The Internet Changes Everything – and Nothing at All

When I heard Taylor Davidson was coming to Charlotte (thanks, Lyell) and checked out his website, Unstructured Ventures and blog I knew I had to meet him. I mean, here was a strategy and finance consultant for start-ups who had recently quit a miserable job in corporate direct marketing to hit the highways and travel across the country. I met him through twitter. Surely he had an amazing social media plan for attracting budding entrepreneurs along the way.

Um, no.

“I’m just heading in the direction of friends and seeing what happens,” he said as I sat waiting expectantly for details about his big social media outreach plan. “I’m emailing and twittering a bit along the way and I’m on Facebook but I really just want to see what happens without too much planning.”

“I do not directly trade my time for money, I earn a lot in return for giving away my time. If you’re spending your time on doing things that make you better, work no longer consumes you; it creates you. We owe it to ourselves to spend our time on our passions, but more importantly we owe it to everyone we care about: only by fully engaging ourselves can we truly give back to others.” ~ Taylor Davidson

When I later learned he had toured India with nothing but a backpack and map I understood.

“This is a great time to start a business,” he said with a shy smile. “I like to show people what’s possible. I want to do that in person. See where they live, what their favorite restaurants are, where they’re thinking of opening a business. I can’t wait to see how it will unfold. The randomness is the best part.”

Taylor’s from a rural town where plenty of people don’t know what a blog is. That doesn’t matter to him. “When the Internet was introduced people were predicting the end of cities,” he said. “But the opposite is happening. Technology lets us live anywhere we want and we chose to live near other people. Nothing beats personal contact.”

I couldn’t dispute that. After all, I wasn’t taIking to a webcam, I was sitting across from him sipping a chai latte at Panera Bread.

Social media is nothing more than a new way to do what we’ve always done – connect people together. Talking to Taylor reminded me that plenty of people can – and will – live without any of it. But they all want to connect.

Follow Taylor’s Drive-by Consulting adventure