Missing Out On CES 2017 Invoked Fear, Forcing Me to Refocus! #FOMOFanz 009

This weekend it hit me that I wouldn’t be attending CES 2017 this upcoming week and it sent me to a place of disappointment and darkness as I was missing out.  This is something I’m not proud of but it happened and I believe I’m better because of it and I hope by sharing this others can see they aren’t alone and that there is a better way.   As a massive tech geek and event nerd the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is one of the biggest events of the year with over 165k people attending.  Last year I spent 8 days in Vegas around the event doing everything from flying a drone to automating an entire house to test driving a BMW that had yet to hit the market.  This year I was planning on attending with a client of mine to host their booth and do a presentation on their behalf around the value of live video for technology brands.  After much discussion they came to the decision that it would be better to pull out of CES at the last minute and focus on Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which surprised me but I 100% supported.   So as I do, I posted to Facebook and sent a couple messages to the media outlets that I had interviews scheduled with that I wouldn’t be attending this year’s CES and I would be following along online and hopefully see everyone next year.  The outreach from friends and peers was great as I have an amazing community including many offering for me to crash at their hotel and even some willing to take my list of must see booths and live stream it directly for me to see.  I’m truly thankful to have such an amazing community but even with all that support not attending CES this year hit me harder than I thought it would.   As I replied to messages and started to see friends like Robert Scoble and Daniel Newman posting about CES, I started to feel bad for myself and then mad that they were going and I wasn’t.  I’m an optimistic passionate person that seldom gets mad and rarely gets stressed but for some reason my FEAR OF MISSING OUT really hit me hard. That led me down a dark path that included uninstalling apps and coming up with a plan to act as if CES wasn’t happening.  Thankfully it only took a couple hours and some soul searching to realize that's not who I am, that’s not how I would want my community to act when I go to events.  You’ll hear how I refocused myself and leaned on some friends and the community and what I learned from this experience and my reason for sharing it publicly with you the FOMOFanz podcast community.    Podcast special: How I will be monitoring CES from my iPhone and how i’ll configured my twitter app to filter the noise around #CES2017 hasthag so I get as much value as possible while not at the event this week.