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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I once went to comic conventions in Seattle, San Diego, Dallas, and Atlanta in the same year, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
The very first comic-con I ever attended was San Diego Comic Con in 2011. I had been following the event for several years and had dreamed of one day attending. So when one of our podcast listeners contacted us and offered to sponsor our trip, that dream finally became a reality. That summer was not only my first con, but my first trip to San Diego as well.
Meanwhile, my podcast co-host, Clint, had spent part of his childhood living in San Diego, and he knew his way around the city quite well. The trip was wonderful. The con had all the nerdy pop culture stuff I loved, amazing cosplay, incredibly nice people, and beautiful weather. We got to be in the same room as the cast of Fringe, and best of all, we got to meet several of our listeners in person.
The following year we returned again and had an even better experience. By that time we’d learned how to leverage our podcast to gain access to press rooms, which allowed us to sit down face-to-face and interview the cast of Fringe and other shows. That year they also had an amazing display of every single Batmobile, and I got to see all of them up close. In case you’re wondering, since then I’ve also seen the Ben Affleck Batmobile in person, so the only one I’ve yet to see is the Robert Patinson version.
Since that time, I’ve returned to San Diego Comic Con two, maybe three more times, as well as cons in Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas, and Oklahoma City. In 2013, I took my kids to their first con, Dallas Comic Con. They each had a great time at the con, and had a great encounter with Jasika Nicole, who played Astrid on Fringe.
In 2015, my son and I took another trip to Atlanta to enjoy Dragon Con. There we got to spend the weekend with several members of the Fringe Podcast community, meet some of his favorite voice actors, and chat a bit with some of the cast of Fringe again.
In 2019, my daughter and I attended San Diego Comic Con together. It was a week of highs and lows as she got to drive a boat for the first time, a memory she still talks about often, but we missed out on the Stranger Things panel due to several hundred attendees cheating the system to gain entry ahead of us.
Cons are a great place to take your kids and create great memories. To be clear, not everything at every con is kid friendly. Depending on the age of your kids, you may want to avoid a certain con or attend the con but steer clear of certain activities, areas, and panels. That’s typically pretty easy to figure out in advance by looking through the programming guide provided by the con. But there have been a lot of positives my kids and I have experienced by going to cons.
That first con I took my kids to was on Mother’s Day weekend when they were 8 and 10. If you know my wife, she loves nothing more than to curl up with a good book, sit under her lamp and relax while cross stitching, and soak up silence. She absolutely loved having the weekend to herself while the kids and I were hanging out with nerds in Dallas.
Colby was 10 when he and I traveled to Atlanta for Dragon con, he got to choose what we did. Aside from a few events that were Fringe or Fringe community related, we prioritized his choices. He got to meet some of his favorite voice actors, participate in an event where kids made cosplay out of cardboard, and take photos with Chewbacca. Not only that, but we attended a Doctor Who themed sing along event where he got to go up front and dance in front of the entire room. He loved it and it’s one of our very favorite memories.
Addi was 14 when she and I attended San Diego Comic Con. At that time, Addi was going through what ended up being a long phase where she wanted to be famous. She said she wanted to either become an actor or singer and when we pressed her on her motivation, she said it was because she wanted to be famous. She saw the glitz and glamour of Hollywood as a good thing and she liked the attention that celebrities received.
Admittedly, this was a challenging time for us as parents. We didn’t want to squash her dreams, be we also knew that her motives were not healthy or practical. We tried to dig into the root of what might be making her feel this way or want fame for the sake of fame. That summer we decided we’d do two things with her and they happened just days apart.
First, Addi and I spent an entire week serving the impoverished people of Guatemala. We worked with kids and families building stoves in homes so families could cook more efficiently, spend less time gathering firewood, and do so in a way that vented smoke out of their home. Others on our team worked to pour concrete for families so they didn’t have to live in dirt-floored homes.
