The story behind the hashtag
Why 42, and why coffee?
G’day, welcome to my LinkedIn series with the hashtag #42Coffees. Let me explain what stands behind that unusual title.
In August 2023 I met copywriter Nick Bendel for a brekkie in a café in Sydney. Nick runs a series under the hashtag #500lunches on LinkedIn, where he meets self-chosen people from his network he didn’t know well for a lunch to share what they do. I had the pleasure of being his guest #50 before the pandemic, and we’ve stayed connected ever since.
He got the idea from Kaley Chu in Melbourne, a formerly shy introvert who created #100lunches and turned it into a book of the same title – even a movement of its own.
In my view, a coffee meeting is the ideal occasion to meet someone we already know, compared to a phone call to a stranger. That’s why my series covers a coffee meeting instead of a lunch. As I started it in August 2023, and the financial year down under ends on 30 June, I called it #42Coffees – roughly one post per week, with Nick Bendel as my first guest.
One hundred episodes and one hundred conversations later, it’s still the same idea: introduce smart business professionals from my network after meeting them for a coffee, and share their tips.
And yes, I know 42 has another claim to fame: in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought spends seven and a half million years computing 42 as the answer to life, the universe and everything. Deep Thought was really just an early, very patient chatbot – you could call it ChatGPT’s great-great-grandfather. I’d like to think a coffee conversation gets you a useful answer a little faster.
