Sasha Dichter is director of business development at Acumen Fund, “a global nonprofit venture fund that invests in enterprises that fight poverty in the developing world.” He’s also a total sweetheart for saying such nice things about me in a recent blog post:

The other day I was lucky enough to sit for an hour with the Acumen Fund Fellows for a talk on networking given by the wonderful, inimitable Sunny Bates.  Sunny is a natural connector, full of joy and exuberance, brimming with energy.

Would that an afternoon with Sunny were mandatory for every MBA student—who inevitably has been misguided into thinking that “networking” is about making a beeline to the most “important” people in the room (defined how?), giving them your pitch and collecting their business card.

Sunny talks about building and cultivating your personal network—the one asset you bring with you everywhere you go—and constantly feeding that network through your own generous acts.  Your network strengthens because you feed it—by making connections between two people who would enjoy meeting each other, starting a business together, or just sharing ideas; by helping others accomplish their goals.

You can read the rest of Sasha’s insightful post (and I’m not just log-rolling) here.

One of the few pleasures of having a birthday between Christmas and New Year’s is that you have vacation time to reflect on the upcoming year. This inevitably develops into something that looks like a long list of self-improvement items. I am not sure why this is such a fixture in my life, but it is.

This year, with all of my international travels in November, I had lots of fly time to get started early. It being the final year of the decade, some of the items were a little more unusual. My usual lust for learning took on a slightly more educational cast.

As a mom of college kids, I have had years of projecting my yearnings onto them. The result is that they are fluent in a few languages…while I am not.

So top of the list is: Learn Spanish.

This year—freshly inspired by all of the remarkable Latin American entrepreneurs I meet through Endeavor.org—I am determined to dust off my college Spanish, really apply myself, and finally learn how to speak the language. I write this as I send my daughter Lucy off to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, during January break to learn Spanish…while I stay home.

But wait…there is more. On to the good bits:

Any of you who have ever received an email from me know that I am among the most pathetic of spellers and typists. I have been accused of all kinds of afflictions, the worst of them being unmentionable here. So, rather than continue to wait for voice-to-text interfaces to catch up to my speaking speed, I am taking the leap: typing lessons.

This year, I intend to be a Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing success story. I was laughing so hard yesterday as I took the Getting Started lesson and found that my stated goal of 70 words per minute, which seemed reasonable at the time (I have lots of journalist pals who way out-type that), hit up against my 87% accuracy at 10 wpm. Making my score a whopping 9 AWPM. Let me be clear: That is 9 words, typed poorly, per minute.

I promise to stay honest and give periodic updates about my adventures with Mavis as I inch up from a whopping 9 to 70 wpm, my goal.

Know, my friends, that 2010 will be the year of the typo-free emails from me. By November or so.

If only you could see how much red ink is on this post…eeeeeek!

Happy Holidays and an amazing New Year.

Let’s make it about plans and goals and less about drunken midnight resolutions.

I got this funny link from daughter Lucy with the promise that our cherished pup, Roxy, would be able to do this by Thanksgiving:

I sent it around to a few close friends, including my brilliant friend comedian Emily Levine. She responded with this comment: “That is so hilarious. But seriously, Sunny, what does it say about the universe that my TED talk gets 30,000 hits on YouTube and this gets over 7 million? Maybe I should start practicing along with Roxy!”

I got to thinking… Why do we love this “talking dog” so much? Our relationships with our pets are so uncomplicated and clean. The terms are set by us. They are unconditional , they are totally devoted, they are so clear and…satisfying.

It isn’t a big leap to see that any human behavior I see in Roxy is not only amusing but also makes our relationship seem potentially human. That is of interest. If we can anthropomorphize our animals (and who doesn’t?), then we can justify our total love and devotion to these creatures. And we can imagine them as a baseline for our other relationships: clean, uncomplicated companionship and devotion—oh, so pleased to see me no matter what mood I am in….

When my kids suggest that I love Roxy the most, they are not right…really. But maybe I do love the nature of our relationship the most.