It gave both Addi and I a new perspective on just how fortunate we are with our middle-class home in the US, and we talked about ways we could continue to serve those in Guatemala and the US who were less fortunate. In fact, to this day, we sponsor multiple families in Guatemala to pay for their children’s education and healthcare for the entire family.
We arrived home from that trip and then 3 days later left for San Diego Comic Con. I knew that trip would be the antithesis of all we’d seen the week before. There at the con we would see extravagant spending, commercialism, opulence, and self-indulgence. We saw the draws of fame and fortune juxtaposed in our minds with the extreme poverty of our new friends in Guatemala.
My hope was that the exposure to both extremes would help Addi gain perspective. I hoped she’d realized that it’s okay to be rich and pursue the highest levels of success, but our goal, regardless of our income, should always be to open our hands to share what we have with others, rather than close our hands and keep what we have to ourselves.
After the con was over, I rented a convertible Mustang and we enjoyed the California sun. We drove up the coast, enjoyed In-n-Out, spent the afternoon on the beach, and made great memories.
Here’s what I learned.
When I talk about the benefits of going to cons, I’m not just talking about comic-cons. The con in comic-con is short for convention, but there’s another word that is often used for these things too. It’s the word conference. I found taking my kids to those was great too.
I grew up during a time where going to college or learning a trade was your best way to get the foundation you’d need to provide a steady income for your family and achieve the dreams you have for what a family can be. I went off to college, dropped out, worked my way up the company ladder as far as I could, then went and finished my degree, worked my way up the ladder some more, eventually leaving the corporate world behind to pursue entrepreneurship.
Today, all of those options are still available, but entrepreneurship has more options, resources, tools, and learning environments than ever before. I wanted my kids to get a taste of what’s out there and see entrepreneurs (besides their dad) doing their thing.
When Colby was 14 spring break fell on the week of a conference called Social Media Marketing World. Naturally, he was not excited about the idea of attending but I knew he would benefit from going. So we flew out to Orange County, spent a day at Universal Studios, spent another day at Disneyland, and then hopped on a train that took us south to San Diego.
Once there I let Colby do his own thing. We spent the next three days at the conference. Each day, Colby got to attend any session he wanted, but he had to pay attention and tell me what he learned after it was over. I also made sure to introduce him to some of my clients like Amy Porterfield and Kate Ahl. We even got invited to a private dinner hosted by my friend Cliff Ravenscraft where he not only got to mee Cliff, but other great entrepreneurs like Chris Brogan, Mike and Izabela Russell, Joanne Miller and Dan Miller, Leslie Samuel, and Ray Edwards.
Colby ended up attending several sessions that he really enjoyed, and had conversations with some amazing people. People who treated him like an adult, asked him tough, probing questions, and made him think. After it was over, he told me that he was glad we went and he enjoyed it much better than he thought he would. I don’t know how much influence it had, but this semester he changed his major from Music Performance to Business Entrepreneurship.
As for Addi, when she was 16 we traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, then grabbed a rental car and zipped down to the beautiful town of Franklin. There, we attended a conference put on by my friend Cliff called Free the Dream. I’d attended the conference the previous year and I thought it would be great for Addi to join me when Cliff offered it again.
She got to learn from entrepreneurs like Ray Edwards, PJ Jonas, Jevonnah Ellison, Leslie Samuel, John Morgan, Jeff Goins, and Aaron Walker. Addi had read Aaron’s book, View From the Top the previous year, and he was especially kind to her, taking time to ask her thoughtful questions, challenge her thinking, and help her understand how to put aside limiting beliefs.
The conference taught her how to set goals, establish a positive mindset, place God in the middle of our decisions, and helped her see wonderful, Godly, successful, female entrepreneurs.
I have no doubt that taking my kids to cons had a tremendously positive impact on their lives. Did they retain or member all the info? Nope. Did they walk away from them with amazing transformations in the way that I’d hoped? No. But that’s totally fine. Each of them DID walk away better than they’d been when they arrived. They were stretched and challenged in ways that they wouldn’t have otherwise been. We had a great time and made lifetime memories.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think those are some great pros taken from some great cons.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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