How can we help?  My Path to Boulder Startup Week….

Sitting down to synthesize the last 96 hours of my life seems like an incredibly daunting task.  Yet, I feel like I could spend a lifetime trying to verbalize the excitement in an attempt to recreate this experience for someone else, and never be able to capture the feeling.  What began with a harrowing (to say it in a way that sounds nice) ride through 10 hours of blinding snow and wind has morphed into this rebirth that I could never have imagined a million years.  Jane Miller, one of the speakers here at Boulder Startup Week, captured that feeling by positing that there is an empowerment of choice and you create you own luck.  Play an active role in your serendipity, she said.  And boom, that phrase hit me like a freight train. 

For the last 7 years I found myself on a journey all too common among the millennial generation.  A journey written for us, not by us.  Graduate from high school, go to college, get a job.  So I did.  But there was this unbelievable sense of discomfort with what I was doing.  I felt that something was off.  I didn’t know what, but there was just something off.  I spent my undergraduate career studying something that gave me a tremendous sense of value and purpose, community health.  But in an effort to turn that into a somewhat lucrative career, I did what I thought was necessary, I went to graduate school.  Because naturally, a graduate degree means you might end up in a job that doesn’t suck, and pays more than $24,000 a year.  Wrong. I was one semester into a graduate program that just felt bad.  My whole undergraduate experience had been this cathartic, cleansing, journey of self-reflection where I left my classes every day feeling better about myself and feeling motivated to want to somehow inject my optimism into the community around me.  Graduate school killed all of that.  I was no longer on a journey of self-discovery, I was figuring out the best way to market a poster to tell people to wear their seat belt.  It just didn’t resonate with me.  I didn’t want to spend time telling people they were doing things wrong.  I wanted to be around people that had the same passion and energy as I did, but I didn’t know what that looked like.

So, I left.  I quit school and moved back to Bozeman, following a guy as again most millennial, twenty-something girls do.  I was craving a way to get back to the community that had given me the chance to nurture myself and see where the next direction in my life would be.  Problem.  I moved back to Bozeman in 2010, no jobs.  My bachelors work had given me a tremendous skill set of tools for self-work and growth, but hadn’t done a great deal to adequately prepare me to be a marketable employee. 

So I did what was comfortable.  After “looking” for a job for a few months, I called my former employer to see if there might be a chance I could get my old job back.  And no surprise, I did.  At the time I didn’t know it because I had zero confidence, but I’m actually a kick ass employee, so they would have been crazy to not have me back.  I don’t know how I rationalized that going back to a place that only fulfilled one part of me (listening to the stories of travelers and helping them have a life-changing hospitality moment), would somehow just magically morph into a place that fed the other parts of my soul, but I did.  And I was wrong.  I literally died a little inside everyday I had to get up and go to work.  And the days that I wasn’t at work, I was sick over the fact of having to go back.  It was awful, literally the worst feeling ever.  But I didn’t know what else to do.  I didn’t feel that I had any marketable value to shop myself around to companies in the area, shit, I didn’t even know what other companies existed in the area.  Because I thought that it was the hospitality industry as a whole that was slowly causing me to die rather than the (what I know now to be) worst workplace culture in existence, I made the radical decision to change industries all together.  Because what sounds more fun than trying to find your passion while pursuing a career in HR?  I thought that by making a profound move into something completely at the other end of the spectrum from my current job, that presto, my life would now be perfect.  Again, wrong. 

At first the change of, well everything, was motivating because I finally found myself working for a boss that respected and valued my opinion and told me I was good at something.  But that motivation and energy faded over the days, weeks, months, and I really started to dig my teeth into what it meant to be working in a staffing firm.  Here I was playing matchmaker for all of these really top-notch, talented people with the freaking coolest jobs.  And I knew for damn sure that in more cases than not, I was significantly more capable of knocking that job out of the park! Why was I spending all of this time and energy and stress helping other people find their dream job, when I hated every minute of mine? And again, I started dying a little bit every day I had to be at work.  I knew that I had to start finding ways to feed the passionate side of me and try to salvage and regrow what passion was left.  It was at that moment that two men, whose complete influence on my life has yet to be discovered, came into my life: TED and Rob.  Well, TEDx to be specific.  I put myself in a position to be a part of putting on TEDxBozeman 2014.  Having attended the event in 2013 (which was probably the single biggest influencer in my life at the time getting me to an emotional point where I left my job), I knew that I wanted to do whatever those people were doing.  I needed to be in the room with the people who created that event.  I didn’t care how, I just needed to be in that group.  When an opportunity came up to join the sponsorship team for the 2014 event I literally could not have jumped at it faster.  There was no way I was going to let that go to someone else, it was mine.  It was my foot in the door. 

