I have a number of close friends whom I think of as my “Cognitive Siblings”. One of them, Amir, I met through Seth Godin’s altMBA program. From the get-go, we talked about nothing but books and interesting concepts we had read or heard about, relating to the work we were doing in the Workshop. Those conversations spread beyond the work in front of us and to this day, we still have some of my most favorite conversations about books, mental models, marketing, branding and ideas, helping each other along on our paths of continuous lifelong learning and self-development.

In another sphere, I have a few friends with whom I talk mostly about technology. They are my “go-to” friends when I need to get up to speed on the latest technology that I’m trying to understand, and similarly, the people whom I think of first when I discover something that I think would serve them, or that's just plain cool.

And I have other Cognitive Siblings again, for different parts of my life. Some of them are just fun to have a chat with in the pub. 

What I've realised with all my Cognitive Siblings is that what have in common is that we aren’t in the conversation for ourselves. We are therefor each other. Ideas spark, insights are gleaned, paths forward are found in the back-and-forth that might not exist through a Google search, or hidden in a pages of a book (even if books are a core conversation topic with almost all my Siblings). We share and support, nerding out on the fact that the other person is as into this as we are, and we can be as vulnerable and open as we want to be.

I’m guessing that a brute force comparison of our Kindle libraries, or our browser histories, would turn up a fab looking Venn diagram of shared interests, but what it might not have the capacity to show is the deep value that I/we put on these conversations. It would miss the crucial details of our attitudes to learning, to growth, to making real connections about the things that matter to us, with the people to whom it matters also.

Who are your Cognitive Siblings?