Curiosity, Care and Purposeful Coddiwompling - The Grokkist Way for Those Who Prefer Not to be Labelled or ‘Put in a Box’

To navigate the world, life and business today, it seems more and more people are talking about - and seeking - connection.

The growth in networks, communities and memberships means there are plenty of online spaces for people to find their ‘tribe’ or the kind of support they are looking for. One of those flying a bit under the radar is the grokkist community. 

In part one of a two-part feature, journalist Gary Spinks talks to its founder Danu Poyner to find out more about how to grok, coddiwomple and “unfold” ourselves.

Grokkist - A Definition:

"Someone who goes through life with a thirst for knowledge and understanding as a way of being. It’s what drives their life and pulls them through life."

"Life Changing Learning that Lights Up the Soul"

The author and humourist Mark Twain is quoted as saying: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

And it’s a quote firmly etched in the mind of Danu Poyner, founder of online community Grokkist, both because the resonance is personal and the subject close to his heart. Education is his passion but his relationship with formal education more ‘love-hate’.

Danu explained: “I have always loved learning but I have not always loved school.

“I arrived at school knowing how to read and reading things like Tolkien, and then they said that we were going to learn to spell words like cat, and count to 10. I felt this huge wave of disappointment crash over me and it has never really left in all my encounters with education.”

That, together with a career involving technology and systems, led Danu to create an online community which is to do with “life changing learning that lights up the soul”. That community is Grokkist.

How it all started, the challenges Danu faced in creating the community, and its future direction is what you can read about in part two of this story.

Here, in part one, we’ll focus on the community itself.

You may not have heard of Grokkist. If you have, it’s most likely you heard about it through a friend or colleague. It has grown to more than 500 members in over 50 countries largely through word of mouth recommendation.

So, what’s the community about and what is a grokkist? I asked Danu to guide me through it.

What is a Grokkist?

According to Danu, a grokkist is “someone who goes through life with that thirst for knowledge and understanding as a way of being. It's what drives their life. It's what pulls them through life.”

The term derives from the word grok, which features in the science fiction novel In a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein. In the book, grok means to drink. To Danu - whose community has nothing to do with Grok AI - it means to absorb, to take in and become changed by what you know.

“Carl Jung has this great quote that says the meeting of two personalities is like a chemical reaction. If there's any reaction, then both parties are transformed. And I think that that's what learning is really about for me.

“Grokkist takes it a bit further. A grokkist is someone who goes through life with that thirst for knowledge and understanding as a way of being... and there are people that you meet who are just like that, and they stand out. I wanted to create a home for people like that”, explained Danu.

The online platform and community he has created is, naturally, called Grokkist.

Did you Hear the Joke about Grokkists?

Danu said: “I often joke that grokkists go around terrified of being asked, ‘So what do you do?’ because the answer is a 40 minute voice note with a flow chart.

“And then we just don't introduce each other by job titles or our CVs. We are much more interested in [asking] ‘What's alive for you right now?’... ‘What's going on?’ or ‘What's your story?’”

Who is the Grokkist Community for?

Danu describes the community as “very international, very interdisciplinary and intergenerational”. The youngest member is 14 years old, the oldest 91. The community includes educators, UX researchers, engineers, community builders, artists, (often “disgruntled”) academics, and “all sorts of people”.

“It’s for people whose path through life often looks - from the outside - like a pile of scattered puzzle pieces.

“They tend to be generalists. They are led through life by curiosity and sometimes caring deeply about things. They tend to accumulate a lot of different experiences, maybe have a lot of different jobs, and they are brilliant at many things - but unable to pick just one thing.

“And they're the kind of person who's still figuring out what they want to be when they grow up at 60. And they're always learning but rarely recognised for what they learn.”

Introducing the Category of One Type Person

Danu says the Grokkist community typically attracts a ‘category of one’ person. People with a unique identity that defies comparison or categorisation, shaped by their multidimensionality and a deep commitment to following their own path.

He continues: “A lot of the deepest value and experience and wisdom that they [grokkists] have is in between all of the different connections that they can see - because no one else has lived quite like them and seen the things that they've seen.

“So they have this experience of being a category of one type of person. 


