– creating \(n_n)/, or How To Build A Community

I’m amused at how poor all the “how to create a community” blogposts are. It’s probably because not many people have actually gotten around to actually creating communities of their own.

You start with yourself, with an agenda of sorts. I’m still not sure how precise that agenda should be. I always wanted to create a sort of mastermind group- I had this fantasy of a “legion of heroes”. It was always a bit premature. I had asked a couple of friends for their input on the ideas. I had some grand visions about the whole thing. But it was like fantasizing about baking wedding cakes when you had never even baked a cupcake in your life.

So n_n was my cupcake, maybe. I decided to keep it simple. I used that as the name because I didn’t want it to be pretentious. I had previously been invited to a group called “Rise Above The Bourgeoisie” and I was so frustrated with the way that group was managed that I wanted to start my own group to see how it ought to be done.

I made a few mistakes. My house rules very very simple- just be nice, respect each other, listen to each other, etc. On hindsight there are more things you should add, like insisting that people share their own opinions, perspectives and interpretations before they post a link. Because otherwise people just post a whole bunch of links and expect engagement to be handed to them. Newsflash: Engagement is fucking hard, and you need to earn it through reciprocity.

You need to start the group really small and grow it slowly and organically. You should talk to a whole bunch of people about the idea of the group before you even start the group, and then you should pick maybe 1-2 people who really share your vision and start the group with just the few of you. Then you need to have real, honest conversations in the group. You need to eat your own dogfood- meaning you need to use the medium of the group to have real, honest and serious conversations. People are better at sniffing out ‘authenticity’ that we realise, as performers and creators. We recognise it when we’re in the audience, but not so much when we’re on stage. If you spill your actual guts, people will come and watch.

So yes, have real conversations in your group. Don’t hold things back. If your group is a place that you need to hold things back from, people will sense that it’s a little fake. Don’t do the overbearing overwhelming oversharing stuff either. That can be intimidating. Don’t write epic walls of text. Instead just describe your reality in the simplest and most straightforward terms you can, and ask genuine questions. Ask people for input. Ask people for their thoughts. Then genuinely listen, genuinely read and give real feedback. Keep this going and eventually you have this nice virtuous cycle that other people will be happy to plug into. This is what Quora must have been like in the early days when it was relatively small- when it was, in fact, just the Quora employees.

Over time you may notice things like people getting into intense, emotional arguments. I’m still not 100% sure how to deal with that, but I think one of the best ways to do it is to “take it outside”. By that I mean to take it into PMs, or to meet in person to talk it out. There’s this really unhealthy thing that happens on Facebook walls that’s very performative. People become less concerned with understanding each other and more interested in winning over the audience. Once this happens, things get polarised, people grow to hate each other, things start falling apart and get ugly. The earliest first principle should be that we’re all here to learn from each other, and nobody should reward anybody else for trying to “win”.

Working with kids

I love kids, because they’re so fresh, young, full of potential. Relatively, at least. They haven’t been ruined by failure and the bullshit negative self-talk that we spread throughout our culture. Look at kids happily revealing their ages and talking about what it means to run or fight like a girl, for instance. Kids give you hope because they don’t immediately inherit the bullshit that we’re already swimming in.

I’m more passionate about empowering children-educators than I am about educating children directly myself. I’m sure there are people better with kids than I am, more passionate about kids than I am.

– Impossibility of Replacing A Person

I used to think that there wasn’t much point in me doing anything at all because other people will do it better. But your life has meaning. Nobody else has your utterly unique set of perspectives and experiences. Yes, you’ll tend to fall into certain broad categories, there will be others like you. There are 7 billion people. Is it possible for every single person to be unique? I think yes, actually, but few people develop to that stage. So we have teeming seas of similar people. But while they might be moved by the same things, I do truly believe that if all of them were artists (and we’re all artists in our own ways- some art is expressed in a very physical, visible space while some is less tangible).

– Dead Poets vs. Dangerous minds

Interesting that I sat down to note the comparison. They’re both about teachers who inspire students. In both cases, the teachers fail to some degree before succeeding. The teachers are slightly rebellious, and they feed these narratives we want to believe in- that a single solitary individual can kick off broader system change just by exuding, exemplifying freedom.

The difference is, of course, socioeconomic status. Dead poets was about upper-class or upper-middle-class white boys, while dangerous minds was about black and brown inner-city kids. I’m sure there are more interesting similarities and nuances to dig up, but I’m writing this from memory.

Hustle, create value. Tina Sellig’s view of Entrepreneurship

Paul Graham recently wrote something that captures my thoughts about this. You need to make something people want. Identify what people want and provide it. Everything else is secondary. If nothing else, make stuff that YOU want, because chances are that if you want something, somebody else would too.

I’d like to create more value, faster. I find myself quickly falling into the trap of living paycheck to paycheck, allowing busywork to pile up so that I don’t have much free time. If I don’t have free time, I don’t need to be doing the important work that might fail, that might not work out. So there’s a certain escapism that I live under. What I really ought to be doing is applying entrepreneurial thinking (which I idolised so much when I was a student/NSF!) to my real life. I need to apply it to my work, which is so fertile and rich for Kaizen/systemic improvement.

Philosophical Dilemmas

I have a book called Philosophical Dilemmas and I once wanted to write essays, thoughts and commentaries about all of those things. I have since sort of lost interest in that sort of thing. I trust in myself to reasonably be able to have thoughtful, consistent positions on those things with a little bit of effort. What is far more interesting and challenging is for me to get stuff done. I suppose in this case we have a bit of a self-reference loop. I said I wanted to write these essays. I suppose I should quickly write them anyway. Just to get them out. And then I can check the box and eliminate it.

Smoking corners

I stopped smoking about 11 weeks ago at the time of this writing, but this is still something that is interesting and important to me. I think that we need more designated smoking areas. I think that designated smoking areas will help to reduce the problem of second-hand smoke by containing cigarette smoke to specific regions.