Coincidences. Recently Daniel Johnson wrote about those in his life. Some were meaningful. Ironically I discovered his article by coincidence because he cited a story that involved my friend and how she met her husband at a party she had not intended to attend – in my village, Sausalito.  

Even today that story warms my heart and brought to mind a holiday party this year that I thought I could not attend yet unexpectedly could. There I fell into conversation with two people who will become lifelong friends I feel.

What are the coincidences that startle you?

No one in Beatrice, Nebraska, will forget what happened just prior to church choir practice on March 1, 1950.  All fifteen members of the choir were due at practice at 7:30 p.m. The minister, his wife, and their daughter were delayed when his wife decided to re-iron the daughter’s dress.

One member took longer than he expected to finish his sales report; another couldn’t get her car started; two others lingered to hear the end of an especially involving radio program; a mother and daughter were delayed when the daughter came home late from babysitting; and so on.

Ten separate and quite unconnected reasons for fifteen responsible people meant that all would be late that one night.

Fortunately, none of them arrived on time at 7:30, because at 7:35 a furnace explosion destroyed the church building. Mathematician Warren Weaver recounted the story in his book, Lady Luck: The Theory of Probability, calculating the staggering odds against chance for this uncanny event as about one in a million.

What are the stories that reverberate in your mind, then guide you?

Two people set up a woman friend on a blind date, five years apart. They were the only blind dates she ever went on. One was on the East Coast and the second on the West Coast – both with the same man.

A singer’s career changes direction from opera to musicals after he walks into the wrong audition and successfully wins a prime role.

Just when he is feeling particularly alone in the world, a man runs into a close college friend on a remote outpost on a South Pacific island.

In each of these real-life stories, coincidences changed lives. Some coincidences are almost too purposeful and too orderly to be a product of random chance – but then how do we explain them?

Synchronicity is when the coincidence has great meaning for the individuals or people who experience it.

When you experience synchronistic events, you might see them as a signal to change your life, especially if you initially resist the message as outside the usual “story” of your life.

We Make Choices Through the Stories That Stick in Our Mind, the Stories We Keep Telling Others

When you meet friends or family at the end of a day, you are often asked first, “How was your day?” Kids ask, “Tell me a story.”  Each of our lives is a story. Synchronistic events call attention to the structure of the story we are living. What if you were a character in the story of your life, but not the only author?

When external events so precisely mirror our own inner state that the impact of a coincidence cannot be ignored or its significance denied, and our lack of control over the events is indisputable, we are faced with the question: If I am not the author of my story, who is?

Synchronistic events confront us with the possibility that sometimes the stories we make up about ourselves, the stories we would like to live, are not necessarily the stories we are actually living or – to go a step further - are meant to live.

An “odd coincidence” can wake you up and point you in a new, truer direction, rather than the life path you should be on.  Synchronistic experiences can be the turning points in the plot we can use to lead our lives more meaningfully and to experience our fundamental, unavoidable, and potentially much more conscious connection with all others.

Synchronicity Can be a Way to Feel Connected to Others

Synchronicity is emerging as a phenomenon from many directions of study, as diverse as quantum physics, medicine, and astronomy. As Arthur Koestler observes in his book The Roots of Coincidence, synchronicity reflects the presumption of a “fundamental unity of all things,” which transcends mechanical causality and relates coincidence to the “universal scheme of things.”

Synchronicity is when traditional notions of causality are not capable of explaining some of the more improbable forms of coincidence and, further, when no causal connection can be demonstrated between two events but at least one person feels a meaningful relationship exists between them.

According to historian Koestler the human psyche has the capacity to “act as a cosmic resonator.” Some people believe that individuals and the universe “imprint” each other, which leads them to a belief in the ultimate ”oneness” of the universe.

Everything is “interrelated and mutually attuned,” wrote Arthur Schopenhauer. 

In exploring the parallels between modern science and the mystical concept of a universal scheme or oneness, Koestler compares the evolution of science during the past 150 years to a vast river system in which each tributary is “swallowed up” by the mainstream, until all are unified in a single river-delta. The science of electricity, he points out, merged during the 19th century with the science of magnetism. Electromagnetic waves were then discovered to be responsible for light, color, radiant heat and Hertzian waves, while chemistry was embraced by atomic physics.