“And so, when you put a lot of these category of one people together, you get this wonderful reflection that starts to happen where people go, ‘Oh, you live life like that too’ and ‘I don't have to reduce myself to something that can be flattened, and easily explained and legible to the world’. 


“[They realise that] ‘I can still have all of my multidimensional richness, but I can understand that it's okay to live this way - and that there are other people like me. And actually this is a really beautiful way to go through the world’.”

Whilst the Grokkist community attracts all kinds of people, Danu says it has clear appeal to people who do not want to be labelled, or easily labelled. 


He said of grokkists: “They're just meant for more than efficiency metrics or being put in a box. They're the kind of people who you can't put in a box easily - and they don't really want to be in a box either.

“So this [Grokkist community] is a place where their first response is to have a big exhale and go, ‘Oh, it's okay to be understood as my whole self here’.”

What’s it Like When First Joining the Grokkist Community?

Danu designed the community as a space for people to reflect on their life, career and more. A place to connect with like-hearted others. A space to help navigate the now and the future.

He said: “People experiment with ways of unfolding themselves and telling their story to themselves and others. They arrive quite fragmented, often because there aren't many spaces where we are allowed to or encouraged to look at our whole selves in a holistic way.

“A lot of how people engage with the space at first is recognising that they have more parts than they realised and start to reclaim them, and then shuffle the pieces around and experiment with telling their story in different ways.


“Often that's quite therapeutic and quite cathartic. But it's also quite scary because we arrive with all of these scripts about ‘Supposed to be productive’, and ‘What's our economic value?’, and “How do I be understood?’ and ‘Am I enough?’ and ‘Look at all of these other amazing people doing things - can I compare to all of that?’

“It's a kind of delicate dance between freedom and excitement, and hesitation and caution. But we try and create spaces to navigate all of that in a way that's quite joyful.”

Curiosity and Care are at the Heart of the Grokkist Community

Danu calls the Grokkist community a home for all those who “insist on meeting the world with curiosity and care”.

He argues that the way the world works discourages curiosity (quite early in our lives) and we often pay lip service to it. People talk about it being important but then don’t put it into practice.

“By the time we get to adulthood, we're quite battered, bruised or burned away. It's quite an achievement to still have your curiosity intact, something to hold onto - just as a practice, let alone as a kind of organising principle for life.

Seeing Curiosity as an Ethos

“And I really do think curiosity is an ethos. It's a practice. It's a kind of commitment to not knowing, in a world that's very shouty and divisive, where people have got their tribes and their boxes that they shout from.

“Curiosity asks us, or invites us, to not know for a while and sit with the not knowing, and be open to be changed by what we might learn. And I think that the world could do with a lot more of that.”

Danu pointed to how the words curiosity and care come from the same Latin word, cura. And he feels strongly that the two go hand in hand.

He believes care has been ‘designed out’ of where it is most needed in the world, especially in caring professions like teaching and health, which Danu feels are more driven by productivity and efficiency.

Danu said: “If you're an individual person who cares very much about the world, it's very hard to be someone who cares inside an uncaring system. And I think that that's an experience that a lot of us feel, just in the world as it is generally.


“How nice to be able to not just start from, but insist on, curiosity and care as organising principles for a way to live. That's really core [to the Grokkist community].”

Coddiwompling - The Art of Purposeful Travel Through Life

One of the things to happen when you enter the world of the grokkist is you will discover new and intriguing words. Words like coddiwomple.

To coddiwomple means “to travel purposefully towards a vague or unknown destination, with a clear sense of how you want to journey but an open mind about where you’ll end up.”

It’s about embracing uncertainty while staying grounded in curiosity, care and intent. It’s not just a way of navigating life but a philosophy of exploration. Values and relationships are prioritised over rigid plans or outcomes.

Comfort in Contradiction

Associated with the coddiwompling is a value around being comfortable with contradiction.

Danu explained: “[In the Grokkist community] We like to talk about ambivalence as being literally ambivalence - to be strong on both sides.


“It's not just to have mixed feelings or not have made up your mind yet. It's to go, ‘Oh, I really believe that technology is incredible and opens up new possibilities but I also really strongly believe that it unleashes terrible unintended consequences and exacerbates already existing divisions in society’.


