Winning & Interdependence

This past week, I attended a CEO forum group that I’m a part of. During lunch, someone asked a question that I’ll paraphrase here, which was essentially this, “does it matter if you win?” A short, but very important question.

In response, I want to spend some time today addressing how two things can be true about our work:

1. Work is about more than winning

2. Winning at work matters greatly

It can be pretty tempting to fall into either/or thinking, but more often than not, we live in a both/and world. We’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks talking about our first job and how hearts are more important than outcomes. Those things are still very true, but that doesn’t mean winning isn’t important.

Some Personal Context

Allow a bit of background context on why this topic is particularly interesting and important to me on a personal level.

Flash back to 2017. I was 27 and was two years into owning my business, but I felt very different than most entrepreneurs I’d meet or talk to. Why? Pretty simple really, I didn’t like business and I didn’t like driving the business to generate profit.

Three things I disliked about business:

1. I didn’t like the concept of management or what I felt I’d learned about it so far. It seemed more like manipulation to me.

2. I had a distaste for making lots of money. While I wasn’t in danger of that being the case, even the thought of motivating myself around it was something I found distasteful.

3. I disliked creating pressure within the business to drive profit. For some reason, pressure in the context of work didn’t sit right with me.

The idea to write a book called The Young Professional Trap originally came out of these thoughts. Little did I know that I was believing part of the actual YPT, allowing myself to think that financially winning in business was bad.

I was living in the either/or world and honestly, it was hard.

As you can imagine, in the eight years since there has been a lot of growth and learning. I now very deeply believe what I shared in the introduction: winning at work matters.

The perspectives you’ll hear from me today are a by-product of personal growth that came through building my business and proof that work is fundamentally good for us. But what was it that made this so difficult for me in the early stages? After plenty of research and reflection, there is one dynamic that I believe was at the heart of it for me, and likely for you as well.

🌟 I believe the dignity of winning has been corrupted by our obsession with independence 🌟 

Allow me to explain ….

Our Obsession with Independence

Over the last 150 years, we have become very focused on independence. I get it, being dependent on someone or something else can be hard, but that doesn’t mean it is bad.

This obsession starts young. Well-meaning parents encourage their kids to get jobs and to start making their own money. As kids become young adults the race is on to see how quickly they can reach financial independence.

While it is good for young adults to get on their own two feet and to learn to be responsible for their lives, I believe we’ve taken it too far. I believe that our unhealthy obsession with independence is fueling two pretty negative things:

1. It fuels selfishness - we are hyper-focused on our status

2. It fuels a scarcity mindset - we have to compete for a finite amount of wealth, happiness, and success

When these two things are true, winning is all about me, me, me. This is the type of mindset that pits businesses and people against one another. One can’t win without the other losing.

• Consumers win when they get a deal

• Businesses win when they generate a profit

This is yet another version of the Young Professional Trap. So the question is, how do we do better?

Cultivating an Interdependent Mindset

We tend to think about work in the “professional” sense, but work is a far more inclusive concept. The professional class gets much of its origin from the Industrial Revolution when we began working in groups and started introducing many of the managerial systems that still exist today. This only represents the last 150 years, meaning that the working professional concept is still very young!

If you look back to before the Industrial Revolution, work was primarily focused on fulfilling basic human needs like finding food (hunting and gathering), providing shelter, and caring for children. People were highly interdependent, working with and for one another to provide for their human needs. Winning at work was good and necessary.

If we are going to increase human flourishing, I believe we need to rekindle and cultivate a more interdependent mindset around work and business today! While this could appear far off, the reality is that we are already highly interdependent. It is just a matter of perspective. Instead of fighting against it, we need to view our dependence on one another as the path to thriving.

If you need a reality check about how interdependent we truly are, just think back to early 2020 when COVID shut down the world as we know it. In the early days of the pandemic, I produced a short video focused on interdependence, which hit home again while writing this week’s newsletter. If you have an extra 5-min, I’ll link the video at the bottom of the post.

In summary, though, I think that these three quotes from the video bring home the point better than I could:

• “You and I live in a country that was founded by declaring its independence, consequently we tend to do that which is unhealthy for ourselves and our city, by depending on ourselves, instead of each other”
  

• “When we fail to be interdependent as a city, we fail to thrive as a city”
  

• “We can choose to rebuild the economy of our city, by deciding to depend on one another. As we become more interdependent as a city, our city will thrive”

Let’s Win Together

As you enter this week, I encourage you to fight against the temptation to depend on yourself and lean into the natural interdependence you have with your friends, family, and coworkers.

When we do this, it helps us fuel two very positive things:

1. Others First Thinking - we are keenly aware of the needs of others

2. An Abundance Mindset - we believe that there is more than enough wealth, happiness, and success for everyone.

I hope that you can rest in those two truths as you enter the week! As always, please respond to this email if you’d like to talk and discuss anything from this or prior posts! And if you have any friends who you think might derive value from this - I’d love for you to share it with them.

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With Hope and Gratitude,

Alex

Link to the Keep Thriving video quoted above: