Another gem from Godin:

It might be a garage or a sunlit atrium, but the place you choose to do what you do has an impact on you.

More people get engaged in Paris in the springtime than on the 7 train in Queens. They just do. Something in the air, I guess.

Pay attention to where you have your brainstorming meetings. Don’t have them in the same conference room where you chew people out over missed quarterly earnings.

Pay attention to the noise and the smell and the crowd in the place where you’re trying to overcome being stuck. And as Paco Underhill has written, make the aisles of your store wide enough that shoppers can browse without getting their butts brushed by other shoppers.

Most of all, I think we can train ourselves to associate certain places with certain outcomes. There’s a reason they built those cathedrals. Pick your place, on purpose.

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So many salmon-related meetings, commissions, forums, and so on — in urban hotel conference rooms. So disconnected from the rivers that are the salmon arteries.

What would the Cohen Commission feel like if it was held on a gravel bar beside sockeye spawning grounds…?

What would various ‘forums’ on salmon conservation and harvest planning sound like if they were alongside the Fraser Canyon, beside fish drying racks, and footholds in the rocks where people have fished for thousands of years…?

What would a salmon think tank come up with if it was outside the confines of a “tank”…?

What would court cases over salmon and fishing rights look like if they were held in longhouses?

Or, on one of the old trollers built by settler families in the early 1900s out of Sitka spruce and cedar — rolling on a west coast swell?

Or, besides folks smokehouses — First Nation or settlers alike.

Or, in the spring as millions upon millions of baby salmon migrate downstream all across the Pacfic Rim, feeding everything as they go?

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There’s a reason why the Fraser River was one of the most densely populated areas of the Americas pre-contact…

There’s a reason why some folks suggest they are almost more salmon than human.

‘There’s a reason they built those cathedrals. Pick your place, on purpose.’