Wanted to share my keynote from last week’s A-Ha! Social Media Summit. My marching orders for this were:

So, just to set the stage – this is not going to be about lean startup or agile development how to do some cool hack. It’s just me, tellin’ my story and sharing what I believe: that you should forget what others think of success and instead, do the crazy thing and stray off that path of success in order to follow your own passions. Because I believe that when you do that, you’re gonna rock it.

I started with a TED-style 15 minute talk:

Followed by an exercise to help everyone discover their own path that involved lots of 3×5 cards, a little creativity and – I hope – some awesome connecting with others.

You can find the full slide deck here: Follow Your Own Path.

I always used to loathe grocery shopping. But then at some unknowable point, I actually started kind of enjoying it. Finding it a bit of an adventure, even.

And I don’t know which was the cause of which but my grocery store’s manager regularly comments on how he loves seeing me in there with my list, crossing off items. How refreshing it is so see someone in there who’s happy as opposed to all the angry, stressed out shoppers they get.

Funny, because I always thought I was one of those angry, stressed out grocery shoppers. But clearly no more.

Now I’m really embarrassed to admit it, but if I’m truly honest with myself then I have to admit I’ve got some stereotypes around people who work at grocery stores.

So last night, when I run into the manager and he mentions that he’s currently reading 3 different books, I guess I probably already have an idea in my head of what types of books he’s reading. And so, when he tells me that one’s on Relativity, one’s on String Theory, and the 3rd is on Time Travel – I’m just kind of standing there, gawking.

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In 1935, Bill Wilson – an alcoholic whose doctor had given him 6 months to live if he didn’t quit drinking – had a vision. His vision was that while experts were ineffective in curing alcoholism, the addicts themselves were the keys to helping one another overcome the disease. And with that, Alcoholics Anonymous was born. Today, they help over 2 million members and have been the model for numerous Anonymous addiction recovery groups.

In the 1980’s, Richard Stallman’s fierce beliefs in freedom and in the importance of free software (free as in free speech) towards securing the future of a free society led him to create the Free Software Foundation. FSF became the impetus behind the open source movement. Today, developers around the world freely volunteer their time to develop the open source software that tens of millions of us use every day.

In 2000, Jimmy Wales decided to launch a free online encyclopedia for children whose parents couldn’t afford their own. After a tedious process that produced a mere 24 articles, the encyclopedia’s editor – Larry Sanger – introduced wiki technology. That decision led to the 100% user generated encyclopedia that ultimately cost Larry his job. Today, Wikipedia is the world’s largest reference site with over 3.7 million articles. It attracts over 400 million unique visitors every month.

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Over 130 people – half techies, half business folks – converged on Microsoft NERD this weekend to start their own companies, have some fun & make some noise.

Friday night, 50 of them stood up and pitched their ideas in quick 60 second spots, interrupted only for a quick game of multiplayer rock-paper-scissors.

Pitches ran the gamut from gamifying entrepreneurship to games to solve the world’s biggest problems. From help with dating to help finding babysitters. Investing help through forecasting small company returns to a game that lets you invest in twitter hashtags.

One pitched a joke “I’m going to create a double rainbow – I mean, a Double Game Layer around the world!”. Some just sounded like it – DidWeShag.com for sharing those vital date details. And a guy named Sting pitched something about the Police (PayYourTicketsOnline.com).

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