Truth Bomb Tuesday: Collaboration isn’t just a nice flow. It’s a tool for survival.
“You don’t have to do it alone.”
Actually, that’s maybe not strong enough.
“You are not supposed to do it on your own.” “I’m not sure it’s actually possible to do it on your own.”
What’s “it”?
I dunno. Probably everything. I’m specifically talking about property investing here and going through the journey of becoming a skilled and successful investor.
But I think it’s just a general rule.
We are a herd species. We are a social species. Before social media there was herd media.
(Lol. I just made myself laugh at how accurate that gag turned out.)
But we have dedicated a huge amount of our energy hungry brains to making social work.
That’s not an accident.
Some animals have sharp teeth. Some have claws. Some have evolved armour plating.
But humans? Humans are soft and tasty and die if they get left out in the cold.
But we have one secret weapon.
Cooperation. We have learnt how to work cooperatively. Initially we cooperated in small teams. Then as culture and language took off, we began cooperating across time.
Everything you enjoy today is a collaboration between you and your grandparents, and everything that they came up with.
So cooperation is the secret-sauce in humanity’s complete domination of earth.
But the point is that the drive to cooperate is an instinct and an incredibly powerful instinct.
Where other animals will bare their teeth or curl into an armoured ball when threatened, humans will instinctively cooperate.
But we have, particularly over the last 50 years or so, become incredibly focused on the individual. The individual has been elevated as the ideal engine of achievement.
I mean, I bet you can name half a dozen great scientists and Nobel Prize winners – Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer, Taylor Swift.
But can you name a single one of their collaborators?
I can’t.
But I can tell you for sure that they didn’t do what they did alone. They had help. Lots of it. Yes, they were brilliant, but they were also lucky to be surrounded by brilliant people too.
Anyway, all this is just to say that if you feel an instinct to ‘buddy-up’ on this journey, you should go with that. That instinct is going to serve you well.
And if you have some concept in your head that says that strong individuals don’t need help from anyone, you need to jettison that idea asap.
In many ways, the whole ILRE community is built around this single idea. We were never meant to do this alone.
We probably can’t.
We are supposed to find collaborators and co-conspirators. We are supposed to work with an A-team of planners and conveyancers and so on.
(No, literally. I make all my students find their A-team.)
This is how we unlock the super-power of being human.
DB.