A lot of community leaders have struggled to navigate how to talk about the election in their communities over the past couple days. It’s a theme that came up in a lot of my coaching calls this week.

As I unpacked the experience with one of my clients, it became clear there were a lot of stories swirling around in their mind at once. Many of these stories contradicted each other:

It feels weird to say nothing about the election.
It feels inappropriate to say something about the election.

I feel angry at the people who voted for Trump.
I see Trump supporters as humans and want them to be included.

I want to support the members who feel hurt and afraid.
I don’t want to alienate the people who feel happy.

I want to take a stand for what I believe in.
I don’t want to politicize the community.

I want to express myself as a human.
I want to honor my role as a neutral community facilitator.

Politics don’t belong in our community.
It’s impossible to separate politics from our members’ experience.

All these stories and feelings were present. All of these contradictions swirling around at once.

It’s a common struggle for community leaders, and frankly, all of us as humans, to know how to express ourselves when in mixed company around a divisive issue.

My pattern is that I experience a core inner conflict between the part of me that wants to express my genuine experience and the part of me that worries that expressing myself will alienate others.

It’s a contradiction.

We all contain contradictions. We’ve all experienced holding two different opinions at once. We are made up of parts, and different parts of ourselves have different priorities. In IFS, it’s called a “polarity” when two parts have different, opposing priorities.

I want to express myself creatively, but I also want job security.

I want to travel the world, but I also want to build roots and a family.

I want a burrito, but I also want a slice of pizza.

These contradictions show up every day. And they make it hard to communicate to others what we want or believe. We think that before we speak, we have to have an answer. So we hold the conflict in, forcing ourselves to choose one side or the other before expressing anything to the world.

The one way I’ve learned to navigate this:

Reveal your contradictions.

I just name that I’m having conflicting beliefs right now. I name all the stories swirling around in my head. In doing so, I reveal my humanity. I reveal my roles—as a human, as a citizen, as a family member, as a community facilitator. I acknowledge that all this is here, all at once.

So in the case of the election, when holding space for people on both sides, it’s okay to tell your community:

“I’m having a hard time today and I want to reveal myself, even though I have a lot of conflicting stories swirling around in my head around this election. Here are all of those stories...”

Put it all on the table. Reveal your contradictions.

It shows that you’re human, made up of many parts. That’s far truer, more honest, and more human than pretending you have just one opinion or priority. In revealing your messy humanity, you invite others to reveal theirs. It’s an invitation to connection, to see each other as the complex humans that we are.

The other option is to repress your experience. To either hold it all in, or force yourself to choose one story. In doing so, you disconnect yourself from your humanity, and in turn to the humanity of others.

I’m noticing that as I learn to love and accept all the messy contradictions within me, I’m learning to love and accept them in others too.

Last week I wrote about living without goals. Most goals, I boldly claimed, can just be intentions.

Chris asked a great question in the comments:

“Awesome piece David. Loved reading this and I can relate to a lot of what you said. You speak about replacing goals with intentions. I would love to understand more about how you approach the act of intention setting, what you believe them be, and what they should signify.”

Basically, Chris is saying, “cool cool but how?” That’s a great question. Here’s my take…

A goal speaks to an outcome I’m committing to achieve.

An intention speaks to how I want to show up to the process.

Eat a whole box of Buncha Crunch would be a goal.

Savor every bite of Buncha Crunch would be an intention.

An activity can have both a goal and an intention but, often, I find it doesn’t need to be goal. It can just be an intention.

How do I figure it out? I run the goal through a set of reflective questions. What I’ve found is that when I discover a goal isn’t necessary, an intention naturally emerges.

To show you what I mean, today I’ll walk through three real goals I’ve recently considered adding to my life:

Goal #1: Get to 10,000 substack subscribers

Goal #2: Bench press 150lbs x 12 reps

Goal #3: Get to $300k in annual income

Spoiler: Through this reflection, I’ll find that goal #1 and goal #2 can be intentions. Goal #3 I find should remain a goal. I’m including that here so you can see both outcomes.

The questions I’ll use to reflect on each goal:

To make it easy for you to replicate this process, here are the five questions I use:

1. Is this goal driven by a real, practical need or by my ego?

2. What story is this goal helping me reinforce?

3. What feelings am I avoiding by setting this goal?

4. What risks would I be taking if I didn’t set this goal and just let things unfold instead?

5. Could this goal be an intention instead? What could that intention be?

Let’s give it a shot…

Goal #1: Get to 10,000 Substack subscribers

I’ve been writing this newsletter for a few years now. I’m currently at 7,000 subscribers. There’s a part of me that wants to grow faster and hit this magic number of 10,000. Should I start using growth tactics to ramp up my growth rate and get there?

Let’s explore this goal using my list of reflection questions.

1. Is this goal driven by a real, practical need or by my ego?

The case for a practical need here is weak. I could say that growing my audience will help me reach the level of income I need for my family to survive, but does it really? Not directly. Pretty sure I could reach the level of income without hitting this goal.

For sure, there’s a strong level of ego here. I notice I want to be someone who has 10k subscribers. I notice that number holding some significance as a measure of reputation and success in the eyes of others.

2. What story is this goal helping me reinforce?

That I’m a “successful” writer and creator. That I have a big audience (social status). That I’m important and worth listening to. That I’m a big deal. That I’m writing something worth reading.

3. What feelings am I avoiding by setting this goal?

I notice feelings of fear around being unworthy and not enoughness. I notice a fear of being irrelevant. I notice a fear, and some anger, around the idea of “losing” by not being as successful as friends who have large audiences.

4. What risks would I be taking if I didn’t set this goal and just let things unfold instead?

I suppose I might end up with fewer subscribers because I’m not pushing myself to grow it.

And look, I know it’s not just about total subscribers. It’s about reaching the right people. Could there be a goal here that’s focused on reaching the right people rather than just total subscriber count? Yes.

Do I feel like setting a goal is needed for me to reach enough of the right people? No…

I think I can reach enough by just doing what I feel called to do without having to push.

5. Could this goal be an intention instead? What could that intention be?

Yes. The intention that comes to mind:

Write what brings me joy, at a pace that feels spacious, and trust that it will reach the right people.

I feel much better bringing that intention to my writing than having to commit to that subscriber goal. And I don’t feel like I’m risking much by removing this goal. If I’m still not getting enough income at the end of this year, I may need to revisit.

Goal #2: Bench press 150lbs x 12 reps

After over a decade of not stepping foot in a gym, I started lifting at the start of this year. I’m really enjoying it! I can feel myself getting stronger. I can see my body changing.

I’ve noticed at times an urge to start setting weightlifting goals. Let’s give this goal an intention check.

1. Is this goal driven by a real, practical need or by my ego?

I do think it’s important for me to invest in my health. I want to be active late into life. I want to be able to keep playing basketball. I want to keep playing with my kids.

But this goal specifically? It feels arbitrary.

My ego feels like it’s very present with this goal. I notice a story that I *should* be able to bench press that much weight. I notice I compare myself to other people in the gym. I notice people I follow online who are hitting these intense fitness goals and how it makes me feel like I need to do that too.

2. What story is this goal helping me reinforce?

That I’m strong. That I’m capable of achieving hard things. That I’m tough. That I’m manly. That I can defend myself.

3. What feelings am I avoiding by setting this goal?

That I’m weak. That I’m not enough until I reach some level of strength and muscle growth. I notice a fear that I’m ugly. I also notice a fear of not being masculine enough.

4. What risks would I be taking if I didn’t set this goal and just let things unfold instead?

It’s possible I would progress a little slower, but I don’t know if that’s true. I feel like I’m challenging myself at the edge of my ability every day without a goal.

There doesn’t seem to be any risk here.

5. Could this goal be an intention instead? What could that intention be?

Yes! I can pretty clearly see how this goal could be an intention instead.

What comes to mind:

Stay present with my body and challenge myself at the edge of my ability knowing that it might change each day.

Boy does that take the weight off my shoulders.

Goal #3: Get to $300k in annual income

Ok last one.

I already spoiled the ending here. I’ll find that this in fact should be a goal.

Still, going through the exercise was helpful for shaping this goal in a way that feels aligned for me.

Let’s go through it together…

1. Is this goal driven by a real, practical need or by my ego?

There’s a clear practical need here. I’ve run the numbers. I need to be making at least $200k, minumim, for my family to be able to live where we live (thanks housing market!)

We’re living here to be close to family, so it’s not an option to move. So $200k is the floor. It doesn’t include luxuries like vacations, going out for dinner, paying babysitters, etc.

$300k would make me and my family feel financially secure and allow us to save, invest, and treat ourselves to the modest luxuries that we hope to be able to enjoy.

Is my ego also present here? A little bit. But the part of me that craves wealth wants me to shoot for millions of dollars. $300k feels low to this part. I know that part of my ego well, it drove me for much of my 20s. I’m listening to what it wants, but I’m not letting it “drive the bus” on this goal.

So this goal feels like it’s relatively free of ego. It’s a real, practical need.

2. What story is this goal helping me reinforce?

That I’m not poor. That I’m someone who knows how to make money. That I can provide for my family. That I’m good at “business”. That I’m successful.

3. What feelings am I avoiding by setting this goal?

I notice fear.

Fear of failing. Of not being good enough to take care of my family. Of not being strong. Of not doing my duty as a father, husband, and son. Fear of not being able to have the quality of life I want. Fear that it will always feel painful to pay for childcare and the expenses of raising a family.

So other parts of my ego are still tangled in here.

4. What risks would I be taking if I didn’t set this goal and just let things unfold instead?

I risk putting our family in financial trouble if I don’t reach the floor quickly enough. There’s a point where, if I’m not making enough money, we’d have to move farther away from family. I risk us not being able to buy a house, provide for our kids, pay for college, take care of my parents, get to go on vacations, etc. I risk us living with financial stress and insecurity.

5. Could this goal be an intention instead? What could that intention be?

I think this should be a goal. There’s a real, practical need. And there’s a real deadline: the line of financial risk that I don’t want to cross.

I can still add an intention here though:

Prioritize work that brings me joy and allows me to maintain balance and spaciousness in my life.

That feels good.

How to set a spacious goal

When I decide that something should be a goal, I have another set of questions I use to make sure the goal is intentional and isn’t more overwhelming than it needs to be.

This post is getting long, so let’s save this framework for next time.

Hit that subscribe button to keep digging in together.

I’d love to hear more about your experience with goals and intentions, and if this exercise was helpful for you. Hit reply or drop a comment and let me know!

I love it when someone names something I’ve always known deep down, but have never been able to put into words.

Emily McDowell’s recent note did this for me (she does that a lot):

2024 was the first year of my adulthood I didn’t set goals.

Goals?! I was swimming at the deep, dark bottom of my abyss, just praying to find some sunlight.

So instead of goals, I set intentions: Surrender. Spaciousness. Let things unfold…

I chose ways of being rather than milestones to reach.

It felt incredible. It felt free. I had no idea my goals were so heavy. It felt good to put them down.

Now, as I’m entering a new chapter and actively working and earning income again, the urge to set goals has been seeping back in.

But I’ve noticed that my relationship with, and understanding of, goal-setting has changed…

I can see more clearly now how my goals were always fueled by the belief that I was not enough.

“If I achieve this goal, maybe I’ll be worthy”, my subconscious whispered quietly.

Hit that revenue goal…

Publish a book…

Grow my reputation…

Were there practical justifications for these goals? Absolutely. The business needed to make money. The book helped people and grew my reputation. My reputation helped me earn the trust of customers and partners, which led to income.

But if I’m being honest, it was never just about my practical needs. I tied my goals to my sense of self-worth. And my ego had a way of pushing my goals to be bigger and more extreme.

I couldn’t just grow the business, it had to be the biggest.

I couldn’t just publish a book, it had to be a best seller.

I couldn’t just have a good reputation, I had to be seen as #1.

Enough was never enough.

Joe Hudson has a concept he calls “the golden algorithm”.

It essentially says that when we avoid feeling something, we unwittingly invite it into our lives.

That’s what was happening to me with goals. I set goals to avoid feeling like I am not enough. But the goals would become a constant reminder that I am not enough. At least not until I achieved them.

Of course, as soon as I achieved a goal, I set a new one. Bigger and bolder this time. There would never be a point where I was done achieving goals. But I had to achieve goals to feel like I was enough.

See what was happening?

I set goals to avoid my feelings of not-enoughness and, in doing so, I unwittingly invited those feelings of not-enoughness into my life.

My goals weren’t just what I was trying to achieve, they became who I was.

I am a successful CEO and community builder.

I am an impactful and well-known leader.

I am a published author of a best-selling book.

My goals were all designed to maintain these identities.

The problem was that if I didn’t achieve my goals, I lost my sense of identity.

“Who am I if I’m not successful?! I’m nothing.”

Like Emily said, I dressed my goals up as ambition. It was important to me to be seen as an ambitious person. Setting goals helped me tell that story.

Failing to achieve them brought the story crumbling to the ground.

Look, goals aren’t bad.

They can be quite helpful when used with intention and awareness.

Now, to bring more awareness when setting a goal, I ask myself questions like:

• Is this goal being driven by a real, practical need (eg. I need to pay for a home for my family) or by my ego (eg. I need to be the best coach in the world)?

• What story is this goal helping me reinforce?

• What feeling am I avoiding by setting this goal?

• What version of this goal feels like it would be enough?

• What version of this goal feels spacious?

• Why is this goal important?

• Could this goal be an intention instead?

• What would change if I didn’t set this goal and just let things unfold instead?

• What are the real-world repercussions if I don’t hit this goal?

• What are the emotional repercussions if I don’t hit this goal?

• What will be different if I do hit this goal?

• What will be different if I don’t?

With these questions, my goals have become fewer, and calmer.

Most goals, it turns out, can just be intentions.

When I can work on something, without attachment to the outcome, my nervous system relaxes, and life opens up.

I have one loose goal now.

I’d like to earn an income that feels like it is enough.

I know what is “enough” based on what my family and I need to feel safe, secure, and have the life experience we yearn for.

For everything else, I’ve just been setting intentions, and letting it unfold.

Welcome to Part III of my series on emergent community design:

Part I: How Communities Emerge
Part II: What is Emergent Community Design?
Part III: How to Bring a Community to Life (This post)
Part IV: How to Design a Community Container (coming soon!)
Part V: The Seven Principles of Emergent Community Design (coming soon!)

Note: This thesis continues to unfold! It has now expanded into a five-part series. Where will it end?! Who knows. But I’m having a lot of fun exploring this topic with you all. As always, please comment with your reflections, questions, hole pokes, and anything else that comes to mind.

In Part I, we explored the basic concepts of emergence in nature and how it applies to communities. In Part II we started to apply emergence to the work of creating and facilitating communities. Now let’s get a bit more practical.

Part III will cover:

✔️ The process for navigating complex systems
✔️ A new community is hatched 🥚
✔️ How to form a community hypothesis
✔️ How to tap into your community intuition
✔️ How to conduct community research
✔️ How you’ll know when a community is emerging

Let’s get into it…

The process for navigating complex systems

We’ve talked a lot about complex systems in this series. I’d like to kick off Part III by introducing you to someone who has spent years studying how to navigate complex systems, Dave Snowden.

Snowden is a Welsh management consultant and researcher in the field of knowledge management and the application of complexity science.

To help us understand how to make decisions in complex situations, Snowden created The Cynefin Framework. According to his framework, we navigate complex systems by repeating a three-step process:

1. Probe: try something

2. Sense: observe, measure, and feel into what emerges

3. Respond: amplify what works, if nothing works then try another probe

This is the process we can follow when practicing emergent community design.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example…

A new community is hatched 🥚

Say you were inspired by the chicken theme of Part II and decided you’re going to start hosting dedicated gatherings for chicken lovers. No, not that kind you sicko... like people who want to learn about them and maybe raise some of their own.

You can sense that people are yearning for this conversation. Everywhere you go, the topic of chickens keeps coming up. It’s like the universe won’t shut up about chickens and you know what? You love it. You could talk about chickens all day. Chickens give you a full-body YES. You decide it’s time to run a community experiment.

Your idea is to design a gathering that will take place at a local farm in the region. The experience will give people a chance to learn how chickens can be ethically raised and meet other chicken fans, live and in-person. Beautiful vision!

What you would do is:

1. Probe: Design the initial container for your gathering and invite 20 people

2. Sense: Get feedback on whether people are interested, if they sign up, and what they want from the gathering

3. Respond: Decide if you’ll go through with the gathering or not based on the quality of the response

Let’s say you get a good enough response to go through with the gathering. Great! Go through the three steps again with a new probe:

1. Probe: Host the event

2. Sense: Did people love it? Were they excited to be there? Were they engaged? Did they give positive feedback? Did they express interest in attending another gathering? Did you love it as much as you thought you would? Do you want to do it again?

3. Respond: Decide if you’ll host another gathering and if so, what worked well that you’ll do again, what you’ll change, and what you’ll cut.

Do that over and over again, and you’re likely to tune into a community that wants to emerge.

Note how different this feels from how many people and businesses build community today. They come up with a 12-month plan, launch a big, complex forum or event series, and when it doesn’t emerge in the way they envisioned they shrug and say, “Guess this community thing doesn’t work!”

Hey, sometimes you get lucky and your big, complex experiment works. But it’s a big risk of time, money, and energy. Most of the great and lasting communities I know of started with small, simple experiments.

