So when you create these events, when you invite people, when you're trying to assess, do people like spending time with me, know you're almost certainly wrong.
People like it more than you know.
People don't share how powerful it time was for them, sometimes for embarrassing reasons.
So I want you to trust that what you're doing is far more important than you know, and that's a reason to keep on going.
Hello, and welcome back to the final episode of the art of community conversations.
I'm your host.
My name is Seth Resler and this has been a series of conversations that we have been having with the author of the International Bestseller.
The book is called The Art of Community, and there's a new Second Edition Out with 25% More content.
Charles has been joining us for this conversations to talk about each of the different seven principles of community.
He is also the co author of another fantastic book that's called Building Brand Communities with Carrie Melissa Jones.
That one won an Axiom business book gold medal.
Charles' work has been used to develop leadership and programs at places like Google, Airbnb, Twitch, Amazon, and the US army.
He has presented all over the place, including the Yale Leadership Institute, Harvard Law School, the Stanford graduate school of business among others.
I wanna welcome back.
Charles.
Hey.
How are you? I'm doing well, Seth.
It's great to be back, uh, doing an event with you.
Yeah.
So so this is the final conversation that you and I are gonna have.
Uh, you organize your book, the art of community into seven principles of belonging.
We have now gone through each of them individually.
We've talked about all seven.
And then the book doesn't end there.
You have more in there.
You talk about advanced concepts steps.
And so we wanna talk a little bit about that today, uh, among other things, we are going to talk about the different types of success that motivate people.
And we're also gonna talk a little bit about, uh, how these seven principles apply people online because there's a lot of people who are now managing online communities through all sorts of new technologies that we have, even though these are very ancient concepts, uh, you know, when they came about, we didn't have things like Slack or Facebook groups or Mighty networks or Discord or any of that.
So we're gonna talk a little bit about how those principles apply.
But before we do, I want to just talk a little bit about the difference between a community and a cult because we've talked a lot about these principles in terms of, uh, religious, uh, traditions, uh, and religious organizations or spiritual organizations.
Can you talk about the difference between what's a cult and what's a community? Uh, that's a really good question, Seth.
Uh, the reason I put that in the book is because, uh, the book that I wrote explicitly acknowledges that the wisdom that's in in the book has been used for well over a thousand years in spiritual traditions to bring people together around shared values and purpose and bring them together in such a way that they have greater resilience facing life's challenge.
And someone who doesn't understand how religion works might say, well, whoa, whoa, if we're using these ideas that spiritual traditions have been using, aren't we just creating a cult? And so I wanted to have a chapter to wait a minute.
Let's be more clear about, um, what makes a cult and what are just simply good principles of bringing people together.
First of all, we need to acknowledge that the way people use the term cult of various widely.
If a cult is just simply people who like to gather and do things together that others don't like to do wear similar clothes and have their own kind of sense of humor, then every high school band in America would be a cult.
Uh, so a cult isn't just because people think similarly, dress similarly and like to do things together that people don't like to do.
Uh, there's more to it than that.
Okay.
That's useful to know.
And in the book, you actually go an extra step, and you say that we are talking about harmful cults.
So, explain what you mean by that.
Talking about, uh, groups that come together, and they have very specific character that when people get involved, it can be harmful, uh, to them and their social lives and their financial lives, even their family lives.
So for example, Seth, When we're looking at a harmful cult, one of the things we're looking for is is growing the membership of the group, the highest priority, and in some cases, the biggest priority, which is to say serving the people who are members, helping members grow in some way is either not the top priority or it's a very low priority.
And along often that comes with that, when the number one priority of your group is just to get more members, there's deception involved because there isn't a priority in ensuring people who are participating grow in some meaningful way.
Another, uh, red flag we can look for when we're trying to recognize if a group is a harmful cult is does the, uh, leadership of the cult, um, have accountability to some kind of moral structure other than themselves? So when we look, for example, at mainline religions, uh, there are several layers of hierarchy in authority so that if someone commits wrongdoing within the organization, at least in theory, in structure, there are people that can hold them accountable.
To be fair, there are a lot of examples where those structures did not do their job, and people were negligent in calling out bad behavior.
But nonetheless, the organization doesn't allow any one leader to just ignore all, uh, rules of propriety, uh, legal rules or ethical standards.
And that includes holding people accountable in the organization to the laws of the land in which they live as opposed to rejecting all that.