“You can have both of those things at the same time, and have some comfort in that contradiction. And then be curious about the way that those contradictions interact. We [grokkists] live a lot in the spaces in between, and like to live in the complexity.”

“It’s Not about Being Clever”

Danu stresses that though the grokkist community does have “a lot of very, very talented people”, it is not about being clever.

“I always agree with what Gloria Steinem says, that ‘ordinary people are smart, and smart people are ordinary’.


“The idea is not to be terribly clever. It's just about care meeting curiosity, wanting to understand the world in order for it to be better. And some of that is about claiming your status as a ‘knower’.

“Because all of us live in the world. We are very experienced about living in this complicated, crazy world that's never been so big and scary as it has been now than any other time in human history.


“We all carry around a lot of knowledge and experience, and claiming our wisdom is part of it. You don't need a lot of credentials or a lot of textbooks for that. We all know a great deal and part of it is about just not trying to be clever or impress anyone, but just show up as you are and let things unfold. 


“And if you don’t know what you're going to say, that's actually great because it might mean that you are about to say something interesting that hasn't been said before. Hannah Arendt likes to say when certainty ends, that's when thinking begins. So we like to be on the edge of things and be okay with that.”

What Does the Grokkist Community Offer - and Why is it Different?

A quick look at the website and you might regard Grokkist as simply a network of gatherings, a body of course and workshops, publishing imprint, and set of ongoing collaborative projects.

Danu describes - and would encourage visitors to recognise - the deeper sense of Grokkist as a space designed to help people. To help people make sense of themselves, their experiences and their work, in thoughtful company.

Grokkist is not attempting to be like a Slack, Circle or Discord. It does have a calendar of events, a member profile directory, course directory and summary of memberships but it’s not a space requiring or promoting daily logging in. It’s a space which invites and openly encourages exploration and discovery.

Danu said: “I think of it as a regenerative learning ecosystem, which is just a fancy way of saying everything we do - whether it's gatherings, discussion boards, publishing - is all about helping people learn about themselves, and each other and the world.”

Key Strands of the Grokkist Community

If you go onto the Grokkist website you will notice some core elements running through it.

The Grokkist Network is where community gatherings can be found - from café-type discussions to courses, talks to workshops. It’s also where people can follow structured learning journeys such as “Unlock Your Grok” and “Find Your Red Thread” (more about that in part 2 of this feature on Grokkist).

The Grokkist Press is a space where ideas, projects and expressions are shared. You can find articles, podcasts, videos, art and more here. It is also a publisher of books, such as Salt & Seeds and To Sustainability and Beyond, both by member and author Alan Raw.

The Academy is where you will find a range of courses to explore.

Groksmithing is the name for the community’s collaborative projects and practitioner ecosystem. It’s a way of supporting practitioners, authors, educators and project leads in developing their own offerings within a relational structure.

Danu describes groksmithing as...

... the “practice of helping people unfold themselves”

He continues: “A lot of it just happens naturally but sometimes people get to thresholds in their life where they need a bit of help to get over the step...

... whether that is a bit of clarity - if they've got bees in the brain - or a bit of momentum, to actually ‘Here, hold my hand while we go through this difficult bit or sit with it’. Maybe just some presence, actually.

“A lot of what we do is based on the social practice of noticing people, noticing what gifts people have, noticing what they're carrying - that they would maybe like to put down, maybe what they're carrying that they would like to share - and just creating presence. 


“And I think, in a very technologically mediated world, where a lot of these things are like broadcasting stuff at you - channels and whatnot - actually the most human thing you can do is prioritise the quality of your presence. And so we do that a lot. Groksmithing is all about that.”

People can also sign up for the Grokkist Newsletter from the website.

Making Grokkist More Visible and Discoverable

Danu sees this year [2026] as one of consolidation, capacity building and making Grokkist more discoverable around the globe.

He invites people to visit the Grokkist website and, in the spirit of a grokkist, discover what parts of the site take their curiosity the most... and explore those deeper.

