Innovation and entrepreneurial issues are some of my favorites  and House of Genius is a great volunteer organization that incorporates innovation, community and networking is a unique and powerful way.

Recently I attended the one-year anniversary of House of Genius. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t invited because I’m a genius, but to offer me an opportunity to help create genius with others.

House of Genius is an entrepreneurial community service that assembled 380 professionals from various fields to assist 57 entrepreneurs in 2011. The founders, Tim Williams, Toma Bedolla and Collin Adair, recognized an opportunity to create an ongoing community event where the contributors could share their expertise for a greater good. Beyond this, they are also more engaged with a small group and get value out of their time rather than a typical networking event where attendees can rarely engage and walk away with valuable or actionable new connections. If you attend House of Genius, you have to participate!

After attending three of these crowd sourcing sessions in 2011, my takeaway was that this unique structure is very special in how it benefits the volunteer participants as much as the presenting companies. They assemble smart, diverse groups of people to focus their collective creativity and experience to explore, discuss and solve important problems. Contributors gain value by applying the lessons of presenting entrepreneurs and other contributors to their own life or venture.

As Tim Williams describes it, “The genius really is in collaboration. We find the consensus of a diverse group of professionals is accurate almost 95% of the time, whereas insight gained from a one to one meeting shuts the door to innovation and other points of view — thus resulting in a higher rate of error.”

Read the full article on Huffington Post

One of the decisions that has consistently altered my life to be better was the choice to surround myself with people that are smarter and more interesting than myself.

I’m fortunate to live in a city full of smart, fun and creative people. This makes it easier to never be the smartest person in the room, but you can do this no matter where you live.

When I first started seeking out people smarter than myself I felt a slight insecurity, but it was not as persuasive as the positive powerful feeling of stretching myself.  In my case, I went deep into tech geek culture with venture capitalists, angel funders, entrepreneurs, socially conscious business people and coders who practically speak in another language when they talk about technology.

There is a phrase I like that says, “Fear is simply excitement without the breath.”  It’s a little hokey and may not be true, but reminds me to get over anxiety when I’m afraid and just do what I’m afraid of.  One of those big fears for me was meeting new people.

Anyone who has only known me the last few years would never believe that I was an introvert because now I’m almost hyper-social.  But it took conscious effort to leave the shyness at the door.  The rewards from not only meeting people, but specifically meeting interesting smart people, has been invaluable.

Besides learning and laughing daily by knowing these people, we have helped each other find jobs, connect to business partners and share resources that have had mutual benefit to our personal and professional lives.

If you’re mostly hanging around people beneath your level of knowledge, experience and financial wealth, you’ll have a hard time creating great experiences because you’ll have to create a lot of it alone.  I’m not saying it can’t happen, or that it’s what everyone wants, but I find life to be much fuller in direct proportion to the time I spend with inspiring, smart, interesting and helpful people.

My Twitter friends have been an exponential boon in my growth in these areas because I’ve found and been found by so many amazing people around the globe.  Social media has opened access for us to millions of people you could never have had the time and energy to connect with otherwise.  Now we are changing the world for the better together.

As you build your online presence realize that we are moving into the Year of the Influencer in 2010 or 2011.  I’ll write more on this in the coming months, but what matters is that you don’t need a lot of money or power to do great things or to meet great people.

To become an influencer or to enjoy the rewards that come from connecting to influencers who share their knowledge, experience and resources only takes passion and action.  After investing some quality time sharing what’s great about you & what you’re passionate about with other great people the snowball rolls down the hill.

Technology and the psychological shift towards more transparent and integrous modes of doing business are creating a revolution.  One of the main reasons this is happening so quickly is that smart people are freely sharing their time and efforts with other high quality smart and interesting people online.  As these people (including you) meet, converse and collaborate, it’s ushering in a new world that’s benefiting all of us.

The next time you’re at a party, a networking event, on Twitter, or anywhere that other people are present, I invite you to seek out the people who seem more interesting and smarter than you.  Then introduce yourself, mention what you found interesting about them, ask them good questions, listen to what they have to share and notice how good you feel after connecting with them.

I recently had a meeting with the other two founders of Oxstein Design Labs to get our messaging together before we launch a lot of what we’re doing to the world. We already have great partners and interested clients that are helping us to create our initial offerings which is nice place to start.

A big piece of this will be creating an open source framework to help people build, manage, measure and understand Trust Communities.  Beyond that, we’ll be playing in the spaces of tech, social media, education and entertainment. I put up our initial blog today.  It’ll be moved to our website when it launches very soon, but it’s time we started to share our vision and begin to connect to our tribe.

After being either a consultant or an employee for a couple of decades, it’s very exciting to be building a company that’s fully aligned with my interests and skill set with top level players.  Working with people who are smarter than me in their fields of expertise and who also value fun and integrity as much as money is a true joy.

When we met for the first time in person after months of Skyping, phone calls and emails to officially kick this company and project off the ground it was amazing to note how each of our respective talents came together and mesh so well to create and build our collaborative vision.  I’ll roll more of that out in the coming weeks and months.

It’s a change to be traveling a lot more and working the hours of a start up entrepreneur as we build the parent company and the companies under it’s umbrella.  I’ll be meeting interesting people as well as speaking and presenting much more.  (Blog posts and Flikr photos will undoubtedly be flowing like a waterfall.)  But most importantly, I’ll be doing work that fills my soul as it helps others to see and enjoy the bigger picture of what the social media revolution and niche Trust Communities are doing to transform our lives.

I’m very lucky.  Communication, relationships, technology and collaboration have been my loves all my life.  We are now at a point where these interests are overtaking the culture of control and competition that we were born into.  It’s a great time to be alive for someone like me.