The control of the body by nerves and glands was linked to electrochemical processes, and atoms were broken down into the “building blocks” of protons, electrons, and neutrons. Soon, however, even these fundamental parts were reduced by scientists to mere “parcels of compressed energy-packed and patterned according to certain mathematical formulae.”

What all this reveals, then, is that there might be what Koestler refers to as “the universal hanging-together of things, their embeddedness in a universal matrix.” Many ecologists subscribe to this sense of interrelation in the world – what the ancients called the “sympathy” of life.  Some scientists are moving to this worldview.

Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigione is studies the “spontaneous formation of coherent structures”- how chemical and other kinds of structures evolve patterns out of chaos.

Karl Pribram, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, proposed that the brain might be a type of “hologram,” a pattern and frequency analyzer that creates “hard” reality by interpreting frequencies from a dimension beyond space and time. That means the physical world “out there,” is, in Pribram’s words, “isomorphic with” (the same as) the processes of the brain.

If the modern alliance evolving between quantum physicists, neuroscientists, and others is not just a short-fused phase in scientific understanding, a paradigm shift may be imminent. We might come to see a new image of the universe, that it functions not as some great machine but as a great thought – unifying matter, energy, and consciousness.

Thus, the synchronicity you see can be the confluence of forces that you, well-connected to others, are using to guide you on a fruitful path of wise choices. That could be a comforting belief for mindful “us” to carry into the year 2010.

We Aren’t Crazy to Fear Losing Control 

Synchronous events can be unnerving because they show we do not have complete control over our life patterns, and we, like all animals, fear the apparent loss of control in our lives. The fear of losing control (as when we experience coincidences that cannot be explained) makes our emotional lives threatening to our rational minds. It also challenges the assumption that we are separate from each other.

If we are open to feelings, we can feel not only our own feelings but the feelings of others as well. We then “know” that we affect each other in ways of which we cannot be completely aware.

Synchronicity brings us in direct contact with the collective unconscious, where we are in danger of losing our own standpoint while realizing the common pool of connection.

The Comfort in Feeling Connected 

Theologian Rudolf Otto described “numinosity” as that experience we have when we feel we are undeniably, irresistibly, and unforgettably in the presence of the Divine – our experience of something that transcends our human limitations. This heightened quality of feeling that accompanies synchronistic events is their most striking characteristic.

If synchronicity is, above all, a connecting principle, then the quality of feeling produced by a synchronistic event – the numinosity and psychic energy it evokes – is the medium by which such a connection is made. The symbolism of a specific incident of synchronicity shows you the place in the story of your life where you are connected with all other human beings.

What You Can Do With Synchronicity

o Have a clear vision of your path in life, and be equally open to seeing the coincidences that “tell” you to consider another direction.

o Notice how meaningful coincidences reveal your inevitable connection with everyone, even those you do not “know,” and thus you must …

o Be aware that every action you take has immediate and continuing effects on many people, even those you might never meet face-to face.

o When coincidences happen, especially those that have an emotional impact, consider what special meaning they have for you regarding your beliefs, especially about who you are and what you “should” or could be doing.

Become more conscious of:

o What you most value. 

o The best gifts you have to offer the world.

o What you can let go and stop trying to do or be.

o How many things are outside your control, no matter how hard you try. 

o How you are often supported by a common river flow of other people, if you can just recognize their commonality in the symbolism of the synchronistic events that happen in your life.

Prepare Yourself for Helpful Change

Synchronistic events are often “wake-up calls” for you to make a change in your life. How do you work with synchronicity? Be open to the meaning in what you did not want to happen. Set aside your agenda, and consider that your story should take a different turn. Consider the possible symbolism for you in the incident.

If you are in a work or personal relationship, consider the real reason you are together, what you are to learn. See how you can use the experience to tame your ego, to move to a larger perspective.

Do not rely on your own ability to control and manage events, people, and objects. The most creative and effective part of your work can emerge only when you lay aside your own agenda and permit randomness to have a place in the story of your livelihood.

If you resist the meaning of a synchronistic event, you are likely to experience similar ones again and again, until you face the meaning.

