All of Us Are Smarter Than Any of Us
Ego is the enemy. Will you still go it alone?
Sharing credit. Being seen as an amateur. Admitting “I don’t know.”
While often subconscious, we interpret these situations as self-failure. It’s hard to look in the mirror and embrace the possibility that I’m not good enough. So we press forward and try to convince the world otherwise. We take on hard tasks alone, even when we know deep down…this thing is going off the rails.
Maybe Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” viewpoint put us mentally on edge, but realize there’s something biological at play too. Our desire to avoid pain and be recognized are deeply ingrained human characteristics. Being “successful” and noticed by others triggers dopamine and serotonin chemicals within us. Our bodies crave those hits, so we chase them…often alone. We want to show the world I did that.
However, 99% of the time when attacking a big task solo, one of two undesirable outcomes ensues:
- You fail (as far as impact): Failure manifests because (a) the task is a poor fit for the person, (b) the task is too complex to attack it solo, or © the person is too proud or ignorant to thoroughly consult the abundant body of knowledge available at their fingertips (books, journal articles, YouTube videos, etc.). Instead, despite our best intentions, our solo efforts often amount to lackluster work — we have no impact.
- Even if you succeed, no one cares tomorrow: Irrelevance is a problem born of the Internet and cheap, high-bandwidth connectivity. It’s that feeling when your blog post get zero responses or Netflix simply overwhelms to the point you can’t choose a show. This is content overload. Consumers of all types are drowning in choices, and their attention — whether at work or home — is being perpetually pulled to the next thing. Many times, I feel I’ve created something great and it was hard as hell to pull it off. But when I cast it out the world, I only hear crickets. It’s simply a numbers game — even the greatest solo work will likely go unnoticed or will be quickly forgotten. This is because a person’s amplification network is generally small and others simply don’t have the capacity to care.
While it may seem contrarian to this storyline, I’m a big believer in philosophies like deliberate practice and Cal Newport’s deep work. Here, you develop valuable skills alone through deep concentration and repetition. But if you want to have an impact, you should apply those skills as part of a team.
Going it alone rarely pays off. For people that seemingly achieve a great feat on their own, look behind the scenes. You’ll discover the network of helpers. Is Tom Brady solely responsible for his success? No way. His wife, kids, personal trainer, nutritionist, coaches, teammates, and others all swarm to make TB12 the person society glorifies.
Big and long-lasting success takes a village, always. Why is that?
Simple: all of us are smarter than any of us.
The power of many
If we both have one orange, and we exchange them, we’re still left with one orange each. There’s no growth there. But if we each have an idea, and we exchange them, we each now have two ideas (and maybe more if we remix them). Opportunities multiply quickly when people start collaborating.
Most importantly, collaboration builds trust.
When we’re unafraid of who gets the credit or if I’ll look dumb, magic happens. And with the abundant, non-zero-sum world we live in, we can feel more confident than ever that it’s truly worth being vulnerable and collaborating with others.
As JFK said, “The rising tide lifts all the boats.”
According to Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach, there are three keys to collaboration:
- Be honest about your capabilities: don’t sign up for things outside your wheelhouse to execute alone
- Conceptualize the ideal team: determine the right mix of capability (and talent) profiles required for the project to have lasting success — consider both development and marketing
- Access people outside your organization: as long as you’re aligned on purpose, today’s marketplace naturally incentivizes people from different organizations to collaborate
Everyone in this world can teach you something. I learn from my elementary-age kids almost every day on how to improve my empathy and communication. My younger self never would’ve anticipated that. How open to learning are you?
We all know that more minds = better ideas. All the great teamwork advice from Harvard Business Review and the like confirms the power of diversity and collaboration. That further confirms the power of many.
Most importantly, a team approach (rather than a solo approach) drives network effects, which improves the odds of an idea being adopted and sticking. If I know 10 people, Susie knows 25, and Terry knows 50, and we’re all working together, we can easily engage with an 85-person audience at a minimum. The network then sprawls out exponentially based on who those people interact with.
As Benjamin Hardy says in Personality Isn’t Permanent, “All growth toward big goals and important work is emotionally taxing. Don’t go it alone. Have a team you can huddle around when you’re fried, torn, burned out, scared, or broken.”
So, when it’s clear that all of us are smarter than any of us, what’s driving our propensity to tackle tasks alone?
Overcoming ego to make your work meaningful
“Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called ego.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
There’s a deep-seated reason we take the solo route: we’re naturally wired to avoid feedback. Feedback is negative. It bruises our carefully-crafted self-image. It’s damning. These are the unfortunate narratives playing in our heads.
Ego becomes the decisionmaker and we let it override our intellect.
As a species, we’re wired to sense and rapidly recoil from negative stimuli. As many psychologists and neuroscientists have demonstrated, this reaction was historically necessary for our survival. When negative feedback approaches our doorstep, our emotions become heightened and our natural fight or flight mode kicks in. For this reason, we often remember negative experiences more than positive ones.
Intellectually, we know feedback is useful to our individual growth and the impact we want to have in this world. And yet…we still struggle to embrace it. Our ego fears a sense of exclusion.
The key to having impact with our work is (a) conquering the fear of feedback and (b) committing to thoughtful collaborations.
Overcome the fear. Practice engaging in the feedback process — getting it and giving it. Make it natural for yourself. As you summit this mountain, you’ll have cleared an important roadblock for engaging with others. As you get comfortable with feedback — even craving it — and combat your negativity bias, you’ll be emotionally in the clear to work with others.
Each of us is way more powerful as part of a team. Once we get past our inner psychological roadblocks, we have a real chance at making lasting impacts with our work.
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