I re-discovered Meetup.com a couple of weeks back, and I think I am onto something, lol. In today’s interconnected world, where one is on Facebook and Whatsapp and LinkedIn and Gmail (and I can’t even keep track of all the other cool tools out there) all the time, it seemed that I was content with all the tools I used.
Incorrect. Meetup and with it, a long lost art of meeting new people offline (pun intended, of course) came back to me. I used to meet a lot of new people while I was at Dexter, but the last 2-3 years - not so much, truthfully.
So when I logged back to Meetup, it was crazy. All of a sudden, I knew of a 100+ meetups going on in a radius of 50 miles from my location. Long live GPS and Meetup. I signed up for 3, and actually ended up going to 2 over the last 2 weeks.
The first one being - Startup India - held at Vamaship’s office - Vamaship is a managed logistics services startup and you can read about it more at www.vamaship.com . The talk was good and interesting. They seem to be in a good space, and I wish them all the luck.
But the discussions after the talk were awesome. Think back to the excitement you feel when you meet complete strangers and it turns out that these guys think the same. I had a variety of discussions with
- their HR head Mandar, on building culture
- their non-tech founder Bhavik, on his family business
- their tech founder Rohit, on his journey
- their tech lead Allwyn and Rohit, on their technology stack, new tools and platforms and Scrum
- their BD lead Arvind, on his background, and his switch from logistics to finance and back to logistics
Actually, the fact that you need to go out and meet new people is not exactly rocket science. But sometimes you get in the rut of everyday life, and choose to be lazy about this. I can confidently say that I was (lazy), and I have definitely woken up to the fact that this will not do. So I am taking another resolution (again, this is not a New Year resolution, haha) to attend at least 1 interesting meetup every week.
So, these are my OKRs for the 1st quarter and this year.
Objectives:
- Build your personal blog so that there is a record of your existence for your children and grandchildren :)
- Meet new people to learn from them, and hopefully give back knowledge
Key Results:
- Write 4 blog posts every month
- Attend 4 meetup events every month
Ok, so I have got my OKRs out of the way.
Actually, the single biggest thing that dawned on me after attending this Meetup, was that I was meeting the same people on weekdays and weekends, thereby having more or less the same worldview as of the group. I don’t mean for a second, that my existing group of friends, colleagues and acquaintances don’t have an exciting point of view. The point is about the kind of diverse points of views you want to be having, and the simple act of attending a Meetup accomplishes that.
The startup movement is surely up and running, and I got to see people of various professions, from companies of varying sizes. Now some of them were complete newbies, others more senior - but a common vein was that everybody wanted to learn from others.
This is a fascinating time to be in. Surely.
The other Meetup I went to was held yesterday. This one was titled - “The Art of Storytelling” by Satish Purohit and was held at 91Springboard, a co-working space for well, anybody. The venue was nice, although a bit difficult to locate.
The session itself was interesting. Mr. Purohit is a newspaper writer, and gave good tips on structuring a business’ story. The crowd was interesting, and had more diversity compared to the previous one - I think, it was due to the nature of the talk. Couple of animation guys, a film maker, a theatre artist, a HR consultant, communication coaches…
Interesting discussions here too - one person voiced the fact that he and his partner had started a business and slowly lost their way, because they didn’t have a clear purpose to begin with - their story was not clear to themselves, and they were looking to start afresh.
That startingly frank acceptance was heartwarming. The acknowledgement that you are wrong, but you wish to correct yourselves, is necessary to be successful. Everyone does something wrong, it takes courage to accept it and start anew. I wish the best of luck to those guys.
After reaching home, I was reflecting on the discussions - and I realized, everyone has a story to tell. Don’t let anyone fool you on that. Everyone, including yours truly, has a story to tell. In our hearts, it is a compelling story. But we are also the ones who try to suppress our stories, in the face of all the problems that we are faced with in everyday life.
But your whole purpose on Earth is to realise your story. So get going, meet new people, get your story right…because there is nothing else worth achieving than telling your story right.
“Aur picture toh abhi baaki hai dost…” (and the film still hasn’t ended, friend…)
Get out the building, and meet new people!
P.S. Steve Blank was the one who originally said - “Get out of the building” - He meant it for startups to get out and meet their customers (as opposed to sitting in a cubicle and dreaming up the product). I have just taken some creative liberty.
P.P.S. If Elon Musk’s dream comes true, please replace “your whole purpose on Earth…” with “your whole purpose on Earth and Mars…”
No pun intended.