They say the reason people stay in the military – face starvation, exhaustion, pain, terrible idiocy, being blown up, and potentially death – is not for a cause.
They don’t stay to “serve their country” or “fight tyranny” or fulfill the contract or collect a paycheck.
When things are really bad, you keep going for one reason.
The guy beside you.
Why Does Creative Work Need Humans?
Thankfully, doing creative work or building a business involves fewer people trying to blow you up.
But they are REALLY difficult.
To wake up every day and do the thing. Long-term. For years. Shouting into the void.
To fail-one-more-time your way to success.
To “brute-force” the thing into existence.
There’s a lot of unknown that you’re facing, both in the outside world and on the inside.
And you need real human contact to meet the goal. You need to know if people get it, like it, understand it, want it, will buy it, are helped by it.
Supposedly, one of the best ways to deal with that problem is to get a tribe, or a community.
A group of people interested in similar stuff, who are willing to watch you throw your ideas against the wall and react somehow.
I struggle with this, not least because a “community” is something I have never had. And I think I have had some serious misunderstandings about what that means.
Gurus Ruined Tribes
“Find Your Tribe” has become a marketing term. And while we do want to chill with a bunch of cool people who love the same stuff… we’re also missing key bits that a REAL tribe would offer.
For example, a bunch of guys who like fishing is not really a tribe. They share an interest; they might be a club or a clique or an organization.
But a real tribe of people know you on a deep level. They care if you are hurting. They share their food with you when they don’t have enough for themselves. They risk their lives for you, if need be.
Dudes who just like fishing don’t do that for each other. They might share great fish advice, sure, but not their souls.
We all secretly know that a “tribe” is really just shorthand for people who like “similar-enough things” that they want to buy sh*t from you. That’s why it was invented by marketing gurus.
What we need, though, is more like Alcoholics Anonymous. We need a tribe of people who will show up for us when we’re down. Who will risk being wrong or silly or miss sleep to help us out. Who waste time making sure we’re okay.
When Conformity Is the Price of Community
A “community” is a term that carries similar scars. I picture the scowls and torches of angry villagers in a witch hunt.
Historically, we have needed our tribes and communities to keep us alive. To share the food, to help us raise children, to fight off sabre-toothed tigers.
But sometimes a community demands conformity at the price of who we really are.
In fact, rather like a society, communities are something that many of us have deep scars from. They are often places where your “belonging” depends on pretending to be something you are not, believing something that feels wrong, or doing something that feels immoral.
So talking about community feels like a dirty word now. We smell the bars of another cage.
I Always Wanted a Village
For as long as I can remember, I’ve never felt like I fully belong anywhere.
My experience of being in groups – society, communities, tribes, classes – is usually one of being the odd one out.
In practice, that looks like spending a lot of time feeling like I have to cut off parts of myself to be accepted. Or feeling like I was bad and broken because other people couldn’t see me, or didn’t know what to do with me.
For example, I was like Hermione from Harry Potter in elementary school. I was the geek with all the answers… until I learned that the other kids thought I was answering questions deliberately to make them look bad. I learned being “smart” or having a voice felt, to them, like being mean. So I stopped talking.
I cried easily. And the other kids thought I was “just doing it for attention.” (Which, by the way, would have to be the stupidest and most painful way to get attention ever.)
It took me a long time to figure out why the parts of myself that I learned to hide were still good. And even longer to start letting them be seen again.
Which is a brief history of why I don’t want to be in a friendship, or a community, or a tribe, where the world will end if I don’t hide most of who I am.
I don’t want be part of a community that is going to tell me what to think, or how to think, or how I’m supposed to dance to be likable.
And I think this is a common scar. So many of us long for a sense of connection, of belonging. But we also know the cost of suppressing what really matters to fit.
And on another level – creative work and starting a business means trying to undo a lot of this damage, in public, in real time.
Humans Don’t Hold Still When You Throw Spaghetti At Them
So I had this misunderstanding about “sharing”. Because we know we are supposed to “share” our ideas and the things we make (it’s secretly called marketing, IKYK).
I thought “sharing” ideas with a community was like throwing spaghetti against a wall to see if it is “al dente”.
I mean, which isn’t a bad analogy.
Except people are different than walls. For one thing, they usually don’t hold still and let you throw spaghetti at them.
For another, they react in interesting ways to the things we do. They have opinions, thoughts, feelings.
I had an experience recently of sharing and asking for help on some very confusing niching and product decisions. I was expecting a “spaghetti” response, where people would basically say yes or no or nothing.
But they didn’t.
Instead, these wonderful humans met me where I was, and sat with me in the not knowing. They talked about the unknown from their perspective, and offered me a great deal of grace.
It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had of feeling understood.
Not because I got answers, but because I felt seen. Because I feel like I have people who are in this with me. And I don’t have to hide.
Which also makes me think that all this marketing has made it hard for us to understand tribes.
Real Tribes
I’ve been so focused on attention, on dancing for the algorithm, or making something of “value” – something worth someone’s time or investment – that I was overlooking the real connection that we want in all our relationships.
A real tribe, circa 40,000 years ago, is not a random group of people who are very interested in deer, or enjoy exploring valleys, or even who buy your flint-knapping.
They are people who know you. People who are struggling right alongside you. People who don’t necessarily have the answers, but who make you smile while you are looking. They care.
They don’t know where the deer are, or how to get through the mountains. They aren’t necessarily even fans of flint-knapping.
But they stand shoulder to shoulder with you, and look at the vastness ahead, and grin.
They make the fight worth it.
So for reading, for being here, for standing with me in this…
I’m grateful for you.
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