Today I heard from someone I hadn’t even thought of in 25 years. A casual acquaintance from early days in NYC. He just sent a nice note on Facebook. It hit me.

These little gifts are like the first time I got an answering machine. I would come home, hit the playback button, and listen. At least once a week or so, I would get a message that would delight me…a call from a long-forgotten pal, a love bomb, an apology from someone starting their 12-step program. Little gifts that would otherwise not be heard.

I love these tools that connect all these loose bits. They make me smile.

What happens when you are struggling, when things are tense and difficult, when you know that your life at a given moment isn’t quite working? People have different strategies.

Some of us look inward and try to find a way forward from there. Some of us instead lift up our heads, look at what’s around, and try to figure out what’s wrong—and then possibly come to a different understanding of the problem and a different way of approaching it. Still others also look outward, but only for something or someone to blame.

And then there’s the double-down: You work twice as hard at whatever you’re doing and don’t ever look up. Which means that you’re likely to miss the need for a course correction, and will fail to see that the landscape has changed.

We used to joke about the importance of “working harder, working faster.” That’s the essence of doubling down. You keep accelerating along a path that isn’t quite right and certainly doesn’t feel that way. You can’t figure out what exactly is wrong—that is, what’s off about your career or your life as a whole. But you figure that everything gets better if you simply work harder, so why not do just that?

There’s a lot of doubling down going on right now. In every area, people are continuing to work harder in the exact same way that they’ve always been working. And all the while, they believe that somehow they will be able to pull out of the spiral with…some more hard work. They continue to block out the nagging feeling that it doesn’t feel right. (It feels, in fact, like digging a hole.)

We double down in every aspect of our lives. It’s funny how, these days, it’s hard even to take a walk without needing to have a conversation as well—usually, by cellphone. When in double-down mode, we don’t allow ourselves to be in one moment at a time, to actually be when and where we are. Putting yourself with the person you are talking to instead being right there, seeing what you can draw from.

It’s kind of the antithesis of meditation. And as we practice this anti-meditative state of being, we keep running, keep doubling down, keep feeling like we’re unproductively racing around, not going anywhere.

So what I’m pledging to do here is stop doubling down. Instead, I am going to slow down and see what’s around me. See who, what, and where makes sense, and why. I’m going to slow down for all of that.

I’m going to stop trying to be in two places at one time.

What about you?

There is a tipping point for connectors. When people know you are a connector—truly in the fiber of your being—they  want to connect to you, and they want you to connect them to the people they should know. If you do it for love rather than for money, people really want to be on your side.

How do I do it?

It’s not that I do it, it’s that I cannot not do it. Every time I think of the people I know, I think of who they should know to get what they need to get done, faster, better, smarter. It seems inconceivable that they should not know each other. I would dismiss this craving as the adult version of wanting all of your friends to like one another, but I know that it is way more powerful than that. I have seen the right people coming together at the right time create extraordinary value, solve problems, and heal real or metaphorical pain.

Sometimes it takes a conversation with a total stranger to knock sense into you. That’s what happened Thursday afternoon. Mutual friend Scott Kurnit did the honors of an email introducing me to Shelly Palmer. We did what all good professionals today do. Set up a time to connect by phone.

It took only a few minutes to know we had lots in common, between our parallel careers in media and technologies, similar sensibilities, points of view, and some idea of a course taken in these uncharted waters. The moment of truth came when he said to me, “Sunny, you talk in all the right ways, and are a part of this world, and yet I go to your site and find a splash page and an abandoned WordPress blog. Either turn it off or spend enough time each day practicing what you preach.”

He is right, so finally, I am getting started.

I’m not sure how I feel about living life out loud…but I know I am prepared to live at least part of my professional life out loud. But then that gets interesting when the boundaries between your professional and personal lives blur.

I think about boundaries all the time these days. I think about how difficult it is to live our boundaries. About how much we crave authenticity and honesty, and yet how hard it is to really be consistent. How easily we are disappointed by ourselves and those closest to us, to say nothing of our institutions and our government.

So, Shelly, this one’s for you. And thank you for striking the match.