Everything is possible… it might just not be feasible… But then I have become accustomed to the fact that when you set your mind to something, somehow it happens.”
Which was probably the best thing any teacher could ever tell his student that was about to leave the safety of the university campus behind.
My Manifesto
We wrote our own Maptia manifesto to inspire people to get out there and see the world. It wouldn’t be true to say that it was ours now though, since the Maptia community own it now. Our amazing community has sent us photos of over a hundred printed and signed copies of their manifestos from all over the world. It has been truly inspiring to see them all come in one by one.
We’d like to collect one amazing story from every country in the world on Maptia and it would be great to see you participate.
Images via LuxuryTravelStories.com and Maptia.com
