The Public Commonplace Project

It was 1985. Maybe 1986 — I can't quite place it. I was about 7, or 8, or maybe 9.

Anyway we were in Bristol. I remember it because I'd seen the SS Great Britain, and I had a newly purchased SS Great Britain notebook with a matching pen — because didn't everyone buy stationery from the gift shop?

We were in a café. My parents were talking about something I've long forgotten. Opposite our table sat a man, alone, mentally chewing on something. Looking – a little sad. And it stayed with me. I have no idea what made me do it, but I opened that notebook and wrote my first ever note. Something along the lines of:

"With so much noise, this man is alone with his thoughts. Is he lonely? Or is he tuning everything out?"

Now, that wasn't going to set the world alight. But it was the first light on a long journey of observing, noticing and seeing — paired with a need I've never lost, to capture a thought before it flees my mind. 

I no longer have that note. Nor many of the thousands that followed. 

But I did go on to make over 300 mini films with my friends in the mid-nineties, to record a catalogue of useless but entirely authentic songs in a band called The Merchandise Flying Ducks, to build the body of work you'll find here on Cultivated, to create an on-going musical memory series, and to have a career you can read about if you're interested.

A note from a twelve-year-old Rob in a Bristol café started that journey of observing, capturing, creating — of common placing. 

The two things underneath

Underneath all of it sit two things.

The first is a skill — learning to see. To truly see, to notice, to spot the patterns. This is the skill the whole of Cultivated sets out to teach, to show, and to bring to organisations everywhere. It is the skill that compounds. It is the skill that lets people solve problems, see where value is quietly leaking away, and grow their impact.

The second is the craft that feeds it: common-placing. The simple, patient act of capturing notes. Insights, observations, learning notes, patterns, ideas, and whatever else stops you in your tracks.

I’ve written about commonplace books before, and how I run them, so I won’t wander over already completed ground again.

But there is a neat little paragraph from the exceptional book “The Notebook; A history of thinking on paper” by Roland Allen, that I think sums up a good commonplace

“…But common-placing is never an end in itself. It’s always about producing something afterwards, or preparing you for public life”

For me, this started way back with that little SS Great Britain notebook and has followed me everywhere since. Learning to see and notice, and capturing that in my commonplace — and then, crucially, using those insights to produce, to create, to improve, to build valuable companies. 

So, that’s why I’m running a project called the Cultivated Public Commonplace Project. Despite my creative nature that’s the best name I could come up with. 

The idea is simple. Behind every finished piece of work here on Cultivated — the books, the courses, the talks — there is a longer, subtler and richer story of reading, watching, seeing, noticing, capturing and connecting the dots.

The Public Commonplace shows that story. It brings the raw material out from behind the polished work, so you can see where the thinking actually starts.

A way of looking that's your own

It’s worth being super clear here. A commonplace book is the opposite of borrowed seeing. It’s not a finished framework to take from the shelf and lay over your own life and work. Cultivated is not in the space of offering absolutes and generalisations for you to lift and apply. That’s kind of the antithesis to learning to see. 

Instead, a commonplace is about gathering raw material — a line that stands out, an observation that got you thinking, a quote that nags at your mind for a week, a song lyric that gives you a breakthrough at work (it happens)  — and slowly, over years, it becomes your own way of looking, your own way of seeing.

Nobody hands it to you. You build it. That is the whole point. The way you see is yours, assembled piece by piece, and it is an extremely useful practice. At Cultivated we help you learn to see, what you see is yours to own.

It is the same work whether I'm helping a leader spot where value is quietly leaking away, or helping someone see that the presentation on stage is only the last 10% of a much longer, richer journey. Different rooms, same underlying approach. Looking, and looking again, until you see differently.

So that's what the Public Commonplace is for — to share the foundations of that seeing. Not the finished walls. The footings.

The notes are not just quotes, but often full learning notes, my own observations, insights from work itself or simple musings on things related to work. 

There’s often a richer description in the post itself about what it means, what it made me think about, and how it may apply to work. Sometimes it’s just a short video of me making one of my own learning notes - showing you how it all happens behind the scenes. 

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A post shared by Cultivated — notes on work (@cultivatednotes)

As with everything here, this won't just be plain text or a Canva style post. There's craft in it.

Almost every note is either written by hand, badly drawn or typed out on the Olivetti typewriter, and I'm working on a way to put them up around the studio — pinned, hung, stuck to the wall.

I'll be honest about why: I don't fully know yet. But I have a hunch. Seeing them gathered in one place might let me spot my own patterns — the themes I keep circling, the lens I've been looking through that week, which notes from the archives are worth sharing and which ones aren't.

Maybe the notes are random, whatever surfaces first from the private book. Maybe they cluster around something I'm chasing. That's the experiment. To see whether I can catch my own thinking in the act. It'll make a nice little film for Creative Soul Projects, too.

Where it lives

The project runs daily on Instagram. That's the home of the Public Commonplace — seven posts a week.

The two I like best will also go up on LinkedIn, alongside the rest of my work there.

I do hope you find the Cultivated Public Commonplace useful.

None of this happens without Studio members and everyone who has bought a book or a course. Thank you.

Your support is what makes this possible — a public commonplace built to help people develop the art of seeing. And a person who sees their work differently can change an entire team.