In today's world, there is a myriad of ways to learn new things and improve your skills. You can decide to read, listen to podcasts, attend webinar and watch educational videos, among others. For these reasons, many find it difficult to attend live events, seeing it as a waste of time and scarce resources.
If this is your case, well I should say you are missing out on one of the best known tools to launch yourself into the mainstream. Live events (Meetups, Conferences, Workshops, etc) provide you with rare, unique learning and career building opportunities that you cannot find else where.
Let me take you through some of the reasons you should make it compulsory to attend live events and also send people working under you to conferences.
Opportunity to meet experts and influencers face to face
This is one of the major benefits of attending live events. Although it is not all meetups or conferences that would offer you the desired opportunity to meet with influential people one on one, but sharing or being under the same roof greatly improves the possibility of that. 
It offers you the opportunity to network
No one survives as an island of oneself. This is an agelong, fundamental truth. Success in life, to a large extent, entails networking and making right connections with people of diverse backgrounds. Whereas it is true that one can leverage on social media to keep in touch with friends and colleagues from both within and overseas, but honestly, there is no substitute to meeting someone in real life.
Well organized live events have opportunities such as cocktails, lunch, photo break and other forms of breakout sessions for attendees to socialize with one another; establishing new relationships and strengthening existing ones for mutually beneficial association. Within the context of Steemit program, you don't know if the person sitting next to you would become your biggest supporter and upvoter throughout the rest of your stay on Steemit. Now, with you out of the way by not attending, another clever Steemian may well take over the opportunity and gets to enjoy the benefits that otherwise would have been yours.
Opportunity to learn new tips and tactics
Information, of course, maybe somewhere on the web but a good conference helps cut through the clutter to deliver the best content for its participants. Source
Internet houses a lot of information. As true as this is, sometimes locating the right information you are seeking becomes so daunting a task that one may have to just abandon everything there. Live events assemble lots of experts on different topics in a given discipline. Attending such conferences offers you the opportunity to ask your questions on any topic within a given discipline and have them answered by experts live and direct, saving hundreds of browsing data. During the just concluded meetup at Enugu, I was surprised to find out some Steemians didn't even know what discordapp is. And I had to take my time to break it real down and guided them on how to download it.
Without attending that meetup, those who didn't know about discordapp, would have continued blogging without employing necessary tools.
You will see reasons to real out of your comfort zone
This is, perhaps, most important benefits of attending meetup, workshops and conferences. Live events engender competitiveness to work harder among participants. During live events, you get to discover some of your mates in a particular discipline or program, who are doing far better than you. This would make you to begin to entertain certain inwards questions such as: is this person that has attained this feat not my mate in this program? What has he done to have attain this level of success that I have not been doing?
By answering this inwards questions, you will be forced to break out of your comfort zone. If you are the type that sleeps a lot, you may begin to adjust the duration of your sleep period to devote more time to blogging. No medium that will allow you to appreciate the level of growth of your contemporaries more than real life situations.
Conclusion
Success on Steemit isn't all about just blogging unendingly; interacting within the perimeter of your blog, upvoting and commenting on other posts. This alone, as important as they are to your success, cannot make you a successful Steemian. You need live networking; you need to build relationships outside internet. People tend to be more serious with business relationships offline. Live events provide that important convergence for learning, making deals, and building social bridges between diverse groups of people.
Start attending live events today
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