by Sean Colligan
Howard Lewis, on the heels of his successful book campaign for Leave Your Phone at the Door, finally has a chance to put his feet up. He spent the summer virtually everywhere except for his home in London, including a book tour in the US with the Publishizer team and his still-growing community of readers.
In fact, if there’s one thing Howard is extremely adept at, it’s growing a community. On his most recent tour, and nearly all of his travels, he finds himself making new connections almost effortlessly. This summer in Oklahoma City, for example, he ended up in conversation with the manager of the gift shop of the museum where he was promoting Leave Your Phone, who hadn’t joined the event earlier.
“The manager of the store and I, we just got chatty. I always walk around with a copy of my book, by the way. Anyway, he saw it, and he was quite intrigued. He looked through it, and he loved the whole concept. He actually not only bought a copy himself, he ordered 12 more for the shop. I kept finding things like that at these events, where people would just say, ‘hang on, that's great, can we have some more?’”
But being so in-demand also means a full schedule, and while Howard may not have travel plans in the immediate future, he’s still taking on work beyond his book and dividing his attention between time zones. Most recently, he’s been working with a film director in Canada, another one of his countless serendipitous connections, as an advisor. “It’s a film about art forgery. It’s a very interesting film, and it’s something I knew a little bit about, obviously because of my background in the art world.”
Long before writing an acclaimed book and starting his Offline project, which hosts face-to-face social events all over the world, Howard's gateway into the professional world was art. At a young age, he became involved with the management of his family’s extensive art collection. “About half of the collection is on loan to museums and other institutions in the UK, Ireland, America and many places besides. As a general rule, we like to share. We’ve got far too much, frankly, to hang on our own walls. It’s a blessing, and privilege, that we get to share with so many people.”
His proclivity for sharing would endure throughout his career and in all his relationships, professional and otherwise. “I think the notion of sharing your good fortune, whether you classify that as sharing works of art, sharing friends or connections or opportunities, has been something sitting with me for a long time.” This would prove to be the foundation for his Offline events, which ultimately established the core concept that Howard wrote about in Leave Your Phone.
Howard admits that, even before his involvement in the art world, his first “personal passion” is books. “We have books within the family collection as well, but I keep book collections of my own which are interesting to me. One particular example is a group of early children’s educational material dating from the late 18th to mid 19th century. Books, tools, and games for children. I have a leaning toward things are utilitarian, that have some value. I’m just really curious.”
Curiosity is another part of Lewis’ affable character that has always motivated him to connect with people from all over the world. However, he’s become increasingly concerned about the fact that curiosity isn’t as common in our social interactions as it used to be. Instead, he feels a greater force has driven people away from the desire to interact.
“I think that one of the single biggest factors is fear,” Howard says. He continues with an observation that has become one of his most frequently quoted: “People are far more concerned with what may go wrong than what may go right.”
He gives a simple example with one of the most basic social interactions: greeting people on the street in the morning. “’Hello’, a wave, a ‘good morning’, whatever. Nothing very complicated about it. But somehow there’s a fear that if you do that, something may go wrong. It may be misinterpreted, or someone will get angry with you, or they’ll think you’re a bit stupid.” But Lewis has no problem laughing off the worry. “Maybe they’re right, maybe you are a bit stupid. Doesn’t matter.”
In creating and hosting his Offline events, Howard has had the joy of meeting, introducing, wining & dining countless individuals from different corners of the world. His guests have been people working in all manner of different industries and come from various cultural & social backgrounds. Yet despite all these differences of the attendees, Howard always noticed a consistency every time he hosted an Offline event.
“There are many people who will agree to agree on most things,” he says. “One of the things I try to emphasize with Offline is actually that there are far more points of convergence than divergence.” While the differences between guests might make them seem incompatible on paper or on a social media profile, they have often formed unlikely friendships and even professional partnerships that may never have happened otherwise.
In a world seemingly always online, it’s never been easier to interact with people entirely through screens and without ever needing to meet anyone in person, or even step out of one’s home. But Howard argues that social media has had a questionable effect on the way people socialize, or perhaps don’t socialize, in recent years.