There are moments in your life where you can literally feel that the universe is giving you a hug.  Working on TEDxBozeman was one of those moments.  Every time the group got together I felt excited and energized.  No matter the amount of work that needed to be done, it never felt like work, because I couldn’t stop thinking about it .  It began to consume me.  So much so that I failed to recognize the extent to which the relationship with my significant other was deteriorating.  But honestly, I didn’t care.  I was finally excited about something for the first time in years.   But it wasn’t just working with the TEDxBozeman team, everyone I met during the course of the project was just someone I was stoked to meet.  They were all movers and thinkers and were ok with living in an emotionally vulnerable place where life is uncomfortable and not stagnant or boing.  TED changed my life.  My coworker jokes that I start every sentence with “well I saw this ted talk….” And it is true.  I am consumed by the spirit of the ideas worth spreading. 

Enter the other man in my life, Rob.  I had known Rob through my mother (madam-connector) for several years, but I had only just had the opportunity to work side by side with him on a project very recently.  While attempting to reengage with my passions I found myself volunteering to help with any event possible where I might have the opportunity to be in the same room with people who were doing cool stuff.  So, I offered to help Rob with some of the logistics for Startup Weekend Bozeman.  While all I really did for the event was help with registration for an hour before it started, having the chance to participate in and be around that type of frenetic energy and creation moved me to a place I didn’t know possible. I knew at the end of 24 hours that Rob was a guy I needed to spend more time with.  His energy was contagious.  And he knew everyone and he cared about them.  So I waited.  I could feel that I was starting to create a shift in the energy of my life and I just knew that an amazing opportunity would come if I continued to put good energy out there.  And then it happened.  Rob had just accepted the position of Director at the Blackstone LaunchPad at Montana State University and was going to need help running the day-to-day operations of the project.  And just as with TEDxBozeman, I literally knew that was mine.  Patience is not a virtue many Gemini’s possess, and it was a long wait for my first day of work.  But it came, and in the last 6 weeks my entire life has changed.  I was catapulted into a world I didn’t know existed.  People could love what they do, want to come to the office each day, make a difference in the world, pay it forward, AND get a paycheck (with some pretty outstanding benefits to boot). 

Did the rest of the world know this little secret that I felt I magically stumped upon?  I felt like I hit the Powerball. I didn’t want to sleep, ever.  I had heard for years people saying that they didn’t want to go to bed because their reality was finally better than their dreams, and I finally got it!

Fast forward to today.  As I sit writing this on the couch at the adorable apartment we rented on AirBNB in Boulder, I cannot believe the giant bear hug from the universe I am the recipient of.  You know that feeling where you start to really realize that everything happens for a reason?  Let me tell you a story.  My coworker and I found out that we were going to have the opportunity to come to Boulder Startup Week about 10 days before the event.  He took to AirBNB, a very successful startup out of San Francisco, to secure a place for the week.  When we walked in door after our crazy 10-hour drive here we immediately wanted to explore.  The social scientist in me wanted to try and cultivate the personality of the homeowner by examining the things they have in their house.  You can sure learn a lot about someone from his or her bookcase.  The first thing I noticed in the bookcase of this random apartment, randomly found on AirBNB, for this last minute trip to attend a week of events for a very specific target audience, is a book I see everyday at work called Startup Communities written by Brad Feld.  I mean really, come on!  All of the randomness that I was feeling immediately vanished and I could feel that something bigger was happening.  The more and more we looked around, the more it felt that I had walked into what I in my head envisioned my house to be.  I no longer felt like I was in a strange city sleeping in the bed of a complete stranger, I felt awkwardly comfortable.  This book was the culmination of moment after moment over the last 6 weeks that were serendipity after serendipity, chance meeting after chance meeting.  

Unable to not celebrate the crazy small world story of this lovely AirBNB rental, we ended up meeting the owner of the apartment for coffee.  Four complete strangers gathered around a table for what turned into hours and it was as if we had known and understood each other forever.  The dialogue among the group was so organic and natural,  you couldn’t have architected it better.  I literally have goose bumps just thinking about it.   I think that is the biggest take away from the first 3 days of this Boulder Startup Week that I have had.  When life gives you Goosebumps, it is time to pay attention.  Things are happening and if you aren’t tapped into what that feels like, you’re going to miss it. 

The community of Boulder Startup Week has offered me the chance to reconnect with a level of happiness I didn’t know existed.  Everyone here is raw and engaged and just wants to know how they can help.  I have been the benefactor of 2 private tours of some of the coolest startups here in Boulder simply because people wanted to know how they could help us bring some of what works for them back to Bozeman.  There is no feeling of “what’s in it for me”, everyone wants to know “what’s in it for us?”

Andrew Hyde, the created of Boulder Startup Week,  said during his obviously-not-a-keynote keynote, that really interesting people are doing these things called blogs.  Crazy right? I was so motivated by what I had experienced in the last 3 days that I actually wanted to go home and write a blog.  Well, ta-dah!  Here it is, my first foray into the blogosphere.  One of my favorite things I’ve heard this week came from David Cohen, “just act like what you want to become and you will be.”  Do the things that give you meaning and purpose, and your life will be meaningful and have purpose. It sounds simple because it is.  Play an active and conscious role in the serendipity of your life.  Build a path if the one you’re on doesn’t fit right.  Seek out things that you think will fuel your spirit.  Just try.  You might find yourself in a place you never thought possible.