Every movement forward in life has three parts:

1. Recognition that the current situation no longer fits or works. An event can make this clear. When the event is synchronistic, we see that there might be more to our story than we thought before. Events that might be frightening or bad are, in fact, openings to a new life.

2. We enter a state of confusion and transition. We imagine how things might be different.

3. Then something happens. We get some help, our feelings become clearer. An opportunity presents itself. We take some action, and we move to a different, more satisfying way of being.

Our lives are full of meaningful events we deliberately set out to cause for ourselves in pursuing work and relationships. These are intentional actions.

Synchronistic events, however, by their very accidental nature, urge upon us another truth about our lives – a truth that we are in the habit of ignoring – that the meaning of our lives, the plot of our life stories, is not written simply by what we know about ourselves but comes from a much deeper place, from our innately human capacity to experience wholeness through living life in more aware connection with others.

When an ”accidental” twist of fate reorganizes our lives and shows us something we did not expect, we have two choices:

1. Numb out, ignore it, and move on so we’ll bump into a variation of it again and again, until we take notice.

2. Notice what it means for us and become more truly alive and connected with each other.

Which patterns of accidental meetings and conversations with others stay uppermost in your mind?  How can they guide you to open the next chapter of the adventure story you want for your life now?  

Instead of standing on a stage, one comedian at a time, humorists were leaning over their computers, waiting with bated breath for quirky Brit Tiernan Douieb to say “Go!”  In this Twitter Comedy Club experiment, drawing a crowd of 6,000 each comedian had a 10 minute act. They madly delivered their best lines in 140-characters, one after the other. Those attending the event simply had to search for tweets appearing with the event hashtag #tcgig. Some searched by smart phone and others by computer.

Out of the comedian line up came Tweets such as Mark Watson’s “My dad used to say, ‘Money: you can’t take it with you.’ Which led to some pretty boring holidays.” 

One participating comedy club, Pappy’s even created Terry Witter (@TerryWitter) a fake heckler.

Humor’s hard to create, especially under time pressure. If these comedians can generate so many ideas, crowd attention and camaraderie using this format, so can you.  This jam-packed, Twitter-based event could be adapted to other lifestyle topics (tips by and for cycling commuters, living well on less, etc.) or professional interests (customer-attracting tips by and for restaurant owners, etc.)

The bonus benefit for all participants?  The “content” that’s created by the event, generates lasting visibility for tipsters and sponsors.  Anytime you can see the ideas again as you can on the comedians’ Twitter accounts.

If you are adept at Twitter you could take on Tiernan’s role as a business. Offer to create such events for an association and/or businesses to sponsor themed events that would attract their members and customers. Such innovative uses show that, used smartly, Twitter can attract customers and potential collaborators.

Like scent, humor has extremely offensive or captivating effects on us, depending on the kind.  In the past two posts I described two kinds, unifying and divisive. The third is humorless. Are you? 

Frank Tyger suggest that, “The ultimate test of whether you posses a sense of humor is your reaction when someone tells you you don’t.” How do we get that way? “By starving emotions we become humorless, rigid and stereotyped; by repressing them we become literal, reformatory and holier-than-thou; encouraged, they perfume life; discouraged; they poison it, warms Joseph Collins. 

Without humor it is hard to step back to see a situation in a brighter way or come to terms with it – or to hope. “There is a sorrow in the seriousness of humorous people. They do not easily find among ideas or purposes a place of rest.  The courage in their eyes is wistful.  If they don’t even recognize sarcasm, they may lack higher cognitive skills.

A sense of humor can put you back in control. Instead of giving in to depression, a

Multiple Sclerosis patient remarked, ” One good thing about MS is I don’t have to worry about stirring my coffee anymore.”

Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl said “I would never have made it if I could not have laughed. Laughing lifted me momentarily, out of this horrible situation, just enough to make it survivable.”

Apparently humorless people usually prefer to focus on getting the task done, being good  - or other “productive behavior.” The get upset when others joke or kid instead of moving ahead.

How does that behavior compare to the other two? Well, divisive humor is often the funniest, at least at first. In making fun of someone else, we can feel superior. Plus some of the funniest lines are insulting.  Like scalpels, they cut fast and deep into even the thickest skin.

An understated way to respond to someone who is shooting divisive humor “bullets” at others is to suggest, “Never draw fire; it irritates the people around you.” Or, when you feel you must escalate, paraphrase Adlai Stevens, “Those who throw mud often get dirty.”