The third, uh, red flag that I'll mention here where we can recognize that these principles of belonging are used in a way that's creating a harmful cult is it's very difficult for members to leave the group.
Whereas in all the communities that you and I are talking about, Seth, or we won't be a part of, as soon as we recognize that the community, uh, isn't that growing according to values that we wanna grow in, or we are uncomfortable with the actions they're taking, we just leave.
It's as simple as that.
Uh, there may be friends in that group that may call us and encourage us to come back and want to see if, uh, men's can be made, but we are not coerced into staying.
Uh, when we look at harmful cults, very often, they structure it in such a way where it's very difficult for someone to leave financially or there's threat of, say, blackmail if they leave.
So those are three things that are that we can look for that are not part of what we're talking about in using very old ideas using spiritual traditions to bring people together around shared values and purpose.
Worth pointing out here that people are often members of more than one community.
And I was thinking of this to see what we're talking about.
Hey, look, there's a community here, but there's also a larger, you know, community or society that they're part of where there are rules.
Uh, can you talk about you know, maybe the tensions or or how these different communities that people can be part of at the same time, uh, coexist with each other.
Well, I don't know if there needs to be tension.
I mean, I'm just thinking my own life I'm definitely part of a group of parents here in Berkeley that support one another and inform one another and help out with childcare.
I'm also part of a pretty robust mountain adventure community, and I train with people in that group and, uh, I travel with people in that group.
And then I'm part of a group of authors and experts who are trying to get a message out in a world that's in a lot of pain and learning how to use new technology.
And try to say things and create media that actually resonates in a way, uh, that will provide service to people who are looking for it.
I don't think there's a tension between those things.
Obviously, I have to choose where I can invest my time, but I know that those are all different communities that I'm participating in because they serve different parts of my life.
Um, all three of those communities I just mentioned to you are helping me grow to be more effective, maybe more powerful, maybe more comfortable, uh, with the activities I wanna do that I do with each of those communities, mountain sport, parenting, and, uh, being a writer and an expert in our time.
Alright.
So then is it a red flag when you see a community that is blocking your participation in other communities? Is that, uh, something that comes up? It's one of the red flags of a harmful cult is that they don't want members to have strong relationships and in the worst cases, any relationships outside of that group.
Whereas in a healthy community, If we're in a in a podcasting media community seth, I know that you have a family.
I know that you do sport.
I know that you have hobbies and you're gonna spend time and hopefully develop really rich relationships in those areas of your life as well.
As soon as I tell you that you're a bad person or everyone outside of our community is a bad person, and so you should spend virtually all or in fact all of your time with us.
That is definitely a red flag.
Said differently, as I write it in the book, in a healthy community, we understand that the community exists within a dynamic world.
And our activities in our community should in aggregate serve other people in this dynamic world and not just pretend that we have the only way of living or that our activities are the best way and everyone should emulate us.
And that leads right into the next thing that you talk about in the book, which is the three different types of success that people are interested in, and I'm actually gonna put them up on the screen here.
Uh, the first is relative success.
The second is personal maximizing success, and the third is community maximizing success.
So let's take these one by one starting with relative success.
What do you mean by that? Yeah.
Well, it's important that we can recognize these different different relationships of success because when we bring people together, uh, there are gonna be people who we're gonna want to invite to have more leadership roles create events, welcome newcomers, restructure what we do to make them more welcoming and more rich.
And, uh, different people are looking to succeed in a community or life in very different ways.
And if we if we invite people to have more authority and more more control in our communities, but they're not seeking success in a healthy way than their growth in the community, giving them more authority can actually toxify the community, especially when we're bringing people together on shared values, And when people show up amongst the three promises we need to deliver is people need to grow, uh, in some way they wanna grow.
So the first of those three you listed is relative success.
And in relative success, a member, wants to succeed relative to other members.
So you and I have referenced, um, a fictional biking community.
A relative success member wants to be a better Biker, however they define that, faster, longer rides, more adventurous rides, more miles per month, they wanna be a better rider than the other members of the community, not simply just grow and to be a better writer for themselves.
Well, if I just wanna be a better writer than other people, then I'm okay sabotaging other people so that I'm relatively a better writer, in this case, bicycle writer than they are.
Now it may not be a simply matter that I'm gonna sabotage them like break their bicycle or help help them crash, but I'm very uninterested in helping other people be the best riders they can be, have the most fun they can have, maybe, uh, put the most days on a bike that they can have, if I think that's gonna make them a better writer than me.
