Although work and family life keeps me busy, I also find time to attend a few meetups each month. Last night I got together with the Portland Instagram meetup. I attend the Portland WordPress user group when I can. Mobile Portland often offers discussions about the rapidly-changing world of portable computing and connectivity.
The secret of these meetups is that I don’t go to learn about Instagram, WordPress, or mobile.
I go to meetups to meet interesting people.
Sure, those people might share a common interest in photography, or blogging, or tech, but I’m more interested in the people than the subject.
I’m not as interested in learning about someone’s Instagram photos as I am the fact that while we’re chatting, he invites me to a private office location with good views of the city. I’m not as much curious about some new function in the code of WordPress as I am about the person discussing it, because she probably has some insights that will help me grok something specific to my situation in the future.
It’s about people, not things.
Nicely written. As a meetup facilitator, I think a lot of people fail to realize that it’s not all about the presentation topic. It’s about finding a great group of people that happen to all have a common interest. In my case, it’s a room full of small business owners. The amount of new business and referrals that happen at a meetup far outweigh my dog and pony show.
Thanks for pointing this out – I’m definitely in the “people [who] fail to realize that it’s not all about the presentation topic” category as Will mentions. I like Instagram, but don’t really have need for tips on how to use it…which is clearly not the only point :). Thanks Aaron!
Well said, Aaron. That is the reason I attended all those WordPress conferences, Ignites, Beer-and-Blogs, and SMCPDX meetings, just so I could meet interesting people. Oh sure, I learned some from each meeting along the way, but I learned so much more from the people I met. Sometimes what I learned could be applied to business, but sometimes it was just about life itself….and I meet some wonderful people, including you!
I absolutely agree. You articulated why I am drawn to tech in the first place – it’s the people I get to hang out with every day that really make me love what I do and when I get a chance to attend a meetup / start-up mixer I go away feeling so honored that I had a chance to meet and connect with the people I had a chance to talk with.
Sorry mate, but I don’t agree with you. Everything is about people because we are thinking beings, but focuses only on the people you can reach or the city view you can enjoy and not pay attention on presentations and things people are making is too much egocentric, “geekless” behavior.
Thanks! You just gave me a new perspective on Meetups.
I go to meetups to learn new things, things that aren’t taught in any class, things that you wouldn’t have learned if you hadn’t been in a group setting to learn them. There are things that happen in group dynamics that don’t happen while reading a blog post on how to do something. But to your point, the people make the difference and if you go to it with that mindset of just wanting to meet interesting people, then learning or networking or anything else is just a bonus on top of that.