The reality is, your community might end up looking nothing like your initial probe. Here’s the story of how Philz, one of San Francisco’s favorite coffee chains, started:

It’s much better, in my experience, to keep your initial probes small and take a bottom-up (emergent) approach. This will help you more effectively tune into the community container that people are yearning for. You’ll know when it’s time to take a big swing.

How to form a community hypothesis

So how do you know what kind of community to experiment with? What should your initial probe be?

I recommend two paths:

1. Internal exploration: tuning into your intuition to discover the community that you, and others, are yearning for

2. External exploration: conducting research to tune into and validate what form of connection others yearn for

If you already have a strong sense of the kind of community that wants to emerge, start with internal exploration. If you’re feeling disconnected from what the community needs, then you may want to start with external exploration.

Let’s talk about each path in a little more detail…

How to tune into your community intuition

Intuition plays a critical role in emergent community design. Effective community creators tap into their inner knowing and feeeel into where the river of connective energy wants to flow. They develop a sense for what community wants to emerge.

But that’s not how many people design communities today. We tend to forget about our intuition. We use playbooks, frameworks, and canvases to tell us what to create for our community. We seek data. We make plans.

We take an intellectual approach to designing something that is very emotional, relational, and somatic. We use our minds to search for answers that our hearts and bodies already hold.

Trust your intuition.

Often, successful communities are started by people who are solving for their own needs…

Reading Rhythms was started by a group of friends who loved reading and lacked alternatives to going out drinking. It’s now growing rapidly because it tapped into something a lot of people (introverted book nerds looking for connection) were looking for too.

TechWalk was started by Christine Farrier who was in between jobs and felt like she didn’t belong at existing networking events. So she created a networking format that worked for her: long walks in the city. It turned out it worked for thousands of people like her.

One of the first “professional” communities I started was a weekly Twitter chat called u30pro. Basically, I was a 20-something professional and wanted a space to talk about the unique challenges of getting started in a new career after college. So I started it with my friends Lauren Fernandez and Scott Hale. It grew to hundreds of participants, gathering weekly, over several years.

Asking yourself, “What kind of community am I yearning for?” is a great place to start.

How to conduct community research

Tuning into what others are yearning for will require talking to them, and conducting research about their needs.

Interviews, focus groups, surveys, and market research are the four core methods of external exploration.

Personally, I think interviews and focus groups are the best place to start. You gain a more intimate understanding of peoples’ nuanced needs when you talk to them directly, and it gives you the opportunity to start forming relationships.

After doing some interviews and focus groups, if you’d like to get insights from a larger group, you can create a survey based on what came up in the interviews, if that feels helpful.

Market research may involve looking at other communities out there to help you refine what it is about them that isn’t fulfilling the need you aim to fill. My friend Greg Isenberg is a big fan of scouring reddit for community opportunities, as an example.

When you’re researching other communities, look at their “turpentine” and explore how your community can fill a hole in the conversation. Find what’s unique about your community (aka your “community wedge”).

Market research may also involve looking at existing studies and gathering data related to your community that will help educate where there’s a strong need.

⭐️ Questions to help you tune into the community that wants to emerge (you can answer these questions yourself, and ask them of your members):

1. What questions do you want to ask, but can’t? 

2. What makes you feel unable or unsafe to ask these questions in your current communities?

3. What permission are you waiting for that this community could provide?

4. Where do you experience suffering? Are you experiencing that suffering alone?

5. What conversations don’t you want to have? What feels annoying, exhausted, or overdone?

6. How do you want to be seen by the world, but the world doesn’t see you that way?

7. What activities or experiences feel fun or important to you, but you don’t currently do?

8. What questions or challenges do you have that can only be solved in community?

9. What form of community is missing? 

10. What form of community feels joyful?

11. When you think about this community idea, do you feel a sensation of expansion or contraction? 

How you’ll know a community is emerging

Through internal and external exploration, you’ll form your hypothesis. This is your initial community design, or “probe”.

You’ll decide on the structure of your container: the purpose, people, space, experience, rules, guidelines, intentions, etc. (we’ll talk more about how to design community containers in Part IV).

If you’ve successfully tuned into the connection people are yearning for, created a compelling container, and offered them a loving invitation, they will flow into your community and bring their energy.

As members arrive, you’ll immediately start getting feedback on whether or not you’ve found the magic. This is the “sense” part of the Cynefin Framework. You’re feeling into whether or not you’ve found “community-member-fit”.

We tend to default to data here, looking at engagement metrics to inform if we’ve found community-member-fit or not.

But in my experience, you don’t need data. You’ll know if it’s working.

Think about a recent event you attended and how you could feel the energy in the room. You can sense if people are happy or sad, excited or bored, eager to connect or eager to leave. We can feel when a community is clicking. We can feel when it’s not.

If it’s working, members will also probably tell you. They’ll express their gratitude for the container. They’ll share how it’s exactly what they’ve been yearning for. When people find their community, it’s hard for them not to talk about it. 

And complimenting your intuition with feedback forms, surveys, and interviews, is a great idea. Even if your community is clicking, this feedback will help you refine your next probe.

You shouldn’t need to force engagement. When you have community-member-fit, engagement flows freely. If you feel like you’re forcing it, it’s a sign that you haven’t tapped into the flow yet. You’ll need to keep running experiments.

Lets review…

That’s all for Part III! Here’s what we covered:

✔️ The process for navigating complex systems
✔️ A new community is hatched 🥚
✔️ How to form a community hypothesis
✔️ How to tap into your community intuition
✔️ How to conduct community research
✔️ How you’ll know when a community is emerging

In Part IV, we’re going to get even more practical and look at how to design your community containers and probes with emergence in mind. I can’t promise that there won’t be more chicken puns but I will do my best.

Perhaps it was a dinner party, a bar, a classroom, a coffee shop, a comedy show… wherever.

How did it feel to be in that space? Were people happy to be there? Were you happy to be there? What sights, smells, and sounds do you remember? Did you feel safe? Did you feel welcome?

Chances are, you can conjure a pretty clear sense of what it was like to be in that room.

Humans, the social creatures that we are, have this innate ability to read a social environment very quickly. It’s been critical to our survival.

Of course, when designing communities these days, we tend to forget about this skill. We use playbooks, frameworks, and canvases to tell us what to create for our community. We seek data. We make plans.

We take an intellectual approach to designing something that is very emotional, relational, and somatic. We use our minds to search for answers that our hearts and bodies already hold.

You may have read my series on emergent community design. In it, I lay out the core belief of the methodology:

Our intuition plays a critical role here. Effective community creators tap into their inner knowing and feeeel into the community that wants to emerge.

I’m not knocking the intellect. Conducting research is important and I love me a good community design framework. (My team and I invented several back at CMX!) What I’m saying is, don’t forget to also look inward.

With that, I was inspired by my experience with mindfulness practice, IFS (Internal Family Systems), and somatic experiences to create this guided meditation that will help you tap into your intuition for what wants to emerge in your community.

I’ve privately taken around 100 community builders through this guided meditation and the results have been surprising and inspiring. Participants report feeling more deeply connected to their community, understanding members in a new light, and having a range of new ideas for how to deepen connection in their space.

I won’t say more, so I don’t lead your experience too much. Give it a shot and see where it takes you.

I’d also love it if you’d email me or comment below to share what emerges for you through this experience, if you feel comfortable sharing. I love hearing your stories!

Find a quiet, comfortable place to sit, and when you’re ready, you can do the guided meditation using the audio or video below.

(The meditation starts at 4:02 after a brief introduction, which you’re welcome to skip)

A Guided "Somatic Community Design" Meditation (Audio)

A Guided "Somatic Community Design" Meditation (Video)

✍️ After you’ve completed the meditation, take five minutes to write down what you observed and any insights that emerged.

If you’re doing this exercise in a group, take five minutes to reflect individually before coming together as a group, and sharing what came up for you.

I can’t wait to hear what emerged!

Welcome to Part II of my series on emergent community design:

Part I: How Communities Emerge
Part II: What is Emergent Community Design? (this post)
Part III: How to Bring a Community to Life
Part IV: How to Design a Community Container (coming soon!)
Part V: The Seven Principles of Emergent Community Design (coming soon!)

Note: This thesis is, itself, emerging. What was originally a three-part series is now a four-part series. As this thesis unfolds I invite you all to add your reflections, feedback, and questions in the comments and replies.

In Part I, we explored the basic concepts of emergence in nature and how it applies to communities. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend reading that post first. In Part II we’ll begin to apply emergence to the work of creating and facilitating communities.

Part II will cover:

✔️ Defining “emergent community design”
✔️ Intentional vs unintentional communities
✔️ The universal river of connection
✔️ The three rules of community emergence
✔️ The community butterfly effect

Defining “emergent community design”

Let’s kick off Part II with a definition of “Emergent Community Design”.

This definition will serve as the foundation for the rest of this series.

Usually, a community is described as something we “build”, “architect”, or “engineer”. Rooted in these terms is the belief that building community is a linear, step-by-step process. “If we just follow the instructions, we’ll have a community!”

Emergent community design challenges this assumption. It’s rooted in the belief that we don’t build communities. We build containers where community has a chance to emerge. And to some extent, what emerges will always be out of our control.

In emergent community design, we form hypotheses and run experiments until a community emerges. Once it emerges, we continue to shape through experimentation and observation. It’s an iterative process that requires fluidity and adaptability.

Once a community begins to emerge, you don’t have to do anything. Like a plant, it will just continue to emerge on its own. Your job is to care for it, guide it when needed, and help it reach its full expression.

Intentional vs unintentional communities

It’s important to note that the emergent community design methodology is specifically focused on intentional communities, which I’m defining as a community that someone intends to create.

In unintentional communities, no one is designing them in any particular way. They just emerged from the social environment. Riots, mosh pits, friend groups, and neighborhoods can all be unintentional communities, at least until someone decides to take the lead.

There must be leadership for an intentional community to exist.

Leadership doesn’t have to be formal. Even in decentralized communities with no formal leadership like holocracies, open-source projects, or DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), leadership will emerge organically.

Unintentional communities are the closest thing to the type of bottom-up emergence we see in nature. When the environment is right, the complex entity (like flocks of birds, schools of fish, and colonies of ants), will just emerge, no leadership required.

For humans to form intentional communities, a leader must take action. Someone must make a conscious decision to gather and/or shape the community.

The universal river of connection

Here’s how I see it…

Flowing through all of humanity is a giant river of connective energy. The river is always in motion. We are always seeking connection.

When you start a community, you’re hoping that the river of connection will flow into the container you construct.

When you position the community container wrong, the river refuses to flow into it. There’s too much friction. You’re trying to change the direction of the river’s flow too much. You’ll notice it’s taking a great deal of effort to get any engagement going.

When you get the community design right, in line with where the river naturally wants to go, connection flows into it with ease. It feels alive and joyful. You’ll realize that you don’t have to do much to get engagement going, the community is emerging on its own.

Once the river is flowing through your community, you get to decide how hands-on or hands-off you want to be with shaping it. Do you want to let the river carve its own path? Do you want to guide the river in any specific direction? We’ll talk more about these decisions in Part III.

The direction of the river’s flow is constantly changing. Other communities will form, in flow with the new direction of the river, and pull the connective energy out of your container into theirs. If your community doesn’t adapt to the river, it will run dry.

The rules of community emergence

So what has to be true for the river of connection to flow into the community space you’ve created?

To explore this question, let’s fly back to our old friend, the starling.

In Part I, we learned that for a flock of starlings to come together, each bird must follow three rules:

1. Fly toward the center 

2. Don’t collide 

3. Match speed and direction with your nearest neighbors 

This got me wondering, what are the rules that must be followed for a human community to form?

I see three:

1. Sufficient motivation

2. Fulfillment of promise

3. Consistent opportunities for interaction

—

There must be sufficient motivation to overcome the friction of participation

Motivation can be intrinsic (pure yearning), extrinsic (rewards), or a combination of both. But keep in mind, extrinsic rewards have diminishing returns. Once the extrinsic reward’s value fades, so will their motivation. The most sustainable communities are ones that are fueled by pure intrinsic motivation.

It’s not enough for members to be motivated. The motivation has to be greater than the friction of participation.

Friction comes in many forms: money, time, travel, clunky software, cognitive load, introversion, risk of leaving an existing community, competition for attention, fear of exclusion.

It’s not necessarily about reducing the friction. People have literally climbed Mt. Everest to find community. It’s often about finding the people who yearn so deeply for this interaction, that they’ll overcome the friction required for participation.

Then again, sometimes it is about reducing the friction (eg. choose a venue that’s more convenient, or an online platform where people are already spending time).

Participation must fulfill the promise of the community

All participation is not created equal. Members’ contributions have to generate value for other members. I call this the Community Activation Point.

Think about an event where everyone is just handing out business cards instead of connecting. Or an online community where everyone just promotes their own stuff. Yes, there’s participation, but it’s creating little to no value.

If your community promises love and support, then members have to contribute their love and support. If it promises answers to their questions, then members have to contribute answers to their questions. If your community promises dope memes… you get the point.

There also has to be enough members in the room for the community to serve its purpose. Easy for a six-person discussion group. More difficult for a large conference or online forum.

There must be consistent opportunities to participate

For the community to persist, members need to be able to come back and participate again and again.

Some communities only need one big event a year and that’s enough.

Others require more frequent opportunities to connect.

Online communities are generally available 24/7.

Whatever the cadence, if members can’t come back and contribute over time, the community will fade.

The community butterfly effect

Great so the three rules have been met, and the river of connection is flowing into your community. What happens next?

The community will begin to unfold, usually in unexpected ways.

Leadership controls the structure of the container and the behavior they model, but they can only influence what will ultimately emerge.

Countless factors influence what emerges in the container that a leader creates: Words, colors, sounds, smells, histories, biases, social norms of the time, time of day, time of year, tone of voice… everything plays a part.

With so many factors at play, what will emerge is unpredictable. Often, something seemingly insignificant will have cascading effects on the community culture over time.

Say, for example, you’re in a community for accountants.

One day a member makes a joke about “counting your chickens before they've hatched.” It was a bit corny but community loved it.

Next week someone references the chicken joke in a hilarious callback. Everyone laughs again.

Another callback follows. Then another. It’s now a running joke.

Fast forward three years and the community has changed its logo to a chicken. Downvotes have been replaced with rotten eggs. Everyone wears chicken hats to the annual accounting conference.

I call this the “community butterfly effect.”

This is how inside jokes form. It’s also how communities form cultural norms, social structures, roles, rules, rituals, and all of the other emergent attributes we discussed in Part I.

What emerges might be serious or silly, beautiful or ugly, inclusive or exclusionary, peaceful or violent, organized or chaotic.

The work of community leadership is to observe what’s emerging and regularly run experiments to guide the community in the direction of its vision.

How exactly? That’s where we’ll pick up in Part III.

Lets review…

That’s all for Part II! This essay focused on the foundations of emergent community design. Here’s what we covered:

✔️ Defining “emergent community design”
✔️ Intentional vs unintentional communities
✔️ The universal flow of connection
✔️ The three rules of community emergence
✔️ The community butterfly effect

Using what we covered today as the foundation, we’ll dive into the design process you can follow to bring a community to life in Part III. See you there. (bring your chicken hat)

My gratitude to the thoughtful humans who took the time to read an early draft of this post and offer their feedback and reflections: Jami Diaz, Sharath Kuruganty, Matt Yao, Brian Helfman, Amy Jo Kim, Michael Daigler, and Taraqur Rahman.

Your turn

1. Does this resonate or am I whackadoodle?

2. Do the three rules ring true? What’s missing?

3. Does the definition make sense? What would you change?

4. How do you see emergence playing out in your community today?

5. What’s your favorite chicken-themed joke?

6. What questions are you still holding as we move into Part III?

Drop a comment or reply. I’d love to hear your reflections.

I recently told my therapist that I think I’m more feminine than most men I know.

“It’s been a part of my struggle to find belonging throughout my life”, I shared while nervously playing with my beard.

His response was surprisingly clarifying.

He said, “If you were gay this wouldn’t be a problem.” (He does a lot of work in the LGBTQ+ community.) He continued, “When a man comes out as gay you get to sort of say ‘fuck it’ and get this moment of fully embracing the feminine parts of yourself. Heterosexual males don’t get that moment. There’s no point where you get to come out as a feminine heterosexual male.”

It made a lot of sense. We don’t have precise language to convey the identity of a feminine heterosexual male. At times in my life, I’ve wondered to myself if I’m gay because feminine gay men were the only examples I saw of men who fully embraced their femininity.

Every time I publish one of these newsletters about my healing journey, expressing my emotions, sharing my inner stories, there’s a voice in my head that represents what I perceive as the "masculine” men in my life.

The voice says something along the lines of, “What a pussy.”

Now to be clear, no one has said anything like this directly to me since middle and high school. It’s a story I still hold in my mind that isn’t totally rooted in my lived experience today.

That said, I do hear my peers use language like this broadly. I hear it on social media and on business podcasts. There are still a lot of proclamations of what it means to “be a real man”, a lot of criticism of therapy and healing practices, and a reluctance to discuss emotions and vulnerability. I notice that when things are dismissed as “woo woo”, it’s often because they’re rooted in qualities of intuition, emotion, and spirituality, which are considered “feminine”. Anti-woo is often anti-femininity in disguise. The patriarchy offers little room for woo.

Whether the story that men will judge me is true or not, it’s a barrier I climb over every time I hit publish on one of these posts. Am I willing to be seen as less masculine by sharing my feelings and experiences as a sensitive person? Am I willing to risk exclusion by my masculine peers? Am I willing to look cringe-y (another word we use for men who act feminine).