“Everything has been benchmarked. Everything’s on a list, everything’s scrutinized, everything’s compared endlessly.” Howard posits that this not only affects online interactions, but even how people approach social situations IRL. “When you’ve got this backdrop of scrutiny, the sense that somehow you’re being watched or measured or given a ‘score’, for a lot of people it creates a sense of ‘better not’. ‘Better I didn’t say anything, that I didn’t embarrass myself.’ I feel that’s become a very dominant theme in modern society.”
But Howard doesn’t believe technology to be “all bad”. “It’s actually very good,” he says “The problem, unfortunately, is people’s reliance upon it, or the sense that it is somehow superior to what has come before. And in my view, it’s not.”
As to “what has come before,” he talks further about the importance of in-person human interaction from an evolutionary perspective. “If you go back thousands of years, what was really clear was that your only way of prospering was the ability to communicate. Communicating the weather, or the danger of wild animals, or saying something to another tribe, visually and verbally. If you go back, you’ll find that the great achievements were often galvanized by the fact that it was a personal interaction.”
While Howard recognizes the benefits of our technology, he still maintains that it simply can’t fully replicate the benefits of face-to-face communication. “Technology diminishes physical engagement and connection, which is really part of our DNA and has been for millions of years. And I think finding a way to somehow recover that is, in a very small way, what Offline tried to achieve.”
Howard insists that he wasn’t trying to solve any great mystery or resolve some extraordinary issue, but just provide an opportunity for people to let their guard down and leave their smartphones behind for an enjoyable gathering. “I wanted to invite a bunch of interesting, disparate people to a lovely venue, and share a few stories. Not too long, not too late, not too expensive. Just enough whereby you can attract a very broad cross-section of people. And I feel like I did that.”
Howard’s book chronicles his creation of the Offline project, but also delves into the finer points of socializing, or what he dubs “codes of conduct”. “It’s all about boundaries of acceptability, cultural taboos, kindness, civics, a bunch of stuff.”
Leave Your Phone also includes stories from his travels abroad, namely Mexico City and Marrakesh. “Within all these things, the fundamentals don’t change a great deal. You accept that there’s an element of jeopardy to everything. Whether the plane is on time, whether you actually find and get to the right destination, a million different things. But all the while, those concerns are governed by my belief that there’s actually far more that connects people than separates them.”
Howard's confidence in this approach to unknown social situations led to unforgettable experiences during his book campaign. Since finishing his book, he’s appeared on roughly 25 different podcasts, including Forbes, Fast Company, and Japanese international news broadcaster Nikkei. For him, this serves as proof that “the message behind the book is pretty universal. In fact, it gets more relevant with every passing day.”
But of all his podcast interviews, the one he remembers the most fondly and recommends listening to more than the others wasn’t on a world news outlet or viral influencer show. Howard's most outstanding interview, in his opinion, was on Thank God for Monday, a career-focused podcast produced out of the Catholic Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey.
“The host had originally been a pharmaceutical executive who found God, and he loved everything about Offline. He was incredible. He listened carefully, he asked great questions. I like that one because it was somehow so different from the others. It wasn't a conventional interviewer, it wasn't my traditional audience. It just shows to me once again, there's no one audience. There's no one way of expressing this idea.”
With Howard’s entire professional life centered on networking and making friends, he has no want for contacts in traditional publishing. Some might be surprised that he wouldn’t make use of powerful connections to go directly to a major publisher, but he had his reasons.
“You can go the traditional route, but it’s a slog. And you have to hope that you catch someone on the right day, or when they’re in the right mood.” Instead, Howard chose to follow a friend’s recommendation to work with Publishizer. “He said the process for him was great because of the template they provided, the level of after care, and the interest they showed in their authors. And I felt that I had a lot of scope to impose my own voice without being constrained.” Even though Publishizer facilitated the publication of Howard's book through a major publisher, “I felt that I had much more control over the creative process. I also knew that Publishizer was a community in its own right. I liked the fact that there was a collaborative tone.”
Howard's events and adventures still garner attention around the world, and his new book has continued that trend without skipping a beat. Whatever may be on Howard’s horizon, even more strong connections are sure to follow.
