Two weeks ago, I met my new friend, sales guru and best selling author, Jill Konrath, at the San Francisco airport and Ubered to my place. Before long, we were craving some goodies so decided to hop in my car and head to the nearest grocery store. The next thing I knew, I ran over her foot! Nice work huh? Running over your mentor’s foot? Then I wrote this article about it.
I’m not usually giddy about meeting people, but if you had asked me sixteen months ago if I could meet anyone, dead or alive, who it would be, I’d have said Michelle Obama, Stephen King, and Jill Konrath. We met at the National Speakers Association conference in 2016. Two hours passed and we found ourselves drinking wine, laughing hysterically, and planning our next rendezvous.
As I was boarding a flight from Kauai to Maui, a small Chinese boy came up from behind me squealing and shaking with delight. He pointed at my carry-on, reached in with his little hand and removed a bottle of pills. His parents were apologetic and embarrassed. As it turned out, the container he clutched was a bottle of Chinese herbs, complete with recognizable Mandarin writing. It seems as though he had zeroed in on something familiar and comforting from China.
The last decade has been a gold rush of searching and gathering information on the Internet. Videos, news, personal information, and opinions are so prolific that the next decade will likely be more about filtering information than acquiring it. Consider Google Alerts, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Pinterest, Instagram and You Tube. These tools are all methods of consolidating massive amounts of information into tiny bites that can hold our attention. Suddenly what we don’t pay attention to has become more important than what we do pay attention to.
