Last updated on April 13th, 2021 at 11:45 pm
Tuesday night found me at an event due to the prompting of my friend, Tash Jefferies, and it was one of the most productive decisions I’d made so far this week!
Setting Up the Cool
To give some quick context, I’d originally met Tash at my DoomzDay birthday bash back in July, crossing paths with her again at her You… Unleashed! event back in August (but we’ll get to that next week). This time, she was at it again—this time with the strength of a team in Cool Connections Toronto—an event based around (and I say this verbatim) people “doing cool s**t” in Toronto and bringing them together to organically make connections that can help make them rather than break them while they try to realize their dreams.
But How Cool Was It?
I can usually tell how good a time I’ve had at an event by how hoarse my voice is afterward—and let me tell you, I was almost speechless at the end of the night (pun most definitely intended). I’ve been to my fair share of networking event, but this one was different. Run by a team of 12 passionate people from varying disciplines (and put together in the span of a mere three weeks), Cool Connections was more about making yourself vulnerable and leaving yourself open to the possibilities that come from truly connecting with people than it was about simply getting your name out or “being seen”, as is the case with numerous events that I’ve hit up these past couple of years.
One of my best conversations of the night happened to be with someone looking to make the foray into social media and do it right—she was considering her brand, her underlying message, where social media was going in the future and not just where it is today—it was refreshing to see others thinking about it the way I have for a good while now.
You can see a glimpse of what went down that night below or by visiting the gallery at my Flickr page.
But what comes next? Only time can tell—my hope is that the people who connected on October 2nd will continue to do so on October 3rd, 4th, 31st, December, 2013 and on. The connections that remain most important to you in a lifetime are not cultivated over a single night, and that’s the message that Cool Connections strove to put forward. The night was productive, but getting to meet someone is only the tip of the iceberg. To keep with the analogy—if you aren’t willing to dive deep to make the coolest connections possible, is it even worth staying stuck in the shallows?
