I know that you are very excited to find out that I learned something so here it is:

Don’t run a flash drive through the washing machine! The data rarely survives.

Now I did not say it was profound but again I did learn that. I had kind of assumed that because they appear to be sealed up pretty good that they might do ok but I learned other wise.

And something I relearned was to check your pockets before you was your pants. Usually I relearn this with gum or a pen or something that gets all over everything so I was fortunate to have this retaught to me in a less destructive way. And I think I have found the data other places.

I have thought of a word for this. it is relesson. A relesson is a thing in our lives that taught us a lesson that we later have to relearn. When I am cooking and not paying attention I sometimes relearn that the stove is hot and that knives are sharp. I hate that relesson!

Why would I write about such a mundane subject matter? Because we all need to relearn things in our business and in our life. Sometimes they are as painful/frustrating/oh-my-gosh-what-happened as a pen in the wash or worse in the dryer with your work shirts and sometimes these relessons are not as painful.

I have a plan so I don’t have to relearn all of my relessons. That is to on occasion take a look at my habits and routines and be sure they cover things adequately in my life that I rarely give thought to.

Man, I hope it works. If nothing else for the sake of my fingers!

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?