Your hobby or work expertise or belief may be unusual, yet it’s likely that people near you share your interest. Or they may just want to have fun. How can you find those kindred spirits? By hosting an ever-better MeetUp.

Also consider start a MeetUp to create a profit center for yourself. Or to hone a skill or support a cause.

What’s a MeetUp? Let masterful Lee LeFever quickly show you.Imagine making money by making others happier. See a large one to get ideas.

• Perhaps, like Liz Ryan, you’ve built a successful online business out of serving clusters of local constituencies. Using MeetUp you can offer your people a new service. Face-to-face gatherings. Through your MeetUp, individuals can chat with people they’ve met online.

• They can meet regularly in some format that they collectively choose, with your leadership. Suggest formats such a mastermind or other kind of mutual support group, cross-consulting or speaker series.

• Forge an alliance of your local MeetUp chapters.  Get ideas from how other alliances work. Recruit and reward local organizers who host “our” gatherings.

• Let each “chapter” decide whether they want their MeetUps to be free or for-fee or a mix of both. Should your local leaders be paid or share in the revenue raised through a speaker series or set of seminars?

• Get input from your host leaders by arranging regular conference calls with them via a free service such as Skype or FreeConferenceCall. In true Me2We fashion you can facilitate their sharing of ideas for MeetUp formats and topics. Explore how these phone seminars and in-person meetings can complement the online offering that you, like Liz Ryan, offer your clients.

• Take a look at an online, for-profit model (in which I participate) that also supports face-to-face gatherings that are organized and hosted by members – biznik.

• Or start or join a MeetUp of your peers. I belong to the Bay Area Reporters and Journalists organized by Susan Kuchinskas.

Why explore these ideas?

Because, if your expertise or experience matches the interest of a distinct niche market, then the approach outlined in this post enables you to enlarge your circle of friends and/or make money in supporting others’ strong needs or interests.

From stay-at-home Mom to art teacher to designer of exquisite Ukrainian eggs to author of a book that lands her on The Today Show. That’s quite career ride.

Better still, it led Jane Pollak to her dream job.

Jane provides what’s probably the single most successful Me2We tool you’ll ever find. The mastermind group. She’s belonged to one for 16 years. Now, she organizes and leads them – and you can too. With more people working on their own, the desire for this kind of structured mutual support and camaraderie is growing fast.

Most meet in person, some online or via phone. (My group does all three.)

Does a mix of writing, coaching and/or speaking – and leading mastermind groups appeal to you? Want to learn exactly how to start a profitable mastermind coaching business – serving the niche profession or industry you know best and enjoy most? Dreaming of a lifestyle change? Seeking more independence?

How about a chance to mentor those in your kind of work and facilitate their mutual support so they can grow successful faster and have a balanced life– and enjoy the ride with them? Many people are now leading mastermind groups. Plus the market for them is growing. And, for starters, as Vocation Vacations and others have demonstrated, there’s a huge market of boomers who’re exploring new ways to work, play and live – with others – and want help finding their way.

Hear how in this interview.

Edith Yeung landed in the U.S. from Hong Kong and has not stopped for breath since she arrived. She’s living her version of the Asian American dream, extremely inter-connected (Asian) and self-reliant (American). She’s crafted several ways to find mentors and colleagues and to encourage other young Asian immigrants to do the same. After finding success as a high tech executive in Silicon Valley, she left corporate life, moved to a lively neighborhood in S.F., volunteered to lead several local support groups, some for entrepreneurs and is laying the ground work with a partner to launch a new venture. Edith and her partner have spent several months creating the systems to make every part of their business run smoothly.

This “go slow to go fast” approach has enabled Edith and her partner to confirm that they:
• do share common values
• can work together in ways that play to their strengths,
• can recognize tasks they can sub-contract out and to whom

Also, if you want to create a close-knit community around your work, cause or personal interest, hear Edith (on this podcast) describe the format she uses for the mutual-support meetings she leads. Each month she attracts a crowd of around 100. Then discover more ways to host lively meetings of people who share your interests.

