Why I Talk to Strangers and You Should Too
Remember when you were little and your parents told you not to talk to strangers?

Well recently I have been going out of my way to forget all of that and it has paid off in interesting ways.
What prompted this?
Part of the reason I’ve been having more random conversations is that I have been taking the advice of Lindsey Pollack whose career search book I’m reading. Lindsey suggests getting speaking about your search with whoever you meet and also getting in the habit of introducing yourself more. I also had a great conversation yesterday with Jocelyn Harmon and we reflected that we are trying to have more faith in strangers. We observed that the web savvy crowd is generally less suspicious of the intentions of strangers and willing to learn and accept resources from them.
Things better and funnier than candy that I’ve gotten from talking to strangers
I had a nice conversation with a woman on the subway who is in business school. She had some good advice for me and when we got off together she gave me her card and wished me luck.
On the street in Manhattan a man dressed in a full batman costume walked by me on the street and gave me a full pat on the back as he passed by saying “Laila tov” (goodnight in Hebrew). Not something I was expecting! (ok this one’s just funny)
Meeting with Jocelyn Harmon yesterday. Jocelyn isn’t really a stranger since I have been reading her blog for a while and I read about her work on Beth Kanter’s blog, but I did call her out of the blue. I found her cell phone number posted on one of her online outposts and decided to connect. A less web oriented person might have been thrown by someone reaching out on the spur of the moment like that. Meanwhile, we had a great discussion and I really enjoyed talking with her.
Sitting in Starbucks the other evening I joined a conversation that three guys were having at a neighboring table about class and race. Turns out they are participating in a summer service internship program I had never heard of. Joel gave me his card and has since connected me with someone at a prominent DC nonprofit focused PR agency.
Traipsing around DC with a friend looking for a restaurant yesterday we were about to use google text to get directions, but then I though better of it and asked a person passing on the street if they knew the area well. DC Stranger beats Google text FTW!
Anyone else have great stories of people you’ve just up and introduced yourself to or struck up a conversation with? Have you found it as worthwhile as I have?
photo by dariuszka
Meshuga Links
FCC Says BitTorrent Throttling Illegal, EFF Releases Tool for You To Test Your ISP For It - ReadWriteWeb
PitchEngine Launches- I Might Have a Plan | chrisbrogan.com
Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America
Persistence and the Role of Brick Walls
If you haven’t seen Randy Pausch’s last lecture on achieving your childhood dreams that has been floating around the Internet yet, watch it now. I’ll wait.
What an awesome and insightful human being. Seriously if you haven’t seen it it is worth the hour long investment if only to see hear his wry jokes and see him pull off those one-handed push ups.
One of the most insightful things I learned from Randy is the role of brick walls.
“Brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”
What a great attitude. I talked about something similar in my first MeshugAvi Blog post ever. There is no doubt in my mind that Tal Ben-Shahar would have shown a clip of Randy talking about this idea in class for that session. He’s just nailed the right attitude to achieving your dreams on the head and for me it ties in nicely to my earlier thoughts on massive action.
Another quote of Randy’s that gets at the idea of embracing the suck during those times when the needed work isn’t to your liking:
“Don’t bail; the best gold is at the bottom of barrels of crap.”
So what are the brick walls in your life? How are you going to throw yourself over them or tear them down? What helps aside from massive action?
photo by viZZZual.com
Meshuga Links
Global Warming Hates Kittens
FriendFeed Greasemonkey Scripts Round Two. Smaller Tabs, More Choices
Get Your Hustle On: Accomplish Anything with Massive Action
I’ve been walking around for a few days now with the phrase “massive action” in my head. I knew that I had read it somewhere as a productivity and motivation hack/mantra, but couldn’t place it. Finally, I turned to google, well the search bar of all my feeds in google reader to be precise, and found that I had come across it in an awesome post on Rock Your Day, a productivity blog from Dave Navarro. I have started to think of this idea of taking massive action to accomplish a goal with the word “hustle”.
Dave’s Pillow Test
One of Dave’s central points is that Massive Action is the proper response to the question
How do I want to feel when I put my head on my pillow tonight?
After a day when I have really worked my butt off I feel accomplished, energized, and confident that my goals are in reach. That’s what massive action can offer.
Consistency
The hardest thing about hustling for massive action is staying consistent. It helps to take things one step at time. Chunking work into smaller pieces can make a project a lot less scary. A good tip for chunking is too tell yourself that you are going to spend a set amount of time doing consistent work- 5 to 10 minutes at most. Set a timer if you want, but force yourself to focus for the time you alot. The idea of this habit is to stretch the length of time you can focus with practice. Eventually you’ll find you want to work longer and, shock of shocks, that you are actually engrossed in the work.
If the work required to move towards your goal is unpleasant, boring, or as a good friend of mine would say, “isn’t to your taste”, then embrace the suck! Dig in, build a rhythm, and get your hands dirty, whatever you do don’t stop and don’t sit idle.
Get YOUR Hustle On!
My main goal right now and the project that I’ve been hustling for the most is networking and searching for my first job. I want to work in marketing, public relations, or community management and apply my hustle and experience at an awesome company or nonprofit organization.
On Monday explore the advantages of baby steps and small actions. Until then…
What are you doing with your hustle? What’s your biggest project or goal right now, or if it’s intimidating to specify the most important, then identify any goal. Share what your hustling for along with a tip or trick you use to stay on target in the comments!
Facebook Birthdays in Google Calendar with fbCal
Birthdays are one of my favorite Facebook features. I love keeping up with people and being able to wish them well. If you are like me though, you find yourself on gmail, google calendar, and google reader more than on Facebook, and the list of upcoming celebrations on your Facebook homepage doesn’t always cut it.
Reason to Celebrate
Never fear my dears! All that awesome birthday data that was once stuck in Facebook can now be liberated for your use elsewhere. fbCal, a very handy web tool, can help you get your hands on birthdays and Facebook events.
Once you give the application permission to access your Facebook data, there are a number of options.
- Subscribe to your birthdays calendar through Outlook or another desktop calendar application
- Cut and paste the calendar url. In google calendar click the Add button above the list of your calendars and choose “Add by URL”. Then paste the url from fbCal into the box marked “Public Calendar Address:” and click add.
- Download a copy of the .ics calendar file to your computer to upload to a service of your choice or on google calendar choose “Import Calendar”.
What do you think? Is fbCal even worth it, or are you finding yourself on Facebook anyway these days? What other yummy data would you like to get out of your account?
Meshuga Links
Do You Stand For Something?: Can Money Buy Happiness?
Blogging Procrastination, Perfection, and Permission to be Human
While blogging I often feel that I want a post to be just right. This has even led me to put off posting something for so long that the content is no longer relevant and I’m forced to abandon the post entirely. Time is precious and timing important so why do I waste so much time over thinking?