What’s been inspiring as I’ve embraced this path, and shared my writing along the way, has been meeting other men who are also on healing journeys, and who are open about their feelings and emotions. They’re dedicated to accepting and expressing their whole selves. They’re actively investigating how the patriarchy has shaped their experiences and views. They’re finally finding their feminine.

And many of them have similar stories to mine.

I grew up playing all the “manly” sports, and I was good at them. Up until middle school I was one of the top junior lacrosse players in the area. But I never felt like I fit in with the social norms of the locker room. It didn’t matter how good I was at the sport, I never felt like I fit in with the community. I quit after high school.

My friend groups were mostly boys, and I struggled to fit in there too. Our group’s idea of fun was ballbusting. We’d spend all day insulting each other and tearing each other down. The insults were harsh. Racial slurs, homophobic jabs, jokes about being adopted… it was all fair game. I was the token Jew. They’d throw coins at my feet and mock my mom’s Israeli accent. I was never good at ballbusting. I couldn’t dish it, and I couldn’t take it. I’d genuinely feel hurt by the insults. I never felt comfortable being so harsh toward the others. It never felt right coming out of my mouth (and yes, I tried).

Other friend groups I found myself in were violent. Fighting with rival groups was a regular occurrence. I’ve been forced into fights against my will. I’ve witnessed huge brawls, with fists and weapons. I’d stand to the side holding everyone’s skateboards because I wasn’t willing to jump in. I wasn’t “masculine enough” to fight.

Late in high school, I found myself in a strange grey area: the hardcore music scene. Violence was a core part of the experience, but it was held in the container of concerts and moshpits. The band would pour their rage out from the stage in guttural screams and breakdowns. “Hardcore dancing” involved punching, stomping, and kicking, but generally not toward each other. If a real fight broke out, it was broken up. There was intense masculine energy, and yet the men were more emotional, more vulnerable. We’d talk about our suffering. The music was a channel to express our emotions in a space that, compared to the rest of the world, felt safe. And through that safety, deeply feminine moments emerged.

Through it all, I’ve still yearned for friendship and inclusion within highly masculine groups. I didn’t want to fight, but I wanted to be included by those who did. I was bad at ripping on my friends, but I wished I was better at it. I wanted to fit in in the locker room. In my adulthood, I’ve sought inclusion in masculine entrepreneurship circles. I have wanted to be seen as a man. I haven’t always been strong or aware enough to seek friendship elsewhere.

I’m extremely fortunate that I now have male friends who accept me fully and who don’t embody some of those more toxic ideologies around masculinity. But I’m still working on finding and loving my feminine qualities. I’m working on being comfortable expressing my femininity without feeling embarrassed about it.

I’m highly sensitive. I’m highly empathetic. I listen intently. I care deeply. I feel deeply. I write poetry. I cry during the sad parts of movies every damn time.1

I don’t want to completely dismiss my masculine qualities either. I still enjoy bringing the intensity on a basketball court. I can still be a protector of my friends and family when I need to be. I enjoy fighting and conflict when in the container of sports, debate clubs, or mosh pits. I still enjoy masculine spaces and energies.

I contain multitudes. I think we all do.

A friend recently told me that they see it as a ratio. Some men are 70-30 masculine to feminine energy. Some are 80-20. While I wouldn’t get too attached to a ratio, I found this framing intellectually helpful. It feels infinitely more true than the binary view that you’re only masculine or feminine

I don’t know what I am. Maybe 60-40? 50-50? Maybe the ratio is constantly changing. Maybe the ratio depends on the situation like I’m 80-20 on the basketball court but 20-80 when coaching a client.

Maybe after I uncover all my repressed feminine energy I find that I’m 40-60. What then? How does a heterosexual man with more feminine than masculine energy identify in the world? What about a heterosexual woman with more masculine energy than feminine energy? Is it important that we have a name for it?

And why do we even label these energies as masculine and feminine? I’ve been told it’s because that’s how it is in nature. Males naturally exhibit qualities like strength, aggression, and logic, and females naturally exhibit qualities like empathy, softness, and intuition. My experience tells me otherwise. I think we all exhibit all of these qualities to varying degrees that don’t necessarily match our sex or gender. I think using the titles “masculine” and feminine” to describe them just reinforces gender norms.

I have more questions than answers. I don’t know what any of this means. I still hold a lot of fear. Hitting publish on this feels terrifying. I worry I’ll be excluded. I worry I’m wrong about myself. I worry I’m being cringe and will embarrass myself. But fuck it. This is me as I know myself in this moment. And maybe, this resonates with you, and we can start talking about it together.

Last week I published “A Day As a Workaholic” and received a number of reader responses saying, “I feel seen!”, and, “How do I make it stop?”

Today I thought I’d write a follow-up about how I broke free from the workaholism cycle.

This is not advice, it’s simply my experience.

Why boundaries didn’t work

Let’s start with what I thought was the solution to workaholism: Boundaries.

I thought that if I could just hold better boundaries, then I wouldn’t work as much, and the problem would be solved.

Here are just some of the boundaries I tried while leading my company:

1. Workblocks

2. Limiting the number of meetings per day

3. No-meeting days

4. Four-day work weeks

5. No meetings policies

6. Hiring a virtual assistant

7. Stopping work at 6pm

8. Not working on nights or weekends

9. 2-week, and sometimes longer, vacations

Each time I would create a boundary, it would create some relief for a short amount of time, but old habits and anxieties would always return.

What I learned is that workaholism comes down to a belief and no amount of boundaries will change your life without first changing this belief.

The belief at the root of my workaholism is one I’ve spoken about a lot on this newsletter…

“I am not enough.”

This belief is deeply painful. It has been the root of my suffering. It’s been a hole my soul. And to fill that hole, to avoid the suffering, I would throw myself into my work.

“I will be enough if…”

I get more done.
I get a promotion.
I sell my company.
I reach inbox zero.
I make more money.
I gain more status.
I am successful.

None of these things ever worked because they were rooted in the belief that enoughness needs to come from something external.

Why couldn’t I find enoughness within?

Success was what was praised by my parents and all the adults in my life, and so the story formed in my psyche that success equates to love, and failure equates to love being withheld. I know now that my parents love me fully, no matter what, but the story has persisted.

Workaholism is a vicious cycle

You think that work will make you feel like you’re enough, so you work hard and you find some success.

“Yay, you did it!”, shout the inner and outer voices. For the moment, you feel like you’re enough.

But the praise is short-lived. If you want to keep feeling like you’re enough, you need to do it again. So you add more work, your plate starts to overflow, and you fall behind.

“Falling behind?! Unacceptable. Clearly, you are still not enough. Look at all your successful friends! They’re enough!”

Now what do you do to prove you’re enough? Work harder! Take on more work!

Around and around it goes until you burn yourself to the ground.

My boundaries never stood a chance

“I’m only going to work four days a week.”

Great! That means I’ll work 20% less, right? Of course not. Because the bar of success I need to hit in order to feel like I’m enough remains the same.

So now I’ve just given myself less time to hit the same bar. I work harder and longer, with greater intensity and expectation. By the time I reach my off day, I’m so burnt out I can’t even enjoy it.

Let’s try another boundary…

“I’m going to stop working at 6pm every day.”

Super! Let’s do it. 6pm arrives, time to close the laptop!

Of course, I still have emails in my inbox and tasks I didn’t get to. But NO! I’m putting my foot down and stopping at 6pm like I said. Laptop closed.

There’s that tension in my chest again.

I can feel the emails waiting for me. The unfinished tasks buzz like gnats in my ears. I’m not working, but I can’t stop thinking about work.

I start pushing work to 6:15, then 6:30, 6:45…

Soon the boundary is just a memory.

Finding enoughness

Setting a boundary around work without addressing the beliefs behind my workaholic tendencies was like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound.

I needed to root out the bullet if I was going to heal.

I needed to believe that I’m enough, regardless of how much I succeeded.

This is the journey I’ve been on for the last two years.

Eventually, I tuned into the parts of me holding the story that I’m not enough. They’ve been working so hard to prove the story wrong, to protect me.

I sat with them compassionately and made them feel heard.

Slowly, the story began to fade, these parts started to relax, the noise quieted down, and I discovered the enoughness that has always existed within me.

How did I break the cycle of workaholism?

By learning how to love myself, seeing myself as whole, and finding enoughness.

I had a lot of help

I tried to navigate my workaholism alone for a long time and it wasn’t until the right people entered my life that I was able to start to make a change.

They helped me see the stories I was holding. They helped me identify the belief that I wasn’t enough. They gave me tools and practices to change that belief.

This took the form of coaching, therapy, IFS, breathwork, meditation, nature immersion, community, and various other practices, people, and spaces.

I’ve found it very difficult to do this work alone. If you’re feeling lost, I invite you to consider asking for help. A regular therapist can be a wonderful place to start. I found mine through Psychology Today’s directory.

I’m deeply grateful to the humans the universe sent me, who have held me through this journey.

I also had a great deal of space to do this work

I stepped down from my company and stopped working entirely to embark on this journey (though at the time I had no idea what I was looking for, I just knew something had to change).

It gave me a lot of time. And it made sure I didn’t have a company or job pulling me back into the cycle of hustle and achievement.

Our family is not independently wealthy. Taking this time off felt deeply uncomfortable from a financial perspective, but it was worth every penny.

I wonder if I had committed to these healing practices and had the right people around me, if I would have been able to make these changes while still running my company. I think the answer is yes, but it would have been much more difficult.

I thought the only tools I had in my battle for enoughness were work and success. I didn’t know these healing practices were out there and available to me and I didn’t carve out the space to commit to them. I didn’t know how profound of an impact they could have.

I was blind. Now I can see.

Now, the boundaries work

Before, I was using boundaries to avoid suffering.

Now, I use boundaries to create the life I want to live.

Instead of acting as a dam, my boundaries flow with the river of my life.

I work for myself. I have no employees or contractors, a boundary I’ve decided to hold in this chapter.

Thursdays are my no-meeting days. I get deep creative work done on these days. (I’m sitting at a cafe writing this post on a Thursday. I think I might grab some tacos after I schedule this.)

Fridays are my “do whatever I want days”, which is usually a long hike in the woods. Sometimes it’s sitting in the park and reading. And yes, sometimes it’s working. But when I work, it’s no longer from a place of fear. It’s because I feel energized to work.

I don’t work on weekends or evenings. That time is for being present with my wife and kids.

I say no to a lot of meetings. I say no to a lot of projects. I have become intimate with my tendency to fill up the empty space in my life, and have stayed committed to maintaining spaciousness.

The work continues…

I still fall into old habits.

But now when the fears arise, I have tools for coming back into presence.

When I feel a temptation to break a boundary, I can ask myself, “Is this coming from enoughness or the belief that I’m not enough?” The temptation becomes my guide.

Sometimes I find that the belief that “I am not enough” has returned.

So I sit with it.

I notice the tension in my chest.

I give my attention to the parts of me that want to feel heard.

I listen to what they have to teach me.

I keep doing the work.

I’m here to help

If you’re feeling stuck in the workaholism cycle and are looking for some help, please reach out. I get a great deal of energy from helping others through this journey through my coaching practice, or just as a friend.

Your turn:

1. What has your experience with workaholism been?

2. What stories have you held that led you to work so much?

3. If you were able to break out of it, how?

I used to judge coaches.

I saw it as something you do when you can no longer *do*.

I was wrong.

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It's strange that I'd judge coaching since, for much of my career, I've had coaches.

They've helped me navigate some of the most difficult times in my life and career.

They helped me know myself.

They held me nonjudgmentally, and acted as a trusted mirror, during times where I had no one else who could hold me, and see me, in that way.

Still, while I respected my coaches, I never saw it as a career I'd pursue.

I had this story in my head that, "Those who can't do, coach".

And that you can’t build wealth by coaching (still maybe true for most?)

Now, in a great twist of fate, I've become a full-time coach.

I didn't intend for it to happen. It was a beautiful accident.

It was a sunny and windless winter day in upstate NY.

took me to Mohonk Preserve to hike and jam on a new community project he wanted to create.

We walked for hours, meandering through a range of topics, snow crunching under our feet. I helped him hone his vision for the community and this new life path. After a while, he paused and said, "You know, you’re really good at this."

I replied, "Thanks! This is fun. I could do this all day."

He smirked, knowing that I’ve been waiting for my next career path to emerge. "You know you just said you could do this all day, right?"

In that moment, I realized that I'd been coaching my whole life.

I've always been the one that friends come to when they have something serious they need to talk through. I've coached community members, employees, colleagues, and even bosses.

I love holding space for people to explore themselves. I love being a mirror. I love helping people find clarity, or if not clarity, then comfort in the not knowing.

In fact, a lot of what has always drawn me to community building I've also found in coaching. The conversation, helping people feel seen and understood, the relationships, the cocreation, it’s all there.

I can also see how community building helped feed my ego’s need for reputation. When you’re a community leader, you’re seen and respected widely. Coaching is much quieter. You’re an ally in the background. It’s often best if no one else even knows you’re there. You exist for the purpose of serving the client.1

So it makes sense that as I’ve healed, and my ego has calmed, I feel less of a need to be in the spotlight and more called to be in quiet service to others, helping them through the journey I’ve been through. I’m deeply grateful to have reached this place.

My career in community started when I realized that I could be paid for the thing I was doing for fun.

Holy shit, it’s happening again.

Since that day in the woods, my coaching practice has quickly emerged in ways I never could have imagined.

I'm now coaching ten incredible humans.

My clients have naturally fallen into two buckets:

1. Community leaders navigating difficult community challenges and engaging in a journey of self-discovery (or what I call the intersection of “community work” and “inner work”)

2. High achievers learning how to downshift into a new season of life with greater presence, inner-knowing, and alignment (working directly through Downshift with Steve Schlafman)2.

Both are identities I know deeply. I’ve been through what you’re going through.

The "return on energy" is high for me. I leave every call feeling more energized than when I joined.

I've found the work I'm called to do, in this season of my life.

Interested in working together?

I have two remaining 1-1 coaching slots open. I’d be thrilled to explore working with you.

I’m also kicking off group coaching for community founders. There will be 6-8 members in the group, meeting monthly on Zoom. This might be the only time I offer this.

If you’re interested in 1-1 or group coaching, hit reply or get in touch here, and tell me about where you are in your journey. We’ll take it from there!

I quit social media eight months ago.

It started with a conflict that forced me to step back. Once I experienced life without social media I was like, “hey this is pretty cool” and just stayed off.

But over the past couple weeks, I’ve dipped my toes back in. Reexperiencing social media after being away so long has been enlightening. It’s shining a bright light on how different life is when immersed in these platforms.

I thought today, I’d share some of what I’ve been observing and experiencing.

Note: these are my experiences with social media as a white, straight, Jewish, middle class, male. I’m curious what aligns or doesn’t align with your experience.

Let’s dive in, and remember to LIKE AND SHARE BECAUSE SOCIAL MEDIA DEMANDS IT.

Stepping off the stage

After quitting social media, I realized how much I was performing.

So much of my life has been a performance, even before social media.

I always needed to be perceived as successful, as kind, as smart, as artistic. It’s how I received love. It’s how I felt I had to earn my own love.

Social media was like crack for the performer in me. I latched onto it at a very young age, in middle school. I was good at it. I never looked back.

Today social feels like a stage where everyone is jockeying to get to the front. For some, their approach is earnest, thoughtful, and to be of service. For most, they climb the ranks with radical claims, division, shitposting, or empty positivity.

I’ve always tried to practice the former, but the reality is, everything is performative when you’re on a stage. Even “authenticity”. You’re still choosing your words for an audience. Perhaps there are people out there who can be 100% themselves and give zero attention to the people consuming their content. I haven’t met one.

Social media turns everyone into a mini-media company, catering to the invisible algorithm. It feels so far from human-ness.

And look, I’m not judging anyone. It’s how the platforms are designed. I had been highly performative at times

And to be clear, I’m performing right now as I write this newsletter. But at least, with this newsletter, I know I’m not catering to an algorithm. I’m writing what I want to write, and you’re reading it because you chose to read it.

Whatever you do, don’t fuck up

I noticed that when on social media, I’m a little scared, all the time.

It didn’t used to be this way. Culture has shifted.

As I’ve spoken to others about my experience, I learned that I’m far from alone. The fear of being called out or attacked online is everpresent for most people who create in my network. This has been true across race and gender.

It’s created a tense environment where people are struggling to talk to each other, they’re talking at or about each other, and everything feels charged.

Being off social media, all of this faded to the background. My personal conflict was still there of course, but I could focus on it on an individual, human level.

People who would speak with extremely charged language online would be much more human and nuanced offline. It’s like we’re totally different people when put in the social media container.

As soon as I log into social media, the fear comes back. What if something I say is misconstrued? What if something I say makes someone feel excluded? What if I’m attacked for some part of my identity?

Putting down the social measuring stick

Sometimes I see people celebrating their milestones and just feel pumped for them. A lot of the time, it just makes me feel bad about myself.

It’s the parts within me that believe I’m not enough, that hold financial insecurity, that crave success, and that loves to criticize me.

I compare. I feel envy. I judge myself for not doing enough.

Being off social media, I wasn’t constantly reminded of how far I have to go. I learned to appreciate the work for the sake of the work. I could focus on improving myself based on where I am today, rather than on where someone else is.

Reclaiming the nooks of the day

The biggest shift I’ve experienced is that my mind has been quieter.

Not a little quieter. A LOT quieter.

It’s like I’ve been standing next to a jet engine, and now I’m standing next to a toaster.