I got this strange idea in eighth grade. To run for student body president is not a surprising decision for most outgoing, popular people. But I was neither. In fact I tended to daydream, read books that were not on the required list, and sit in the table at the far corner of the cafeteria with the only two friends I had, Denise and Janice. What unfolded within two months led me to discover the single best method to succeed (sometimes) in new endeavors. Perhaps more importantly, looking back, it enabled me to savor my life with some remarkable and remarkably diverse people who became my friends. Here’s what happened.

After graduating from college I returned to that school to visit the only teacher I really liked, Mrs. Dodge. She taught English like it tastes good. Even she did not recall my ever raising my hand to speak in class. Every school has a girl with the flawless hair style, perfect-in-front-of-adults manners, the tight clique of “in” friends and decent grades. In my school her name was Claire and she kept bumping into me in the hallway. At first I thought it was accidental but accidents don’t happen with such regularity. At least twice a day she knocked me aside, then gave me a tight, apologetic smile. I don’t know how I provoked her but she motivated me to sign up to run against her for student body president. Or rather she motivated my two friends to sign me up.

Talk about The Law of Unexpected Consequences.

My friend Denise’s sister was a sophomore at Harvard, a world away from Maplewood grade school in Portland, Oregon. Over Christmas vacation, she’s told us how she’d been invited to join a mastermind group that met regularly to support each other in their study goals and their plans for who they wanted to meet at school. Denise decided we should form a mastermind group to get me elected. We met everyday, right after school, reviewing a list of students. We brainstormed reasons why each one might want to vote, in their own interests for me or (more likely) against Claire.

We created cascades, a term we learned from Denise’s sister. It meant that we looked for students who were most likely to influence a cascade of other students. Those are the people that one of us approached first. So, while Claire (and her parents and friends) conducted a very public campaign with posters and parties, we worked quietly, one-by-one, under the water line of public attention at our small school. My narrow victory was a surprise to many including, frankly, the three of us. My victory speech, in front of the entire student body, was the first time I had voluntarily stood up to speak in front of more than two people, and that was to my five cousins at our family reunion.

At Janice’s suggestion, I thanked my opponent for her gracious manner in the campaign, alluding to the main trait she had not exhibited. “Look to their positive intent, especially when they appear to have none”, my behind-the-scenes campaign manager, Arne (aka my Dad) had advised in an early meeting of our kitchen (literally) cabinet.

That’s how I got my first taste of the power of what’s now called Collective Intelligence. With the right model for how we meet, we become more valuable together than apart.

I’ve often feeling like the odd duck among others in the jobs I’ve had, from reporter to corporate executive to government policy wonk to author/speaker. With each career shift, the most meaningful way I’ve created a tight-knit community of work allies and friends has been through starting a mastermind group of my peers, as you may want to do. Napoleon Hill was the first person to describe a “mastermind alliance” in his timeless book, Think and Grow Rich.

When a group commits to supporting each other by meeting regularly and abiding by mutually agreed upon Rules of Engagement, remarkable things happen. We tend to bring the best out in each other, as thousands have learned around the world through their mastermind groups. Individuals become tight-knit teams. We become happier and high-performing with and for each other.

In an increasingly transient world where more people spend more time alone, mastermind groups could be the best medicine.

If you think you’d like to form one, you might consider a group of your peers (in the same profession or industry or kind of work). I am in a five-year old group of my peers. We have all published books, worked outside the U.S. and speak for fee.

Or find others who share a top-of-mind business interest. When my friend opened her craft store she started a mastermind group of non-competing businesses that also sold locally.

Want to start one? For helpful guidance, turn to Jane Pollak, Karyn Greenstreet, Christine W. Zust, Evan Carmichael, Gayle Lantz and Susan Henderson.

Also you can learn faster and have more fun by creating what Chris Bailey calls a Learning Circle. Or, become an authentic and captivating presenter by joining one of Lee Glickstein’s Speaking Circles.

Thank you, Claire, for literally pushing me into discovering the power of mastermind groups. You changed my life.