So you can imagine if we put me in charge of the Barclay bicycle chapter, and I'm really threatened by people who become a better bicyclist than I am, because I want relative success to them, I'm going to impede the growth and the maturation of anybody who's depending on me to help organize our bicycle community.
And so it may look that like I'm really involved, and I like to bike a lot, and I like to bike with other people.
But if you don't recognize that I'm trying to just beat other people at this game, you won't recognize that I'm going to at some level, start, um, encouraging other people to not grow unless I can beat them when we're writing.
So that is viewing success as a zero sum game.
In other words, I want to win, and that requires other people to not do as well.
Not necessarily a zero sum game.
Right? So, like, I may become a better bicycle rider, I might work myself to doing century rides.
And maybe when I started, I could only do 50 miles in a day.
And I would be okay if you, Seth, go from 50 miles to 75.
But if I'm at a hundred, I don't wanna encourage you.
I don't wanna support you, resource you, train you, create a schedule for you if it's gonna get you to a 20, and I'm not there.
So at some point, I'm gonna start sabotaging your development so that I can be the number one writer.
If we have a community that's gonna go pick apples together as an example and I'm a relative success, then I'm going to only want to be with people who are gonna pick less apples than me.
So at the end of the day, I can say I pick the most apples.
And that might include hiding the ladders from you, not because that's gonna help me get more apples.
In fact, every time I hide a ladder, I'm not picking apples.
Right? But if I hide your ladder, then you're gonna pick less apples.
And then at the end of the day, I I can say, oh, look, I pick more apples than Seth.
Now I'll be really involved and I will have gone to the Apple picking, and I might be really friendly, but who wants the guy in charge of the Apple picking day who goes and he hides ladders because he just wants to have the most apples in his bucket at the end of the Apple picking day.
So that makes sense to me.
This second type of success was a little less intuitive to me, and and so, uh, it was interesting to see you point that out.
Uh, explain what personal maximizing success is.
So we can go ahead and look at the Apple picking example that I used in the book, and we all go Apple picking as a group.
If I am approaching our community event for personalized success, then I will do whatever it takes for me to get the most apples I can get.
Now that doesn't mean that I, uh, will stop you from getting more apples than me, but I will only make choices that maximize my success.
So if you say Seth, hey, Charles, you helped me move my ladder to a new tree, and I calculate that to move your ladder means for ten minutes I can't be picking on my tree, then I'm gonna say no, not because I don't like you, not because I don't want you to have lots of apples.
This is like, but I came here to maximize my apples, and so I'm not gonna stop picking apples to move your ladder.
And what's happening then is every choice that happens, where do we mark? What time do we arrive? How many, uh, ladders do we take? Who's gonna carry the ladders? At every step, I'm calculating, well, does this benefit me? In contrast, is, uh, is it helpful that Seth is in our Apple picking group? And Seth can't move his ladder by himself? And so, again, I can be very, very active.
I can pick a lot of apples.
I can be excited that Seth is picking a lot of apples as well, but the calculation is always prioritizing myself, which is fundamentally selfish.
And, uh, if you put me in a leadership role, then I'm not really gonna extend myself for people that I don't understand exactly how that's gonna help me maximize my wits because I'm here for my success.
And if Seth can't move his ladder, tough beans for Seth, I gotta pick my apples, that's what I came for.
So that brings us to the third, uh, motivation here, which is maximizing community success.
Talk about that.
So maximizing community success, uh, in its purest form, when I show up, I'm willing to do whatever it takes that the group of us pick the most apples.
And we could even take that further.
Uh, the group of us can pick the most apples every year, which is to say we make sure the apple trees are healthy for next year, and we get invitation back to the apple orchard.
So if I show up and I want community success, I'm happy to carry ladders with other people and maybe even for other people.
And maybe while you're picking, I'm willing to go get empty buckets from the car and bring them to you to pick apple so that you can stay picking.
Hopefully, in this scenario, we're sharing apples, but even so, um, I'm willing to do this even if I personally Charles might get more apples if I just stood at a tree and kept picking my own apples and didn't move Sesameder move anybody else's ladder or bring anybody else an empty bucket.
Said differently, I'm investing so that all of us are maximizing our success in this project, in this case, Apple picking.
So now when you put me in charge, or give me more authority to organize Apple picking or train people in app Apple picking or just ensure that Apple picking event goes smoothly, nobody gets hurt.
