Networking 101: HOW Conference Adventure #1

So I arrive in Atlanta alone – feeling a little stranded, but I had goals for the evening:

1. Get fresh, non-airplane contaminated, clothing on
2. Eat a breath mint
3. Catch the bus to the HOW Networking Kickoff and Keynote and
4. Track down an old roommate and dear friend, Whitney Pratt

So I accomplish goals 1 – 3 and arrive at the event amongst what must have been 30 or so busloads of people (holy cow was there a lot of people!). I grab my cellphone and call Whitney. “Where ya at?” She says, “I’m at the top of the escalator. With a huge peanut in my hand.” I’m like, “huh?”. I get to the top of the escalator, and sure enough there she is standing there with a paper peanut in her hand – imagine a size 16 shoe. Anyhow, there were people handing these peanuts out as a part of a networking game created by a company called, “The Creative Group” who serves as a recruitment company of sorts for creatives. Seems appropriate. Seems challenging. Could be fun?…

The game kinda goes like this: Find someone who fits the profile from the list provided on the peanut, have them sign your nut next to the profile they fit and trade business cards. Seems easy, right? Well, imagine walking up to a total stranger and asking them, “Can you twist your tongue into the shape of a W?” or how about asking them to sing, “Georgia On My Mind” or “Do you have a peanut allergy”? You have to admit, you have to be just a little ‘nuts’ to do it. However, the incentive was an opportunity to submit your completed peanut in a raffle and win a prize, so all (okay, most) of us introverts sucked it up and got to networking.

Being that my secondary goal while attending the HOW conference was to supplement my creative processes by inventing adventures for myself, this got me to thinking… which can be dangerous. Before long, I was using a collected business card to prank call a designer with Texas Instruments, leaving vague messages referring to ‘nuts’ and ‘peanut versus plain m&ms’ on his office phone. Not to mention the ‘nutty’ prank calls I encouraged others to leave on his voicemail as well. Funny thing is, he was often not standing too far away while this was all happening.

Now, most of your might be fooled by my hidden talent to parade around like an extrovert, however, I’m pure introvert, so networking is a very high anxiety and exhausting experience for me. With that, I walked over to the drink line with my peanut and free drink card in hand to refresh myself (the theme for the conference this year was “Refresh”) and to muster up some extra courage when I happened upon Valencia alumnus, Kevin Scarbrough. This is an important encounter you will read about in a bit.

So the peanut game has been conquered and and I’ve met a lot of new people from all over the world, but now it’s time to get moving with the herd to the next event – the opening keynote speaker and kickoff to the conference. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting the speaker to be this good, but Karen Salmansohn was hysterical! Whitney and I were laughing so hard we were crying throughout most of her inspirational speech adapted from the various kernels of advice given in her books including, “Ballsy: 99 Ways to Grow a Bigger Pair and Score Extreme Business Success”.

Now, because this is getting long (and because I probably need to keep this clean), I won’t go into the details of her speech however, the adventure isn’t quite over yet. I’m sitting there crying in hysterics and then it dawns on me… Ballsy… Growing a Bigger Pair… large peanuts… and although this was an unintentional relationship between the oversized nuts we all had in our hands and being ‘ballsy’, I just couldn’t resist the temptation to request Karen autograph my nuts at the end of her presentation.

Don’t believe me? Compliments of Valencia grad, Kevin Scarbrough, you can purchase them on ebay right now. The bidding starts at $0.01! Going once… going twice…