How did we get here?
It has been suggested to me that developing a birthday website and declaring a year of celebrations might be a tad uncouth, self-serving, or lacking humility. (Drama queen and diva have also been bandied about.)
But if I may say this with a straight face, it’s not about me, it’s about you. My friends and family. I basically just wanted a mechanism, an excuse to spend some time together! I swear!
Let me explain how we got here. At work, my organization puts on a big conference every year--and this year we had to make it go virtual with just a few weeks to go. So we worked with a great group of folks internally--and hired a global design firm to help us think through how to make a virtual event happen. And where we started wasn’t with technology platforms, audience segmentation, or marketing strategies. Instead, in what was familiar to me from my upbringing with a philosophy-professor father, we asked questions like, What is a conference? Why do we gather? How do we want people to feel? We spent a lot of time during our few precious weeks figuring out the why and breaking down to the elements the reasons we would bring people together--only then determining what we would do.
So for my birthday celebration, I asked myself similar questions. By having a big party and an international trip, what had I been hoping to accomplish? What was my birthday party--scratch that, parties--even for? And I came up with a few things:
Spend time with the people I have collected throughout my life--both individually and in groups;
See and experience new things; and
Share a sense of fun, extravagance, and delight.
And so with those goals, I set out to design an experience that would allow me—and all of you—to accomplish these goals.
And so far it’s been great. I spent my birthday weekend and the weeks surrounding it with people stopping by (in small groups to allow for distancing) and doing a bunch of Zoom calls and chats. Lots of laughter and stories were told—just as if it had been a regular old birthday party.
So thank you for all helping to kick things off! I look forward to the rest of the celebrations in the weeks and months to come.
