Okay. I’ve been to the beach. I’ve clocked hours staring at the ocean, eaten an heirloom tomato like an apple, let my hair go full wannabe surfer girl, driven down a country road blasting an epic song with one arm out the window, cooked dinner for friends in my bathing suit, gone sailing with my dad, let the weeds win, and stopped pretending the sand was ever coming out of my car.

I’ve summered.

And I’m not exactly ready to give it up. I’ll happily squeeze another beach day out of September if the weather cooperates. But around this point every year, I start craving a different kind of stimulation.

I want to see things. A new play. An exhibition. A movie I know nothing about. A reading. A concert. I start looking at the September cultural calendar and feel the same jolt I used to get from buying new notebooks for school. Summer isn’t devoid of culture, but after Labor Day, someone turns the volume way up. Fall exhibitions open. Theater seasons get underway. New books arrive.

The city feels like it’s turning itself back on. Apparently, so am I. For a long time I thought I was just responding to the energy of September. Now I think it’s something more specific.

I’m hungry for new input.

We spend an extraordinary amount of time thinking about output. What are you writing? Posting? Selling? Building? What’s your marketing plan, your content strategy, your next big idea? We expect ourselves to be creative and original on demand, and we don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the raw material we’re giving our brains to work with.

I’ve started calling this my culture diet.

What are you reading that has nothing to do with your work? Watching? Listening to? When was the last time you walked into a gallery, saw a play, heard live music, or had a conversation that introduced you to an idea you’d never run into before?

Because if all you consume is real estate, eventually you’re going to sound like real estate. You can’t keep feeding yourself the same ingredients and expect to produce something new.

And these days, the sameness isn’t even entirely our doing. Our algorithms are remarkably good at learning what we like, what we watch, whose posts we linger over, what we’re likely to click next. And then they hand us more of it.

That’s incredibly convenient. It’s also a pretty limited diet.

The problem isn’t that the algorithm gives us bad things. It’s built to eliminate surprise. The better it knows us, the more precisely it can serve up another version of something we’ve already proven we like.

Our brains seem to want a little unpredictability, though. Research on creative cognition suggests creativity comes from a back-and-forth between spontaneous association and deliberate evaluation, making unexpected connections and then figuring out which ones hold up. Novel experiences give those two processes more to work with.

Put more simply: it’s hard to connect dots when you’re always being handed the same dots.

This is where culture in the wild has an edge over the algorithm. Nobody’s pre-qualified it based on your history. You go to the play because a friend had an extra ticket. You wander into the gallery because you happened to be walking by. You buy the book because the cover caught your eye instead of your feed.

And sometimes you hate it. Good. Not every input needs to delight us. Some of it should confuse us, annoy us, or send us home wondering what we just sat through. That friction is what forces our brains somewhere they weren’t already planning to go.

Maybe that’s what I’ve actually been craving. Not more content. God knows none of us needs more content.

I want more surprise.

And I think this matters professionally more than we give it credit for. Some of the most interesting people I know aren’t interesting because they know the most about their industry. They’re interesting because their industry isn’t the only thing they know about. Their ideas show up sideways, out of a novel, a restaurant, a conversation with someone doing something entirely unrelated to them. They just have more raw material sitting around.

Maybe it’s worth thinking about your culture diet the way you think about your actual diet. Keep the familiar stuff you love. But leave room for something your algorithm would never think to hand you.

An algorithm’s whole job is to feed you more of who you’ve already been. Culture can introduce you to someone you didn’t know you wanted to become.

Coaching Corner

As everything turns back on this September, pay attention to your input. What have you read, watched, heard, or seen lately that had nothing to do with your work, and wasn’t chosen for you based on something you already liked?

Pick one thing this month you wouldn’t normally choose. See the play. Walk into the gallery. Read the novel. Accept the weird invitation. Go because you’re interested, not because it’ll make you better at your job.

No networking. No content creation. No ROI.

Just give your brain something it wasn’t expecting.

Turn off the algorithm. Turn yourself back on.