Getting Ready for World Domination Summit!

It’s that time again! If you’re going to World Domination Summit this year, flag me down and say hi.

This is going to be our third year. As in previous years, I’m reporting back each morning rather than filling the time with auto-scheduled posts in advance. That’s because WDS is one of the most interesting things I do. Each day, it feels like so many insights are popping up and so many things are clicking into place, it’s all I can do to keep up.

This is one of the two times a year that my husband and I pause our normal routine and go for an aerial view of what we’re doing and how it’s working. New Year’s is the private, contemplative, wintry time, and WDS is the social, busy, summery time. At the New Year we’re asking: What are we doing that is working, and what are we doing that isn’t working? Editing and assessing are the mindset. At WDS, it’s more about: What are other people doing? What ideas and trends and innovations can we pick up? What is something radical we never would have thought of on our own? What can we spontaneously create or invent with new friends?

The people are the main reason to go to WDS. It seems like the more years someone has attended, the more it affects them. You can almost guess the moment you meet someone. Veteran attendees tend to be better listeners, more open and curious, caring, more likely to laugh and give out free hugs. They’re also more likely to be doing something daring and interesting, because, well, that’s what happens.

After our first WDS, my hubby and I came home and decided to work toward financial independence. We’re up to saving 40% of our income. We got rid of almost all our stuff, and now we live at the beach. It seems so simple in retrospect, and yet it had never crossed our minds that this was a possibility before.

After our second year, my hubby filed his first patent.

What’s going to be different after this, our third year? That remains to be seen.

So many things that we worried about the first year are just non-problems. What to wear? Pfft, who cares. How to strike up a conversation? Turn to the nearest person and ask what they’ve been up to. Where to eat lunch? Food carts, of course. When to sleep? After we go home again.

The only significant problem we have now is what to do about the FoMO of wanting to go to five meetups that are scheduled at the same time. The answer to that is that it truly doesn’t matter. Wherever you wind up, you find someone interesting to talk to and you pick up new insights. Chances are, you’ll wind up meeting someone who went to one of the events you “missed,” and they’ll tell you all about it.

We have a strategy of comparing schedules and deliberately going to separate events as often as possible. That means we get twice as much information and we meet twice as many people. Then we “download” as much as we can during meals and our bus ride home each night. Being married is almost like having a second brain...

...while being at WDS is like entering a hive mind consisting of hundreds of fascinating people. Any and all of them are primed for ideation, serendipity, and adventure. We all woke up one day and realized that life is so much more interesting once you decide to replace anxiety with curiosity, once you realize that other people are trustworthy.

This would be a great trip even without WDS, even if the weather winds up being cruddy. Portland in summer can break your heart. The river, the Rose Garden, the food, and of course Powell’s Books - how could you go wrong? I have the added benefit of being able to visit my family. We’re going in with high expectations, while also not attaching too much to demands that every moment will be perfect. That’s because each moment is already perfect, just as it is, and if some moments lead to more opportunity than others, that’s only because we recognize that the opportunity is there.