Unifying humor is a surefire way to break tension or conflict – especially when the specific details spark an “aha” of instant near-universal recognition.

People who use divisive humor are more likely to not keep agreements than those who exhibit no humor or who use unifying humor.

People who exhibited no humor at all were more likely than those in the other two categories to be most harsh and unforgiving in their judgments of others. They are more likely to see the world in “right/wrong” categories, thus the least able to be accepted as team players.

Most of us rationalize our use of cutting humor as harmless fun. After all, it is usually a matter of perspective, that is who is getting skewered. As Mel Brooks once wrote, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die.”

Unifying humor is healing and enables us to see the larger picture where hope is possible. Charlie Chaplin once said, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in long shot.”

How Do You Use Humor?

Humorist, Allen Klein began writing about humor as healing when his wife was diagnosed with cancer. He offers this story: “When the naturalist William Beebe used to visit President Theodore Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill, both would take an evening stroll after dinner. Then one or the other would go through a customary ritual. He would look up at the stars saying, ‘That is the Spiral Galaxy of Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It is 750,000 light-years away. It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun.’

Then silence followed. Finally, one of them would say, “Now I think we are small enough. Let’s go to bed.’ A little perspective, like a little humor, goes a long way.”

Consider the times when you’ve simply goofed, made a “silly mistake” or otherwise didn’t do the smartest thing in the situation. You have a rich reservoir of such stories from which you can draw. Have them ready in your mind to tell when you want to lighten someone else’s load and bring them closer. Those are the situations you want to share with someone when they are in an unfamiliar situation, feeling insecure, just made a mistake or feeling uncomfortable for some other reason.

Sometimes light, dry humor can brighten a dark situation. My friend Stevie Weir walked through the rain to open the door of his eagerly awaited new home to find water dripping from the entryway ceiling and said, “Every silver lining has a cloud.”

When you make a mistake you might offer this facetious advice to poke fun at yourself and your teammates, “Fool-proof implies a finite number of fools.”

“In life, as in art, it is often a matter of knowing where to draw the line.” If you overuse self-deprecating humor be mindful that you may wind up looking victim-like.

Every humorist needs an audience, and I, who can’t remember punch lines, can often play that role. My father is a natural storyteller and punster. He gets me laughing when I take myself too seriously. As my friend Adama says, “The shortest distance between two puns is a straight line” and I’m often that line.

Unexpected Humor Can Crack a Mood

Some of my favorite kinds of humor are when people can juxtapose two apparently unlikely images to make a point. In a tense meeting where I was attempting to coach the engineers in a company startup on how to describe their complex wireless portal product to potential investors in a way that was understandable, their usually patient lawyer finally broke the tension by saying, “I’m as confused as a baby in a topless bar.”

Some people may never offer a direct apology for past behavior but will sidle into atonement by using wry humor, such as, “Procrastination means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Inject Laughter Into Your Daily Life

Move to a new chapter that is the adventure story you want for your life.  Here’s one way. What role do you want to play today?  Try on the underdeveloped, perhaps unexpected facet to your “character”? Alan Funt’s classic program, “Candid Camera” and subsequent knock-offs of that show can give you ideas.

As poor students in a fellowship program, eight of us used to form a spontaneous “live theatre” group on Friday nights for free entertainment and wound up learning a lot more about ourselves and each other. We assigned “roles” to each other and then walking separately into a busy bar in San Francisco to act them out with each other.

The rules? Each person could give three attributes to another person in the group. For example, one time I was to be a very shy, kindergarten teacher who was raised in a small North Dakota town the same night another person was designated as a rich, playboy law student from a rich, old line Philadelphia family. You can imagine the scenes that unfolded.

These days you can still watch Drew Carey’s hilarious improv show, “What’s My Line Anyway” and learn some new rules to create your own spontaneous “live theatre.” I’ve found those evenings offered unforgettably fun ways to let stress roll away and see new sides of friends I thought I knew well.

Alan Weiss has a funny list of suggestions for creating live theatre in an elevator ride. One suggestion: “Have a friend with you, but act like your friend is a complete stranger. After a while, turn to your friend and say, “Wanna trade?” and switch wallets or purses.

