the idea: meet people by casually eavesdropping your way into conversations

I went to my first TEDx event today and it was, in a word, fantastic.  In fact, it’s hard to know what else to say…

I’ll start with the people I met, since that’s my idea for today.  Despite, or perhaps because, I am overly gregarious a good amount of the time, sometimes I feel incredibly introverted.  It didn’t happen quite as much when I was younger, back then I would say and wear whatever I wanted.  But as I grow older and more self-aware, I find that my courageous self-confidence is not always what it used to be.

Today I wasn’t sure which way I would fall.  I was at TED, which was amazing, but I was there alone, which was daunting.  In the end, I said what the hell.  I decided to sidle up to conversations that I thought looked interesting, or speakers that I hoped I could speak to, and when they noticed me I just said “Don’t mind me, I’m just eavesdropping.”  And because it was a friendly group of passionate people, that was an immediate acceptance into any conversation.

Through this approach I met and spoke with the three incredible people in today’s photo and, hopefully, managed to rope them into the Somerville Salon.  I also met a neurobiologist who is going to help me with the neuro-based invention in my current fiction novel, a salsa dancing masters student who is organizing her own TEDx event, and another young non-fiction author.  I walked away not only with new ideas, but also with a renewed belief of my old ideas (much needed after I did my exit counseling for student loans last night).

In short: for future reference, anyway who told you that eavesdropping was bad obviously just wasn’t eavesdropping on the right people.