Seven Qualities that Make a Good Community

This note is to signify that while this article is at a spot where I feel ok posting, it is not at a spot where I would say it is finished. There are a few things that I would like to add, just haven’t found the correct wording yet. Come back later as I put on the finishing touches.

Yesterday I wrote about how my generation was facing a loneliness epidemic, one that had some very alarming mental and physical health concerns.

Obviously, that was not a fun thing to learn about, and it got me thinking about the times where I felt the opposite of alone. Where I felt wanted, like I was a part of something, and people genuinely liked having me around, and then how did those circumstances happen so I could create more. 

After thinking about it for a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two main ways of avoiding loneliness. One way is by creating individual connections with someone; finding a significant other, mentor in business, best friend from down the street. The easier way is by joining a good community.

Today I am going to talk about what makes a good community. I have been pretty lucky to be a part of some great ones, and I spent yesterday night coming up with all the qualities that they did best. What follows are the seven qualities I found that made a good community.

Shared Goals

A good community needs a goal. A goal that everyone shares, that they can work together towards and bond in their journey for. 

The goal of original communities, when humans finally got around to communicating with each other, was survival. I’ll watch your back while we hunt this tiger to feed our families. Now it is a little less extreme, but no less important to creating worthwhile connections. A sports team wants to win championships. A startup wants to reach 100,000 users on its platform. This provides a reason for the community to form and creates a shared basis on which friendship is created.

When a community has a shared goal that everyone wants enough to buy in, that’s when the rest of the characteristics fall in line. 

Skin in the Game

A good community requires its members to buy-in. That they sacrifice something personal, whether it be time, money, or capital for the good of the team. A step further is putting your skin in the game. 

Skin in the game is a term coined by the philosopher Nassim Taleb which refers to absolute responsibility being taken for one’s action. In a group setting, this means that one person is responsabile for the actions of the group, and vice versa. Nassim used the analogy of an architect sleeping under the bridge he designed and oversaw its construction-if it fails, he takes the ultimate responsibility for it, even if it wasn’t his own fault.

Again, less extreme, today this is seen in sports teams running for the mistake of an individual. My old lacrosse coach used to make us run a liner for every minute a person was late to practice, while the person who was late watched. While this felt unfair at first, it built a sense of shared responsibility in the team around reaching this standard. No one wanted to let the team down and be liable for their mistakes, so everyone made sure to get to practice early.

Responsibility/Sharing of Work

There are no freeloaders in a good community. Everyone is required to work; towards the shared goal, so that others don’t feel that you’re slacking off, and simply for your own benefit of getting better. 

There may be people injured on the sideline, or sick at home, but these people are either participating in the way they can (cheering during a big game, helping coach watch film) or have built a sense of trust through previous work where the community knows that they have paid their dues. 

The people who do try to freeload, to get the easy A without contributing, rarely last long in good communities. 

Standards

A good community will hold everyone to a high standard, both for the good of the community and out of respect for the individuals. A good basketball team is going to set the standard of hustling back on defense. A startup will make sure that everyone is putting their maximum effort towards hitting that deadline. If someone misses this standard, it is every other teammate’s responsibility to pull him back up to this standard, even if this means a little bit of yelling.

Enjoyment

I am a terrible climber. Despite this, one of the best communities I was ever in was a climbing team. The people there were supportive, worked hard at their craft, and brought everyone else up to a high standard. 

But one of the reasons I think the team was so special to me was that everyone enjoyed each other’s company. They were having fun, even during the 20-minute ab workouts and the conditioning and the hard days at competitions. 

Every community is going to face some difficulty. But if you have a culture of people who genuinely have fun together, those hard days are going to be a lot easier.

Obstacles/Shared Hardships

That being said, those hard days are instrumental to creating a close community. Sigmund Freud, like him or hate him, once said “One, day in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” 

For me at least this has been true. Some of my favorite years were when I was being physically punished with the few sports teams I was on, or thrown into unfamiliar territory when I was abroad. These times were hard, but they netted some of my best friends and best memories.

Obstacles and shared hardships in overcoming them provide the fire that heats the iron. They force a team together, providing opportunities for everyone to prove their worth to each other and rely on each other. When that happens, unbreakable bonds are forged.

Trust

The most important part of a good community is absolute trust. It is a beautiful thing when it happens. When you send a pass without looking because you know your teammate is going to be there. When you don’t worry about not finishing an assignment because you know your team is going to get the work done.

It’s a beautiful thing, but without it, a community cannot exist. I am not going to buy into a community, share in the work, hold others to high standards, and go through difficult times if I cannot trust the people around me. That’s simply absurd.

The problem is that trust is the hardest quality to build in a community. It requires time, good people, and multiple times of it not working before a community can gain a trustworthy reputation. Unfotnantly, the only way to build trust is to keep an open mind. Be open to it for a while, put in the work, and see what happens. If people seem like they’re not willing to buy in three months in, maybe it’s time to find some new people. 

When I’ve looked back on my childhood, I’ve found that the communities I was lucky enough to be dropped in were some of the most influential parts of my life. But communities are changing. Kids are growing up in a world where a good portion of where communities are usually formed, school, is online. Gaming is becoming a trillion-dollar industry, and teams are being formed around it. That’s not to mention the development going on in crypto, which I might be going to cover in the future.

The point is, before I go off rambling too much, is that if the internet and social media are such a large cause of the loneliness pandemic, we need to find a way to build communities with the aforementioned qualities digitally to combat it. Otherwise, the technology that was built to connect everyone will end up being the one that drives us apart.

See you tomorrow.