I have a fundamentally generous relationship with everybody who got in the car to Apple picking with us because I am less concerned whether I beat you at Apple picking, Seth.
I'm less concerned whether my Apple bags are the fullest, and I'm more concerned that we, as a group, uh, had a successful Apple Day.
Now, obviously, the way we've described all three of these are letting their pure form.
And I think in the real world, it's a little bit mixed.
I don't wanna go to an Apple Booking Day and only carry empty buckets and only move ladders and have no apples.
And I may not want to, um, go and make sure that everybody is fun, but me, But we need to make sure that our leaders that were inviting into more authority that are planning what we're gonna do aren't stuck in a particularly selfish relationship to success so that they're limiting the success of other members or their calculating how do they personally gain to maximize, and what that does is that's not actually community, that's extraction.
If I go with you and I get a ride with you or share gas to the Apple Orchard, and then I won't help you move a ladder.
And I'm constantly calculating how am I gonna win.
I'm extracting from you as much value as possible.
And as soon as you seth, as an Apple picker, are no longer benefiting me, and I can do it by myself, I wanna ditch you.
If I have maximizing personal success.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with it.
It's an awfully selfish way to live, but it's not good community leadership.
You mentioned that, you know, these are not always in their purest form that they can, uh, you know, have a little bit of from column a and a little bit from column b.
I also imagine that they can change a bit over time that maybe when people are first interested in the community, it might be for more selfish reasons then once they realize and, and become part of the community and the value and start developing those relationships with other people, uh, maybe it becomes a little bit more of, you know, community maximizing that that becomes some of their motivation.
Does that happen? Absolutely seth, and we call that maturation.
So as I become more mature in Apple picking or bike riding or podcasting, hopefully, a part of my maturation is I care more for other people who value what I value and do what I do, and that I help them mature, grow better at what they wanna do or wanna be.
And in as much as I invest in other people succeeding, I am demonstrating maturation, and that's why when we talk about the inner rings principle, it's very important that the people who work up through the inner rings actually expand their realm of concern.
If I show up with that out orchard and I'm less concerned about how full my bucket is.
I I want apples in my bucket.
That's why I'm here.
But I'm less concerned how full it is, and I'm more concerned how other people are also filling buckets.
One way to describe that is I've expanded my realm of concern.
I'm concerned not only for my it, I have concern of other people's buckets, and that means I'll help Seth move a ladder for the sake of his bucket.
I wanna talk about online communities because the principles that you discussed in this book uh, as you've mentioned several times, go back thousands of years, uh, and these are time honored principles.
But we have some new ways of employing these principles, uh, thanks to new technology and the rise of the internet.
Uh, you know, and I mentioned things like, uh, Facebook groups or Slack channels or Discord servers, and you start to see communities that are built online.
You actually do talk about advantages to building community online.
They do allow us to do some things that we have been unable to do before.
Can you talk a little bit about what some of those advantages are? I'm happy to talk about the advantages.
It's it's important that we acknowledge before we talk about online communities.
Because so many people just assume they are the silver bullet to our loneliness, and they are the go to structure that we should create when we wanna bring people together.
We need to say it on the front side that the research shows that online connection and online communities are a very weak substitute for in person experiences.
So if you're bringing together podcasters or Apple pickers or bicyclists even if it's only four times a year, it is important to understand that that in person time is critically important and quite frankly changes everything.
With that said, yes, there are really powerful advantages online, uh, not the least of which is we can bring people together who are physically incapable of coming together in person, either because of medical challenges or legal challenges or even just the expense of bringing people together from around the world.
So that's one of them.
Another one is it's really inexpensive to do that because we don't need to find a building that's big enough.
We don't need to set up chairs.
We don't need to make sure that the heating works.
And we don't need to make sure there's enough parking.
So if expenses are real issue, having people connect online eliminates, you know, that all kind of stuff.
And where we really find it, uh, helpful is when there's a stigma connected to the reason people are gathering.
So if there's something that I don't want you to know Seth that I'm wrestling with, say abuse in the home or trauma that I'm surviving, and I don't wanna broadcast that.
I may not want to put up a flyer or necessarily show up in a room that has the sign outside that says, you know, this trauma survivors meet here, you know, 10AM.
But online, we can do that very, very quietly.
