You should start a group
Why you should try starting a new group, rather than join an existing organization, to achieve a goal or engage with a personal interest
About 4 months ago, I took a leap and started a company. It’s still very early days, and every situation is unique, so you won’t catch me writing about how to run a successful fundraise process, how to build a team, or how to transform an idea into a sustainable business any time soon. Reality hasn’t provided enough feedback for anyone to differentiate between skill and luck, good and bad decisions just yet.
But after a few months, I do feel confident expressing some things I’ve felt as part of the interpersonal experience of working with a small team. I also think that these observations would apply to many people, in many contexts — business, athletics, spirituality, politics, volunteer work, recreational or intellectual endeavors.
Here’s why you should start, rather than join, a group to pursue your interests:
There’s less bullshit. In a new organization, you can focus on the exact purpose in which you and the early members of the group have mutual interest.Existing organizations have a certain path dependency, a momentum to their ends and means. They’re going to focus on things based on their original mandates, the incentives they’ve operated within, the individuals that have made up the group and especially its leadership. Every organization becomes more locked into its existing patterns and accumulates bureaucratic processes as it makes progress towards its ends and has to coordinate the actions of more contributors. This is an argument Alexis de Tocqueville made in Democracy in America — it’s only in the early days that an organization can straightforwardly follow principles to their conclusions and ignore conflicting interests.
Values will translate to action. In addition to the freedom to pursue whatever goals motivated a founding group to coalesce, starting a new group lets you pursue those ends by means that live up to the groups shared moral, ethical, and aesthetic values. Whether you think that startups don’t hire women or bring people of color onto the cap table early enough, or that your local political party affiliate is too hung up on the status quo, or that the book club at the library would benefit from a wider range of genres on its reading list, starting a new group lets you approach things with an uncompromised perspective informing how you decide what actions to take.
You will have a stronger sense of agency, responsibility, and traction. This is point is commonly made in favor of joining tech startups, that you will have more independency around how you approach problems, carry more responsibility earlier in your involvement, and see more evidence of the positive impact of your efforts. Whether in the context of business, political activism, volunteering, or helping people meaningfully navigate the big questions we live with, a small, new group has fewer people to distribute responsibilities to and a far stronger sense of mutual obligation to other members of the group to carry your load toward the group’s shared goal. This ownership and responsibility are fulfilling in their own right, but also tend to facilitate rapid personal growth. And as a group, the sense of traction that comes with making progress from a modest start feels far more real than the fairly abstract results of the same level of effort in a larger institution.
Motivation when things are tough. As an individual, it’s easy to fall into pessimistic thinking about whether you can make an impact or achieve progress toward your goal. Few worthwhile aims can be accomplished in the first several attempts. Attempts made on your own can feel inconsequential, either due to problems seeming very large or providing no sense of relative achievement. The earliest experiences in larger organization often provide the opposite experience to the benefits highlighted here, and because these existing organizations often trust that there will always be new members, they put relatively little effort into facilitating early positive experiences or encouragement that drives future involvement. New, small teams whose existence depends on everyone sticking around and following through will do a much better job of providing support to get over early hurdles and past ongoing difficulties.
Your own space. As we’ve seen in some communities that have shifted conversation from public Twitter discourse to more private group chat apps, it’s nice to be able to express your interests and reactions to things among people that you trust, and away from people who will drive-by criticize your priorities or perspective on how a problem should be solved. This is a fine first step toward starting a group, but with the satisfaction that comes with achieving a shared purpose, I think many would benefit from orienting this communication shift around forming groups that translate discussion to action.
The biggest challenges we face today feel like massive, abstract collective action problems where our individual concern drives escalating dread. Whether you’re bored, dissatisfied with your own progress toward a goal, or worried about where the world is headed, finding some like-minded folk to talk to, listen to, and collaborate with can ease your psychic burden and make the results of your efforts feel far more tangible.