Impresarios
At the seminar I did in July for college students, we talked a lot about impresarios. (You can read one student’s take on it here).
Weave together resources and opportunities and put on a show. That’s what impresarios have always done. You rent the opera hall, find the singers and sell tickets. You see an opportunity, connect people who can benefit from it and make something happen.
I challenged the group, 20 strangers who had just met, to orchestrate an ebook of brainstorms and opportunities for their fellow students (and to finish it in just 80 minutes). Here’s a copy of their short ebook. 
The magic of the impresario opportunity is that it can start on the tiniest of scales. You can organize a lunch outing at work. You can start a bowling league. Over time, you can work up to a Kickstarter or a small association of fellow industry professionals. It’s not strategically difficult to imagine fifty ways you can use the resources you have right now to start something.
But actually becoming an impresario is far more difficult than it looks. Not because the systems aren’t in place, not because it’s not straightforward, but because it is fraught with risk. The risk that you’ll be called out for going against the grain and the risk that it might not work. We’ve spent so much time worrying about how hard things are that sometimes we overlook how easy today’s tools make it to actually create something.
And here’s the recording from the seminar I did in 2014: https://seths.blog/2016/04/on-being-an-impresario/