That’s right, tonight we went to Tranny Bingo at the Bowery Poetry Club with another cool couple we met last weekend. Out of the 75 people playing, ACbert walked away the big winner of the night by winning three of the six rounds including the money pot of $205 dollars! The other two prizes were a light up fish tank and two free drinks from the bar. It was a rather epic night beyond just the fact that ACbert won 50% of all the prizes. You’ll have to ask me in person sometime to get the full story . Nothing better than spending a Monday hanging with new friends while experiencing something new. 

An old man in our building passed away a couple weeks ago. I only saw and spoke with him a couple times. Annie and I nicknamed him Morgan Freeman because of a striking resemblance.

I found out about his death because of a police notice on his door and asked our Super what happened. Our Super said the police sealed his apartment because they needed to go through his stuff to find someone to call. They haven’t been able to find any one yet nor has anyone showed up. That’s sad.

I remember someone telling me how the first two rows of your funeral are the people who really count. The exercise then is to think about who would be in the first two rows and make sure to put an effort into keeping and building those relationships.

LinkedIn’s Google tag line is “Relationships Matter.” They say they are about helping you strengthen the relationships within your existing network. 

Today I received this email from LinkedIn:

From an engagement perspective, three things jump out to me in this email…

1. Relationship Strength – I’ve met everyone on the list IRL (in real life). This isn’t information LinkedIn would know, but whatever calculation they are using is doing a great job of weighting the strength of my connections. I suspect it is based on the number of common connections we share.
2. Call To Action – There’s a nice simple motivating call to action to get me to want to click though.
3. It’s Human – 95% of the email contains smiling human faces. It makes me smile. Each face I look at brings back a collection of stories between me and that person.

Like Facebook, I’m not very selective at “friending” people on LinkedIn. I just don’t have time to mentally decide on who to link with and who not. So my account has a lot of noise. I’m impressed LinkedIn is able to filter most of the noise for this email. Relevancy matters.

The only additional result I’d like from this email is when I click through, instead of just bringing me to that individual’s profile, it would highlight the change(s) that happened and then even give me the option to quickly send them a note of congratulations or support.

Lots of people seem to duck and hide whenever a fellow friend has a house/apt move coming up and is seeking help. I go the opposite direction and preemptively offer my help for two main reasons…

1. Moving is a great workout.
2. The best gift you can give a friend is your time. That time can come in a lot of different ways, and helping someone move is one of those ways.

Anytime I can get a great workout and better connect with friends, count me in!

The much hyped and anticipated movie about the US educational system, Waiting For Superman, opened nationwide about a week ago and has already sparked a lot of great conversations. If you haven't gone yet, go!

But before you buy your tickets, make it a Win-Win-Win experience by following the steps below:

Win #1

Purchase your $15 tickets at Fandango or MovieTickets.com and receive a $15 gift card to make a donation to the classroom of your choice via DonorsChoose.org.

Win #2

Go enjoy Waiting for Superman and know that 100% of your ticket price is going to teachers who need it the most.

Win #3

Donate your $15 to a very good teacher friend of ours who has a DonorsChoose page and is trying to raise money for her classroom. She's beyond an amazing teacher and dedicated to making all her kids amazing.

Bonus Win #4

Celebrate because YOU are amazing!

I accompanied Annie to her ingrual NYC softball game today. Partly to support her, and partly to meet the team. I also got to play, and we won by a lot. 

In Chicago we built up an entire friend base through playing sports, and figured the same should work in NY, so we joined a bunch of teams. 

Long term friends don't happen overnight though. Friendship quality is proportional to the number of shared positive emotional experiences. Knowing this, all the people we've met so far are great and we are super excited to hang with them, but are realistic about instantly becoming bestfriends. It just takes time. My oldest brother (Robin) once told me he thinks it takes about three years to establish roots in a new place.