There are 3 key activities undertaken by the Meetup:

1. Open Discussion of any topic (so long as it is valuable, interesting, or hilarious)
2. “Stand-ups” — a chance for each member to talk about where they’re at, what their goals are, and what they need help with.
3. Challenges — A group mission each month that is fun and pushes each member to do new things, things that we might be too scared of to do alone, and things that will make each member better.  These challenges are proof that we can enjoy personal growth through even small amounts of effort and the help of community.

The Meetup is done via Skype and lasts 2 hours.

Community is powerful.  But building a strong community requires the right culture and the right people, so members are added via invite only.

(Purposeful people know rules can be bent or broken: purpose@Vogel-labs.com)

But, we do encourage you to start your own.  As time goes on and the meetup matures, we’ll be sharing what we’ve learned and any other resources we can provide.

Follow us on Twitter @VogelLabs

Image via Wikipedia

Vogel Labs is here and is making moves.  We’re excited to introduce an elegant and powerful concept–The Performance Meetup.

People that are chasing ambitious goals most often fail for the following reasons:

• Inability to sell. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an aspiring teacher, you need to be able to sell in order to get the necessary results or resources.
• Focus failure. There are so many ways one can spend their time when pursuing an ambitious goal, and a purposeful person can be pulled in many directions.
• Inadequate endurance. It’s always a long hunt.  However, people often fail to build the necessary endurance.
• Wrong Strategy, Wrong Tactics. Due to inexperience, misinformation, and misinterpretation, people use the wrong strategy, which in turn leads to the wrong tactics.
  

The Performance Meetup is designed to solve these problems by tapping into key elements of the human experience**.  And it’s useful for anyone chasing an ambitious goal.

The composition of the Performance Meetup is quite simple:

1. Meet regularly with a group of purposeful people with ambitious goals that are doing something different from you.
2. In front of the group, speak to your accomplishments.  Share your plans for moving forward.  State what you need help with.  Accept honest feedback.
3. Find ways to make the other participants get better and go farther.

The first Meetup will be  is tentatively scheduled for this coming Sunday 11.21.2010 at 7PM (time and date will most likely be shifted to accommodate initial participants, so indicate your interest in coming even if that time doesn’t work, we’ll eventually stick to a regular schedule).  It will be held at Lab One of Vogel Labs near Inman Square.  You can join in person or virtually via Skype.

This is a fun and productive exercise, so we hope to see you join.  Spectators (people not sharing anything with the group) are welcome to attend, if capacity allows.

Let us know if you’re interested in coming by Thursday 11.18 by leaving a comment on this post, tweeting @VogelLabs saying that you’re coming, or email Meetup@Vogel-Labs.com.  Once we know who wants to attend, we’ll finalize the date and time.

-Kevin Vogelsang
11.14.2010

**The key elements include: shared knowledge, shared experience, vicarious experience, competitive spirit, the desire to impress one’s peers, accountability to one’s words, accountability to one’s community.

Through the help of Microsoft, Cooley, and George Moussallem of CitiSchemes, Vogel Labs has arrived.  It takes a lot of time and love to build something great.  But, after an entire year of work and  thought, we’ve taken the first and most important step: we’ve started.

The name is a bit deceiving.  Vogel Labs is not a singular place. At its core, Vogel Labs isn’t really a place at all—it’s a community of purposeful people.

The necessity of Purpose

Everything we do in our lives is an expression of our purpose.  The company you build, the painting you paint, the book you write, has your name written all over it.  It is a reflection of you.

People with weak purpose produce little.  People with a strong sense of purpose build the world we see.

We should want to be connected to as many purposeful people as possible.  People with a strong sense of purpose are responsible, ambitious, passionate, and understand the importance of lending a hand. (After all, they can’t achieve their purpose without the help of others either.)

