So this week I came up with a new mission for myself. Connect with 52 new people in 52 weeks.

I've never had a problem meeting new people. I'm aware that I am charismatic and, from what I've been told, engaging. I have a friendly face and that often results in some sort of connection or magnetism. We all have a "super power" and mine happens to be the ability to connect with people quickly. It's important to be aware and embrace what you do well.

My goal in this year long, and maybe longer, experiment is to connect with people I would traditionally never meet. I want to expand my life Rolodex and branch out to other categories of people. Not people I meet through the traditional routes, but rather people I would never imagine meeting.

Social media makes it easy to just blindly pick out a profile and click "follow" or "friend", but I want to go beyond that. I want to make contact with these people, learn their story and share mine. Almost kind of creepy to some of you reading this right? I am a student and teller of stories and I always want to add more to my collection.

Here's what happens in life. You grow up, become an adult and fall into a rut of friends. You can easily put your relationships in buckets like "people I still talk to from school”, "people from work" or "people I met through stuff my kids do". For most of us, that's the breakdown of categories. Maybe two to three buckets of people. Although all these groups are great and I appreciate and love the people in my life; I would be selling myself short in the relationship department if I limited life to just these buckets.

We should all want to have tentacles and branch out. Think of the doors of knowledge, experiences and maybe even opportunity that could he opened with an additional bucket of "life friends" or people you have met through living and not through arrangements of where you grew up, where you work and what neighborhood you live in.

When I was in college I used to play the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game with my friend Robyn. We actually executed it on stage during a talent show and impressed crowds of people with our useless knowledge. You know the game right? People shout out an actor/actress and then we connect that name back to Kevin Bacon within six actors. I can even do it with myself.

Example:
I was in the movie "O" with Martin Sheen. Martin Sheen was in "The Departed" with Jack Nicholson and Jack Nicholson was in the movie "A Few Good Men" with Kevin Bacon.

I did it in 4.

The challenge is to be able to do it within six actors. Hence the name "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". Why Kevin? I honestly don't know.

Like the game, we see that the world increasingly gets smaller and we learn that most of us are separated by just a few people. Imagine tightening up those degrees of separation and realizing that you are only a handful of people away from becoming aquatinted with 1000s of potential connections. Maybe you are not a "people person", and that's fine, but we should #Tryharder to be aware of the importance of people and the value that comes with having more relationship buckets.