Adult Conversation is Way Cheaper Than Therapy

Last night I threw together an informal meeting of friends I’ve met via Twitter, blogging, & local tech events. We held our “Tweetup” at a great pizza place in the far west suburbs of Chicago.

I could go on and on about how important (and fun!) it is to take online relationships offline, but suffice it to say I attribute a big part of my success to getting out and meeting people in person.

It’s also incredibly important to get out of the house when you work at home – it sounds counterintuitive, but it’s so true. I’ve been reading more and more lately about entrepreneurs who worked at home and gave it up because they missed interacting with a team – they got lonely. Personally, I can’t afford to let myself get to that point anymore – I mean, how exactly could I run a blog network for people who work at home from an outside office? Not exactly congruent.

Anyway, it’s easy to pull events like this together – especially if you do them in non-busy hours when restaurants or other meeting locations are eager to bend over backwards to get your business. I’m no event planner either – here’s my brain-dead list of what I did to pull our Tweetup together:

1. Emailed everyone I knew in the area and figured out a date that would work for our core group
2. Found a restaurant. Sanfratello’s (who didn’t do anything for this plug and have my most favorite pizza on the planet) were awesome, they didn’t require a deposit, didn’t care that I didn’t know how many people would show up, and gave us our own room as well as group pricing. I didn’t even know I booked a place that had free WIFI and half-price wine on Thursdays – how lucky could I get?!
3. Spread the word on Twitter, asked friends to retweet and spread the word
4. Hunted down some people on TwitterLocal.net and sent them tweets to invite them
5. Jim added the event to Upcoming
6. Showed up
7. Hung out with Brad, Jim, Kim, Jeff, Barbara, Derek, Carolyn, Jerome, and Karen
8. I warned you this was brain-dead simple, right?!

By the way, if you’re in the Chicago area and missed our meeting, we’ll be doing them quarterly. Colonel Tribune from the Chicago Tribune is also having one next week in Chicago.

Our Tweetup was a BLAST. I highly recommend it. Someone asked me in an interview recently why I thought it was important to go hang out with people offline like this. I told them that adult conversation is way cheaper than therapy.

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3. How to Be in the Right Place at the Right Time