Social media has a way of filling in all the nooks of life, the little in-between spaces.

Walking to the car. Waiting for the microwave. Pooping.

Now, instead of opening social media, I just sit in the spaciousness of these little transitions throughout the day. They add up.

My anxiety has also been way down. Quitting social media coincided with many other changes in my life, and work on myself (therapy, breathwork, coaching, IFS, etc.), so it’s hard to claim cause and effect.

But I can feel the tide of anxiety slowly creeping back up as I’m using these tools again.

Better social nutrition

Social media feels like the “empty calories” of human connection. I’m filling my cup with connections, but they lack nutrition. They’re social donuts.

In its place, I’ve spent most of my social time in intimate and often vulnerable 1-1 conversations, usually while on walks in the woods.

I’ve been more present with my wife, kids, sister, friends, and parents.

I started seeking out in-person experiences like hebrew classes, local events, and in-person therapy.

I’ve spent my phone time in small group chats where there’s a culture of privacy and nonjudgment.

I’ve been reading and commenting on long-form content, engaging more fully with creators whos content speaks to me.

It’s all felt infinitely more human, more true, more real. 

Welcoming back my own thoughts

Social media tells you, 100x per minute, what to think, what to do, and what to care about.

You should do ____ to grow your business.

You should use your voice about ____ issue.

You should ____ every morning.

Open up your feed for one minute and count how often the thought, “I should _____” gets triggered. It’s wild.

It was like my brain was led by a train conductor with extreme ADD, who had absolutely no awareness of what was good for me, and just wanted me to stay on the train.

Being off social media helped me remember how to think for myself. I’m having my own thoughts again, rather than social media telling me what to focus on.

I’ve been able to spend my time with much greater intention. I learn what I feel called to learn, rather than what’s put in front of me.

So why am I thinking about returning to social media?

Over the past two weeks, slowly, uncertainly, I’ve started to dip my toes back in.

It just started happening as I’ve reemerged from my abyss. I think it’s because I’m starting to work again. Social media and work have always come hand-in-hand for me.

I can make it about 10-15 posts on Twitter before I get triggered. Linkedin is like three.

I feel like a rabbit, emerging from my den, sniffing around to see if there are any predators nearby. The slightest threat sends me sprinting back into the darkness.

There are three practical reasons I’ve found draw me to using social media:

1. I enjoy the practice of articulating my thoughts and ideas concisely, and value the informality of social media as a way to test ideas with the universe

2. It helps me grow my newsletter, my business, and my career

3. Social media is a powerful source of synchronicities that lead to new connections and learnings

I haven’t found great replacements.

I also have this story that I *should* be able to use social media without getting hooked and triggered.

I have friends who seem to use social media with great freedom, joy, and ease. Why can’t I?

If I can’t hold boundaries, and I keep getting triggered, that’s my work to do, right?

And yet I keep getting hooked and triggered. Which brings the shame that I couldn’t figure it out.

The social media addiction cycle

The other day, I asked my therapist, “What should I do if I’m addicted to social media?”

He said, “IF you’re actually addicted, you can’t use it. An addict can’t moderate their addiction. You’d need to just stay away”.

Am I an addict? I don’t know.

As soon as I start posting, the dopamine cycle hits and I can’t stop checking to see who liked and replied to my posts. It’s incessant. I’ll check like 30-40 times per day.

Each time I check my stats, it pulls me back into the feed. The feed makes me want to post. Posting makes me want to check my stats. It’s a vicious cycle.

I’ve tried all the apps to reduce social media usage. I deleted the social apps from my phone. I’ve tried to set boundaries. I still get swept up in it.

I’ve found that I can either use social media all the time or not at all. It’s been very difficult for me to find a balance.

Is there a way to use social media consciously?

I listened to a podcast that Daniel Thorson did a while back with Zak Stein about “American Culture’s Psychotic Break” and Daniel asked, “Is there a conscious way to use social media?”

Zak’s answer: “No.” 

I get it. It’s kind of like asking, “Is there a safe way to punch myself, and everyone around me, in the face?” That’s a silly question. Punching is inherently harmful.

If you and everyone around you have opted into punching each other in the face then I guess it’s morally okay, but it doesn’t make it good for you or anyone else. 

I know, that was an incredible analogy. Here’s another one…

It feels like social media is today’s cigarettes. Everyone does it and it’s killing us.

Unlike cigarettes, there are positive elements of social media. Maybe that makes it even more dangerous. We can convince ourselves that the loneliness, anger, jealousy, division, comparison, and depression it triggers is worth it. 

I joined Saumya Gupta on her podcast “Loneliness Busters” and we talked about the idea of putting a Surgeon General’s Warning on social media the same way we do on cigarettes. Imagine if every time you logged in, a pop up said:

“Social media can lead to feelings of loneliness, division, suicide, and might destroy society. Have fun building your following!”

The more optimistic side of me feels curious about how I can bring more mindfulness into using social media.

1. I could take three deep breaths and set an intention before logging in

2. I can create boundaries around the time I spend on social media and who I interact with

3. I can pause after reading each post and sense how it feels in my body

4. I could try to be a source of kindness, honesty, and patience

Or I could just keep not using it.

Maybe that’s okay.

What say you?

1. Have you ever quit social media? What did you learn?

2. Did you go back? Why? How’s it going?

3. If you’re a content creator who doesn’t use social media… how?

4. How many posts can you read before feeling triggered? How many “shoulds” come up in a minute of scrolling?

5. Is there a way to use social media consciously? Or is it a fundamentally flawed system?

Welcome to Part One of my three-part series exploring emergent community design:

Part I: How Communities Emerge (this post)
Part II: What is Emergent Community Design?
Part III: How to Bring a Community to Life

Today in Part I, we’ll cover:

✔️ What is emergence?
✔️ The human urge to connect
✔️ How communities emerge
✔️ Why humans aren’t like ants
✔️ The emergent attributes of communities

Background and disclaimers: This is an unfolding thesis. Please comment with your reflections, challenges, and thoughts to help it unfold! I have done 50+ hours of research on this essay over the last 8 months but I’m not a scientist and I’m open to being wrong. For the purpose of this essay, I’m defining community broadly as, “a group of people who find their connection to each other to be meaningful”. Ok, let’s do this!

What is emergence?

When fish come together, they form a school.

A school isn’t simply a collection of fish, though. No no no…

While in a school, fish can do all sorts of fancy things like synchronize their movements, respond collectively to threats, mock the main characters in Disney movies, and so much more.1

No individual fish plans or designs the unique attributes of the school. They appear organically.

This is known as ✨emergence✨.2

Emergence is the way complex patterns rise out of a collection of relatively simple parts and interactions.

It appears everywhere in nature:

Atoms come together and form cells.

Cells come together and form organisms.

Ants come together and form colonies.

Birds come together and form flocks.

Bees come together and form hives.

In each case, individual “dumb” parts come together and a more complex, “smart” system emerges.3

There’s no central decision-maker orchestrating these movements in nature. Each individual is wired to follow a simple set of rules that leads them to emergence.

For example, in a flock of Starlings, each bird follows three rules:

1. Fly toward the center 

2. Don’t collide 

3. Match speed and direction with your nearest neighbors 

Each bird acts in accordance with the seven birds around them, follows these three rules, and a flock emerges.

Fascinating, right? 

Of course, the next question my brain asked was, “What about human communities? Do we emerge?”

The answer, I believe, is yes. And the implications have forever changed how I think about community design and human connection.

The human urge to connect

Prisoners in solitary confinement, while on death row, would seem like unlikely candidates to start a Dungeons and Dragons club. Well, they did!

Even in the most restrictive environments, humans will find a way to connect.

Why are communities so likely to form wherever there are humans? It’s no different from why emergence occurs elsewhere in nature:

Evolution!

There’s strength in numbers. Fish are more likely to survive in a school, birds in a flock, and humans in a tribe. The traits that made us more likely to gather were passed on. The traits that made us more likely to isolate from other humans weren’t, and the introverts all died (just kidding).4

We may not be hunting for our food or fighting off saber tooth tigers today, but our brains and bodies are wired the same way. Feeling isolated or abandoned can feel a lot like you’re going to die because for most of humanity, that was true.

Perhaps that’s why loneliness feels so scary and why we’re inextricably drawn to each other.

How communities emerge

It was 1938 and 22-year-old Kae Einfeldt was working her dream job as a cartoonist for Disney.

Kae stood out, literally. She was 6-foot-3 (and the only woman in the room).

While working on an obscure movie you’ve probably never heard of called "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", she had the spark of an idea for a “tall club”. She recalled, “I painted dwarfs day after day and I started thinking, we’re doing something nice for little people, but what about tall people?”

She decided to pitch the LA Times an article about the struggles of the tall. They were into it and her piece titled, “Six-Foot-Three (What Will It Be?)” was published. Eight people responded saying they’d be interested in getting together and North America's first tall club was born!

She called the first club “The Longfellows Club". Soon a second tall club formed in Kansas City called “The Greater Kansas City Skyliners”. Then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. On June 24, 1940, Life Magazine published an article called “Life Goes to a Tip Toppers Party” and soon tall clubs were springing up all over the country.

Though Kae has since passed away, thousands of tall people still gather today in dozens of local chapters around the world.

Tall Clubs International emerged over time through “the community lifecycle”, which I cover in The Business of Belonging:

1. Seed: A person, or group of people, feels isolated around some aspect of their life and feels the urge to gather. They plant the seed with a first experience (online or offline) and it catches life. A sense of belonging emerges.

2. Growth: Others who feel the urge to gather are drawn to the community and the community grows. Each active participant influences its direction. Like fresh branches, new norms, rules, language, and other attributes emerge.

3. Maturity: The community reaches a full expression. The new norms and emergent attributes are firmly in place. The branches of the tree are set. There isn’t a whole lot of room for new attributes to emerge.

4. Pollination: People start feeling the urge for a unique expression of the community. They replicate the experience as new chapters, subgroups, or entirely new communities. New seeds are planted, creating space for new attributes to emerge.

Look into the story of any established community and you’ll witness this journey unfold. It often starts with a humble beginning, and complexity emerges over time:

• Burning Man, now an entire city built by 70 thousand attendees each year, started when Larry Harvey and Jerry James invited 20 people to burn an 8-foot tall wooden figure on Baker Beach in celebration of the summer solstice in 1986.

• The Polar Bear Club, now with dozens of clubs (thousands informally) taking the icy plunge each year to raise money, started in 1903 with the OG health influencer, Bernarr Macfadden, jumping into the freezing ocean at Coney Island alone.

• The Dinner Party, with dozens of chapters healing together through potluck dinners around the world, started with a single potluck dinner organized by Lennon Flowers and Carla Fernandez who were looking for a space to process their grief with people their age.

The initial event doesn’t have to be small, humble, or unexpected. Some communities start with a big experience or a lot of intentional structure. But what emerges within that structure, and how that structure evolves over time, is never totally in their control.

We don’t build community.

We build containers where community has a chance to emerge.

^ This was a profound insight for me. It will be a core theme in Part II as we dive into designing communities for emergence.

Why humans aren’t like ants

While there are many similarities in nature (unconscious) and human (conscious) emergence, there are also key differences.

The first big difference is that unlike in nature, in human communities, there’s usually a central decision-maker. Someone chooses the initial rules, features, guidelines, and format of the container.

So while emergence is always present, it’s rare that it will be purely “bottom up” like we see in nature.

Another difference is our ability to make conscious decisions. 

In nature, things generally follow “cause-and-effect” rules. An ant releases a pheromone signal and the other ants fall in line. Fish don’t consciously decide to join a school. A tree doesn’t choose to grow in a forest. It just happens.

Humans, on the other hand, have choice. We follow “cause-THINK-effect” rules. We don’t just join a community because someone tells us to, we get to decide.5

So even when a community feels “bottom-up”, like a mob for example, our consciousness is still orchestrating and influencing what emerges in ways we wouldn’t see in nature.

A third difference is the complexity of our communication. We use words, eye contact, body language, smell, touch, and even neural syncing, to name a few. This wide range of inputs increases the variability of what can emerge.

This, combined with our ego, is why human communities can take many unique forms while ant colonies, bee hives, and schools of fish will generally look and function the same way each time (within the same species).

That all said, if we zoom out, different types of human communities tend to be quite consistent in their form.

For example, all cities have the same structural attributes like business districts, geographical distribution of income, parks, public transit systems, etc. They may have different cultures but the structural attributes are the same, just like in an ant colony or bee hive.

The same is true of membership communities. Every community looks unique but when we zoom out, we see the same structural attributes emerge.

Let’s wrap up by exploring what those attributes are…

The emergent attributes of communities

One of the markings of emergence is how the larger, complex system develops a set of attributes that are unique from each individual part.

So what are the attributes that humans take on when in community, that they don’t exhibit independently?

Here are some that I’ve identified:

1. Collective effervescence: The magical “sense” of community, belonging, and connectedness members get when a community is clicking (coined by Émile Durkheim)

2. Culture and behavioral norms: Members start behaving differently in the community than they do elsewhere. New cultural norms emerge.

3. Collective decision-making: The community will make decisions that are unique from what each individual may have decided. Groupthink seeps in.

4. Social capital and hierarchy: As members interact and transact a system of trust and reciprocity forms. Implicit social hierarchy and explicit positions like moderators, facilitators, chapter leaders, mediators, and mentors may emerge.

5. Community wisdom: Collective knowledge emerges from the diverse experiences and skills of their members. Shared knowledgebases start to form.

6. Collective action: Members may coordinate to achieve goals or address social concerns outside of the community. Each member becomes more powerful and influential by being a member of the whole.

7. Rituals and ceremonies: Formalized experiences develop around membership stages, celebrations, and transformations.

8. Group memory and lore: Members form a shared recollection of past events, experiences, and traditions within a community, communicated through storytelling, rituals, and documentation.

9. Identity, language, and symbols: Members will continuously seek more effective ways of communicating and expressing their identity, forming entirely new languages, styles, uniforms, iconography, and imagery. 

10. Rules, laws, and governance: As bad actors show up and challenge the health and safety of the community, new rules and guidelines organically emerge. Community policy generally becomes more strict and complex over time.

11. Subgroups, cliques, and spinoffs: As members' needs become more specific than what the broader group can provide, new social circles form as cliques (implicit) or chapters and subgroups (explicit). Some spin off into standalone communities.

12. Biological synchronization: When humans interact and feel connected, our brainwaves and hormones can start to synchronize. Physiologically, we become a unique entity when in community. (🤯)

I don’t think this list is exhaustive. I invite you to share other attributes that may emerge within a community in the comments.

Lets review…

That’s all for Part I! This essay focused on the basic concepts of emergence and how it applies to communities. Here’s what we covered:

✔️ What is emergence?
✔️ The human urge to connect
✔️ How communities emerge
✔️ Why humans aren’t like ants
✔️ The emergent attributes of communities

In Part II we’ll get practical. I’ll cover what emergent community design is, teach you a process for how to navigate complex systems, and help you apply all of this to your community building practice.

I can’t wait to see what emerges!

Your Turn:

Again, this is an unfolding thesis and I invite you to help it unfold. Comment or hit reply to share on any (or all) of these prompts:

1. What stood out for you from this post? Did anything shift?

2. What didn’t add up? What holes can you poke? (I love friendly debates!)

3. What questions do you have about emergence and how it applies to community building? (I’ll make sure to cover your questions in parts II and III.)

4. What’s your favorite story of community emergence?

5. Can you think of any examples of community where emergence wasn’t present? IS MY ENTIRE THESIS FLAWED?!

6. Would you rather be a bird, a fish, or a bee? Why?

7. What do you notice about your own yearning for connection and community?

Acknowledgments and further reading

Adrienne Maree Brown’s book “Emergent Strategy” has been hugely educational and inspiring. She artfully connects emergence to social justice work.

Steven Johnson’s book “Emergence” is a deep exploration into the history of emergence research and how emergence works in all of its various forms. I learned a ton from this book.

The Women’s Permaculture Guild has a thorough guide to emergent design which is tangential to community design and worth a read.

I’m deeply grateful to Ben Bradbury, Hillary Leone, Ruthie Berber, David Nebinski, Rachel Saslaw, Saumya Gupta, and Saba Ahmed, for helping me shape this piece with their thoughtful feedback and wisdom.

Dear high achiever,

I want you to know something. Something I wish someone told me when I was in your running shoes.

You don’t have to live this way. There is a different way of being.

There’s a world where you can be calm, by default.

You can feel like you’re enough, without needing to prove it.

You can have a sense of openness and lightness in each day of your life.

I know I know. That sounds dumb and unrealistic. I thought the same thing. The truth is people DID tell me this. There were the Instagurus, the Michael Singer and Eckhart Tolle books, the friend who left the grind years ago and never looked back. Intellectually, I could see that it was possible. In practice, I couldn’t get close enough to touch it.

It’s impossible to notice the peaceful swaying of the trees while you’re speeding by on the freeway. To truly experience it, you have to stop.

For 15 years, there was no stopping me.

I had goals to achieve. I had to prove to myself that I was enough. I moved to SF (a.k.a. highperformerville), worked at the fastest-paced startups, started three companies, joined two accelerators, grew a substantial social media following, ran a podcast, wrote a book, built a massive network… foot on the gas… go go go. There’s no time to waste! I have one life to live! One chance to prove myself!

Stop? Stop?! What would that even look like? Shutting down my company? Making no money? Letting my reputation wither? All my hard work going down the drain? I’m not even wealthy yet! Would my successful friends quit? Would Steve Jobs quit? Would Michael Jordan quit?!1

Nope. Suck it up. Push through. Quitting was not an option…

Until it was the only option.

