Who Needs A Mob?

Mike brings up an excellent point - who you hang out with makes a big difference in your success. I happened to see this video after having a conversation with my friend Leslie about working at home; she wanted to know if I ever missed having co-workers?

I told her I did, but that I tended to need to focus during the day so that I found the lack of folks around to be more of a benefit than a cost.

But, as Mike points out above - your mob is key. And not having co-workers around, contributes to not having a mob.

Building A Virtual Mob

So, I decided at the very least, I should have a virtual mob to chill with. But where to find one? For this, I turned to everyone's favorite generic tool: Twitter. I usually talk about using Twitter to get your messages sent out to folks, but in many ways, Twitter's true strength is in allowing you to build your own custom stream of conversation. So, rather than hang out with programmers or business people, I can hang out with interesting folks from any group that I want.

To get started on forming my virtual mob, I took the few individuals I was already following (like codinghorror) and started checking out who was following them. If their Twitter streams looked interesting, I clicked the Follow button. Then, I took Nick's advice and used search.twitter.com to find folks who mentioned topics that interest me (entrepreneur, small business, etc.). Finally, I followed some service type feeds, like cnnbrk for CNN Breaking News.

The result is a stream of chatter - my new virtual mob. Like any group of friends, it's not something that's right immediately - I'm expecting to tweak who I follow significantly. My goal is clear though, keep tweaking till I have a sense that I'm surrounded by hard working people who I'm not only learning from, but can also engage. Oh, and I want all this to happen without taking huge chunks of my day.

Is It Working?

And how's this experiment working out? Well, so far:

I've seen lots of meaningless chatter: Soooo exhausted. Frm todays activities
I've come across technical blog posts I wouldn't have normally read: I'm not failing; I'm merely deferring my success. http://odetocode.com/blogs/
I've learned about amazing tools: http://iwantsandy.com is really cool.
I've seen insightful and amazing videos: Yes, Yes, Yes! content and Community. Become a part of the community http://is.gd/1iYS
I've laughed out loud: Looking over the kills:shots-fired ratio in the monthly Viper report. Who's training us, a blind child with a water gun? Also, I hate Excel

And that's in just a couple days of playing around. Boy, am I glad that Mike and Leslie were already part of actual mob. I'm really curious to see where this experiment goes.

Note: if you Twitter, definitely leave your username in the comments so I can start following along. If you're interested, you can follow me here.