As If We Needed Further Proof That I’m An Extrovert

Some people get runner’s high. I get "meeting high."

About six weeks ago, we had a two-week-long meeting at work with about three dozen people from our worldwide sites to hash out plans for upcoming projects. Most nights I came home completely unable to focus, not because I was tired, but because I was so energized by the things we’d talked about that I couldn’t pull myself back out of my own head. I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t really do anything except follow the train of thought we’d been talking about all day. "This is weird," I thought. But then we were done, and I didn’t think about it again.

Last week, it happened again. I spent several hours on Tuesday talking with different groups of people about how to tackle some issues we’re having. We generated some insights about we might do things differently and we decided on a few things to try, with the result that I was optimistic about both what we were doing to do and my role in it. And I came out the last conversation buzzing, just like I had after every day of that two-week summit.

I think the reason I love working in larger teams is that while do I get energy from interacting with people, I get exponentially more by interacting with a larger number (and different combinations) of people. When I follow up a five-person planning session with a pair of one-on-ones to discuss the insights and plans from the first meeting, I’m on fire. Those ideas keep bouncing around and combining in different ways with the things the new people have said.1 One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed the LARPing2 I’ve done is that it has that snowball effect: Each person that I interact with gives me a kind of psychic momentum that I carry to the next person.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about Connectors (people who "link us up with the world... people with a special gift for bringing the world together"), Mavens ("people we rely upon to connect us with new information"), and Salesmen ("persuaders" or charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills) who are all critical to the spread of ideas. While I might like to see myself as an expert or a persuader, last week reaffirmed that I'm really a guy who likes to connect with people.

1 And yes, there’s all sorts of connections to both Group Genius and Flow here, but I’ve been kind of beating those to death lately.

2 That two-week summit came just after the brilliant time I had in Jess Heinig’s Dying Kingdoms LARP, in which I played a serious (though idealistic) political operator. The parallels between the two situations were amusingly strong.