As I blog about this and other adventures it will be great to connect with you on deeper levels than I have in previous blog posts.  My heart will have more to say as it’s song develops on this journey.  I’m getting for the first time how fun business can be.  It’s fun because when you play with the right people to do the right things that contribute in the right ways it’s a blast.

Startup Weekend is a conference bringing together developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.  Sounds cool, right?  It is.

The concept grew from an idea by  Andrew Hyde in 2007 and now there have been over 49 Startup Weekends with 65 cities and 11 countries signed on to host more.

Rather than your typical conference of watching speakers and panels, these conferences are designed to facilitate learning through organically forming teams and getting into immediate action.  It’s a conference with some unconference elements that facilitate cumulative collaboration creating community and companies.

It kicks off with all the participants sharing their backgrounds and answering the question, “What’s your problem?”  Over the years I’ve discovered what a crucial question this is to ask for any business or proposed project, product or service.

A classic mistake most entrepreneurs and companies make is that they get excited about an idea and invest valuable time and money into creating a product or service they think is great.  Then they take it to market and try to convince the public to be interested in it.  This is why so many of them fail.  If people aren’t interested in what you’re offering then you don’t have a business.

It’s much more effective to ask people what they want and provide that.  Or even better, ask them what problems they currently have and provide simple and powerful solutions to those problems.  That’s where the sweet spot of helping people and making a profit lie.

Jason Janelle, Tom Markiewicz & Harry Love build an internal media sharing solution; Ron Bronson makes a Twitter-based baseball application; Neil Simon creates WordPress Plugins

In the case of this Startup Weekend, after identifying problems we all broke into teams to immediately start building the solutions.  Through conversations covering design, development and marketing things moved very quickly.

Within the first 3 hours of meeting this morning one product was a ‘fast fail’ (Rosetta Stone already has a similar version of how to connect people who want to practice their second languages with people of equal levels of skill), and a name and WordPress Plugin were created for SpotGrab – a product to connect renters with available apartments.  And that’s just what happened for two of the projects.

Though products, projects and companies are birthed at Startup Weekends, the first focus is on community.  Regardless of any outcome, the conference provides an environment for internet creatives to meet and share their skills with one another.

About a month ago I volunteered to help with business development, marketing and PR for iVolunteer which is a product born from the last Boulder Startup Weekend.

We’re developing a website, iPhone app and WordPress plugin that enables you to find local volunteer opportunities aligned with your interests easily anywhere.  There are over 30 volunteers working on this.  Most of us found out about it after two guys met at the last Boulder Startup Weekend and saw an unfulfilled need.

I’m wondering how similar conferences can be created outside of the tech world to generate collaboration and community.  The registration fee goes entirely to the food budget and the space rental (unless it’s donated like it was this weekend.)  Aside from this, participants are welcome to drop in and out as their schedules demand.  This makes it easy for people to contribute in whatever ways work for them.

How could you create an event like this in your community based around your interests to share your influence and bring people together in fun and productive ways?  Or an easier way to look at it is, ‘What’s your problem?’  Just asking.

Last night I attended the Entrepreneurial Mashup hosted by Silicon Flatirons.  It was an event honoring the biggest entrepreneurs in Boulder.

It’s quite amazing to be in a room with 150 fun, successful, optimistic dreamers committed to building a better future.

As you’d imagine, it’s the opposite feeling of hanging out with people who follow every tidbit in the news about how the world is falling apart.  (Garbage in, garbage out.  Turn off the corporate news and go make your own news.)

The other wonderful aspect of this is that Silicon Flatirons is a center for law, technology, and entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado.  The university and state government actively participate in supporting the visionaries, investors and advisors who are creating the next generation of meaningful companies to impact local, national and international concerns.

I spoke with a 23 year old entrepreneur who is getting free legal help through the university and other free assistance from advisors, investors and older successful entrepreneurs.  These are the kinds of things happening right now that aren’t in the news.

I’m sharing this with you as an invitation to look at the power of your own attitude and the attitude of the people you choose to surround yourself with.  By hanging out with smart, fun visionary people I’m constantly in creative conversations with people taking action to build a better future.

When those people are venture capitalists, tech geeks and entrepreneurs, it’s all about building community and  companies that are creating the architecture of our new societal systems.

After these conversations everyone in them leaves inspired, excited, connected to new great people, turned on to make great things happen and to give back to the community.

They’re also in action, not just talking about what they’re going to do ‘someday’ (have you noticed that ‘someday’ never actually comes?)

When I’m around people who are not in those circles I hear conversations about how horrible everything is.  These people are hanging way too much hope on the government and people outside themselves to solve our problems.  They are also notably in depressing moods most of the time because their minds are living in a victim mentality with a dark perception of current affairs.

Yes, the old status quo systems that have been corrupt and debilitated for 30 to 50 years are dying.  This is great because now we’re forced to create new and better systems.  Most people do not change unless they are forced to.  Now we all have to swim in new, better and more inclusive uncharted waters.

If you find yourself surrounded mostly by the Cathy and Ken Complainers of the world, then how about searching out the folks who are so busy creating great futures that they don’t have time to whine?

You can have the attitude of an entrepreneur even if you’re an employee.  Simply take responsibility for whatever is in front of you and start making something greater out of whatever opportunities and materials you have.

Ignore figuring out how to do it; that only comes by taking action. So do something now.  Make it happen.

Commit to the brighter future you know you deserve and get on with it before you waste any more time and miss out on more happiness.

The people in your life, the thoughts in your head and the actions you do or don’t take will either take you up or down.  You won’t be in the same place in one, five, ten or twenty years.  Which way do you want to go and what are you going to do today to create a better tomorrow?