Unlock Your Potential by Finding Your Tribe
Before any notable achievement, there lie two significant mental hurdles you must overcome:
Believing success is possible
Giving yourself permission to look stupid
Unfortunately, the way evolution has wired us stops most of us from ever getting past these. That’s why it’s incredibly challenging to have any outsized success on your own. On our own, the world looks a lot riskier with a limited upside - finding our tribe flips the equation on its head; not only does it help us jump the mental hurdles that initially held us back, but it also curtails our most common risks and lets us tap into a nearly limitless upside.
We live in a world of asymmetrical risks and rewards
As far as I can tell, life on Earth is subject to asymmetrical risks and rewards – continually being exposed to situations that have a nearly unlimited downside and a capped upside. For example, my morning commute to work: a great outcome is gliding through traffic and getting to work five minutes earlier than planned; a terrible outcome is getting in a catastrophic accident with multiple fatalities.
Almost every activity we do can take an extreme turn for the worst. It's very hard in life to find situations that have limited downside but nearly unlimited upside. If you ever come across one of these opportunities, always take it. If you can find these opportunities with any kind of regularity, you should consider becoming an investor.
It seems awfully unfair that the worst situations in life are far worse than the best situations are good; take two animals, in which one is eating the other. One fills their belly for the next day or two, while the other ceases to exist. For every “good” life lived, there is a nearly incalculable mountain of death. How many plants and animals must die to bring one person to old age?
Not only are the scales being tipped, but nature has whittled a measuring stick that’s lopsided. If we were to place all of the events that could happen to us distributed on a line that stretches from "bad" to "good," 95% of the line would have some kind of classification as “bad.” As Leo Tolstoy wrote:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Nature is creative in its ability to torture. There is no shortage of opportunities for asymmetric loss, which has led to evolutionary pressures molding us to be more cautious. But while every other animal heeded caution, humanity threw caution to the wind.
How humanity turned the tables on nature
Humanity broke the mold and distinguished itself from other animals by being a cultural species. We began to learn from each other, with culture acting as the collective brain that allowed us to build off of the knowledge and skills from previous generations. This can be seen in the doomed expedition conducted in 1845 by Sir John Franklin. After three years exploring the Arctic, they found themselves stranded 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle, forced to set up camp and survive on King William Island. These were 105 experienced, brave, and intelligent explorers trying to endure the same environment neighboring Inuit tribes had weathered for generations. However, the expedition party gradually died and even turned to organized cannibalism.
The Inuit survived not by being more intelligent - they had the benefit of generations worth of complex knowledge and skills passed down to them. For them, It was common knowledge on how to build snow houses, hunt seals using harpoons, kill wildlife using compound bows, and navigate the flowing waters on kayaks in the springtime. Altogether, our cultural knowledge far surpasses what any of us could learn and figure out in a single lifetime.
This capacity for both inter-generational and cross-generational learning is what allows us to overcome this seeming minefield of asymmetrical downside.
While risks are still plentiful, we've successfully managed to cap the downside of many risks that would typically ruin us by leaning on our family, friends, and community. This is especially apparent when we're young, where we can strike out and have a financial safety net, even if it looks a lot like our parents' basement. Many risks we wouldn't be able to absorb as an individual, are survivable as part of a group.
As individuals, we're fragile, but as a group, humanity is antifragile. Unlike fragile things, those that are antifragile thrive when exposed to randomness and volatility, and benefit from risk and uncertainty. At an individual level, this can be seen in exercise, where our muscles and bones don't just resist stress and shocks, but they're actually strengthened by them. And at a group level, if someone fails at creating a vaccine for a known virus, their research is added into the collective knowledge of humanity, thereby saving another from following in the same fruitless steps.
Not only have we found ways to benefit from our risk, but we've managed to dramatically scale the upside of events, creating more opportunities to produce asymmetric rewards. Without the rest of humanity to benefit and realize value from our efforts, risky endeavors wouldn't be worth pursuing. For example, the amount of time and effort it takes to write a book that encompasses our expertise on a particular topic would have minimal value if it was only shared with a handful of others. But as soon as we expand the potential audience to 7.5 billion people, the full value of the book can be captured repeatedly by different people at the same time. It can even continue to provide value to future generations and allows people to build upon the idea in ways the author never foresaw.
This is the dynamic that modern-day web-based startups exploit; they create a service that may only provide incremental value to each individual (like video streaming), but when multiplied across the entire global population, the value is tremendous.
Another way we have managed to capture asymmetric rewards is humanity’s ability to rise to the level of our best individual in every endeavor. If you think about all of the advances in human achievement in the arts, sciences, athletics, mathematics, etc., the value of making a discovery, innovating, or doing something for the first time, benefits all of humanity. The printing press is one such innovation that has created incalculable value for humanity and will continue to pay increasing dividends for all of future humanity. Because we're a cultural species, we stand and build upon the shoulders of all who have come before us.
One of the most potent ways we benefit from one another is in our ability to show others what is possible. Even if 7.5 billion people don't think something is genuinely possible, as long as one person does, they have a chance to push the boundaries of human potential forward.
A classic example of this happened in the running world on May 6, 1954, when Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile with a time of three minutes, fifty-nine and four-tenths of a second. Roger Bannister's feat lifted a collective mental barrier and served as a change agent for the entire running world. Runners had been actively trying to break the four-minute mile since 1886, but just 46 days after Bannister broke the record, an Australian runner beat Bannister’s time, clocking in at 3 minutes 58 seconds. The next year, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race. In one herculean performance, Roger Bannister gave every runner permission to run faster than ever thought possible.
How can we take advantage of this dynamic for ourselves?
Our power lies in finding our tribe
If we want to do anything significant, one of the first steps we should take in our long journey ahead is to find our tribe. Finding our tribe allows us to overcome our cautious nature and to tip the scales from asymmetric losses to asymmetric rewards.
This is the reason why we so often see hotbeds of talent in sports, where a single training gym or facility will be responsible for a disproportionate number of sporting elites - or the notion and rise of Silicon Valley "mafias." These are small intimate communities that push each other to expand what they view as possible, and they give each other permission to fail and to look stupid.
This is also why it's so prevalent in startups where co-founders do better than solo founders. It's hard to go it alone - it's an incremental but enormous difference to go from no one to someone who believes in your vision, and who will support you through all of the bumps and setbacks to come.
Even when the media highlights seemingly successful solo founders like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, they're quick to point out how lucky they were to have their tribe. Bezos said, "I think one of the precursors of being able to take risk is to have some kind of support from somebody... these are the kind of things that build up and allow you to jump off into uncharted terrain and do something new, because you know you have a support system." And Zuckerberg stated in a Harvard University commencement speech in 2017, "The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail."
When I was a personal trainer, we were fundamentally a fitness tribe for hire. While we can give practical advice around complex movements and provide workout regimens, this is all information that is freely and widely available across the Internet. The real reason people hire personal trainers is that we give our clients permission to fail and to look stupid in front of others and in front of themselves.
Not only does our tribe give us permission, but it's ultimately an empowering environment. When we join, we go from being a fragile individual to a part of an antifragile group. The group benefits from its members taking risks, and instead of frowning upon that behavior, it's both rewarded and encouraged.
I’m in the process of finding my own writing tribe, taking an online course called Write of Passage. It’s been a fantastic experience - never have I been surrounded by so many people who are all singularly connected by their desire to share their creative works. And remember, once you find your tribe, the best way to contribute is to dare greatly.
