On the road again: TED@PalmSprings, day 2

The sessions started in earnest today, and as I did last year, in general I found them interesting, informative, and moving. TED is, as Bill observed, incredibly self-referential, so much so that it's tempting to see the references as acts of ego, but I don't think they are. Rather, I think Chris Anderson and the TED team are very good at quickly building a community of the attendees--and then of making that community matter, both to its members and, in many cases, to the world.

I'm not going to cover the individual sessions, because you can probably read about them elsewhere. Instead, I'm going to indulge (yet again, and maybe too much) in a bit of navel-gazing.

More than any other event I've attended, these two TED conferences have aroused in me powerful but mixed feelings. On the one hand, they inspire me to go forth and make the world better. On the other, they leave me depressed at my own lack of accomplishment and lack of work on anything that matters. I see what others are doing and despair over my own meager contributions.

They also make me feel like the high school dork once again. Tonight's dinner was around the pool. People were talking in small groups all over the place. I have no doubt that if Bill and I had joined any of those groups, the people would have talked to us and been generally welcoming. That's certainly been my experience so far. Instead, we wandered together and chatted with each other, neither of us comfortable enough to intrude on others. When someone talks to me, I think I do well in response, but I rarely initiate conversations in such gatherings. I wish I were better at this whole party thing, but I'm not.

Part of me wants to give up, part of me wants to learn this skill, and a small but egotistical part wants to solve the problem by becoming so famous that people come up to me and thus save me the hassle of having to initiate contact. To do that, I better write more and better books--which is what I will go work on next.

Please don't get me wrong. I do not regret coming here. I love the sessions, the atmosphere, the interesting people--pretty much all of it. I've already signed up for next year. I simply regret my own limitations and must work to overcome them.

When isn't that the case?