He Likes It, He Really Likes It

My friend Doug Dock­ery made my day. Doug started a blog a few weeks ago, and in a recent post he said that I was one of the peo­ple who helped to intro­duce him to blog­ging. I inspired him, which feels pretty damn good. Three weeks into it, Doug is now offi­cially hooked on blog­ging, and his site con­tin­ues to get bet­ter. Doug had a recent encounter with one of his heroes, Guy Kawasaki, that solid­i­fied the value of the weblog for him. It is all about connections.

Doug has always been an “Apple Guy.” Being an “Apple Guy,” he has always admired Guy Kawasaki. Guy’s work as an evan­ge­list for Apple and as an author has inspired mil­lions, chief among those mil­lions is Doug. Well, Doug had a recent encounter with his hero thanks in part to his blog. He got to share a brief con­ver­sa­tion with his hero, and Guy agreed to put a link on his blog to Doug’s site. This is the power of the web. Every­one con­nected to everyone.

Much like Doug, I feel like writ­ing some­how shrinks my world while simul­ta­ne­ously expand­ing its pos­si­bil­i­ties. Like Doug, I have “met” so many great peo­ple as a result of sim­ply speak­ing my mind. For exam­ple, last sum­mer I was at a meet­ing of the Day­ton Ad Club where the topic was get­ting the most out of the media. The per­son next to me asked the panel about RSS and blogs as a source of news, and they just stared at him dumb­founded. He pressed fur­ther say­ing “there is a guy here locally who blogs about mar­ket­ing events and local busi­nesses, do you fol­low sites like that?” Again they side­stepped his ques­tion, and the meet­ing moved on. I was now curi­ous to meet this guy and find out more about the site he was talk­ing about. After the meet­ing, I approached him, intro­duced myself, and asked him “what site are you talk­ing about?” It turns out he was talk­ing about my old site, which com­pletely blew my mind. We con­tin­ued to talk and dis­cov­ered that we shared a great deal in com­mon. That guy, David Esrati, is one of the bright­est peo­ple I know. He is some­one I con­sider to be a trusted friend and respected col­league — a con­nec­tion I never would have made with­out blogging.

Another exam­ple was when I posted a Thank You to author Seth Godin for being such an inspi­ra­tion to me. (If you have not read Seth’s blog or his books, you are miss­ing out on some great insights into the world.) The post was sim­ple, it would not be a can­di­date for the Pulitzer Prize, but was sin­cere in express­ing my appre­ci­a­tion for Seth’s work. When I hit pub­lish, I never thought that Seth might actu­ally read the post. I just fig­ured that per­haps I could turn a few peo­ple on to his work. Imag­ine my sur­prise when I checked my email a few min­utes later to dis­cover a per­sonal thank you from Seth to me. I was blown away. The guy is a respected entre­pre­neur, a best sell­ing author, and a highly sought after moti­va­tional speaker, yet he man­aged to email me, a com­plete stranger, about a blog post I wrote within 10 min­utes of its cre­ation. Connectivity!

For Doug to say that I some­how inspired him, or at least informed him about blog­ging, is another high­light. The guy is a sharp as nails, opin­ion­ated as hell, and not afraid of any­thing or any­one. He is exactly the type of per­son who will be great at blog­ging. While Doug and I often dif­fer in opin­ion, we always main­tain a deep respect for each other. I am look­ing for­ward to hear­ing his voice on the world in which we live. Keep the posts com­ing Doug, and thank you for mak­ing my Mon­day morn­ing great!

I Won­dered Why Every­one Liked This So Much… at doug’s blog