I was listening to The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC the other day. The guest was Lisa Napoli who was talking about her book Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth, and how she started a youth-oriented radio station in Bhutan. Napoli talked about how she ended up in Bhutan, and ended the interview by encouraging people to pay attention to the connections in their lives that have the potential to result in amazing things. *Her* amazing thing was that she met someone at a party who ended up inviting her to go to Bhutan and start this radio station. And it got me thinking about my own social and professional connections.

I talk a lot about the problems I see with librarianship and where we can expand/improve/etc. But this area of social/professional engagement (the word networking makes me squirm) is an area where I think librarianship really excels! Librarians all around the country (world?) are connecting with each other via Twitter, Facebook, and other social web sites. And these connections are having amazing results. We’re motivating/inspiring each other, sharing ideas, planning projects, building teams, and pushing innovation. Quite simply, we’re making it happen.

So when I heard Lisa Napoli talk about the importance of these “connections” and these serendipitous relationships, I got really excited. And not excited at the thought that I might meet a beautiful stranger at a party and she would invite me to a remote country to do something that had never been done before. I got excited at the prospect of being the *connector*! I got excited at the prospect of being the person who introduced the pair who ended up going to a remote country to do something that had never been done before!

We all aspire to have positive impacts on our communities, and pursue game-changing innovations for our libraries. But I believe its equally important for us to play the role of the “connector”. Our most significant impacts could be hooking up the right people, or connecting the right person to the right idea.

Lets be honest, you are I are pretty awesome. But you and I, *together*, can do way more good for our communities than you and I, alone.

Shout-out & #buildtheteam love to Andrea Davis for we>me inspiration.