When I finally stepped down from my company I felt like an empty shell. I didn’t know what was important to me anymore. I forgot how to find joy in my work. I had no energy left.

I didn’t feel burned out per se. I’ve been burned out before, usually from overworking and overwhelming myself. At this point in my career, I had gotten my workload under control. I had my first kid, which forced me to set more clear boundaries. I was still running the community but we had been acquired three years prior, so I didn’t have the pressure of being CEO on my shoulders. I was leading a team and still executing at a high level.

So no, I wasn’t burned out. What I felt was hollowed out. Empty. Lost within. Something had to change. I put in my notice and stepped off the ledge into the abyss.

I spent the next two years floating. Slowly, painfully, alone, I peeled back the layers of my high achiever identity, letting them float off into space, and started to tune more deeply into who I am.

What I was doing, I have now learned, was “downshifting”.

You know when you hear a word that perfectly explains a concept you’re very familiar with but didn’t have a name for? That’s called a wordgasm (it’s not…I just made that up to convey the point). I had a wordgasm when I heard “downshift” for the first time from my friend .

Downshifting is the process a high achiever goes through when stepping off the treadmill. It’s their journey into a new version of life where achievement is no longer their north star (at least not the version of achievement they’ve known).

We high achievers were never taught how to downshift. Our entire life has been a long thread of upshifting. Get to the next level. More knowledge, more experience, more reputation, more acumen, more success, more wealth, more growth… more, more, more…

Can you think of a single time in your childhood or career when someone said, “hey pal, maybe do less with your life”?

I can’t. I’ve been told to take a break… to take a vacation… to stop working for the day… momentary moments of calm and peace just so I could jump right back onto the treadmill when I return.

No one ever asked the question, “What if you just stopped? Like, indefinitely stopped?”

But that’s what I did. I would have had the option to take a paid sabbatical. But I’d be committing to returning to work. The treadmill would keep speeding along in the background, just waiting for me to jump back on.

It was important to me that nothing was waiting for me on the other side of my sabbatical. I didn’t know how long it would end up being. I sensed that there was a new shore waiting for me out there, and that I had to completely lose sight of the shore I was leaving if I was going to find it.

In his book “Transitions”, William Bridges describes the first stage of transitions as an “ending”. Your current stage has to end so that you can enter the “neutral zone”, or what I call “the abyss”. Only after floating in the abyss for some time can you enter the third stage of “new beginnings”.

We’re never taught how to end a version of our life or how to sit uncomfortably in the abyss.

Here are a few things I learned:

• The downshift process isn’t linear. Every time I thought I had let things “end” I learned that there were more layers to peel away. I’d enter “new beginning mode” and be swept back into the neutral zone over and over again. I’m currently coming out of round four (or five or six?) of the abyss.

• Downshifting doesn’t mean you never upshift again. Unless you adopt a monastic lifestyle, it’s unrealistic to avoid upshifting entirely. That said, after downshifting, the next time you upshift you’ll do so with deeper calm, alignment, and inner knowing. In fact, the whole purpose of downshifting may be to help you upshift in a more healthy and effective way in your next chapter.

• Downshifting isn’t a cost, it’s an investment. I was afraid of not making money and burning our savings so Alison and I sat down and looked at our finances in detail. We calculated exactly how much of our savings we’d cut into for us to take this time (Alison also took a year off from teaching). A friend gave me the sage wisdom to reframe it as an investment in myself, my family, and my relationships, rather than a cost. It’s the best investment I’ve ever made.

• Downshifting allows you to explore the source of your high-achieving tendencies. Why do you need to achieve to feel like you’re enough? Where did that belief come from? As you become more aware of these stories, you can slowly start to shift them (I highly recommend working with a therapist, IFS coach, and/or meditation as you go through this journey). Work will feel different when you shift from seeking enoughness through work to a place where you already believe that you are enough. You start to choose work that you genuinely enjoy. I’m finding joy in my work today that I’ve never known before.

• Downshifting can be an extremely lonely process because it’s likely that the people in your life have also been in hustle mode. Stepping off the treadmill can feel like leaving your community. When all your friends are playing the game, leaving the game can feel like a betrayal. My isolation was also deepened by a difficult public conflict and feeling generally exhausted by online communities. Finding others who are downshifting, and those who have previously downshifted, makes the journey more joyful and less lonely. This took me a long time to figure out. I spent a long time alone in the abyss.

• If you’re trying to figure out what you’re going to do next, you’re not downshifting, you’re trying to jump straight into your next upshift. I made this mistake. It’s natural. It will take time for your high achiever tendencies to quiet down (this is part of the ending phase). Not knowing what to do next will feel deeply uncomfortable. Sit with that discomfort, it has a great deal to teach you.

There’s a lot more I can say about downshifting but I hope this essay gives you a glimpse into what’s possible. Perhaps the door has opened, ever so slightly, to your exploration of a new state of work, of living, of being.

Steve Schlafman is kicking off the very first “Downshift” decelerator cohort with a small group of high achievers ready to step off the ledge into the abyss (or who are already floating). I played a small role in supporting Steve as he shaped this program. It’s been an absolute delight. This program is everything I wish I had when I stepped down from my company. I’ll be at the in-person retreat and supporting throughout the program. Applications are due Monday! Maybe I’ll see you there.

Your turn:

1. Have you ever downshifted? What did you learn?

2. Have you ever felt “hollowed out”? Are you feeling like that now? Want to talk about it?

3. What stories are preventing you from downshifting?

4. Did you have a wordgasm while reading this? Be honest…

5. What questions do you have for other readers in the comments?

Hey, hello, and tbh… what’s happening?1 It’s been a minute. Actually, it’s been about five months. How have you been? Seriously, I’d love to know.

Me? I’ve been floating in the abyss.

I suppose I’ve been in some level of “abyss-ness” for two years, since I stepped down from the company I cofounded, moved across the country, and set out to… not sure what. Find myself? Figure out what I wanted to do next? Discover why my life had an everpresent sensation of numbness and anxiety most likely rooted in shadows from my childhood? Yes… all that.

Then over the past five months, a public interpersonal conflict and a series of family health emergencies swept me like a rip tide out to the deep end of my abyss.2

I had a choice. I could try to escape the rip tide and swim back to shore, where it’s safe and there are cool shells, or I could surrender, let the tide take me, and see what happens.

I decided to surrender.

To do so, I had to drop everything. I stopped writing this newsletter. I stopped using social media. I stopped taking on new clients. I went inward. Deeply inward. I entered the abyss.

🕳️

In the “Parable of the Trapeze” (sent to me by ), Danaan Parry beautifully illustrates these moments in life:

“Most of the time, I spend my life hanging on for dear life to my trapeze-bar-of-the-moment. It carries me along at a certain steady rate of swing and I have the feeling that I'm in control of my life[…]

But every once in a while as I'm merrily (or even not-so-merrily) swinging along, I look out ahead of me into the distance and what do I see? I see another trapeze bar swinging toward me. It's empty and I know, in that place in me that knows, that this new trapeze bar has my name on it. It is my next step, my growth, my aliveness coming to get me. In my heart of hearts I know that, for me to grow, I must release my grip on this present, well-known bar and move to the new one.

Each time it happens to me I hope (no, I pray) that I won't have to let go of my old bar completely before I grab the new one. But in my knowing place, I know that I must totally release my grasp on my old bar and, for some moment in time, I must hurtle across space before I can grab onto the new bar.”

That’s what the last five months have felt like. I let go of the last bar and have been hurtling through space… floating… unsure when or if the next bar might come.

A Tour of My Abyss

It’s hard to describe what being in the abyss feels like.

describes it as, “…the feeling of being in a very small boat, in the middle of a very big ocean, with no visible land to navigate by.”

That feels right.

You’ve lost sight of where you’ve come from, but can’t yet see where you’re meant to go. You know there’s something out there, calling to you, but it’s beyond the horizon.

In his book “Transitions”, William Bridges calls this the “neutral zone”. “People go through an in-between time when the old is gone but the new isn’t fully operational”, Bridges explains. “It is when the critical psychological realignments and repatternings take place.”

There’s nothing to really do when you’re in the abyss. You can only surrender. Alan Seal describes this uncomfortable sensation, “For whatever reason, you feel caught. Much as you might like to move on, you realize that something is going on inside, and you can’t hurry the process. It will take as long as it takes.”

So you float.

But, in the stillness, there’s a flurry of motion.

In, Jenny writes about “Śūnyatā”, the Buddhist concept of the void. “It isn’t just emptiness or nothingness. It isn’t nihilistic. It’s crazily alive. It’s where we experience a profound understanding of the nature of reality.”

For the first time in my life, there was nothing to distract me from sitting with myself. No work. No travel and adventure. No drinking or smoking. I took away all the distractions, all the numbing agents. There was nothing but space for my inner voice to fill. And fill it did.

It brought me right up close to my shadows. At the core of it all, I discovered a deeply seeded belief that “I am not enough”.

To fill that void of “enoughness”, over the course of my life, I formed a constellation of “parts”3. These parts focused on reputation, success, money, people pleasing, conflict avoidance, perfectionism, creativity, moralism, competition… all things I thought would make me feel like I’m enough. There was also the “inner critic” who would judge all the other parts for never being successful enough, liked enough, moral enough, etc.

Of course, it never worked. It just reaffirmed the belief that I wasn’t enough, that I needed external validation to be enough.

It’s been a raging internal battle and the source of my anxiety and depression.

I discovered that the work I set out to do two years ago when I stepped down from my company, the work that’s been waiting for me my entire life, was to discover the place within me that was already enough.

How do I tune into enoughness? How do I show up to my work, my relationships, my parenting, my art, and every aspect of my life, from a place of enoughness?

These are the questions I’ve been asking. This is the journey I’ve been on.

What I’ve Been Doing

Fortunately, the tide brought me a lot of support. I’m not sure I ever believed in the idea that if you surrender the universe will bring you what you need. In this case, it did.

Here’s a list of some of the people, groups, and practices I’ve been working with:4

1. A conflict and transformative justice coach approached me after witnessing the conflict unfold. We started working together to help me show up as openly and consciously as possible. It’s helped me navigate both the interpersonal conflict and, surprisingly, my inner conflicts.

2. A friend invited me to a chat group for founders on spiritual and consciousness journeys where I found dozens of people navigating many of the same questions and shadows as me. It’s been a wonderful blessing and has led to a number of fulfilling new relationships like…

3. After I posted in the chat group about my struggles with “enoughness”, an Internal Family Systems (IFS) coach named reached out to me and suggested I try IFS. He offered to be my guide and we started working together. It’s been the most impactful practice I’ve found for tuning into my “parts” and finding “enoughness”.

4. and announced they were hosting a retreat for founders navigating their next chapter. “That’s me!” I said, and I quickly sent my not-so-small payment without knowing much about what it would entail. I expected exercises on choosing your next project, visioning and values workshops… that kind of stuff. It ended up being none of that. What it did include was two very intense breathwork sessions (there was lots of sobbing and roaring), six hours sitting in one spot in the woods, cold immersion in a lake, a sound bath, and morning and evening Zazen meditation sessions. It ended up being exactly what I needed. (Peter is hosting another one in May).

5. That retreat led me to commit to a daily Zazen meditation practice5, which I later deepened further with a weekend retreat at the Zen Mountain Monastery where I lived like a resident for three days in the Catskills. Zazen has helped me connect much more deeply to my body, to my emotions, and to practice surrender. It has helped me tune into “enoughness” which I’ve found is the same as “oneness”, “awakening”, “abundance”, and the many other words people use for “nonduality”.

6. I found a new therapist locally who I’ve been meeting with weekly. It’s been a helpful space to talk about and process all the things coming up in my other practices and in my life generally.

7. Every Friday I’ve been doing long solo hikes and nature sits. I made a list of hikes in the Hudson Valley and choose a different one every week. I also do multiple short hikes in the woods by my house every week. I feel a sense of peace and presence in the woods. It teaches me a great deal about enoughness and surrender. It’s my happy place.

8. My sister (in-law but we don’t like using that term, there should be something better tbh) and her partner invited me to start going to the gym with them. So I’m lifting weights again for the first time in 15 years, and committed to a healthy, high-protein, high-calorie diet. I’ve only thrown out my back once so far!

9. I’ve been writing morning pages to start each day. It helps me get *all the things* out of my head. When I find myself deviating from “enoughness”, I use journaling to tune into what’s happening internally. I use Notion for this, where I also track my mood, health, diet, phone usage, and sleep every day.

10. I’ve been having much deeper, more vulnerable 1-1 conversations with friends and professional peers. There are a number of people I’ve been checking in with monthly. Some are supporting me. Some I’m supporting them. Some we’re supporting each other. My calls don’t drain me anymore. They are usually 60+ minutes and are either in-person or on the phone (like an actual phone call) while walking in the woods. They’ve been delightful.

11. I’ve been present with my family. I’ve built (and destroyed) countless magna-tile towers with my kids, cooked dinners my kids refuse to even sniff, watched The Sopranos (we’re on Season 5 and if you spoil anything I’ll have you “taken care of”) with my wife, and spent long weekends in Long Island with my parents.

12. I’ve felt hungry for learning in a way I haven’t in a long time. I’ve spent much of my free time consuming long-form content: reading books and newsletters and listening to podcasts.6 I also started taking Hebrew classes at the local JCC. Staying totally off social media for five months has been a big shift in how I consume content. I don’t think I want to go back.

It’s been a full reboot.

More moments than not, I’m feeling grateful, calm, and at peace.

I still have moments where I feel anxiety, where my shadows show up, where tension and anxiety arise. I still get hijacked with fear, envy, competition, self-doubt, etc. My ego is still there. But I’m building a more keen awareness of when it arises, and I have tools that help me return to enoughness.

I asked my wife the other night if she’s noticed anything different about me since I started doing all this work. She said, “Actually, you haven’t had an ‘off day’ in a while”, which is what we call my short, sometimes not-so-short, bouts of depression. I’m not getting caught in the downward spiral nearly as often.

I’m not “crushing it” and I’m not getting crushed. I’m balanced.

I’m enough.

Where am I floating next?

People keep asking me what I’m doing and I keep responding, “I’m in the abyss”, to which they either awkwardly chuckle and change the subject, or they give me a deep, knowing look because they, too, are familiar with “the abyss” 🕳️.

That said, I’ve started to catch sight, just barely, of the shoreline on the other side.

I can’t quite see it yet. I still have a lot of questions. I still find myself reaching for the old trapeze bar.

In a recent, Phan shares an essay titled, “Second Wind” from Václav Havel, a Czech playwright and former President, about the three choices an artist faces after achieving “success”. It captures the struggle I’ve been experiencing with deciding what to do next:

“Sooner or later, however, a writer (or at least a writer of my type) finds himself at a crossroads: he has exhausted his initial experience of the world and the ways of expressing it and he must decide how to proceed from there.

He can, of course, seek ever more brilliant ways of saying the things he has already said; that is, he can essentially repeat himself.

Or he can rest in the position he achieved in his first burst of creativity, subordinate everything he learned to the interests of consolidating that position, and thus assure himself a place on Parnassus. 

But he has a third option: he can abandon everything proven, step beyond his initial experience of the world, with which he is by now all too familiar, liberate himself from what binds him to his own tradition, to public expectation and to his own established position, and try for a new and more mature self-definition, one that corresponds to his present and authentic experience of the world.

In short, he can find his "second wind." Anyone who chooses this route—the only one (if one wishes to go on writing) that genuinely makes sense—will not, as a rule, have an easy time of it. At this stage in his life, a writer is no longer a blank sheet of paper, and some things are hard to part with. His original elan, self-confidence, and spontaneous openness have gone, but genuine maturity is not yet in sight; he must, in fact, start over again, but in essentially more difficult conditions.’

Phan summarizes the options:

1. Repeat the exact same thing as past successes

2. Build on top of past successes but remain in the same creative lane

3. Find a “second wind” by trying something completely new

I’m no longer a blank sheet of paper. I’ve been building and teaching Community for business for 15 years. It was my first wind and the only one I’ve known. It’s very hard to let go of that identity.

In this moment, I know I don’t want option one. I don’t want to keep doing the same thing. I feel drained by the battle of proving the ROI of community to businesses, and the tension of building community in a container where it’s not a true priority.

But I’m torn between options two and three.

For option two, there are still elements of community and human connection that are calling to me. There are still big themes around loneliness and social health I feel excited to work on. I still enjoy working with community leaders and businesses where community is the core priority.

For option three, the “second wind” I feel guiding me is more intimacy, more depth, working more directly with individuals to help them feel seen, to help them heal, to help them do meaningful work. Or maybe it’s something completely different I haven’t yet seen.

I don’t know where exactly the tide is taking me. shared a passage in his newsletter from “Letters to a Poet” by Maria Rilke that I’m keeping close to my heart:

"I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

My purpose, in this moment, is to live these questions and see where they take me.

A few projects that have been emerging

These are the paths that are starting to emerge. I’m following where my heart is taking me. I don’t know where they lead.

1. I’m starting to write again.

This post is my attempt at getting words out there and starting up a regular publishing cadence again.

I don’t know what direction this newsletter will go. I’m still planning to research and write about human connection and community. I also have a lot I’d like to share about my journey with inner work and seeking “enoughness”.

One interesting theme unfolding for me is the weaving of “community work” and “inner work”. How our “parts” show up in our relationships and communities and how our communities and relationships show up in our “parts”. How the way we navigate conflict internally is connected to how we navigate conflict in community. How belonging with others starts with belonging with Self. What does building community look like from a place of “enoughness”? I’m excited to explore this intersection more deeply.

