I recently attended an excellent healthcare conference.
It was an expansive conference intellectually, one in which I learned quite a lot.
It was also a very good conference socially (despite being on Zoom) where I was able to establish (and re-establish) some nice connections.
But my favorite part?
I may have created a physician ikigai dyad!
( Ikigai is roughly the confluence of one’s passion and skills with what the world wants and what the world needs. Check out my post Physician: Know thy ikigai? Then Know thy Twitter for more information. Oh yes, and FYI—I love the word “dyad”!)
So what happened?
Well, a very bright physician who is a medical consultant for an established PBS healthcare series asked me a question about how to better leverage social media around their show to better reach out to a younger audience.
The question is fairly complex. I suspect given time (maybe a few weeks?), and if I understood the content of the show and what its deep goals were, I could probably develop some good ideas. But the truth is, although I have a pretty good feel of the relationship between healthcare institutions and social media, I don’t have the same feel for the relationship between TV media (especially public TV media) and social media, especially within the content subdomain of healthcare.
Simply put, I was just the wrong person to ask.
However, I do know a pediatric physician who is a national level healthcare social media expert, one who has both a deep, practical understanding of these issues (at least an order of magnitude better than mine?) and whose “ikigai” resonates strongly with the healthcare education of youths. (To see a physician’s ikigai in action, check out the website of the physician social media expert I am writing about: Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson.)
So, after a quick Twitter DM and a couple of short in-conference emails, I was able to establish their potential connection.
Now, will anything come of this? Will they connect, and form not just a dyad, but even “an ikigai dyad”? (Hey, that’s two of my favorite words!)
Perhaps not (and truthfully, when I try to put physician-creatives together, things usually don’t work out, mostly because of time constraints). But I have a good feeling about this, and at a bare minimum, it’s put both of these talented physician-creatives on my learning radar and, as an added bonus, I think I have created a new term: an ikigai dyad!
Hey—that’s not too shabby!