Everyone has played the Kevin Bacon 6 Degrees of Separation game.  Name any actor or actress, so the story goes, and you can link them via film roles to Kevin Bacon within three to six actors.

Last week I was at a speaking engagement in the Atlanta area.  It was a luncheon meeting and so I was chatting with the participants as they arrived and ate lunch.  Just prior to the start of the meeting, I sat down at one of the tables near the front and started a conversation with the three men sitting there.

One of the men had noticed that I grew up in Tampa (this was published in my bio that the group printed in their program).  He told me that his wife went to Plant High School in Tampa.  “Well, what do you know!”, I told him, “So did I!” 

But, so did Stephen Stills, Wade Boggs, Gallagher and Lauren Hutton!

He paused for a few minutes and it seemed our “connection” was over.  The business portion of the meeting was about to start, lunch was over, and soon I would be delivering my speech.  So I began to get mentally prepared to stand up and start talking.

Just then, Joe leans over one more time and says, “Oh yeah, my sister in law lives in Tampa too.”  He then proceeds to tell me her address.  It sounds very familiar.  I quickly look up MY sister-in-laws address on my Sprint Treo phone.  My sister-in-law and Joe’s sister-in-law are neighbors, separated by probably 4 houses!  They both live on the same street, opposite sides, in South Tampa, on the water, what the locals call the ”fingers”, as the houses are built on dredged up land that stick out into the bay like fingers on a hand.

Here I am in Atlanta, about to stand up and deliver a speech and I meet a man whose sister in law is my sister in laws neighbor.  So, I used that incredible connection as a nice ice breaker for my speech, still shaking my head at our new found “1 Degree of Separation” as I was introduced.

Two lessons, the world is really a pretty small place.  We are more connected than we think we are.  Secondly, I never would have discovered that connection with my new friend if I had not been purposely meeting and greeting people.  Too often, especially with our hand held technology of today, we get so focused on email, voice mail, text mail, that we forget to smile, stick out our hand and say hi!

Start looking up, smiling, talking and asking questions…..Your 1 Degree of Separation may just be at the table having lunch with you! 

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Habits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.