What the Heck is an Interesting People Fund
Whatsup guys! Blog Challenge Day 5 has arrived. Writing is a new habit for me and putting myself out there everyday is a novel activity, but for your sake I hope I'm getting the hang of it! Having a daily topic definitely helps and today's topic is Letting Go.
There are people out there who will believe in you and there are those who will bring you down, even people who are close to you. I touched on this a little already in my first post; Becoming a Free Spirit, but again there is a theory that you are the average of the 5 people you surround yourself with. This is tough for me because here I am trying to craft a lifestyle of freedom while everyone around me has resigned themselves to the American work-a-holic mindset. I believe in working smarter, not harder so I refuse to follow suit. However finding like-minded people has really been a challenge for me because I'm a little shy and introverted. Then I read a post on 99u by Sean Blanda called 10 Creative Rituals You Should Steal and I totally stole Ben Casnocha's idea of creating an "Interesting People Fund", only I'm trying to do it for free.
"The interesting people fund is a pre-commitment strategy: by pre-committing time and money to meeting interesting people, you increase the likelihood that you actually do it. Because many people know they ought to do it, and think about doing it, but when push comes to shove and it’s time to take an hour out of your day or spend $40 buying someone lunch — they punt on it".
My free strategy for meeting interesting people is Meetup.com. If you're not familiar with it, Meetup is a social networking tool that allows users to join or create interest-specific groups and events in areas all over the world. I went to my first meetup event this past March for a whitewater rafting trip with a local hiking group. I actually ended up going for a pretty scary swim through 2 class V rapids, but don't let that deter you- there are much tamer events to choose from. (I should also note that the rafting itself did cost money).
Since reading about the Interesting People Fund I've had a renewed interest in Meetup and this past Saturday I went to shoot Baltimore City with a Photography group. I got the awesome photo below out of it and met a really cool Italian guy named Riccardo. Now I'm making it a point to try attending a free event at least once a week and my next one is coming up tomorrow, where I hope to meet 3D Printing Techie DIYers and learn about their creations. Sounds cool right?
Besides letting go of certain people, another thing that can hold you back is bad habits. I actually just finished a book that touches on this called "Awaken the Giant Within" by Tony Robbins. The thing about bad habits is they're habits for a reason- they're hard to break. But Tony had really some helpful secrets. For one, we usually associate breaking a bad habit with some sort of pain or strife and we are naturally programmed to avoid pain, so bad habits have a way of sticking around. The trick is to re-associate pain with the bad habit itself, and think about all the good emotions that a better habit will bring. If you're an over-eater, the idea of passing up a cupcake seems unpleasant. The key is to train your brain to think about how unpleasant it will feel to keep gaining weight, and how good we will feel if we loose weight instead. The other trick is to replace the rewarding aspect of a bad habit with a similar reward. Eating a sweet but healthy snack of pineapple will reward you for passing up the cupcake and still appeal to your sweet tooth.
I've already started eating healthier and exercising more, so my next bad habit goes hand-in-hand with the interesting people topic. I have a tendency to be introverted but I know that meeting new people will serve me well in life and in business. I am challenging myself to cultivate a habit of being more social by talking to one new person every day through the rest of this blog challenge.