While personal networks are very important, through our experience, we’ve learned that networks that are slightly formalized and have the right set of values can be extremely powerful.  They build better connections, provide more diverse (and therefore more helpful) connections, and are more scalable.

Thus, Vogel Labs:  a community of purpose.

The first Lab

Everyone wants to be a part of a community of great people.  However, these things don’t just fall from the sky.  It takes work to get them started.  They also need a home to provide a stable foundation and keep people in contact with each other.  This is where our physical locations—the Labs—come in.

We’re happy to announce that the first Vogel Lab has been opened in east Cambridge. It’s not too far of a walk from Kendall, and not too far from Central Square.  The first Lab is very simple and the facilities include desks, a library, whiteboards, blazing fast internet, and other bits of magic.  We think it’ll suit the zero stage entrepreneurs quite well, and we hope entrepreneurs will be the founding seed of this community.  However, artists and writers will find their way to the first Vogel Lab soon enough.

The way forward

By starting simple, the way forward is even simpler—we’ll go the way the community needs.  If we need more space or space in a different location, we’ll just go get more space.  The same goes for any of our facilities.  We’ll find a way to get what we need.  In time, we’ll have facilities for people that, for instance, want to rebuild old cars, fabricate physical things, or teach others a new skill.

A deep connection to Learning

Building a strong sense of purpose is a learning process that takes time, and most people haven’t developed their purpose fully.  Sadly, many have never seized the time to develop it at all.  We believe the best way to start building a stronger sense of purpose is to simply start expressing a purpose that you’ve chosen.  And this gets to the heart of Vogel Labs: a place that helps people get started and push the learning process forward.

At the very beginning, a perfectly valid and natural starting point is the purpose of finding a purpose.  To help with these early stages we’ve put together the Vogel Labs Fellowships.  We’ll share more about how these work soon.

Becoming part of Vogel Labs

As far as becoming a part of Vogel Labs, we’ll keep things simple.  First, send a statement of purpose to purpose@Vogel-Labs.com.  A confident paragraph or two should be sufficient.  We’ll then start a dialogue to figure out if a membership at Vogel Labs would be a great thing for you.

We are in no hurry to add members to Vogel Labs.  Growing a quality community is not something that can be done in a hurry.

Members gain value and must offer value in return.  Part of this value payment comes in the form of cash; members will pay a monthly fee that is currently set at $100.  However, this fee by no means represents equitable payment to Vogel Labs.  The greatest portion of a member’s payment will be their best efforts to aid and improve the community.

Members have access to all facilities and resources.

The Vision of Vogel Labs

The idea that purpose is expressed is worth reiterating, so by default, Vogel Labs is as much about expression as it is about purpose.  The end goal, the Vision of Vogel Labs, is a place where a purposeful person can make anything, and have a community surrounding them that will push them farther than they could’ve gone alone.

The development of Vogel Labs is inevitable, and in time, it will reach its vision.  This will become clear as the story is told.

Follow us on Twitter @VogelLabs.

Kevin Vogelsang
10.1.2010

Building anything takes time–much more time than we think.

Vogel Labs is a dream of ours, and we aren’t there yet. However, it’s only a matter of time.

However, our treatment of the word “technology” remains true to the fuller meaning of the word.  For us, technology is any tool, method, art, or system that serves a purpose. Due to this our experimentation isn’t limited to the types of work commonly associated with a laboratory–mixing chemicals, tinkering with gizmos and gadgets, developing algorithms on computers.  We believe in the need to invent new social machinery and develop new frameworks of thought that will allow us to live a better life.  Consequently, our work often takes on a very different form.

Vogel Labs values and supports four things:

0) Purpose
1) Learning
2) Creativity
3) Community

Each of these is necessary for achieving one’s purpose in the world–whether it’s crafting a work of art or building a billion dollar company.  Vogel Labs will continue to develop and provide resources to the broader community to support these values.

Follow us on Twitter @VogelLabs, or email us at Purpose@Vogel-Labs.com