I went to the first World Domination Summit in 2011, a conference in Portland for readers of the "Art Of Nonconformity" blog. It was popular with one-person businesses, people who created & sold their own products (typically online). Though when I got there, the crowd had lots of life coaches & people starting their first blog.<p>It changed my life in that I got a job out of it - I ended up being hired by someone I met in the hallway between talks. We bonded over how much we <i>weren't</i> enjoying the talks, finding them to be more "motivational" than actionable & substantial. (Something about people singing "Kumbaya" a lot.)<p>I've since realized the value in conferences is usually not in the talks themselves, but the people you meet in the "hallway track" or the conference social events like evening drinks, bungee jumping, skydiving, etc. The talks & speakers are there to attract like-minded people and provide a shared topic of conversation. I've always made more business contacts & friends from the skydiving, and learned much more from the private conversations over drinks at the bar.
Somewhat spontaneously attending the GF (Grammatical Framework) summer school gave me a totally different appreciation for natural language formal grammars. Now when I’m learning a foreign language I can actually look at its GF grammar and understand it in the same way I’d understand a purely functional program library. And I hope to use GF in future businesses and projects.