Keeping Your Connections Alive

Today I feel fantastic.

I used to be quite the socialite and quite the networker however, with the demands of work increasing and with the extra demands in my personal life due to being a father, I found myself meeting friends and networking less and less. And despite the growing presence of online social networks in my life I think it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I’ve been living in a social desert.

My family spent Christmas and New Years in Manhattan and while there we made efforts to reconnect with friends, some of whom I haven’t seen in 10 years! This experience inspired me to take a more proactive role in keeping my personal connections alive by meeting face to face with friends. The great thing is that it is actually working! I’m inspired, motivated, and most of all socially fulfilled. We’ve had dinner parties at friends’ apartments, gone on trips to wine country, and I’ve even been able to sneak away to guys nights out and game industry networking events for the first time in what feels like a very long time.

This all came to a climax yesterday when I met a former Sega coworker for breakfast, a former Unity coworker for Lunch, an afternoon working session at the Retronyms, and then a networking event for game industry entrepreneurs in the evening where I bumped into a ton of old friends, some of whom I haven’t seen since 2007! It is a kind of high that just doesn’t happen for me through online interactions.

So, the moral of the story is: just like you need to carve out time in your life for physical exercise and meditation, you also need to MAKE the time to be with friends, family, and peers — it is part of the equation that makes life worth living. The other moral is: your friends’ lives have also become more demanding and — like you — they’re waiting for an invitation to do something. When both parties take a passive approach there will be no motion, so don’t wait; it is up to YOU to be the catalyst.

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