Wow, it’s over. What an amazing event it was!

I wanted to share with you a bit of the TEDxBoulder back-story. For me, it was one hell of a learning experience about organizing, planning and avoiding stress. This was my first time putting on an event of this magnitude. Luckily for me, I was part of an amazing team that included:

• Andrew Hyde
• Jennifer Roberts
• Arthur Nisnevich
• Ef Rodriguez
• Ken Ficklas
• Jamie Harkins
• Dan Storch
• Josh Mishell

In the Summer of 2008, I registered TEDxBoulder with TED, under the full intention of getting an event running by the Fall of 2008. I delayed. Several months later my wife was pregnant, so I delayed again. Then my son was born, again I delayed. All these delays were excuses I was giving myself to push off the event to a date in the future when I would be “ready.” It wasn’t until April of 2010 that I began to realize I was afraid to move forward. At the time I was reading “Making Ideas Happen” by Scott Bellsky of Behance, and “Linchpin” by Seth Godin. It occurred to me that my “delays” were unnecessary, and that I just needed to start taking action. I needed to move the ball forward to gain momentum. It was then that Andrew reached out to me about doing the event jointly.

There it was – my kick-in-the-ass. Now I had to be accountable to someone other then myself. Andrew’s history of action, community involvement and experience starting up events like Ignite Boulder and Start-up Weekend was undeniable. The ball started rolling. Andrew locked in Chautauqua Park and started assembling a team. Interestingly, with the exception of Josh and Ef, this team had very little prior history with Andrew and me, and I had little history with Andrew and his hands-off style of leadership.

At first the project manager in me thrashed with discomfort. I was used to milestones, to-dos, project plans etc.. TxB had none of that. Instead, we used Google Docs to collaborate and share planning schedules and budgets. I naively thought we could grab sponsorship first, develop a budget and spend from there. Andrew decided to charge everything, keeping the faith that we’d sell out. I soon realized that all of those old project management techniques would have just gotten in the way of us reaching our goal. Fundamentally, it was the Team that made this happen. The joint passion, interest and dedication of the members removed the need to “check on people” or delegate out assignments. We all knew what we needed to do, we just needed to ship!

We started with the speakers. The entire team reached out to their networks of friends and family to find some of the great thinkers and leaders in the Boulder area, and by mid-June our speaker list was 90% complete. Ken tackled the music talent and landed Vienna Teng and John Spottiswoode. Jamie coordinated the staging, signage and venue resources. Jennifer coordinated and rallied together 25+ volunteers plus our food vendors. Dan’s team at Good Apples designed our materials & gifts for the speakers. Arthur managed the TEDxBoulder.com site and was in charge of the overall presentation of the slides. Josh had the monumental task of beautifying the slides a week before the event, and Ef… he just did his thing, and did an amazing job of it. I worked on sponsorship and general coordination, and Andrew showed us the way and lead the charge.

The inaugural TEDxBoulder was a great success. We sold out a few days before the event. Our audience stayed engaged from 4pm till 9pm. Our speakers drove home their messages of hope, knowledge and action. Vienna and Spottiswoode delivered some beautiful entertainment. I made some great friendships and was introduced to some amazing people.

Will we do it again? I’m not sure.

I, for one, won’t decide for another month or so, and I’ll only do it if I can have the same team that I had for this event. They were ALL amazing! That doesn’t mean that someone else won’t pick up the reigns and run with it, however.

My take home: taking action, no matter how small is the necessary prerequisite to success. The stress isn’t in the “doing.” The stress is in the “delay.”