Deadlines
I got thinking about this again from a post by Tim Ferris on profitability. In his 11th tenet he discusses the importance of deadlines -
“11. Deadlines over Details - Test Reliability Before Capability:
Skills are overrated. Perfect products delivered past deadline kill companies faster than decent products delivered on-time. Test some one’s ability to deliver on a specific and tight deadline before hiring them based on a dazzling portfolio. Products can be fixed as long as you have cash-flow, and bugs are forgiven, but missing deadlines is often fatal. Calvin Coolidge once said that nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent; I would add that the second most common is smart people who think their IQ or resume justifies delivering late.”
His thinking about products informs my sentiment about deadlines in blogging. I also see a tie in to the Positive Psychology principle of the permission to be human.
Mistakes and Risk
Part of the reason many people are reluctant to hit the publish button is that we are afraid of making mistakes. But mistakes are part of learning! As J.K. Rowling said at my commencement earlier this month, if you aren’t making mistakes, you probably aren’t taking enough risks. Michele Martin, a nonprofit blogger I look up to, posted recently about her desire to take more risk in her professional life. Coincidentally she links to a different but also relevant post by Tim Ferris about big goals.
In any case I have realized that I want to be less of a perfectionist in my blogging and give myself permission to make mistakes. My goal has been to become consistent in my posting and I will never achieve that regularity if I rethink every step I take. Have you noticed yourself setting the bar at perfection or avoiding risk at the expense of growth? In what way? Any advice on how to avoid this trap?
photo by fdecomite
Marine Debris and the Incredible Garbage Patch
This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine features a worthwhile article about plastic in the oceans today. The problem is especially alarming in the North Pacific where The North Pacific Gyre, one of five naturally occurring ocean Gyres in the world, causes plastic to accumulate at high concentrations as it rotates in the
North Pacific.
Differing Approaches
The article highlights a number of approaches being taken in the environmental community to respond to the crisis.
The mission of the International Coastal Cleanup, an annual project to clean beaches across the world, is focused on raising awareness of the problem by educating volunteers. Other organizations, like GoAK which recently completed a months long project to clean the shore of Alaska’s Gore Point, aim to begin the immense work of actually cleaning up the plastic piece by piece.
Charles Moore, who’s work is also discussed in the article, has been conducting research in the famed “Garbage Patch” reported to be the size of Texas at the heart of the Gyre. I discovered a 12 part video series project that he captained recently along with a professor from the University of Missouri in a post from Social Butterfly.
Also check out this embedded video of some of Moore’s work.
All of this has me thinking much more seriously about where the stuff we throw out winds up. Most of that plastic comes from cities dumping their trash directly into the ocean rather than individuals tossing things overboard from ships and piers. The city of Los Angeles is considering a plan to stop all dumping by the year 2016! That’s great, but what does that mean about what we’re dumping now? We don’t know what happens to our trash. It’s burned, buried, and dumped who knows where, but it still has a consequence somewhere.
Are you blown away as much as I am? Does it make you want to recycle more? Start using permanent bottles and tap water more? I’m curious what people think so do share in the comments.


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