The Lesson From The Lock-In
When I was a freshman in Highschool our local church hosted a lock-in party.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this, a lock-in party is a group sleepover where you arrive around 5 pm and no one leaves or enters the building until the next day.
If you've been watching the news you may have some idea why this memory bubbled to the surface recently.
The cool thing about these parties was that the rules of hierarchy that dominated high school didn't exist.
There were no cool kids tables because everyone ate at the same big table loaded with pizza and soda.
There was no hazing by the seniors or upperclassmen because we all were participating in the same activities.
No one had a better place to sleep than anyone else because we were all in sleeping bags on the floor.
In short, we were all in it together and our outside "status" had no pull for that overnight.
And if the past few days are any indicator of what's to come, there's a good chance that many of us are going to be spending a good deal of time at home in the hopes that we can weather the storm that's coming.
Often I get asked by people about how to best connect with the people you admire and one of my main pieces of advice is to just reach out because most people assume the other person is too busy or important.
My guess is that many of the people whom you consider heroes or whom you idolize would probably love to hear something right now that isn't doom and gloom.
A fun activity you could do during some of this downtime is to make a list of all the people whom you think are doing amazing things in the world and find ways to tell them.
Most people have an email kicking around somewhere or some way to contact them on their website and the inboxes have certainly slowed down since all of this happened.
Worst case scenario you never hear back from them, but the best-case scenario is that you develop a new relationship with someone you may have never thought you'd meet.
Try it out and let me know how it goes.
Excelsior!
P.S. I write a daily email that teaches you how to make your brand referable, your messages memorable, and your ideas unforgettable. Want it? Go HERE