As Norman Cousins said, “He who laughs lasts.”  How do you use unifying humor?  

… and, in some cases, save lives.  Report Websites that appear to be blocked from access at Herdict. That’s the new tool launched by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

In true crowdsourcing spirit Herdict is a combination of “herd” and “verdict.” Anyone with access to the Internet can help put global pressure on governments that attempt to censure news and information. The brain behind this

site is one of my heroes, law professor, Jonathan Zittrain. 

He says,  “It’s a civic technology, an attempt to get people to see themselves as global ‘netizens,’ engaged in a collective effort in producing humanity’s information medium.” 

It is not just the usual suspects like China that appear to censor online communication.  The Netherlands has “126 reports of inaccessible sites” at the time I posted this.

Be an opportunity maker – for and with others. Become invaluable in this time-starved, information-glutted and transient world by speaking to the sweet spot of mutual opportunity.  If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, consider attending a morning seminar I am leading for the San Francisco chapter of IABC, thanks to the remarkable transplanted Brit, Alison Harrison. (It was such fun at the Minneapolis chapter.) More than smarts, money, contacts or even charisma, your ability to spark smarter collaboration enables you to be the go-to leader. Beyond your greatest talent your most vital strength is the ability to bring out the best side in extremely diverse people to work well together. Every attendee gets a free copy of SmartPartnering. If your work involves communication you may want to join IABC and attend their idea-packed international conference here and meet experts from around the world in June. I’d love to meet more of you face-to-face. 

Here’s to living a greater life and accomplishing greater things together than we can on our own:

“It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own. “  ~ Joyce Carol Oates

 “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~ Carl Jung

“We judge others by their acts, but ourselves by our intentions.” ~ American proverb

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction then both are changed.” ~ Carl Jung

“Mutual understanding and the human touch are in inverse relationship to frequency of encounter and kinship.” ~ Yi Tuan

“A true leader is not one you look up to because they are the best. A true leader is one that draws the best out in you.” ~ Anne Warfield

“A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.” ~ Henrik Warfield

“To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.”  ~ anonymous

“It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.” ~ Samuel Johnson

“You can’t stay mad at somebody who makes you laugh.” ~ Jay Leno

“In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.” ~ Blaise Pascal

“In the religion of love to pray is to pass, by a single word, into the inner chamber of the other.” ~ Galway Kinnell

“A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“To love another person is to see the face of God.” ~ Victor Hugo 

“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” ~ James Arthur Baldwin

“Conversation means being able to disagree and still continue the discussion.” ~ Dwight Macdonald

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” ~ John Donne “All value resides in individuals. Value is distributed in individual space. Relalationship economic is the framework for wealth creation.  Deep support is the new metaproduct. ~ Shshanna Zuboff 

“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.” ~ Victor Hugo

“We didn’t come over on the same ship, but were all in the same boat.” ~ Bernard M. Baruch

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, I was wrong.” ~ Sydney J. Harris

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies…” ~ Tom Paine

“Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” ~ Chief Seattle

“Many candles can be kindled from one candle without diminishing it.” ~ The Midrash

Attract a crowd to your event or brand by giving them bragging rights. Vicki Smith creates a post-event storyboarding experience where enthusiasts see almost moment-by-moment coverage of motorcycle events featuring the elegant Ducatis -  in a captioned sequence of photos. In short, what she dubs a “photo web story” is designed to tell the story of the event or weekend. More importantly it lets people that didn’t attend feel like they were there and potentially plan to attend the next one.” 

Last month her Ducati photo stories’ site had close to a half million page views

 of previous events. Got your attention? With Vicki’s permission, here’s her lightly-edited description of this crowd-attracting Me2We method.

The Rewards

• It’s photo journalism but without the cost restraints of traditional media so you can be much more in depth.

• These stories are quite popular, getting many web visits month after month. A yearly event I did last year in March was still getting hits in November (close to 18,000).

• Because I have been doing this for specific types of events (motorcycle events and travel related photography), and posting them all to a central area, this website now enjoys a steady traffic of people interested in motorcycles or travel. (She created popular portals for participatory photo stories around two hot interests.)

