World Domination Summit 2016 Recap

​We're on our way home from our first World Domination Summit, finally having time to take a few breaths and start downloading everything we learned. Right now our brains are like a browser window with several tabs open for each day. We both have stacks of business cards, each one representing a connection with someone we want to get to know. We have pages of notes to review. We have lists of books and articles to read. That's just the external stuff. We've both also come to some realizations about our shared, ordinary home life. We each have a list of actions to take, starting when we walk in the door. We would never have guessed that one five-day event could affect us this much.

The first thing we're both doing is revamping our Facebook accounts. Neither of us has logged on in months, and we've realized that this is not Facebook's fault. It's all about what we see and read, and what we hide and don't see. There is no requirement that a Facebook feed needs to be full of belligerent threads about politics. There's no need to maintain relations with acquaintances we barely know (or haven't met in person) who are consistently obnoxious and rude to our other friends. On the positive side, we have access to online groups of people who both share our interests and comport themselves pleasantly. There are also the couple of dozen actual friends we've been neglecting. (Sorry, guys). Once the decision is made, the snip-and-clip, depraved-or-saved processing is fairly quick.

Coupled with this is the mechanical process of sending brief notes to our new friends, reminding them of who we are, how we met, and what we talked about. Some of these are just offers of support and connection. Some will be following up about projects. I can honestly say that several people I met have projects going that interest me slightly more than my own projects! I have an emotional stake in whether they get off the ground. There are a few faces I already miss.

I was walking down the stairs, talking to a sweet girl about social isolation, when I stumbled and started falling forward. It was a spiral staircase, and there's no telling how far I would have tumbled down the steps. I flailed. Out of nowhere, a hand appeared and grabbed my wrist. A gentleman walking up the stairs a few steps ahead of me had seen me and instinctively reached out. "You saved me!" I told him. That's when reality becomes a metaphor. We can trust one another. Almost anyone will go to personal physical risk to help someone else out of trouble, even a complete stranger, and we do it just as quickly as we would snatch our hands off a hot stove. It takes a bit more to go to an emotional risk, but we still do it.

The second thing we're doing is that we're upgrading our Saturday Status Meeting. Now the status will be the first half (or less), and then we'll move on to a new planning phase. During the status update, we make decisions about our finances, travel, and other bureaucratic aspects of our household. This has become fairly routine, as we've learned to trust the process and each other. The planning phase will be mainly voicing our upcoming tasks out loud, keeping each other informed and possibly asking for advice. This will kick in on Saturday. As soon as I thought of it, we both absorbed it as an obvious thing to do.

After this, we have a stack of notes to review, homework to complete, videos to watch, and research to do about some of the keynote speakers who seized our attention the most. The list of tasks toward our projects is going to get longer. It's so important to remind ourselves of the commitments we made, as they are now layered under hours of additional information, conversations, speculations, and anticipations.

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