My Year of Hopefulness - The Power of Passion

By nature, I am a passionate person. I get excited about charitable causes and I enjoy sharing my excitement about them. I often write about them on this blog and on my Examiner.com column. On occasion, I wonder if anyone's listening or if anyone reading shares my interest and excitement. I guess that insecurity is normal for writers though I've never been able to be comfortable with it, particularly when I'm writing about something that I care about deeply.

Today, I received an email from a friend of mine that eased my sense of insecurity and re-energized me. Recently, I put together a post about a cause that I'd like to support. I'm not sure how to support the cause as it's not one that is talked about frequently, at least not in the circles I travel in. My passion for the idea and my desire to make a difference in this area prompted me to put the idea out there into the world, hoping that I'd attract people to it who are as interested in it as I am. For a while, the airwaves have been silent but today, all of that changed with my friend's email.

As it turns out, he and a friend of his are also very interested in this cause. They've been in the process of creating some content to support the cause and have been searching for someone to do the business framing around the idea. Perfect! I've got the business framing in mind and have been searching for content.

In addition to finding out about this shared interest with my friend, I also learned a critical lesson about social media. It gives us a way to howl and find our pack. It gives us a way to connect and explore new interests in ways that are far-reaching and previously impossible. It gives us a way to unite, collaborate, and innovate in extraordinary, immediate ways.