It’s Sunday again. Another coffee sits on my desk as I tap the keyboard.
A few months ago I met someone at an event here in Cyprus. If you’ve spent any time on Instagram locally, you’ll probably know him as The Island Keeper.
We’ve stayed in touch ever since, largely because we seem to care about the same thing: encouraging people to leave places a little better than they found them. This week we finally made something together.
It started with me joining one of his litter picks at a viewpoint overlooking Kourion — a remarkably beautiful spot that is, somewhat bafflingly, also littered all too often. Niklas Wilhelm tells me he’s cleaned this spot many times.
A few weeks later I designed a poster for an old, slightly abandoned sign frame that sits there. It looks like it once held a warning sign urging people not to get too close to the edge of the cliff. Now it mostly just frames the landscape, and the occasional piece of rubbish.
I called Niklas Wilhelm a few days before and asked if he wanted to put it up together. He agreed immediately, which says more about his optimism than my planning. So this week we installed it. I’m rather pleased and proud with how it turned out. If it persuades even a handful of people not to leave rubbish behind, it will have done its job. And, the collaboration video we made will probably reach a wider audience online and, hopefully, encourage a bit more care for the island.
The curious part, though, wasn’t the project itself. It was what happened inside my own head. Niklas has around 160,000 followers. I have about 6,000. I’ve spent the last twenty years working with some huge global brands, building businesses, speaking at conferences, making films I’m genuinely proud of. And yet somehow, the moment social media enters the equation, your brain quietly redraws the hierarchy.
It’s remarkable how quickly an otherwise sensible adult can feel like they’ve wandered into someone else’s league. None of this came from him, I should add. He couldn’t have been more generous with his time, or more open to the slightly chaotic idea of installing a poster on a cliff edge in the heat. It came entirely from me.
Social media has a peculiar ability to reduce complicated human beings into one conveniently comparable number. And once that number appears, it is astonishing how much weight we give it.
By the end of the collaboration, we’d filled bags with rubbish, removed a microwave from the side of a cliff (an unexpected highlight), talked about Cyprus, debated ideas, and put up a poster that neither of us could have created alone.
It stopped feeling like a collaboration between someone with 160,000 followers and someone with 6,000. It became what it should have been all along. Two people solving the same problem with different tools. He gets people to notice litter and I spend a lot of time thinking about how design might influence behaviour before litter appears in the first place. Different approaches. Shared values.
It made me realise how often we compare ourselves using the wrong scoreboard: followers, job titles, revenue, recognition. We instinctively choose the one metric where someone else is ahead and quietly ignore the dozens where we might bring something entirely different.
The older I get, the more I’m convinced that the best collaborations aren’t built on equality. They’re built on complementarity. One person opens a door while the other notices something everyone else walked past. One brings reach, the other brings ideas. Neither is more important. They’re simply different.
The poster now sits overlooking one of my new favourite spots on the island. I’m far more proud of that than I am of any number underneath my profile picture. Perhaps that’s the real trick. Choosing the right scoreboard.
If you want to help with Love Our Island, feel free to drop me a message or visit the website www.loveourisland.cy