The Myth Of The Lone Wolf: Why Collaboration Breeds More Success

This is the most important lesson you could ever learn.

For most of my life, I struggled with the concept of a higher power. As I was getting sober, I stumbled across a video of Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining “The Most Astounding Fact” about the universe.

I’ll never forget where I was the first time I watched this video. It changed my life.

As the great Carl Sagan said, “we are all star stuff.”

This week, I am getting a bit weird. Today, I’m explaining to you why connection is so important in your business and your life.

LFG. 🔥

Thermodynamics And The Connectedness Of Everything

As I began to obsess over physics and the relationship of everything, I learned more about thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics is the law of entropy. Entropy is the universal law in which every system will always default to chaos. This is an over simplification, but you get the point.

An easy way to think about this is with a billiard table. You can organize (or rack) the billiard balls into a triangle as if you’re about to break them. But if you walk away from your perfectly ordered billiard balls, over time, it is inevitable that the balls will spread themselves around the table in a seemingly disorganized way.

That disorganization is called “chaos.” And chaos is actually the organizational structure of the universe.

As humans, we hate chaos and we are constantly rearranging the world around us in a way we perceive to have order.

Note*: This is where your brain will start to break because it’s very ironic and counter productive to try to organize chaos, when in actuality, chaos is the natural order of the universe. It gets deep.

This idea really helped me, because it allowed me to forgive myself as I could recognize that the spirit of the universe isn’t trying to make my life (or my business) more difficult. But rather, creating a business (and creating a system) is an infinite endeavor because the universe is actively interacting in a way that tries to untangle the order I have manufactured.

In short, you can’t stop the cobwebs from forming. You can only clean them up. They will always come back.

Nothing Exists In Isolation

There is a famous quote from the book Silent Spring, that says “In nature, nothing exists in isolation.”

Everything is connected.

This is an obvious statement, but if it’s so obvious, then why do we all behave the way we do?

The biggest problem with our society is that it incentivizes isolation. We see ourselves as individuals. We have convinced ourselves that will power and determination are the biggest contributing factors to our success.

Yet, the laws of the universe are very clear about this. Isolation is the opposite of healthy.

When isolated, animal and plant cells don’t know how to survive, because they can’t produce their own energy. The only way for any organism (or system) to produce it’s own energy is to integrate with a system around it. So when a cell becomes isolated, it only knows how to mass replicate. It becomes cancerous. It can’t heal itself and it’s only way to survive is to expand.

This is why we run ourselves into the ground, because if we are not connected to a larger system, our only option is to extract energy from our ourselves. This is how cancer works. Cancer can’t heal itself, so it replicates itself because for a cancer cell, reproduction is the only way to survive.

But, as we all know, cancer eventually kills the host.

Business (And Life) Is About Collaboration, Not About Competition

We glorify business tycoons like John D. Rockefeller, Steve Jobs, and Daniel Carnegie. These are the people who have seemingly taken on the world, and built empires as “self made men.”

But these are not good examples or role models.

First off, none of these men built businesses on their. They each existed in an ecosystem that allowed for their businesses to thrive in the first place.

Second, it’s very unlikely that they succeeded as lone wolves, as every business leader needs to belong to a group of people who can help them, create connections, and relationships.

Lastly, even if they did create all their own success, it’s not something that you should want to emulate, because as we’ve already determined, success in isolation is not healthy nor is it desired.

Greatness Is In The Agency Of Others

I want to write about these subjects more. I think about this stuff a lot and I think about how we all belong to systems. It is my firm belief (as is it my own lived experience) that when I feel connected to something bigger than myself, I feel great. When I am isolated and when I am constantly thinking about myself, I am miserable.

Success is a strange word. It means different things to different people.

But I think we can all agree on a universal form of success, which is belonging.

Every religion, theology, and philosophical ideology is all trying to find an answer to the same question. Which is, “how do I live a life of connection?”

The same is true in business.

You are much better off trying to build a business that is collaborative and connected. This western philosophy of “winning” is very counter intuitive, because everything that thrives in nature does so by best integrating itself into a larger system.

So if you want to succeed, which is another way of saying that you want to thrive, then you’re much better off doing so through collaboration, connection, and mutually beneficial relationships.

There’s no other way to do it, because any other strategy will leave you isolated.

In isolation, you can not heal, you can only extract. Isolation is a terrible strategy for success.