There’s a part of me that’s afraid to start publishing again. Afraid of becoming attached to likes, comments, and subscriber counts again. Afraid of seeking enoughness through external validation. But writing is something I love. I love the craft. And I love the connection it brings with all of you. I’m hoping I can come to it from that place of love and connection.

2. I’m supporting a couple of friends on their projects.

They’re both focused on helping founders and high performers navigate transitions and connect around inner-work journeys. Both are very intimate and hands-on community experiences, one an online cohort and one an in-person retreat. They’ve both been delightful to work on.

I’m not making any money on these projects. I do have to start earning income again soon because my existing clients have now wrapped up and my kids eat a small country’s worth of berries. We’re also hoping to one day afford a house in the United States of America.

I’m doing my best to trust that “surrendering to enoughness” will bring me to do the work I’m called to do, and that will lead to sustainable financial security.

Which leads me to my third project…

3. I’m shifting my work to a coaching practice.

Slowly, I started to shift how I worked with my consulting clients to more of a coaching format. I started working less with teams and more with individuals. I’ve been working with them on both community work AND their inner work journeys.

The truth is I’ve always enjoyed being a coach. I often naturally take on that role for peers at work. My friends in college jokingly called me “Dr. Spinks” because I’d always sit with them and talk through their problems. I get a great deal of energy from going deep with people.

I don’t know exactly what form this coaching practice will take but I sense there’s a powerful opportunity at this intersection of “community work” and “inner work”.

I recently updated my coaching page. I’d LOVE any questions, reflections, challenges, poems, or soliloquies you feel called to offer me on this new direction. And please get in touch if you’d like to explore working together and we’ll set up a complementary call. Note: I’m offering a few sliding-scale pricing slots for those who need it.

So that’s what I’ve been up to.

I still feel like I’m in the abyss, but I’m getting more comfortable in it. Maybe you never leave the abyss. You welcome the abyss. You accept the abyss. You become the abyss.

Maybe the abyss is enoughness, and we are all already enough.

So what’s up with you?

1. What parts of this post landed with you and your life experience? What parts made you feel seen? What parts made you feel unseen? What are my blind spots?

2. How have you navigated the question of “enoughness”? What have you learned?

3. Tell me about your abysses (abyssi? asbyssum?). How did you decorate?

4. Seriously how do kids eat so many berries?

6. What questions do you want to ask?

Consider two people and how they spend their day:

Person 1: Interacts with three close friends.

Person 2: Interacts with one close friend, one family member, and one coworker.

Which person do you think is happier at the end of the day (if all other factors are constant)?

Researchers have found that, most likely, it’s person #2.

Today we’re going to dive into why…

IN TODAY’S ARTICLE:

✔️ How we often misunderstand loneliness
✔️ Why one close friend can’t fill your social cup
✔️ The magic of the “neighborly nod”
✔️ The role of communities in social health

HOW WE OFTEN MISUNDERSTAND LONELINESS

You’ve read all the headlines. Loneliness is on the rise, it’s worse for you than cigarettes and obesity, it’s an epidemic, etc.

It’s a problem that, if you’re reading this newsletter, you probably care about solving. But too often, we rush into solutions based on false assumptions.

Assumptions like: “More connections = Better social health”.

For example, many of us (myself included) fell in love with the idea that social media could help us connect with more people. But we didn’t yet understand how social media would change our habits and culture, and the deeper connections that social media would replace.

Then there’s the other common assumption: “Deeper connections = Better social health”.

To reduce your loneliness, you need to have deep relationships, right?

It turns out this assumption isn’t totally accurate either. Deep relationships are critical, but they aren’t necessarily enough…

WHY ONE CLOSE FRIEND CAN’T FILL YOUR CUP

In a study titled, “Relational Diversity in Social Portfolios Predicts Well-Being”1, researchers set out to answer a big question:

“[Which] set of interactions—with which types of relationship partners (e.g., family members, close friends, acquaintances, strangers), and how many interactions with each type—is most predictive of well-being?”

Over the course of four separate studies, they assessed the social interactions and happiness of over 50,000 people. Their day was analyzed and broken down based on the different types of interactions they had:

Here’s what they found:

✅ Yes, the total amount of social interaction someone experiences throughout the day leads to higher well-being.

☝️ But the relationship between social interactions and well-being was even stronger when there was more diversity in the types of relationships that members interacted with.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Relational diversity was a strong predictor of well-being across many different demographics including “gender, age, number of children under 18 years old, number of people in the household, employment status, and annual income”.

Simply put, regardless of who you are, “interacting with a more diverse set of relationship types predicts higher well-being.”

This research totally changed the way I think about loneliness and human connection.

THE MAGIC OF THE “NEIGHBORLY NOD”

I was getting into my car and my neighbor walked up to me. His wife just bought a new Subaru and, seeing as how I’m a fellow Subie owner, he had some questions.

“Does your car beep when you’re backing up?”

“Yup”, I said. “Super helpful.”

“Hm. Ours doesn’t do that.”

“Maybe it’s a setting you can turn on and off?”, I suggested, uselessly. I know nothing about cars.

“I looked! Couldn’t find anything…”, he replied.

“Have you looked at the manual?”

And so we went, back and forth for several minutes, me providing no actual value. He snuck in a joke about how long his grass was getting and I went on my way.

And as I drove off, I couldn’t help but smile. These tiny, neighborly interactions always brighten my mood. Even something as simple as a smile and a neighborly nod feels great.

Research explains that these kinds of interactions are critical for our well-being and are more powerful than we think.

In one laboratory experiment, researchers randomly assigned participants to interact with strangers, and others to interact with their romantic partner and found that there was no difference in their levels of happiness after the interaction.2

In another study, researchers found that when faced with a highly stressful situation, people are actually more likely to turn to strangers and weak ties than they are to their strong ties and intimate relationships:3

“Rather than consistently rely on their “strong ties,” people often take pains to avoid close friends and family, because these are too fraught with complex expectations. People often confide in “weak ties,” as their fear that their trust could be misplaced is overcome by their need for one who understands. In fact, people may find themselves confiding in acquaintances and even strangers unexpectedly, without much reflection on the consequences.”

We need both deep and shallow interactions in our life, with both weak and strong ties. In three out of four of the data sets researched in the relational diversity study, social portfolio diversity was a stronger predictor of subjective well-being than being married. It’s having a range of interactions that makes us happy.

Fascinating stuff.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR SOCIAL DIVERSITY

Ever since reading this research, I’ve changed how I show up in the world.

I was definitely the guy who smiled at people on the street and chatted up the barista before. Ten years in the Bay Area will do that to a guy.

But now I have the knowledge that these aren’t just kind things to do, they’re actually good for me.

I’ve found myself smiling at more people, having more spontaneous conversations, and looking at every interaction as valuable, no matter how small.

If you’re the data-driven type, here’s a one-month experiment you can run to diversify your “portfolio of interactions”:

1. At the end of every day, write down what % of your day was spent interacting with each type of connection: family members, close friends, acquaintances, strangers, time spent alone. Rough estimates are okay. Then, for each day, choose a 1-10 rating for how satisfied you feel with your social health for the day.

2. Identify areas of your social portfolio that are lacking.

   For example, if you find that you usually interact with close friends 5% of the time during the work week, you might make a commitment to call one friend every other day would balance your portfolio.

   Or if you find that you rarely talk to acquaintances, commit to taking a walk for lunch every day to cross paths with more neighbors or coworkers.

3. At the end of the month, review your ratings and see if diversifying your portfolio of interactions had an impact on your social health, and which distribution feels best for you.

HOW COMMUNITIES PLAY A ROLE IN RELATIONAL DIVERSITY

I’ve heard many community builders talk about building deeper relationships as a goal of their community. Some go as far as to say that for a community to be truly healthy, it requires members to form deep relationships.

This research relieves the pressure a bit.

Our communities can be wellsprings of weak ties and neighborly nods. They can provide members with a space to turn when they don’t feel comfortable talking to their friends and family. They can be a place for members to find the more passive interactions that they need to diversify their social portfolio on any given day.

Sure, members may find deeper relationships through your community. That’s a great outcome and probably means you’re doing something right. But it’s not a requirement for your community to be effective at reducing loneliness and increasing social health.

In some circumstances, overfocusing on pushing deep relationships may be detrimental to members who are relying on your community to provide them with more passive interactions.

Communities alone won’t solve loneliness but they play an important role. Get clear about what role you want your community to play.

3

Small, Mario Luis, Someone To Talk To (New York, 2017; online edn, Oxford Academic, 19 Oct. 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190661427.001.0001, accessed 17 Oct. 2023.

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🍭 Brain Candy

Some goodies to get your community gears turning…

🗺️ The loneliness economy has arrived. Here’s your map.

🤖 Stack Overflow pushing the boundaries with how to use AI in online communities.

📈 Throwback thread on how to build a paid community to 1,000+ members.

❤️ Some hard truths about soft skills.

👩‍⚖️ Discord is experimenting with reforming the behavior of banned members.

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🔥 Featured Community Jobs

1. Director of Community & Connection, eCommerceFuel (US/Remote | $105-135K)

2. Customer Advocacy Marketing Manager, Zoom (US/Remote | $73k-178K)

3. Manager, Supporter Community and Fandom, LA Clippers (LA | $70-80K)

View 21 more community jobs here

Hiring? Post your job to my collective to have your job featured here, and to get access to the 252 candidates I’ve personally vetted.

Post Your Job

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🫡 That’s all for this week…

I’ve been spending a lot of time out in nature. The trees are all turning. It’s my favorite time of the year.

Until next time!

- David

A client had launched a Facebook Group and they were struggling to get engagement.

“What we should be doing differently?”, they asked.

I went into the group and found that their posts were mostly educational. It was high-quality stuff, but it was designed to consume, not to connect.

When they did post discussion prompts, they were basic questions that could have more easily been answered by a blog post.

They didn’t need a community for this. They were bringing community to a content fight.

A community works best when it taps into the advantages that ONLY a community can provide.

What are these advantages? That’s what we’re covering today…

Today you’ll learn in 9.23 minutes or less:

✔️ Solving problems with content vs. community
✔️ FRAMEWORK: The six communal advantages
✔️ EXERCISE: Designing for communal advantages

Let’s dance…

SOLVING PROBLEMS WITH CONTENT VS. COMMUNITY

Take any problem and it can be solved with content or with community.

Say, for example, you want to eat healthier at home. You can solve that problem:

1. 📝 With content: Take a cooking class

2. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 With community: Join a group of people who are learning how to cook

Or say you want to improve your newsletter’s landing page. You can solve that problem:

1. 📝 With content: Read an article on “10 High-Converting Landing Pages”

2. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 With community: Get direct feedback from a group of creators on your landing page

Say you’re struggling with depression. You can solve that problem:

1. 📝 With content: Read a blog post with 10 tips for improving your mental health

2. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 With community: Join a small with other people who are struggling with mental health

Content can be anything from a Tweet, to an article, to a course.

And here’s the harsh truth…

Content solves most problems much more effectively than a community.

Content will be more readable.

Content is going to be better researched.

Content will be more concise and actionable.

Most problems don’t require a social solution.

So why do we need communities? Why don’t we just use content?

FRAMEWORK: THE SIX COMMUNAL ADVANTAGES

You must figure out how community can solve your members’ true problems in a way that content can’t.

You must play to one of your community’s advantages.

There are six of them:

—

1. BREADTH

Content can only provide one point of view. Even if it curates a number of different examples, it’s still all coming from one person.

Communities allow you to tap into “the wisdom of the crowd”.

A community provides a range of different perspectives from a range of different people. It can shine a light in the dark corners you didn’t think to explore.

When a problem requires a range of insights and perspectives, it’s a good fit for your community.

✅ Put into action: Review all the questions someone might post in your community and identify which would benefit from a breadth of ideas and perspectives. Deprioritize asking questions where just one answer will suffice.

—

2. PERSONALIZATION

Content is always going to be generalized for its audience.

A community allows members to get personalized feedback from members.

I can read plenty of articles on how to organize my Tiny House, but only a Tiny House community can tell me exactly how to squeeze that fridge in next to the sink.

Whenever a member would benefit from getting personalized advice, it’s a good fit for your community.

✅ Put into action: Encourage members, when asking questions, to include as much information about their situation as possible. When they ask general questions, they get general answers. The more specific their question, the more personalized the responses will be. If a member posts a general question, private message them with a recommendation that they add more details.

—

3. TIMELINESS

Content can only cover what’s happened in the past.

A community is a living, breathing organism that exists solely in the present moment. So if you want the most up-to-date insights, news, and information about a topic, you need a community.

Say, for example, you’re getting into buying and selling stocks. Every piece of content you read will be outdated in a matter of weeks. Only a finance community will give you the chance to get the most up-to-date information on specific stocks and markets.

It’s no surprise so much content today is sourced from communities like Reddit. Communities are where trends start and end. Communities ARE the zeitgeist.

When a topic is constantly evolving and would benefit from having the most up-to-date information possible, it’s a good fit for your community.

✅ Put into action: Prioritize questions where the right answer is constantly changing and revisit these topics regularly. Share breaking news that’s relevant to your members as a way to spark discussion. Deprioritize questions that have the same answer forever.

—

4. ACCESS

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen someone start a sentence with “please don’t share this publicly but…” in a community, I’d never need to do insider trading again (JUST KIDDING, for any readers who happen to be building community at the IRS).

Content is where transparency goes to die. It will always be packaged to be consumed by a large, public audience. Even with the most “transparent” content, creators have to pick and choose what they want the world to see and what they don’t.

Communities, especially small and private groups, are where the real talk happens. Insider trading isn’t just for stock markets. If you want to know what’s *really* happening behind the scenes of any industry, join a private community where members have skin in the game.

✅ Put into action: Model the behavior of sharing things in the community that you’d never share elsewhere. Consider implementing Chatham House Rule. Organize small group discussions to increase feelings of safety and privacy.

—

5. CAMARADERIE

Why do I call my mom to translate Hebrew for me rather than Google it? Because it’s a chance for a connection.

Content can solve your problem but community will make you feel like you’re not alone in navigating that problem.

Sometimes people will ask a question in a community that they easily could have looked up elsewhere not because they’re lazy, but because they’re using it as a reason to connect with other people.

Any time members are facing a challenge that makes them feel vulnerable or alone, it’s a good fit for your community.

✅ Put into action: Create “raise your hand if…” posts that show members that they’re not alone. Model the behavior by sharing experiences that make you feel vulnerable or embarrassed.

—

6. COLLABORATION

You can watch a YouTube video about how to build a house but a community can actually build it with you.

This is where the biggest community advantage lies.

Nothing connects people more strongly than building something together or working together toward a shared goal.

It could be accountability groups for a fitness goal. It could be a massive collaborative art project. It could be building a piece of software. It can be as simple as creating a piece of content together (that’s right… the content 🔄 community flywheel is real).

If a member’s problem can be solved by building or working toward a solution together, it’s a great fit for your community.

✅ Put into action: Start simple by asking members to contribute their insights and expertise to a piece of content. Look for opportunities where members could build a new solution to a problem that many of them face. Design experiences (monthly pods, hackathons, etc.) dedicated to cocreating something or progressing toward a shared goal.

EXERCISE: DESIGNING FOR COMMUNAL ADVANTAGES

To put this framework into practice, grab and duplicate this worksheet or read the instructions below…

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DIRECTIONS:

1. Choose a problem that your members might be struggling with (you can pull from the turpentine exercise for this).

2. Write down how it can be solved by a piece of content first. This will define what you should NOT do.

3. Then, write down how community can solve that problem using each of the six advantages: Breadth, Personalization, Timeliness, Access, Camaraderie, and Collaboration.

Repeat this process for 3-5 problems until you have a strong list of ideas you can try with your community.

EXAMPLE:

Problem: A member is trying to figure out what community software they should use.

Content solution idea: Publish a guide on how to select community software with a comparison chart of the features of each.

Community solution ideas:

1. Breadth: Encourage the member to ask others in the community, “What is your favorite platform and why?”.

2. Personalization: Encourage the member to share the list of platforms they’re considering and ask for feedback.

3. Timeliness: Post a monthly thread where members share the newest community technology they’ve discovered.

4. Access: Host a private discussion group with Chatham House Rule so members can share their *real* opinions about the software without fear of angering the vendor.

5. Camaraderie: Start a discussion about how damn stressful it is to select a piece of software and how annoying it is that all of these platforms are so opaque in their pricing and features.

6. Collaboration: Host a hackathon for members who want to work together to build new plugins for their community software.

Are all of these ideas good? Nope. But I came up with them in five minutes and there are definitely some gems. The private group discussion where you get to collectively poop on software actually sounds like it would be super fun and valuable.

You’re not looking to bat 1000 here. Just get those ideas flowing and see if any gold comes out.

HERE’S WHAT WE COVERED TODAY:

✔️ Solving problems with content vs. community
✔️ FRAMEWORK: The six communal advantages
✔️ EXERCISE: Designing for communal advantages

I hope this framework helps you unlock the value that ONLY your community can provide.

Your comments and feedback keep me going. Please, hit reply or drop a comment with your questions, reflections, or what you ate for breakfast this morning.

🍭 Brain Candy

Some goodies to get your community gears turning…

🥕 You’re growing, even if people can’t see it yet.

📝 Take this survey to contribute to a thesis on the business value of community.

🧠 New research shows that our brain waves synchronize when we feel connected.

