What your choice of trade fair tells you about you…

Talking to a client the other day, who as part of his job has to go to Infosec, the big internet security trade fair. He said to me that he’d secretly rather poke pins in his eyes than go.

We’ve all been there, having to drag ourselves off to some dull old grey old industry event, when frankly we’d rather…

… poke pins in our eyes.

BUT what if it was an industry you were INTO. Bit different then. You’d be LOOKING FORWARD to it, intrigued, even excited. You’d be interested in the conversations, and the people, and the stuff. You’d PAY TO GO. You might even flourish the date your diary embezzled with a few stars.  With a few exclamation marks if its ESPECIALLY GOOD.

Wouldn’t that feel GREAT?

So we got talking about the trade fairs/events/festivals he WOULD like to go to. He had to scratch his chin a bit at first but then got on a roll.

The list read something like this:

The Good Food Show

The Wired Conference

Grand Designs

Real Food Festival

Anything to do with the Slow Food Movement

The London International Wine Fair

100% Design

The Comic Festival

The International Animation Festival

ETC

Not an InfoSec in sight. Some of these were just interests – like the comics and animation- not stuff he’d particularly want to do for  a living. But the food and buildings and design, that’s the stuff he LOVES. And suddenly trade fair becomes fun fair.

Have a look at the visual contrast here:

vs

Striking isn’t it. And pretty revealing.

So, what’s your list? Have a google around and have a look.  It’ll tell you alot about you and what you’d really love to do.

And then it may be an idea to GO ALONG