Danu said: “I don’t want people in a funnel. I don’t want people to feel like they are being railroaded into anything. Grokkist is just a lovely garden to explore, or like a bookshop - there’s too much in it and it’s kind of overwhelming but it’s a nice space to be.”

Some Definitions to Guide You Through the Grokkist Community

The Grokkist community, it's fair to say, has some unusual words in it. To help you understand what they mean, here is a guiding set of definitions:

Grok (verb)

To understand something so fully that you become changed by the encounter. A way of talking about learning and knowledge that goes beyond the abstract, dry or academic type of knowing. Something much more embodied and rich, lived and relational.
(N.B. The word ‘grok’ comes from the science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A Heinlein. In the book, grok means ‘to drink’)

Grokkist (noun)

Someone who goes through life with that thirst for knowledge and understanding as a way of being. It’s what drives their life. It’s what pulls them through life.

Grokkist Community (noun and space)

A place that helps people rediscover their aliveness and then act from that. A home for those who go through life with a thirst for knowledge and understanding as a way of being.

Groksmithing (activity)

Structured support through a collaborative ecosystem, helping people to “unfold” themselves: get clarity, navigate uncertainty, gain momentum, and step into their potential with intention and authenticity.

Category of One (description and identity)

A unique identity that defies comparison or categorisation, shaped by your multidimensionality and a deep commitment to following your own path.

Being a category of one is often where the grokkist journey begins. It’s the realisation that you don’t fit into the usual moulds - that your curiosity leads you to connect ideas, experiences, and values in ways only you can.

This uncategorisable uniqueness is both liberating and daunting. Without clear benchmarks or a peer group to validate your path, you may oscillate between wild confidence and self-doubt.

But this is only the beginning.

For grokkists, living as a category of one sparks a deeper exploration - of how the seemingly disconnected threads of your life might weave into a red thread, and of how you might translate your individual gifts into contributions that resonate with others. It’s not about standing apart but about discovering and embracing your role as part of something larger, in a way only you can

Coddiwompling (activity, art and philosophy of exploration)

The art of travelling purposefully towards a vague or unknown destination, with a clear sense of how you want to journey but an open mind about where you’ll end up.

It’s about embracing uncertainty while staying grounded in curiosity, care and intent. It’s not just a way of navigating life but a philosophy of exploration. Values and relationships are prioritised over rigid plans or outcomes.

For more definitions of words in the Grokkist vocabulary, visit the glossary page.

Which word is your favourite?

Quoting the Quoted

Here are some quotations from people who featured in my interview with Danu Poyner...

Carl Jung (Pyschologist and psychiatrist)
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

Gloria Steinem (American feminist, journalist and social and political activist):
“Ordinary people are smart and smart people are ordinary.”

Hannah Arendt (Political theorist, philosopher and feminist thinker):
“Where certainty ceases, thinking begins.”

Mark Twain (Author and Humourist):
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

Buckminster Fuller (Architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher and futurist):
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

More Information - Explore and Discover

To explore more of the world of the grokkist, visit the Grokkist website. You are encouraged to visit the website in the spirit of a Grokkist, and discover what parts of the site take your curiosity the most.

Questions for Individual Reflection or for Group Discussion

Q. Based on what Danu has said, do you see yourself as a grokkist - and why?

Q. What resonates, if anything, most with you about the way of the grokkist?

Q. What questions does this interview and article raise for you?

Q. Based on Danu’s definition of a grokkist, do you sense you know somebody you would now think of as a grokkist?

Q. Is there a core area (or more than one area) of the Grokkist community that excites or inspires you to want to discover more or explore further? Is it the Network? The Press? The Academy and courses? Or Groksmithing?

Q. Was there anything ‘missing’ for you in this piece?

Q. What, if anything, might you do next after reading this article (for example, research something, do more reading around the topic, or visit the Grokkist website)?

This article is part one of two. In Part 2, we look at the story behind how Grokkist began and developed, explore the Red Thread and discover what the future holds for the community and its founder, Danu.

Gary Spinks is a copywriter, storyteller and journalist. Beyond Scotland covers the interconnected themes of sustainability, community (including Citizens and Transition Town projects) and Responsible Tourism & Travel.