Meet Me in the Middle
We're Better Together
We had a morale event for our team that was navigating a high ropes course together. But before we went through our safety briefing and donned our protective gear, they had some games set up for us to play together. Our guide split us into two teams, six of us per team. She directed one to stand next to a 3' plastic ring on the ground with a dozen small balls inside of it. The other team was directed to stand at a second ring with balls about 30' feet away. She then explained the game, "The goal is to get all of the balls into your ring. Go."
Twelve people began running back and forth grabbing balls from the other ring and then running back to put them in their own ring. Some tried to carry a few balls at a time. Others tried to block their opponents from getting to their ring to retrieve more balls. But no real headway was being made. It didn't matter how fast either team was running, it was impossible to get all the balls into one ring. But driven by the game, we just kept trying, and laughing with each other as each team tried to win.
Then one of the players stopped and took a look at what was going on1. He saw the chaos and the futility in what we were doing. Then he calmly walked over, picked up one of the rings, carried it over, and put it on top of the other ring. There was a collective "a-ha" as everyone dropped their balls into the double ring. "That's much easier." "Indeed, working together 'for the win'." But there was one voice that was holding on to the competition, "Who won?"
The game, the competition, is exhilarating. It's fun to match up against able contestants and push yourself, and each other, to achieve and to improve. But it's also important to assess the game and make sure there's a point to playing. There's a time and place for competition. And there's a time and place for cooperation.
Us Versus Them
Competitiveness is very natural. Our tribal nature is in our DNA. It takes work to override our base instincts. We fall into "versus" by default. With intentionality, we uplevel from "versus" to "with".
I've talked about the power of the social feed in two earlier posts, Nuance and Generosity2 and Propagate the Signal, not the Noise3. I want to build on that more to talk about our "versus" and "with" opportunities. The feed creates silos and clearly delineates the in group and the out group. It discounts centrist ideas in favor of extremist ideas, amplifying the fringe to drown out the reasonable. The feed sows division. And the feed is a strong force that is only getting stronger as tech works to increase engagement. Any doom scrolling experience reminds you of just how powerful the feed is.
The worthwhile fight is fighting the feed. And we overcome the feed with the collective energy of us meeting in the middle. It's not Us versus Them. It's All of Us versus the Feed. The image for this post captures it perfectly. In the middle, there is a road. It is wide enough for all of us to fit on. There's room on it for us to shift our positions without ever leaving the road. It's brightly lit and carries all of us forward. Gems litter this road, showing all that we create together. It's the high road. It's the signal.
On either side of this high road are the gutters. They are low. They are narrow. They are dark. There's really no difference between the left gutter and the right gutter. All that matters there is that you're not on the high road. There are no gems in these gutters because there is no creation there, only destruction. The gutters are the noise.
The middle way is our two rings stacked on top of each other; all of us working together. And every step towards the middle makes the high road wider and shrinks the gutters.
Fight the power: fight the feed.
Look Up
More than a decade ago, Gary Turk made the powerful "Look Up" 5min video4. It is a plea to not let phones take so much of our attention that we miss out on the world around us. "We're surrounded by children, who since they were born, have watched us living like robots and think it's the norm." The sad thing is that, in the years since Gary made this video, phone usage has only risen.
When I was a senior in high school, we lost two boys in a fatal car accident. While I didn't know them personally, there were people throughout the school who did, and that next week they walked around the halls somewhat aimlessly, and weren't really hearing much of what the teachers were saying in class. I remember watching all of this and trying to reason about the tragedy of this loss. When the time came for a memorial assembly at school, I opted to leave to just drive around. At some point I had had enough of the silence and pushed the cassette into the player. Phil Collins' "Long, Long Way to Go"5 played at some point, and the "Turn it off if you want to. Switch it off it'll go away." line really stuck with me. It totally captured the feeling that ignoring it doesn't make it go away, but sometimes you've just had enough and want a break from all of it.
This Monday I had reached the point of "switch it off", and that immediately reminded me of this song. I played it on my bike ride and found a similar bitter comfort as I had 40 years earlier. I've been pretty switched off this week, and spending more time looking up. And on a drive to pick up my niece and nephew from school, I was rewarded. As I approached an intersection, a mother was pushing her newborn in a stroller with her 3-year-old walking next to her. When they got to the opposite corner, the boy walked up to a huge tree, reached out, and hugged it. The kids' arms, fully stretched, didn't even cover the front half of the tree. I laughed and as I drove past the three of them, I said, "that's some great tree love there." She laughed back.
There is more beauty out there than the feed wants us to see. It's actually everywhere … just waiting to be noticed.
Love the tree hug 💜