What's your next step?

At the closing party

​The second day of the World Domination Summit main stage event was at least equal to the first day. The standout presentation by Zach Anner stole the show. He's at least twice as funny as anyone else. His talk would have been amazing under any circumstances, but watching him carry on speaking with occasional tremors in his legs was deeply moving. Here's a guy with cerebral palsy, owning the audience from a wheelchair. It's impossible not to realize how few excuses we have for holding back on what we have to offer the world.

Zach took questions from the audience. One of them was, "What's the next step for you?" He replied, "Well, that would be my first step."

What can we do despite our limitations? What can we offer, even as our situations require us to receive?

We've met dozens of people during WDS, all of whom are burgeoning with ideas. We all have tremendous enthusiasm and high energy right now. Motivation tends to fade after an event like this, though, because the immediate physical presence of the community is gone. We go back to our accustomed environments and our tediously familiar routines. We start interacting with the usual naysayers in our lives again. The question becomes, What can we do to sustain any part of the energy we're feeling during the event? Can we find a way to create more of an inspiring, uplifting community in our home environments?

The incipient, nebulous, partially-formed dream projects in our collective cloud-brain are really only a small part of the story. The draw is that being immersed in a fairly large group of committed creative people generates a continuous stream of new ideas. It feels so easy to hear someone else's idea, add an observation, and watch the AHA! as it instantly shifts, pivots, or transmogrifies into something bigger and better. We can do so much more together than we can do alone.

There are, or could be, 'next steps' to bring many of these projects into fruition. We start to see how simple and straightforward it really can be. We feel a sense of obligation to the group to produce what we described. We've made public commitments, and others have been hooked and felt an emotional stake in whether they ever come to be. In that sense, the 'next steps' are about how we pull closer, how we give and take energy and ideas and support. What's the next step we can take to develop real-world bonds, to be part of each other's lives?

---