And then re meet regularly with a much lower chance of exposure to tell the whole world that that's a group that we wanna be part of, um, if that's a part of our life that has stigma.
So those are some of the advantages And like you say in the book, I mean, the disadvantage really comes down to, uh, online.
It's just not the same thing as being in the same room with people.
Uh, and so oh, go yeah.
Go ahead.
Well, it's not that it's just the same thing.
We just know it's much less powerful, and the research has been coming out to show exactly in what ways.
So for example, we know that even the smell even the smell of people that we meet with in person makes a difference in how much we feel connected to them.
We also know that there's a great number of nonverbal cues that we interpret when we meet with people that help us feel comfortable and connected that are missing when we do that online.
And there's also the issue that we just don't like being online.
Uh, the example I give, Seth, is if, uh, I invited you to my home on Friday night from 06:00 to 09:00 you know, to share good pizza and maybe soda, uh, you might be excited for that evening at least to find out if it's a good time.
If I ask you to jump online with me from 06:00 to 09:00 on a Friday night, you'd laugh out loud.
It's just evidence.
We don't even like doing it, and then we want people to do more of it to connect.
And the worst part is we know it takes longer for people to connect emotionally online than it does in person.
So it's a less efficient way to create those relationships and we all want to do less of it.
And when you just play that out for a year or several years in a family or in a workplace, what that translates to is far, far less connection.
Now the good news here is that this is not necessarily an either or.
You can actually create communities that take advantage of being in person, but also sometimes have online communication or find ways to get together online.
Do you see organizations doing that successfully? Absolutely.
Um, I can just say that, for example, my wife works for a large tech company, and, uh, they are remote around the country.
And so she overwhelmingly sees them in person.
They do do have, uh, gatherings every few months where they meet in a city and have several days together.
And I'm mentioning this because just this last year at one of these events where she gathered with some colleagues that she talked to several times a week, She discovered that one of her colleagues had a spouse die of cancer, uh, within the year.
And my wife felt terrible because she's been talking to this person several times a week for months and months and no idea he lost a spouse.
And it would didn't come up until they were sharing meals together in person.
And it was a great reflection about how they had a certain level of connection online, but as soon as they started sharing live meals together a whole another level opened up.
He felt comfortable sharing things he could not share online, and then she could, uh, express and feel a whole level empathy for someone who had lost a spouse that she couldn't express before.
So both parts are important when people are remote.
And what that means is we have to make an investment.
If the company had not invested for them to all fly in, they put up and share those meals, that conversation among many, many others, about what, uh, they were dealing with outside of work would have never come up.
Let's take a moment and do a deep dive here.
I wanna go through each of these seven principles that we have just been talking about in this video series.
And let's talk about each of them in the context of, uh, online communities versus in person communities and talk about which ones maybe lend themselves naturally and and are easier to do online and which ones are more challenging and sort of the advantages and disadvantages of each.
Let's start with the boundary principle.
I mean, how does that principle work online? So same thing online as it is in real life.
You need to make sure that people you're inviting to participate.
Understand what are the values and our purpose of your gathering and need to assess should they be here? And if they shouldn't be there, then you need to have a way of inviting them out and protecting the inside so that it's safe.
Often, that's very easy because um, online gathering.
There's usually a way that someone has to get permission or maybe even get the link to join.
And so that's an easy way to keep people out.
And it needs to be used, which is to say that if you post that link and let everybody come all the time, chances, you'll have people gathering in a way where they feel safe to talk about a very specific subject in a way that's important to them will go down.
You know, when we talked about this principle, one of the things we talked about was this idea of a distinction between an announcement and an invitation.
An invitation is where somebody knows that they are welcome to come to an event and will be missed if they don't come to an event whereas an announcement is just sort of a, hey, this is happening.
Hey, we're gathering.
Yeah.
Right.
It strikes me that online where you're talking about mass emails, it is very easy to accidentally be sending out announcements when you really need to be making invitations.
Absolutely.
And I think that there's a default in our culture to shoot out announcements and mistakenly believe they have the power of invitation.
Whereas if I actually host a dinner party where I'm going to make a dish my mother serve me for years, it's pretty clear I'm only gonna invite a number of people because my house is only so big and long to make so much food, and those invitations are gonna resonate much deeper than just an announcement.
Hey, Charles is making something with teriyaki tonight.
Alright.
So the second principle then is initiation and this is the idea of a ritual or something to help people across that boundary to let them know when they are actually becoming a member of the group.
