Monday night a group of us held a party at The Mod Club for over 600 of our closest friends. We raised $25,000 and over a ton of food for the Daily Bread Food Bank. The whole party was streamed live to the Web. We called it #HoHoTO.

And we did it all in less than 2 weeks. Using Twitter.

For a moment after I woke up the next day I wondered - did it even happen at all? It seemed to come together and pass *so* quickly. Well, yes it did happen:

Joey was there. Andrew was there. And many of our other friends were there too. There was a lot of dancing. *A lot*.

And while the frenzy has now subsided, and Jay Goldman, Lee Dale and the rest of the all-nighters have now gone home, for a while #HoHoTO seemed to be all that any of our friends were doing or talking about.

DJs Duarte Da Silva and Ryan Taylor presided. We played video messages from a whole bunch of tech and Toronto notables including David Miller, the Mayor of Toronto; Biz Stone (a founder of Twitter); Tara Hunt; Nora Young and the rest of CBC’s Spark team, and many others (much love to Michael O’Connor Clarke for making those videos happen). We also streamed twitters to screens in the Club - you can see an example here (and yes, the DJs did rickroll #HoHoTO).

How did we do? (Read more)

One of the reasons I do what I do is because it puts me in such close contact with people who are very creative. Spending this much time with creative minds can be very exciting - I see a lot of fascinating and wonderful ideas before they’re released into the wild, and I often get a good look at the creative process as it’s happening. It’s constructive, positive and very affirming. That’s good for the soul.

A great example of this is a group of people I’ve been working with lately. This group has, in a matter of days, put together a holiday party we’re calling #HoHoTo, to be held on Monday December 15th at The Mod Club here in Toronto (sorry, it’s sold out!!).

That’s right: sold out - in a matter of days. And The Mod Club’s capacity is over 600 people. How did this happen?

Well, there are a lot of answers to that question, but I think the best one is that it happened because of creativity. First, and most important, is the community that’s involved in this party - as we say on the site, “It’s for geeks, phreaks, webheads, twitterfiends, techies, media, marketing, and PR types and all their friends.” So, we were appealing to a group of people who are exceptionally open-minded and supportive of new ideas. They recognize a creative effort, and respond to it with understanding and enthusiasm. But also very important was the creativity of the organizing group itself (you can see a list of these wonderful people here). At every step of the way this group said “yes” to new ideas. There was no ego on display, no position-taking, no territoriality and no negativity. The team treated the exercise as a giant whiteboard - it filled the board with ideas and then arranged them into what we now have. I’m convinced that this attitude was core to our ability to take a pretty complex challenge and make it happen efficiently - and have a lot of fun doing it.

I’m more convinced than ever that knowing how to say “Yes”, and treating others with the generosity of spirit that this requires, is vital to meeting challenges well - in your business, and in life.