What it’s Like to Organize a Choose Yourself Meetup
I was nervous. Twenty people were there and I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to say. I had some notes that had an outline of what I would say, and I had gone over them again and again, but I was still scared. I would have rather been reading a speech.
I started the meetup with what I had in my notes, and realized that I was mostly just reading the outline. Maybe I sounded boring, so I apologized for ‘reading off my notes too much’ and went on with the meetup.
The meet up I had organized was a ‘Choose Yourself’ Meet Up for San Diego. The group is mainly for people who have read the book, ‘Choose Yourself’ by James Altucher and are inspired by the daily practice of trying to improve yourself 1% a day mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. It’s also a group for anyone who wants to live life on their terms, be an entrepreneur, or just do things differently than the norm. The group is about people getting together and sharing ideas.
The mental part of the daily practice is to come up with 10 ideas a day, while the emotional part is to surround yourself with people who support and inspire you, not people who bring you down.
This gathering is a huge boost to the emotional part of the daily practice. The people we encounter in our lives know nothing about our 10 ideas a day or the daily practice, and it feels good to surround yourself with people who are into the same thing.
The way I became the meetup organizer was through Facebook. I’m all about ‘Choose Yourself’ and the daily practice, so when I heard there was a Facebook group of people who are also into it, I joined immediately. I started participating when the group was still budding and it had less than 200 members. Now, there are over 2,000.
Through the group, I made contact with Aaron Brabham, who was the co-host of a podcast with James Altucher a few months back, so I knew who he was. He had just moved to San Diego and was looking to form a Choose Yourself Meet Up here. I commented on a post he wrote about it, and we started exchanging ideas about how to grow the group. I told him I would do anything I can to help out.
The conversation with Aaron fizzled out over a few weeks. I checked my meetup.com messages one day to see that I had a message from him asking me if I could take over the group because he was too busy with his new podcast to do it. My heart jumped a little bit because I knew it might be hard and would involve speaking in front of a bunch of people I don’t know, but I went for it. How could I pass up an opportunity like that?
I took over the meetup page from Aaron and set a date for the first meetup. The things I was worried about were where to host the meetup and how to get more people to go. I didn’t want to spend money on a venue because I wanted it to be free for the members. A cafe in my neighborhood with a very nice back patio and a long table that can seat up to 25 was available. They let me do it for free.
I had about 25 people in the meetup group and around eight people marked as ‘attending’ for a few weeks straight. Those were numbers I was happy with at the time. We had enough room for 25 in case everybody decided to go at the last minute, and I wasn’t afraid of speaking in front of eight people. Eight is a number of strangers that I can handle.
Next came the ‘what do you do at a Choose Yourself meetup?’ question. That was hard for me to answer, so I looked at other Choose Yourself meetup pages in other cities to see what their meeting schedules looked like. I decided that I didn’t want to have it be too organized, so I wrote three questions that everybody had to answer in front of the group. We would go around the circle answering the questions individually, and then people in the group could give feedback or ideas to each person after they talked.
After the natural networking activity I planned, there was no planned activity. However, if nobody was talking and it was awkward, I had an idea sharing activity up my sleeve.
The week before the meetup, James Altucher posted about the meetups and the meetup group exploded. I went from 25 to 65 members in the group, and up to 22 people attending the meetup from eight. That made me scared. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that, I had planned on eight people but got 22. Would my activities work with 22? I decided I would have to push forward with what I had. I was busy with work that week and didn’t have time to change anything.
Come meet up day, I’m nervous, I’m excited, I gave my spiel, and it was time for the group members to start sharing one at a time around the circle. I thought this would take maybe 30–45 minutes for that part of the meetup and then we would move on to the networking. I was wrong. It took two hours. People love to talk about themselves, and I gave them the stage.
Even though it sounds bad that my one activity took two hours and we didn’t get to do much else, it was really great. My questions were: How are you choosing yourself? What changes in your life has the daily practice brought? Where is choosing yourself going to take you? These questions made people really open up and share what they are most passionate about in life.
We had people from all walks of life open up. Some of the group members included a man from Kenya, a hydroponics podcaster, a tech blogger, a life coach in training, a peak productivity coach, a painter, a mustard maker, people who used to work in the corporate and the government worlds, some who still do, and more.
The one thing that everyone had in common is that they wanted to share their ideas and their story with the group. They wanted to expose their ‘Choose Yourself’ persona to a group of like-minded people that would accept that persona and give them ideas to grow. Listening to everyone talk, giving them ideas, and talking about my own journey was incredibly cathartic to me and I could tell everyone in the group felt the same way. We don’t get to be around other ‘Choose Yourselfers’ in our daily lives as much, and needed to connect with the group to let that side of ourselves open up and grow.
My one regret is that we didn’t have as much time as I wanted to network. I let people talk for as long as they wanted to at the beginning, but realized(thanks to the help of another person in the group) that people were talking for a very long time and at this rate people at the end of the table wouldn’t get a chance. I had to limit time to 5 minutes a person towards the end, which I felt bad about, but everyone was okay with it.
Next time it will have to be more organized. There will have to be a time limit on the round table discussion, and someone will have to play the ‘moderator’ role and make sure no one talks for too long. Then there will have to be a networking activity that is scheduled in, so that people can talk freely, and not just one at a time around a table. Also, because the group has grown so much, we will need a bigger venue.
There are a lot of challenges, so I decided that I should not plan the next meet up alone. I recruited two people who seemed very enthusiastic and willing to help plan the next one with me. We are going to sit down for an hour and plan out an even more awesome meetup. I’m excited to share ideas with other people to make it a better meetup, because sharing ideas is what this meetup is all about.
It was a scary but enlightening experience. I learned a whole lot about planning and people. I’m very grateful that I had the opportunity and made it happen. The group will only grow and get better from here.
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