💣 Could our tribal mentality could lead to a nuclear apocalypse in the next 100 years?

❤️ The six provisions for social health [research paper].

🔥 Featured Community Jobs

1. Senior Community Manager, ClassDojo (SF/Remote)

2. Senior Manager, Kids' Community Management, Lego (UK/Denmark)

3. Alumni Community Manager, Y Combinator (SF | $140,000-$160,000 + bonus)

View 32 more community jobs here

Hiring? Post your job to my collective to have your job featured here, and to get access to the 240+ candidates I’ve personally vetted.

Post Your Job

🫡 That’s all for this week…

There are some big updates coming to this newsletter as I’m going to launch paid subscriptions and double down my focus on writing here.

I’ll have more details for you all soon, but if you want to take the leap of faith and show your support, you can pledge today. You’ll be locked in at the current price before I launch at a higher price point. Subscribe and pledge now:

Subscribe now

I’m collecting your feedback on what I can offer paid subscribers that would make the sides of your mouths turn upward.

Until next time…

Thanks for building community.

- David

When I was a kid I would ride my bike around town in hopes of finding people to hang out with.

Usually, I didn’t find anyone and would return home, empty-handed (socially speaking).

Sometimes it worked, I’d find a group of people who allowed me to tag along.

One time, it ended in disaster.

MY FIRST FISTFIGHT

I could sense something was up as soon as I saw the group riding toward me. I knew this group. We didn’t get along.

I tried to act cool, biking as fast as I could without looking like I was running away. But Greg, their leader, started calling my name. “SPINKS!” YO SPINKS!!!” His tone sounded almost friendly.

Not wanting to look afraid, I stopped.

They formed a circle around me with their bikes. “Spinks, we need a favor. You gotta fight Billy”, Greg said, grinning. He had been my bully for most of my childhood. I knew he wasn’t bluffing.

Billy debiked and walked hesitantly into the circle. It was an “initiation”. They wanted him to learn how to fight.

I said, “Uh, I don’t want to fight Billy.” Greg was prepared for this response. He barked back, “You can fight Billy or you can fight all of us.”

Welp.

I was terrified. I was sure that even if I did agree to fight Billy, others would jump in.

The choice was made for me when moments later, Billy started swinging wildly. His masculinity was being tested too.

And so we fought.

It didn’t last long. After a few swings it turned into a wrestling match and I was able to pin him down. The fight was called. “You’re both fucking pussies", Greg said, grimacing. He was hoping for blood.

They took off on their bikes and left me in the middle of the street to process what just happened. My heart was pounding through my chest. I was afraid they’d come back so I sped home.

The biggest emotion I felt was embarrassment. I knew word would get around about what happened. I didn’t know how I’d be able to face people at school the next day.

I set out that day looking for human connection. I went home feeling more lonely than ever before.

Was it worth the risk?

THE RISKS OF SEEKING HUMAN CONNECTION

My friend Ivan Cash is a creator who organizes large-scale social art projects like:

• Snail Mail My Email: He invited people to email a message to him and he would handwrite it as a letter. 2,000 volunteers joined in to help send 29,249 letters.

• Selfless Portraits: He invited strangers to draw each other's profile pics. Over 50,000 drawings were created.

• The Passenger Project: He handed out surveys to people on airplanes, resulting in clever, funny, and beautiful collaborative art projects.

He would later give a TEDx talk about his projects and he finished it by saying:

“Any attempt at human connection inherently involves risk.”

I think about this quote a lot.

Connecting with new people, in a new setting, in a new way, is TERRIFYING.

You might be rejected.

You might be ignored.

You might be forced into a fistfight with Billy.

Ok… maybe not the last one but the first two are for sure risks.

The risks today are even higher. We’re entering a peak of social awkwardness after years of Covid and the growing remote work trend. It’s never been easier to just stay home, stick to Zoom, and avoid human contact.

I continued to set out on my bike looking for connection, even after the fight, because I was more afraid of being alone. Sitting at home alone was unbearable. I had to try something.

Sometimes that’s what it takes. The pain of loneliness needs to outweigh the potential pain of rejection.

If you want to connect with people, you have to take a risk.

COMMUNITY BUILDING IS AN ACT OF BRAVERY

There’s a reason the community you’re building doesn’t already exist.

Everyone else has been afraid to create it.

Afraid to go big enough.

Afraid no one will show up.

Afraid to do something radically different.

When you create a community you’re saying, “This group of people deserves a place to call home and we’re going to create a home that they will fucking love.”

You create a new set of social norms and rules, which means you’re acting in defiance of society.

Communities fail so often because they aren’t doing anything different. They aren’t taking risks. They’re yet another way for the same people to gather the way they already gather.

That will never work.

To build a great community you have to offer something radically different.

A different space.

A different group of people.

A different voice.

A different experience that these people have never had but whether they know it or not, they need it. 

It took me years to launch CMX Summit. It was too big. Too bold. Too different.

I never would have taken the leap if Max Altschuler didn't come along and make me feel like we might actually be able to pull this thing off together.

The idea that the community industry could sustain a large, expensive conference sounded absurd at the time.

But it was precisely because we went so big and so bold that it worked.

When people walked into that room they couldn’t believe this space was created just for them. It made them feel big. It made them feel bold.

These days it’s way too easy to spin up another Slack or Circle or Discord or whatever.

And look, getting started is what truly matters, even if you’re starting off with something simple. I spent years working on smaller, simpler communities for community builders before CMX.

But eventually, you have to take a risk. You have to be bold. You have to bring people together who have never been brought together. Not in this place. Not in this way.

You have to do something that will make the members of your community say, “Holy cannoli, I can’t believe they built this for me.”

Do that, and you might just have a chance of building a community that will stand the test of time. 

🍭 Brain Candy

Some goodies to get your community gears turning…

🧠 I love the “Why We Buy” newsletter, and this issue on “Unity” does a great job of connecting human connection to business.

💔 If we already know the cure to loneliness, why are so many suffering?

🏰 How prisoners on death row found connection through Dungeons and Dragons.

👯‍♂️ Why friend-dating apps don’t work.

👨‍🏫 Love this new academy from Brian Oblinger. Most thorough “school” for community professionals I’ve seen. (Use the code ZUCCHINI to get 15% off)

🫡 UNTIL NEXT WEEK

Your comments and feedback keep me going, so hit reply or drop a comment below and let me know your thoughts on this week’s post.

I’m considering turning on payments for this newsletter. I’d love to be able to make writing my full-time thing. I have no idea if there are enough of you out there willing to pay for my writing to make it worth it so it will require AN ACT OF BRAVERY 😉

If you’d like to support my writing, you can subscribe and choose to pledge.

Subscribe now

-David “Didn’t Get Beat Up” Spinks

(The names in this post were changed to protect my bully’s identity for some reason.)

A friend of mine recently launched a very successful membership community, hosted on Slack.

In just one year they signed up hundreds of members who are paying thousands of dollars.

Their goal is to get to eventually get to 10,000 members.

They recently reached out and ask me:

“What should we be thinking about as we scale to 1,000 then 5,000 then 10,000 members on Slack? What issues are we going to run into? What should we plan for?”

I thought I’d share with all of you what I shared with them. Some of these points are specific to Slack, but many of them can be applied to any community.

BY THE END OF THIS EMAIL, YOU’LL LEARN:

✔️ The enormous importance of founding members
✔️ How to turn conversations into content
✔️ Community creep: the silent killer
✔️ The keys to scaling intimacy
✔️ How to build a community operating system

THE ENORMOUS IMPORTANCE OF FOUNDING MEMBERS

This post isn’t about how to acquire new members, it’s about how to make sure your community doesn’t break as it grows.

That said, I know you’re probably wondering how they grew a paid community so quickly out the gate.

Three things they did:

1. The founder had a big audience and a strong reputation already

2. They leveraged their network to get well-known people to join as founding members (for free)

3. They hit the phones and sold the community one at a time, using the name recognition of the founding members as a draw

That’s it. It all hinged on getting high-status founding members their target audience would want to be in a room with.

Since these founding members were very busy, they manually wrote up content for them to post in the community. It make it look like those members were organically active.

Effective? Yes. Ethical? You decide.

Regardless, it worked. Their community grew fast, and by seeding the community with content they knew was high quality, they set a strong model for how other members should participate in the community. It’s now growing fast in both new members and engagement.

Of course, with fast growth, things can break down pretty quickly, so let’s talk about how to manage that scale…

HOW TO TURN CONVERSATIONS INTO CONTENT

If you’re using the free plan on Slack, your content will disappear after 90 days.

But even if you’re not on Slack, after 90 days your community essentially disappears. Communities, especially chat-based communities, are notoriously bad at resurfacing old content.

That’s a shame, because your community is a goldmine of content.

The simplest solution is to use a tool like Waves to save and organize all your Slack conversations.

But there’s a more impactful way to save your conversations:

Convert the most interesting conversations into readable, delightful content.

Don’t copy and paste the threads. That’s boring.

Instead, write an article and reference the best community content. The reader doesn’t have to know that the article is sourced from the community. They just see good content.

A community that does this phenomenally is Finimize. They watch closely what their members are talking about in the community, and quickly turn the hottest topics into content that goes out in their newsletter.

This content 🔄 community flywheel is an absolute goldmine.

COMMUNITY CREEP: THE SILENT KILLER

Communities always start simple.

Then they add a channel here, a ritual there, and slowly the CX (community experience) becomes complex and confusing.

That’s why you must ABC: Always Be Culling.

Every three months do an audit.

• Cull any channels that are dead or low engagement.

• Cull any rituals that people haven’t been participating in.

• Cull any events that have been seeing low turnout rates.

Focus on the 20% of your community experience that’s driving 80% of engagement.

This will free up your time to run 1-2 experiments every few months for new content and experiences that will keep your community feeling fresh.

You should also practice the art of being bossy and teach your members how to keep their sidebar tidy. Slack offers a guide you can borrow from here.

THE KEYS TO SCALING INTIMACY

As your community grows, it will become less intimate…

...if you let it.

When members join your community you want them to feel seen and valued. If they feel like "just another number”, you’ve already lost.

A few ways you can scale intimacy for new members:

• Volunteer welcome committees

• Buddy systems where each new member gets assigned to an experienced member

• New member cohorts where they get to know each other before entering the large community

Keep improving your welcome experience to make the content less overwhelming for new members:

• Recommend the first few channels they should join

• Show them examples of great questions to ask

• Drip them content that summarizes popular conversations in the community

For existing members, you can offer “pods” where members are assigned to groups of 8-10 members who meet monthly.

The Dinner Party is a great example of a large, national community, where the member experience is very intimate (small, potluck dinners, in their homes).

YPO and Chief offer small mastermind and coaching pods where members meet every month.

Pods and small, volunteer-led groups are a great way to scale intimacy.

HOW TO BUILD A COMMUNITY OPERATING SYSTEM

Document 👏 everything 👏.

Let me say that again.

DOCUMENT 👏 EVERYTHING 👏.

This is something I didn’t do nearly enough early on in my community career.

Every time you do something that you’ll have to do again in the future, turn it into a process doc:

✍️ Onboarding a new member? Write it down.
✍️ Responding to an angry member? Write it down.
✍️ Exporting data to a spreadsheet? Write it down.

Over time you’ll develop a full guide on how to operate your community. Any time you have to run a process, you’ll have a step-by-step guide to follow. Hiring someone to work on the community? Just hand them the guide.

Over time you’ll start to identify opportunities to automate some of these processes.

Slack has a lot of great automation tools:

• Donut for 1:1 introductions

• Polly for surveys

• Greetbot for welcoming new members

There are also a number of general automation tools like Threado, Common Room, Orbit, Talkbase, Waves, and Dots.

These tools will allow you to trigger actions based member activity, like:

• Send a message when someone goes inactive

• Deliver a survey out 30 days after a member joins

• Ship out swag when someone reaches a certain level of activity

But remember: Every time you use a bot to do something a human would usually do, you lose the human touch, you lose intimacy, and you lose an opportunity to build a relationship with members. So only use bots when you absolutely have to or when you can still make it feel human.

HERE’S WHAT WE COVERED TODAY:

✔️ The enormous importance of founding members
✔️ How to turn conversations into content
✔️ Community creep: the silent killer
✔️ The keys to scaling intimacy
✔️ How to build a community operating system

🍭 Brain Candy

Some goodies to get your community gears turning…

🤖 I’m a bot! Thanks to Threado’s new AI tool (still in beta), you can ask my bot anything and get answers, sourcing from most of the content I’ve ever created. Test it out and let me know what you think.

😑 Covid made us socially awkward and people forgot how to act in public.

🏡 They say that living close to your friends is the dream. Use this app to make it happen.

💌 There’s a new newsletter in town, doing deep dives of community-led businesses. I’m a fan. Check it.

📖 I did a fun interview with The Breakfast, a publication and app focused on reducing loneliness.

🔥 Featured Community Jobs

1. Head of Marketing and Community, GTM Fund (Remote)

2. Community Manager, Scholastic (NYC | $85,000 - $95,000)

3. Community Engagement Program Manager, Square (Remote | $77,900-$126,900)

👉 Explore 37 more community jobs

There are now 242 candidates in the collective with recent additions from Meta, Intel, WaPo, and more.

Hire Your Next Community Lead

Use the code “starthiring” to get your first month free. Offer is available until Sept 30th.

I love writing this newsletter. If you love reading it, help me out by spreading the word. You can earn some nifty gifts for referring readers. 👇

Refer a friend

🫡 THAT’S ALL FOR NOW…

I’m still figuring out where I want to take this newsletter and my content. I’ve been thinking about three paths:

1. Community Creators - Focusing on helping people build businesses where community is the core product, writing case studies and behind-the-scenes content.

2. Social Science - I’m realizing that I’m interested in broader topics of human connection and social psychology, not *just* community. I’ve toyed with the idea of a newsletter and podcast called “Social Studies” where I research and teach these subjects in a fun and relatable way.

3. Social Fitness - There are a lot of people who are struggling with loneliness and don’t know how to connect with other humans. I expect there to be a big new wave of social health and fitness content and products. I could take everything I’ve learned and turn it into actionable content to help people improve their social health.

Your feedback and reflections are what keep me going so hit reply and tell me what you think of these paths, and of today’s newsletter.

Until next time…

Thanks for building community!

-David

Today we’re diving into one of my favorite community concepts: Engineering Serendipity.

The tension is thick:

Serendipity is the occurrence of the unplanned.

Engineering is the occurrence of the planned.

How do you plan the unplannable?

That’s what we’re exploring today.

I spent 20 hours researching and writing this one. We’re about to go deep.

IN TODAY’S EMAIL, YOU’LL LEARN:

✔️ The magic of serendipity

✔️ The serendipity process

✔️ How to create a serendipitous environment

✔️ The five levers of serendipity

THE MAGIC OF SERENDIPITY

I’ll never forget the first time I saw my wife.

It was freshman year of college. She was in front of the library, wearing a black AFI hoodie and ripped, baggy jeans covered in marker. Just my type.

My friend caught me staring and said, “That’s Alison, she’s in my math class”. I said, “Want.”

A few days later he ran into her at a frat party and shouted over the music, “Spinks has a crush on you!” She shouted back, “Who the fuck is Spinks?!” The ideal introduction.

We found each other on AIM, as one did back then (that’s AOL Instant Messenger for you youngin’s). She was “drowninginuUu” and I was “SistemOfASpYnX”. A match made in hell.

After a thorough interrogation by her roommate, I was permitted to talk to her. We scheduled an innocent “non-date” over grilled cheese at the food hall. The rest, as they say, is history.

I love telling the story of how we met because of how serendipitous it felt.

✔️ We had to go to the same college.
✔️ We had to be in front of the library at the same time.
✔️ I had to be with a friend who knew her.
✔️ That friend had to run into her at a party.
✔️ We had to have goth-y usernames. (ok not really, but it helped)

It’s this combination of seemingly random events that makes serendipity feel so special. It makes a relationship or an idea feel like it was meant to be. Like the universe made it happen.

Think about a meaningful relationship (that’s not a family member) in your life: your partner, a friend, a cofounder, etc., and reflect on how you met. Chances are, it felt serendipitous.

The more I studied serendipity the more I realized that it sits at the very essence of community.

We participate in communities with the hopes that we might find the right person, the right piece of information, the right inspiration, the right advice, at exactly the right time.

When we experience serendipity our heart rate picks up and our brain fills with dopamine. It’s intoxicating. We proclaim “WHAT ARE THE ODDS?!”

As community builders, our job is to increase those odds.

THE SERENDIPITY PROCESS

A 2015 study set out to discover how serendipity occurs.

Through in-depth interviews, they uncovered the 4-step process (edited for clarity):

1. ⚡️ Trigger: A cue that sparks an experience of serendipity. (e.g. meet at an event, see a question in your Slack, get introduced…)

2. 🧠 Connection: The recognition of a potential valuable outcome (e.g. learning, collaboration, friendship)

3. 🤳 Follow-up: An action taken to obtain the valuable outcome (e.g. set up a meeting, plan a project, chat on AIM…)

4. 🏆 Valuable outcome: The positive result of the serendipitous experience (e.g. form a meaningful relationship, learn something new, commit to build something together…)

And there’s one more factor…

For serendipity to occur, there must be an 🧵 “unexpected thread” throughout the experience. The more unexpected each step feels, the more it will be perceived as serendipity.