That makes Vicki a valuable spokesperson for Ducati.  What product, service, annual conference or other event, cause or issue do you want to tout  - and perhaps also be rewarded for doing so?  

Dog shows. Before and after stories like home or office renovations. What ’s your passionate interest? How can you cover events related to it, invite others to add their color commentary, then seek online and in-person sponsorships – for you would-be spokesperson and for online community?

The Methods

• People are able to comment on the galleries. Some commenters, like the Italian trip ones are largely from people that participated.

• But some event galleries were a surprise to the participants. Many people did not get to attend but heard about it from people who were there and wanted to participate. They did so by adding their comments. It helped them feel like they were there.

• It’s cost effective if you happen to be handy with a camera (I am) but even with the price of a photographer included it’s hard not to see the benefit of the ongoing promotion.

See other ways to harness technology (even if you are not a geek) to make an event more involving - and attract a larger crowd next time.

Even our highest court isn’t immune from making political decisions about voting results in a presidential campaign, Jeffrey Toobin found. It’s a tight race. Turnout is already record-breaking.  Some have already been given the wrong polling address. It’s up to us as citizens to ensure every citizen can vote and have every vote count. Now we can cover what we find at polling stations. Traditional media invites us to get involved. Document any interference, malfunctioning machine or long line at a polling place and post it at Video Your Vote  - co-sponsored by PBS and YouTube.  Judy Woodruff promises the best videos will be shown during election night

 coverage. You still have time to learn how recognize trouble at Video the Vote.   The project is recruiting volunteers to video-monitor voting in all 50 states. They support “timely, complete, and accurate reporting of voter suppression and election irregularities by organizing citizen journalists to document elections and then using their footage to raise awareness about the ongoing challenges facing American voters.” 

Or you can staff hotlines. Also see two wikis that enable us “to collect examples of problems with voting, whether exceptionally long lines or more direct actions meant to scare off voters.  They are SourceWatch’s Election Protection Wiki and the Voter Suppression Wiki. This is an historic time to participate in election protection in your community.

Tired of self-promotion? Would you like to make work and life easier, more productive and fun – with others? Here’s four ways others accomplish more together than you can on your own – and sometimes forge friendships.

1. Co-create Products, Cause Support and More

• From clothing design to science experiments, the right crowd can get more done together.

• Collaborate online for a cause or faster innovation – and to become more well-known.

• Crowdsource a contest; take it public.

2. Swap and Share

• Enjoy more travel  by house swapping or other shared hospitality.

• Swap books, lightly-used clothes and more.

• Moms share everything from recipes to medical advice.

3. Get More Out of Meetings

• Organize meetings for those who share your interest and perhaps make money.

• Capture the benefits of twittering at conferences.

• Create conference formats that will excite and involve attendees.

• Start a mutual growth, support or mastermind group.

• Share ideas in a fast and fun way for everyone. Try Ignite and Pecha Kucha.

• Make conferences more popular by harnessing the right technology.

4. Attract Customers With the Right Partners and Methods

• Even and especially in a bad economy partnering can be profitable.

• Train others to teach your methods – even sell your stuff.

• Forge an alliance with a bigger business or other organization.

• Recruit an unlikely ally to attract more interest.

Now, what Me2We methods have you used to accomplish more with others?

Who are your heroes?  To me they are those who create ways we can accomplish more together than on own. They bring out our best sides.  A positively mutually-reinforcing effect. We are more likely to spiral up into great accomplishment together rather than down into conflict. We’re more likely to go to dinner together rather than to war. For starters look how a small firm and five volunteers  (kudos to Fuad Ta’eed, Collis Ta’eed, Leo Babauta, Easton Ellsworth and Cyan Ta’eed) attracted a legion of participants on this blog action day to spotlight poverty.  They embody the Me2We approach to leveraging value – with others.Painting others as villains seldom helps. The truly extraordinary heroes don’t escalate “us vs. them” situations.  Instead they draw their rivals closer, sometimes even turning them into allies or a team.  In a post-American world that trait will take us farthest in alleviating poverty.That’s why some of my heroes on this “Poverty” day are Jeff Skoll, Anna Deavere Smith, Jack Kornfeld, Habiba Sarabi, Larry Brilliant and Paul Hawkin.  Here’s to kickstarting your method for enabling others to do better together.  As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.”