Three people living lives too cool to ignore.

As I mentioned the other day in my post about the tools, tactics and strategies I use to filter the noise, I depend heavily on people to help “create my web” and point me toward valuable and relevant information and insights. To extend the focus on people a step further, I wanted to highlight a couple people who are doing cool stuff and play a part in my daily web…

Part of an irregular series, three people doing cool things big and small, a small sample of the many people I follow throughout the web…

Chris Guillebeau (@chrisguillebeau)
I first heard about Chris from Valeria Maltoni, who pointed me to Chris’s Art of Nonconformity (AONC) project, focusing on personal development, life design, international travel, and “the battle against conventional beliefs”.

An example, about going to extremes:

Conventional living is all about being balanced, well-rounded, risk-adverse, and safe. The problem is that well-rounded people rarely do anything interesting. Balanced people don’t usually change the world.
The alternative is to truly live, and come back tired – even if you’re not traveling. Be better than you have been before. Give more than you take. Embrace the extremes. Say yes.

I struggle with the notion that many of us are merely pretending to be lifestyle rockstars, promoting online lives that don’t live up to our offline lives, but Chris walks the talk, helping people create their own unconventional lives by bringing his story, lessons and guidance to the community.

Sloane Berrent (@sloane)
Currently a Kiva Fellow in the Philippines, I first heard about Sloane through my NOLA (New Orleans, LA) friends when she was temporarily living and working in the New Orleans community earlier this year. In the Philippines, Sloane is working as a loan officer for a micro-finance institution, going into the field and helping people that are interested in a Kiva loan, and then writing about their stories and her experiences.

As a long-time (albeit small, and currently lapsed) lender through Kiva, I’m finding it interesting to learn about the people behind the Kiva profiles and the impact that micro-finance has on their lives.

Christopher Natsuume of Boomzap
Fine, I’ll admit I’m incredibly biased: not only is Chris my cousin, but he and his family are also my guides on my current little jaunt in Japan.

That said, he’s still doing cool stuff; Chris is Creative Director and co-founder of Boomzap, a casual game development studio headquartered in Singapore that has become one of the leading independent game developers in Southeast Asia.

But what’s really cool is how Boomzap is doing it, leveraging a distributed, virtual workforce to tap into quality games developers and artists across Southeast Asia, creating a structure that frees their staff to define their work schedules, enabling the company to focus on developing and delivering great games.
The common thread? People creating their lives, their way, on their terms. It’s a thread common to the original thinkers, passionate entrepreneurs, creative professionals and open-minded travelers that help “create my web”.

What three people would you highlight from your web?