You can see how my experience meeting Alison followed this process:

⚡️ 1. Trigger (me seeing Alison at the library)
🧠 2. Connection (me feeling warm fuzzies)
🤳 3. Follow-up (us connecting on AIM)
🏆 4. Valuable outcome (marriage!… 13 years later)

Note: The study found that serendipity could take anywhere from weeks to years to come to fruition. Community takes time.

Now that we know the process, the next question is how can we put people in a position where serendipity is likely to occur? …

HOW TO CREATE A SERENDIPITOUS ENVIRONMENT

People are unlikely to experience serendipity unless the settings are just right.

A 2020 study found that serendipity was more likely to occur when people:

✔️ are in unfamiliar places
✔️ are with unfamiliar people
✔️ have a high willingness to socialize
✔️ aren’t too busy
✔️ have lots of energy
✔️ share common interests
✔️ have similar personalities
✔️ are comfortable in social interactions

We can sum these criteria up into three actionable categories:

1. 🧠 Internal Context: How you prime your members. You want them to be high-energy, comfortable, not busy, and willing to socialize.

2. 🏠 External Context: The space and format you use to bring them together. Ideally, they are unfamiliar, free of distraction, and create opportunities to meet a variety of people in a variety of contexts.

3. 🤝 Social Context: The people you surround them with. You want people who are unfamiliar, but who have similar interests, knowledge, and personalities.

Still with me?

Good. Let’s go deeper… 🐇

THE FIVE LEVERS OF SERENDIPITY

It’s clear from the research that communities are already serendipity machines. They naturally check most of the boxes for serendipity to occur.

So, if you’re building community, you are already engineering serendipity. Mazel tov!

That said, you don’t have to leave it all to chance. Based on my research and experience, I’ve identified five levers we can use to increase the odds of serendipity…

LEVER #1: IMMERSION

Immersion means bringing members together, for an extended period of time, in a space that is free of distraction and allows them to have repeated social collisions.

One way to immerse your members is with multi-day, in-person events.

I ran large conferences for a decade and can say with confidence that they are like steroids for engineering serendipity.

Your members stay in the same hotel, spend the whole day together networking, learning, and eating, party together at after-parties, and then wake up and do it all over again.

They allow you to condense a massive amount of serendipity triggers into a couple of days.

Immersive experiences don’t have to be squeezed into a couple days though. They can take place over weeks, month, or years.

For example, last year I participated in a cohort-based course for creators, hosted by Maven. The group met online every week for an hour, for six weeks.

Students were guided to work together and give each other feedback throughout the course, creating lots of opportunities for serendipity. It was through this course that I met Jay Clouse, who I now talk to every week as we support each other in our creator journeys.

Immersive experiences check all the boxes for engineering serendipity:

✔️ are in unfamiliar places
✔️ are with unfamiliar people
✔️ have a high willingness to socialize
✔️ aren’t too busy
✔️ have lots of energy
✔️ share common interests
✔️ are comfortable in social interactions*

*Take care of your introverts by offering highly facilitated/guided experiences, and creating quiet spaces to escape (we had an “introvert zone” at CMX Summit where you weren’t allowed to talk, Evan Hamilton’s genius idea).

LEVER #2: VARIATION

The goal is to connect your members with:

• a variety of unfamiliar people

• a variety of unfamiliar experiences

• a variety of familiar topics

To do this, you have a lot of options…

You can introduce members personally. That’s great. Or to automate introductions, you can use a tool like Donut, Meetsy, or Orbiit to match members up using AI.

You can also create a variety of connections at scale by starting threads to help your members connect around a unique subidentity. I’ve done this in the CMX community around the platforms members used to host their community:

Or based on location:

At in-person events, introduce variety by connecting members around different subtopics and identities.

For example, during lunchtime at CMX Summit, we’d host “Birds of Feather” tables where each table had a discussion topic and facilitator, so attendees could meet other people interested in the same subtopic while they ate.

We also helped members get to know each other outside of their “professional identity” by hosting experiences like group hikes, city tours, chocolate tasting, and dance parties.

I’ve been to events where instead of having attendees write just their name on their name tag, they have them write a hobby they love, a skill they have, a book they’re reading... a variety of topics to connect around.

The options are endless.

LEVER #3: FACILITATION

I planted my first garden this year.

My zucchini plant grew and grew but it wasn’t producing any damn fruit. I discovered it was because the pollinators weren’t getting to the flowers.

A quick YouTube search and I learned that you can manually pollinate the plant by rubbing the staman of the male flower in the female flower’s pistil. Steamy, I know.

And it worked! Look at this beauty:

The lesson here is that sometimes you have to help nature along.

You might assume that your members are really good at socializing.

You’ll often be wrong.

Show them how. Facilitate.

An event I recently went to sent an email out afterward with everyone’s names and contact info. We all agreed to this when we signed up so it wasn’t weird. This made it super easy to follow up, a key step in the serendipity process.

They also set up a WhatsApp chat for attendees before the event so everyone could start networking. It gave us an easy place to find each other and follow up afterward.

Sometimes it’s just about being explicit. I will ask members to make three commitments when they join our community or attend our event:

1. I WILL TALK TO STRANGERS (it’s why we’re all here)

2. I WILL NOT BE A SELF-SERVING ASSHOLE (give first)

3. I WILL BE PROACTIVE (it’s all about the follow-up)

Then remind them. Post in the community, or get on stage at your event, and tell them to, “Choose one person you’ve interacted with this week, who you think is rad, and invite them to coffee or a Zoom call”.

People aren’t always good at people’ing. They need permission. They need guidance.

Help them find triggers. Push them to them to follow up. They need you to facilitate.

LEVER #4: POLLINATION

Remember, serendipity is strongest when it’s most unexpected. You want your members to cross paths out there in the wild: on the train, at a concert, on a social network.

One way to make this happen:

✨ SWAG ✨

Most businesses do swag all wrong. They think their t-shirt is a billboard and that slapping their logo on it will get them that sweet brand awareness.

The way I see it, swag has two purposes:

1. To remind the person rocking the swag of their connection to your community

2. For members (and aspiring members) to recognize each other out in the wild

Heck, even the best billboards give you nothing more than a subtle wink and a nod.

It doesn’t matter what you put on the swag as long as it’s something they actually want to wear/use and it’s recognizable.

Like, I could give you all a t-shirt with a zucchini on it and, if you saw someone wearing it out in the wild, you’d know they’re a subscriber of this newsletter.

Swag isn’t the only option for pollinating your community.

You can create badges, slogans, or titles that they can add to their bios. For example, members of the On Deck community often add ‘On Deck Fellow” or “#ODF” to their bio.

The ultimate win is just having a community so powerful that people want to talk about it wherever they go. If Jesus did it so can you.

LEVER #5: REPETITION

I recently moved back to New York after 10 years in San Francisco.

You’d think that I’d be good at making friends. It’s kind of my job. But making friends in the burbs turned out to be more difficult than I expected.

In San Francisco, I’d constantly run into the same founders over and over again on the street, at events, at coworking spaces, etc.

In the burbs, it’s taken a lot longer to make friends because I just don’t have enough of those repeat interactions with people who are similar to me.

To engineer serendipity in your community you have to create repetition. One way to do that is to offer recurring experiences.

For example, in the Trends.vc community, Dru Riley hosts daily standups where members share what they did yesterday, what they will do today, and how other members can help.

It’s this kind of repetitive action that creates countless triggers for members to connect.

To incentivize members to participate in daily standups, Dru offers access to more community resources if they maintain a daily streak:

There are lots of ways to create repetition in your community:

• Monthly meetups

• Weekly rituals

• Office hours

• Book clubs

• Annual conferences

Or, most simply (but not easy): build a community so good, SO valuable, that your members WANT to come every day and spin the wheel of serendipity.

YOU ARE NOW A SERENDIPITY ENGINEER

Here’s what we covered today:

✔️ The magic of serendipity
✔️ The serendipity process
✔️ How to create a serendipitous environment
✔️ THE FIVE SERENDIPITY LEVERS:
1. Immersion
2. Variation
3. Facilitiation
4. Pollination
5. Repetition

YOUR TURN!

Serendipity is a fascinating topic. The deeper I went down the rabbit hole, the more layers I uncovered. This could be a whole book.

So let’s go deeper together:

• What’s something you’ve done to engineer serendipity in your community?

• Tell me about a time you’ve experienced serendipity in your life.

• What other questions do you have about serendipity?

Drop a comment or hit reply.

🍭 Brain Candy

Some goodies to get your community gears turning…

🧠 Go deeper with this 10-min TED Talk on the science of serendipity.

💵 Should subscription be the default for paid communities? Why not lifetime membership?

📚 Folks who are new to community management will love this collection of resources.

🧵 Danah Boyd drops a dose of reality for Threads, and anyone else who thinks they can just copy Twitter. It’s not about the tech, it’s about the network.

📖 A reader created a practical summary of my book, for those of you who don’t feel like reading the whole thing.

It’s never been easier to start a community.

Just click “launch” on Slack, or Circle, or [insert platform here] and you’ll be smashing humans together in no time.

The result? There are more online communities than ever before.

That could lead you to believe that you shouldn’t launch another one. “There are already 100 communities about AI, should I build another one?”

The short answer: Yes!

Today I’ll show you how you can find your “community wedge” and create a unique community in a noisy market.

THIS EMAIL WILL TEACH YOU:

(in 10 minutes or less)

✔️ Why people love to community hop

✔️ How community benefits evolve over time

✔️ Community framework: The Five Community Wedges

✔️ How five real communities found their wedge

✔️ 30-min exercise: Find Your Wedge (+ FREE worksheet)

Let’s get cookin’…👨‍🍳

WHY PEOPLE LOVE TO COMMUNITY HOP

A recent Reddit study set out to discover why people participate in multiple communities focused on the same topic.

What they learned was members derive one of three benefits from each community (reworded for clarity):

1. 🤝 Connection: form relationships with similar types of people

2. 👀 Consumption: find specific types of content, discussions, and information

3. 👨‍🎨 Creation: find the largest possible audience for their content

The study found that these three benefits are in conflict.

“…the more a community provides one of these benefits, the less able it will be to provide the other two. A single community might provide two of these benefits, but almost never all three.

This, my friends, is known as a “trilemma”.

Because it’s difficult for a single community to offer all three benefits, multiple communities form to fill in the gaps.

HOW COMMUNITY BENEFITS EVOLVE OVER TIME

Let’s play this out. Say you join a newly launched community focused on tacos called The Tacollaboration. 🌮

That’s right, you’re a Tacollaborator.

🛎️ DING!

STAGE 1: 🤝 CONNECTION 📈

It’s the early days and it’s still small. Everyone’s basking in their love of tacos and feeling each other. The vibes are immaculate.

You get to know a few of the other members and become friends, or “Guacamigos” as it’s known in the community.

But soon people start to catch wind of this little taco party you have going on and they want in.

The community grows.

🛎️ DING!

STAGE 2: 👀 CONSUMPTION 📈 (CONNECTION 📉)

As more people join, the depth of connection isn’t what it used to be. It’s getting too big to know everyone.

But you now have even more people to learn from. The content is rich 🤌. It becomes the go-to spot for taco news and information. Word spreads.

The community grows.

🛎️ DING!

STAGE 3: 👨‍🎨 CREATION 📈 (CONSUMPTION 📉 CONNECTION 📉)

Who loves consumers? That’s right. Creators. With content consumers rushing to the community, the tree of reputation is ripe and ready for harvesting.

It’s great because you start gaining a following as a taco expert, and your newsletter, “The Taco Times”, is growing fast.

But the vibe changes. People start dropping dope taco memes to get more likes. There’s a lot more noise. Content quality goes down.

The range of topics also expands. Some members start talking about burritos and quesadillas (blasphemy). You’re no longer building new relationships and it becomes harder to find the specific taco information you crave.

You start looking for a new community where you can feel connected again.

🛎️ DING!

The cycle starts over with a new community.

—

This is the evolution of communities. They’re never static. And there’s always a window of opportunity to come in at the connection level and eat the existing community’s tacos.

⧨ COMMUNITY FRAMEWORK: THE FIVE COMMUNITY WEDGES

The Reddit study gave us a window into how to differentiate your community, but not a complete list.

In my experience, there are five wedges you can use to insert your community into an already busy market:

1. Size - Because when the other communities go big, you go small (or vice versa)

2. Benefits - Because the other communities can’t be good at everything

3. Flavor - Because ain’t nobody got your specific style and voice

4. Identity - Because every identity has infinite sub-identities

5. Format - Because people get tired of Yet Another Zoom Call (YAZC™)

Look at the communities that are out there and figure out which of these wedges you can use to create something novel and exciting.

FIVE REAL COMMUNITIES WHO FOUND THEIR WEDGE

1. CMX went big and global with a conference when all the existing community events were small and local (size and format). We also created a brand voice that was more innovative and relatable (flavor).

2. Sales Hacker focused on providing quick “hacks” for how to improve your sales (benefit) and their culture was all about being experimental (flavor). It appealed to a unique group of salespeople who had more of a hacker mindset (identity).

3. Tech Ladies saw that a lot of communities focused on women in tech were only for engineers. They went broader by focusing on all women who work at tech companies (identity) and providing a job matchmaking service (benefit).

4. Hampton saw existing players like YPO charge a premium but members had to self-organize their groups, and the vibe felt old and stuffy. So they created a community where members get put in groups facilitated by professional coaches (benefits) and created a distinct brand that felt modern and exciting (flavor).

5. The Dinner Party found that all the existing support groups for people who lost a loved one drew an older crowd and didn’t feel super cozy. They designed an experience that focused on people in their 20’s and 30’s (identity), welcomed dark humor (flavor), and hosted it in members’ homes, potluck style (format).

30-MIN EXERCISE: FIND YOUR WEDGE (+ FREE WORKSHEET)

Click here to get your free “Find Your Wedge” Notion worksheet

Let’s put this framework into action.

1. Choose a community in your market from whom you’d like to differentiate

2. In the second column, describe what their community is doing for each wedge

3. In the third column, write down how you might do things differently

Duplicate the table and repeat the process for any other communities you want to analyze.

A vision should quickly start to form for how your community can stand out in your market.

The wonderful thing is you don’t need to use all five wedges. Even using just one can be enough to set your community apart.

A hypothetical example:

Say you wanted to launch a community event for startups and tech. SXSW is a community you want to differentiate from. Here’s how you might fill out the worksheet:

I can already start to see the wonderful community you’re going to launch. SXSW won’t stand a chance 😉

HERE’S WHAT WE COVERED TODAY:

✔️ Why people love to community hop

✔️ How community benefits evolve over time

✔️ Community framework: The Five Community Wedges

✔️ How five real communities found their wedge

✔️ 30-min exercise: Find Your Wedge (+ FREE worksheet)

…happy wedging! ⊿

There’s a great Picasso quote that every community creator should keep on their desk.

It goes like this:

“When art critics get together they talk about form and structure and meaning.

When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”

In these two sentences, our old pal Pablo points out a common mistake community creators make:

They focus too much on purpose when members just want to go deep on their practice.

Let’s take climate change as an example.

A lot of communities focused on climate change flop. Members are drawn in by purpose: they’re worried about the planet and want to do something about it. But, once they’re in the room, they don’t know what to talk about.

The space gets filled with articles about climate change, lots of venting, not a whole lot of “doing”, and, well, nothing changes.

Their problem is they’re focusing too much on purpose and not enough on practice.

This may be a personal preference, but I find communities that focus on the practice to be much more interesting. I love the weird shit that “artists” (the practitioners), talk about. I love the turpentine.

If you want to put a dent into climate change by building community, I’d recommend you find the people who are looking for the turpentine. Find the artists. Find the practitioners. Then, go to the one-inch view and identify the highly specific problems the community will help them solve.

Some possible climate change identities to focus on:

1. Sustainable living nerds: “What worms do you put in your compost?”

2. Climate change activists: “What script do you use when you call your local governments?”

3. Climate researchers: “I’m gathering X data, who else is working on this?”

A few real-world examples…

The Daddit Community has posts celebrating being a dad (purpose), but the most engaged and meaningful conversations are about the real, difficult stuff that dads are dealing with in their life (practice):

The Creator Lab doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about the growth of the creator economy (purpose). The conversations are highly practical, sharing experiments that members are running and their results (practice):

Belongly is a community for Therapists. Their homepage doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about the importance of therapy (purpose). It shows the practical tools that they know members will be able to use in their work because it’s the stuff that the community talks about the most (practice):

Purpose is important. It reminds members of their “why” and keeps them going on the days when the work starts to feel too heavy. The occasional purpose post can be effective.

But purpose is the background for your community, not the foreground. It’s the “why”, not the “what”.

Root your community experience in your members’ reality. Find their turpentine.

30-Minute Exercise: How to Find Your Members’ Turpentine

Here’s an exercise I’ll have community creators do to find their turpentine:

Take 30 minutes and write down 25 questions that you believe your members are going to ask.

Get “oddly specific”:

• What do your members wake up and think about every day?

• What are the little annoyances they have to deal with?

• What are the raw materials of their work?

• What details do they tend to obsess over?

• What are the questions that ONLY your members would know to ask?

If you’re building a community for people like you this should be easy because their questions are your questions.

If you don’t know what questions your members are likely to ask, then it’s time to get out of the building. Get on the phone and talk to your members or potential members. Send surveys. Ask them about a day in their life. Ask them about what keeps them up at night. Ask them what’s currently on their to-do list.

Then look at other similar communities and see what people are asking. Read the comments (that’s often where you’ll find their turpentine).

If your community has multiple identities within it, then write down 25 questions for each group.

Try it out and let me know how it goes!