My Peeps obby has failed miserably. This is the obby where I’m supposed to find/create a community of self-employed people. What I envision is a group that meets regularly to socialize, bounce around ideas, and generally support one another in our pursuits.

This is the first obby I started when I moved back to Boston. I posted an ad on Craig’s List, got some responses, and formed a self-employed women’s lunch group. We met a few times. Then, I was out out of town for a while and no one organized any activities. Slowly, the group fizzled out, all except for one or two women that I still keep in touch with.

I place a lot of importance on this obby because I’ve been warned that life as a self-employed person can be quite isolating. Seeing how I’m a very social person, I’m especially wary of this aspect of my new life. Now that I’m out of school and not working at a regular job, I don’t have anyone to interact with during the day. I want my own colleagues. You know, people to chat around the water cooler with and to eat lunch with, people to go to happy hours with and play softball with. Wait a minute, I don’t even play softball, but you get the idea, basically the social interactions that working people take for granted. Even though I’m doing all these fun projects, I miss the camaraderie, the feeling that we are all in this thing together.

You can understand my excitement then when I got this email about a business mixer from the MIT alumni association. Business? Business? Did someone say business? I went bright and early. It was held at an Irish pub in Kendall Square. To facilitate interaction, the event organizer asked everyone to put a colored dot on their name tag. ORANGE means you are an entrepreneur, BLUE means you are looking for a job and YELLOW means you are an investor. Since I’m an entrepreneur wanna be, I put on an orange dot. There were a few obligatory introductions but after a while, I found myself in some very engaging conversations. I met someone who’s starting a biotech company and several Internet startup founders.

At one point, I was approached by a very businesslike women in her late forties wearing a yellow dot. She shook hands with me and looked directly into my eyes,

“Tell me about your business.”

I was taken by surprise, then quickly gave her the two sentence oh-I-just-got-out-of-school-and-am-brainstorming-for-a-business-idea introduction. I saw impatience and disappointment quickly flash across her face (I’m getting better at reading people), and without blinking an eye she said,

“Get back to me when you have an idea”, and moved on.

Right then and there, I felt terrible. I felt rejected and out of place. “Why am I here?” I asked myself. All around me are go-getters building growth companies and hoping to make millions and billions. Here I am, dreaming to start tiny businesses that will hopefully generate enough income to make a living. When I think about it, our interaction was perfectly normal. She has money to invest and she’s looking for that little company that’s going to be the next Google, and she sure isn’t going to waste her time hobnobbing with an obbyist. She is just doing her job and pursuing her own goals. From my side, I should have recognized it when I’m not among those that will likely be part of my community and moved on. But somehow I let it get to me. I think the old go-getter in me is upset. Just because I figured out what it is that will make me happy in the long run — doing obbies with people, doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy to walk the walk.

The lesson I learned that night is not necessarily that I should stay away from MIT business mixers or all go-getters, but that I should be more deliberate when I go into these situations. If I decide that it is indeed worthwhile to go, I will need to inoculate myself psychologically beforehand so I don’t get swept up in other people’s goals or my own insecurities. I will need to figure out exactly what my goals are for attending that event and to meditate on them, to visualize what they mean to me in gory details. For example, my goal for attending that business social was to find people to join my community. I ought to visualize what kind of people I’m looking for. What are their mannerisms? What are their personal qualities? What do they care about? The more focused I am about what it is I want, the less likely it is that I will get distracted, including by my own emotions.

Back to what I was saying before, I’m still looking for my peeps (people who are self-employed or spend a good portion of their time pursuing independent projects, AND who are interested in making new friends). Maybe I will try events sponsored by the chamber of commerce. Any suggestions on where and how I can find them? Do you know anyone personally that you think I should meet?