#StrongerTogether
In The Missing Half, last week, I cited Dolly Parton. Not to write about the rhinestones, the songs or Dollywood. All three probably deserve essays of their own, but her altruism was something I wanted to mention. Her achievements across the board were great and among them, the Buddy Program was up there with her best songs.
In 1991, Dolly discovered that the school dropout rate in her home county in Tennessee was over 30%. A compassionate soul with a purpose, she responded in a wonderfully simple manner, creating the Buddy Program.
Every seventh and eighth grader was asked to choose a buddy. If both stayed at school until graduation, Dolly would personally give each of them $500.
It sounds a bit like Trump rigging the votes. Well do you know why votes are paid for? Because it works. And Dolly made it work for the benefit of many many school children. She rigged the system, and the dropout rate fell to 6% wherever her system was introduced!
I wanted to mention the story last week because it illustrated what can happen when somebody looks at an old problem differently. Or perhaps two old problems in this case. But there is another part of it that I've kept thinking about. Dolly didn't simply pay children to stay at school. She gave them somebody else to help them, and someone that they could stay for.
The myth of doing it alone
We have a peculiar fascination with individual success.
Business magazines put the founder on the cover. History gives us great leaders. Music gives us stars. Sport gives us champions. Even the language of entrepreneurship celebrates the individual.
Self-made is celebrated.
One of the great gifts of the Enlightenment was the idea that an individual life shouldn't be determined entirely by birth, church, monarch or class. People were told they had agency. Rights. And with these, increasingly, the possibility of determining their own future.
It was a magnificent idea.
Somewhere along the journey, we might have turned possibility into an obligation.
“You can make something of yourself” has become “You should make something unique and exceptional of yourself.”
And now…
We carry several million examples around in our pockets as a reminder of our failure whenever we dare to look.
The entrepreneur who sold his company for £100 million.
The 28-year-old with a property empire.
The impossibly fit 50-year-old.
The person who is apparently running a seven-figure business from a beach while working four hours a week.
These people may actually be perfectly real. Although many are not. But there is certainly a distortion that comes from seeing the exceptional so frequently that it begins to look normal. It is called exceptional for a reason.
And there is a rather nasty consequence of a belief in self.
If success is entirely individual, failure must be too.
If the self-made billionaire made himself, presumably the person struggling to pay the electricity bill made that happen as well.
We have only ourselves to blame.
Except, of course, none of it is true.
Nobody is self-made.
For even the most driven, solitary, focussed individual, behind them is the first customer who took a chance...
And for the rest, there is the employee who stayed late when something went wrong. The friend who listened to the same problem for the seventeenth time. The supplier who extended the payment terms. The partner who kept everything else moving while the business consumed rather more life than anybody had anticipated.
Behind the rock star is a band, a producer, engineers, road crew and someone who remembered to order the sandwiches. Behind me is a band of people making sense of my ideas, allowing them to shine. Felix doesn't like to be on the spotlight that much, but he alone gives multiplies my own power by 5 times or more!
We notice the person standing under the spotlight. We are less good at noticing everyone who wired the stage.
Perhaps this matters because the myth doesn't merely distort how we remember success. It changes how we pursue it.
Independence isn't the same as strength
Entrepreneurs are particularly susceptible to relying upon our own independence. We become accustomed to solving problems. It is part of the job.
Something breaks and we fix it.
Someone leaves and we cover the gap.
Cash gets tight so we go and find more.
A customer complains and we sort the problem.
Over time, the competence to get things done can become independence. And independence is a slippery slope as it inevitably becomes isolation.
But...
There is a strange point in the development of many businesses where the founder's ability to solve everything becomes one of the things preventing the business from developing.
We see the same thing personally. Asking for help can feel like an admission that we don't know something. Offering help is now treated as generosity rather than something integral to how a healthy community works.
