Talk to five strangers.

Above is a picture I took during my evening commute. Notice how heads are forward, cell phones are out. and nobody is saying a word to one another. I sit this a crowded train twice a day going to and from my office in center city Philadelphia, and rarely do I exchange more than a whispered “excuse me” to someone in passing. A few days ago, I sat shoulder to shoulder in between two business men who spent the entire commute on their Blackberrys sending emails to colleagues, clients, friends, etc., never once looking up to acknowledge the community of people that they were also present on the train. I was guilty of the same thing, as I checked facebook and tweeted my thoughts through my iPhone, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the fact that every person on the rain was having a conversation, just not with one another. It was dead quiet, the silence only broken by intermittent shouts by the conductor as he announced the next stop. Why do we feel so uncomfortable speaking to people we don’t know, yet are willing to post such personal information on so many social networks that are accessible on a global scale?

I tested my comfort zone the other night out of pure curiosity and a craving for change. A woman sitting in front of me was fumbling her belongings and looking for a lost glove that had slipped beneath her seat when the train was stopped at her station. She knew she only had a certain amount of time to exit the train before it would start moving again. Unfortunately, she wasn’t quick enough in her departure. She found her glove a few seconds after the train had started moving, but was helpless. She looked around at the other people in the car, not saying anything, but really asking “did anybody notice what just happened to me”. Well, I did. Her goal was to make her distress noticed by the other passengers, (unnecessary exhales, head shakes, letting her hands fall hard in her lap as she angrily waited for the train to stop again. At my stop.

The woman was the first one off the train when it stopped in Malvern, but looked like a lost puppy as soon as her feet touched ground on the platform. She began asking, “Does anyone live near Paoli?” She needed a ride. Not reluctantly, I offered. It was an opportunity for me to break the silence that I had been observing during my daily commutes and to learn something about myself and another individual. I offered to drive her to Paoli so that she could get in her car and drive home, wherever that may be.

It was a bit of an awkward moment as we walked across the snowy parking lot and into my car, only to find ourselves on another commute with another stranger sitting side by side. Most of our drive together was filled with her complaints about the Septa transit system and a flattering amount of “thank you’s”, but I wasn’t expecting a life changing conversation to occur in the 5 minutes it took to drive to Paoli. By the time I ran out of different ways to say “you’re welcome”, we had arrived at the parking lot where her car was. She got out, thanked me one more time, and went on her way.

I think that as a society we don’t expect people go out of their way to talk to somebody they don’t know, especially if nothing is in it for them. In this situation, my accomplishment was that I met someone new, and I had established a familiarity a personal connection to a situation that I face every day (a crowded Septa train). I think that pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones socially is the first step in realizing how easy it is to do things that we thought we might never do. I encourage every one of you to try this social experiment. Next time you find yourself standing or sitting uncomfortably close to someone you don’t know, don’t reach for your cell phone and read old text messages or emails or check the time. Talk to them. It’s the first step you can take in building the confidence you need to create the lifestyle you’ve always wanted.

Lemonade is a documentary that features a group of creative minds who were recently let go from their jobs, and the paths that they took to redefine fulfillment in their lives. They looked at their circumstance as a golden opportunity to finally follow the dreams that they’d never had time for. After much self-exploration, these individuals have set forth on roads that are leading to utter happiness and enjoyment of their lives. The liberation that they talk about is an emotion that we all crave, whether we realize it or not. Though unemployment forces us to evaluate our career paths, we should all be keenly aware of the direction we are headed and not simply coast through corporate life thinking a steady salary = happiness.

“Despite the still-dominant survivors’ mentality that you’ve got to hang on to what you’ve got, more and more (and more) people are becoming disenfranchised with careers-as-usual and finding new ways to make lemonade.”

Erik Proulx, Creator, Please Feed the Animals

This is So1o, a project and business management tool for freelancers. It was designed by designers, for designers, and makes managing projects easy and nice to look at! So1o offers the ability to manage deadlines and timesheets in the designated sections as seen below, and also offers your clients the ability to access your dashboard to eliminate circuitous dialogue between you and your client during the design process. This way, both parties remain up to date as the project progresses. At the end of a project, custom branded invoices will be sent to your clients and stored on your projects library so that you can easily look at your client turnover on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis. So1o is offering a 10-day free trial period, so if you’re a freelancer drowning in email chains between you and your clients, I suggest you get on it!

TeuxDeux is a slick means of keeping your day organized. It’s easy to navigate, easy to update, and most of all… it’s easy to look at. Designed by Swissmiss, this eye-catching day planner has been popping up on numerous creative blogs as well as recently being added as an available mobile app.

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FOMO, by definition, means “fear of missing out”. It is a highly infectious disorder that leaves us all feeling like we should be doing something else with our time, and it is more common today than ever before. Social networks like Facebook make it easy to keep track of everybody else’s social lives, and as we sit at the computer screen clicking ceaselessly through every frame of every party that happened last weekend, we can’t help but be overcome with a sense of FOMO. The flip-side of this highly contagious disorder is NOFOMO, the idea that you are the one doing something awesome and that everybody else is missing out. Alex Cornell has created a video documentary of otherwise ordinary events and makes them seem interesting. The grass is always greener on the other side, they say. Awesome mentality, carried through by a slick video piece.