To some people, disagreements feel like conflict; they don’t have to be, and avoiding disagreements comes with a high price. It doesn’t have to feel bad to figure out where you might be wrong if you learn to disentangle your self-worth from your belief system.

True belonging is always the product of co-construction. This requires mechanisms that: create buy-in, ensure people are and feel heard, facilitate collective decision making and error-correction.

Five steps on how to build a tribe:Identification: find and be foundCommunication: increase bandwidthCooperation: create valueReification: make your group “a thing”Adaptation: find the dark forces to preserve the essence of your thing

Growing your tribe creates more resources that can allow you to reach higher goals. New people bring in new knowledge, new ideas, more attention, etc. At the same time, as the tribe grows it becomes increasingly harder to maintain highly trust-based group dynamics.

We don’t have a good sense for what the maximal “carrying capacity” of a tribe is. If you are interested in growing your tribe, you probably want to adopt a slow and careful approach, one that allows you to slow down further or take a step back if it looks like you have been moving too fast.  

Members of a tribe expect to benefit from investing into the tribe - and they might decide to leave if those benefits never manifest - but it matters little to them when and how exactly they receive that benefit.

It is not a coincidence that humans have developed ever more complex forms of coordination: it unlocks positive-sum dynamics that realize more and more of potential. 

Coordinating with other humans is key to achieving lasting impact. Coordination helps us grow our well of common knowledge, build things, become better humans and create more value for the world than we could on our own.

To bring about grand futures, we humans have to figure out how to reconcile our current needs with our lofty ambitions. Tight-knit support communities - what we call tribes in this post - seem to be a good way to preserve our well-being and values while achieving more impact. Yet, building effective tribes seems like a relatively neglected puzzle... See more