Pontificating on Running in Crowds

I like doing projects that challenge me. Big things that I've never done before. I've run a music festival; written and self-published a book; started a monthly delivery service; designed and had a board game professionally published; and now I'm looking to start a nonprofit for opening movie theaters.

Might as well include proof that I ran a music festival

Each time I pivoted to a new project, not only did I have to learn new skills to handle the task I discovered the existing community and, for lack of a better word, infiltrated it. For some of the communities, like the music festival, the community was definitely preexisting. I had to find them, but they were there. When I got into board game design, while finding folks down for a board game isn't that challenging - finding where the designers are was tricky. I contributed to bringing the designers of an area together to have weekly test play nights and it was magical.

Getting into the nonprofit community locally isn't that difficult - each nonprofit is its own community and there's a lot of intersection - folks happily ready to support one another. And the people I've met are overflowing with altruism. They are driven to make their local area better than they left it and, my goodness, is it exhilarating to be around. It gets me more and more excited to get my nonprofit up and running so we can figure out ways to connect.

It also got me thinking of the communities themselves over the years. Board game designers mostly fell into two categories: those that are determined for everyone to have a good time and those that are determined for them to have a good time. Fortunately its more the former than the latter. At a big protoyping event, one of the fellow designers just had to comment about how refreshing the general community was - everyone was so supportive and generally drama free. He mentioned that he was also a musician and that community was quite the opposite.

And the emotional floodgates just opened when he said that. Running the music festival was fun. Being involved with most of those communities came with an emotional cost almost daily. It made it so it was less fun every time I went to another event. And if it wasn't fun... why was I even doing it?

But the board game community absolutely was a blast to be around. And its even more refreshing in the nonprofit community so far. I'm so excited to get more involved and meet more people. I really do think this is the focus for the next chapter in my story.