Magical events change people’s lives. Great events foster passion by providing well-designed opportunities for significant engagement with peers. For passion and engagement, you need a tribe—be it two or a hundred other people—with whom you relate and connect while you’re together at the event, and, hopefully, afterward too.
For passion and engagement to be possible, what should we avoid?
“If you want people to become passionate, engaged in a field, transformed by an experience — you don’t test them, you don’t lecture them and you don’t force them. Instead, you create an environment where willing, caring individuals can find an experience that changes them.”
—Seth Godin, “Will this be on the test?”
Hmm…don’t test, lecture, or force people to do what they don’t want to do.
As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, seventy years ago:
“Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a community of love.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Citadel”, 1948, translated from the French
Giving people the opportunity and support for meaningful emotional experiences gives them the gift of potentially changing in positive ways.
Photo attribution: Flickr user 98810885@N07
Here’s Seth Godin again, five years later:
from https://seths.blog/2021/06/lessons-learned/