I was watching a program on nano technology yesterday and it got me to thinking. Nano technology is the manipulation of organic at the molecular level… really small stuff. Anyway, one of the comments was that with nanobots, that would be REALLY small robots, that each one would not be intelligent but as more of them come into existence that the collective would gain in intelligence.

Kind of creepy and sounds like the Borg from Star Trek!

What got me to thinking was that often when we hang out with smart people we tend to become smarter. I don’t mean that your IQ goes up 89 points but when you hang with creative, out of the box types, after a while you start to see things differently.

One example would be when I first started with the Chamber, when any chamber did an event we might check with our neighbors for advice but generally we stuck with our own volunteers even for critical things or something that did require some knowledge. Then Jay Lifson and I started helping each other at our big events. It is great to have competent “professionals” helping you when the world is running wild. It worked great and now we are discussing with other chambers the idea of a core of professionals that each chamber can call on to do those things that we have had lots of experience with and let the other volunteers do the pouring and such. We even have interest from some chambers across the bay!

After that we have helped to resolve a number of difficult issues here in CC County that with out the collective really did not even get attention much less energy to resolve. In some cases our collective wisdom helped to make us aware of things that were not on our radar at all!

So look at whom you are hanging with… do they bring value to what you do? Are you smarter when you associate with them?