Businesses that work for social good even have a special category: social enterprise. I've always found that slightly odd. Shouldn't enterprise, by definition, ultimately be good for society?
Perhaps we have the equation wrong.
Maybe strength isn't the ability to need nobody.
Maybe it is having enough confidence in what you can do yourself to recognise what you can do better with others.
Maybe it is having the confidence to know that your own achievement is not diminished by helping others also become great alongside you.
An oddly individual group activity
Which brings me, somewhat inevitably, to skiing.
I seem to like oddly individual group activities. By this definition, climbing and skiing are somewhat similar.
Nobody can ski your run for you. You stand on your own skis. During the activity of skiing itself, you alone are focussed on your activity. You make your own turns.
And you need to decide whether that rather steep bit is within your abilities or whether discretion suggests taking the blue run and meeting everyone at the bottom.
Yet the quality of a ski day depends enormously on the people around you.
Someone is there to help you improve, whether through observation, or mere encouragement.
Someone knows the mountain.
Someone waits.
Someone points out that over there is worth avoiding. Or that this is really fun.
Someone loses a ski. And others wait and help them find it.
Then you regroup at the lift, compare versions of what just happened, spend ten minutes discussing where to have lunch. You remain entirely responsible for getting yourself down the mountain. You simply do it better, often go further and always have considerably more fun with the right people around you.
Business isn't that different, is it?
Who’s skiing beside you?
Yes, we're taking a group of founders and entrepreneurs to Chamonix for a week in January. And yes, there will be a lot of skiing. But we’re all as interested in what happens between the skiing.
The person at dinner who asks a question you hadn't considered.
The founder running a completely different business who sees something in yours precisely because they don't know the industry rules you've spent years absorbing.
The conversation on a chairlift with somebody who solved the problem you're currently wrestling with.
The first time I went to Chamonix with property people, I met Matthew White. On the cable car, Matthew appeared to go to sleep for five minutes. I asked him about it and ever since I’ve been able, if tired, to get 2-3 stops of sleep on the London tube and feel awesome by the time I get off at my stop. That in itself was worth the entire cost of that trip. Quite possibly several times over.
Nobody is there to run your business for you. But they might help you see something differently. Plus, it’s great fun!
And this brings me back again to The Missing Half.
For the past two weeks I've been writing about what happens when we exclude half the available perspectives from the room. I was asked to talk about women, and that seemed like the poignant element I could feel OK to talk about.
The broader question isn't simply who gets into the room, but what we do once we're there.
Do we compete for attention?
Do we protect what we know?
Do we surround ourselves with people who think like us?
Or do we become invested in someone else's success?
There is an important difference between networking and actual connection. One increases the number of people you know. But to what end? More phone numbers?
The other changes what becomes possible because you know them.
Find your buddy
Dolly Parton's genius wasn't the $500. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great marketing hook. But the real success was the buddy. She took an individual problem and made it shared. Your buddy staying at school mattered to your own outcome. Their success became connected to yours.
There is something in that for the rest of us. We spend a great deal of time trying to become more capable, more resilient and more independent. That’s great, but perhaps independence isn't the summit we've made it out to be.
There are mountains that are worth climbing alone. But for most of the interesting ones, those that are properly worthwhile, I'd always rather have good people beside me.
If you’d like to find your support system of founders, enquire about Tables.
And of course, if you like to ski, TableSki is probably your first port of call.
TableSki
Join us in January for an adventure to Chamonix! Will you miss out?
We take skiers and boarders of all abilities. And there’ll be someone at your level to ski with and to go to the spa with, and to go out dancing with!
Don’t regret not joining us. Register for info and pay your deposit here.
Easter Eggs in this week’s article
“nasty” – Nasty, by Polyphia & Jason Richardson
“same problem” – The Weekend Starts Here, by Fatboy Slim
“asking for help” – All Neon Like, by Björk
“attention” – Attention, by Doja Cat
P.S.
Would you prefer a support system?
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