What does this look like online? It's very important that at some point when someone joins that they take an action where they're committing to participating at some level.
We talked earlier about how there should be a visitor ring where people can just check out to see, is this a group I wanna spend time with? And then when they're done, there's needs to be some kind of act where they're choosing to be more committed.
This can be done with online tokens and access to particular levels in a community where there's perhaps more private conversation going on or access to even smaller conversations with people who we know are really committed to learning and grow in a certain way.
Uh, but there needs to be some kind of very clear action that lets them know Okay.
You're no longer visiting.
We're giving you access to something.
You're you're participating in something that is not open to the public.
And when we talked about the third principle, that was rituals.
And one of the things that came through really clear in our conversation was that when you're hosting a ritual, you are changing the space.
You are making it different.
And we talked about lots of different ways to do that.
If it's normally quiet, you make it loud.
If it's normally loud, you make it quiet.
We talked about lights and and color, and we even talked about raising things up off the ground.
And it strikes me as I'm just listing them off there.
Those are all things that are very difficult to do online.
How do rituals work online? So there are a number of people who've been thinking about how to create rituals online, and I there are books available for that.
CurSat out of the Stanford, uh, Design School has written a whole book on rituals online.
And my understanding is, uh, what's very, uh, useful is just calling out a very clear and tension, and then doing an act, having shares that are different than how the time is is usually used.
And that cues people to understand that this time online, where the rituals happening is sacred or said differently, it's set aside.
To honor something that's different, something that's changing.
The fourth principle is temples.
Uh, this is about, you know, creating a space.
Is that something you can do? I mean, is a website? Is a Facebook group? Can that be a temple? Yeah.
Well, when we talk about temples in the book, uh, I define them as a place where the community goes to enact their rituals.
And, of course, we discussed how rituals mean something people in the groups, they may seem very, very silly to people outside the community.
And so online platforms can provide a type of temple where people gather and they do things that make sense to them and have meaning to them.
That other people think are silly.
Uh, you know, for years, I was advising, uh, the people who are designing the Twitch platform online, which has a quarter billion numbers.
And there are many, many insider understanding activities and symbols and responses in Twitch.
That means something to the members that don't mean very much to you or me.
And so in that way, this giant platform twitch has created if you will little temples where groups can convene, uh, within the greater Twitch universe because Twitch is made of a collection of many, many different types of enthusiasm and gaming.
And, uh, they've successfully brought symbols and brought rituals and made safe place for their members to find one another with their very specific meanings.
The fifth principle is stories.
We talked about this.
This strikes me as something that probably translates a little bit easier to online.
Does it? Yeah.
As a matter of fact, making stories that are important for the community public are very easy online because blogs have been around for a long time.
Podcasts are an easy way to do that.
And also when we put people in rooms to other to share private campfire experiences, uh, the stories come out.
So stories are very easy to, uh, share an online format, and they make an enormous difference.
Uh, we also talked about Cymbals.
That's the sixth principle.
Um, do symbols work online? What are digital symbols? We specifically talked about tokens.
Uh, can you do digital tokens, or can you even, you know, still do physical tokens even if you've got an online community? Yes and yes.
Uh, there are many online tokens, uh, symbols that indicate how senior someone is, what authority they have, what their experiences are, and they're used all over.
Twitch actually developed uh, very specific, uh, symbols that can be used across their platform and that meant something to members to indicate rank as far as authority in managing the space, uh, seniority and, also expressing, uh, emotion, something far beyond the emojis that we have outside of Twitch, they created a whole really universe of that.
And those are all symbols that mean something internally.
And absolutely, when an organization, a platform sends a physical item that honors the status somebody has in their platform, that's a physical token, uh, that goes on walls or goes on dressers.
And, uh, there's no reason not to use them just because primarily members are meeting online.
I've seen that in places.
For example, uh, I host my website on, uh, the kajabi platform.
And when people hit certain milestones, other Kajabi users, they will actually send things like a metal or a t shirt to them.
Uh, and so they are still using those physical tokens, even though the people primarily know each other through online these.
And then it actually goes back and forth because people will then take photos of those tokens and share them digitally.
And so you start to see them again.
So that's interesting how you can kind of work.
And, Seth, I would say that that photograph they're taking and the fact they're sharing is equivalent of lifting it up, putting it in the center and lighting it, which is exactly what you do with something that you think is special in a physical space.
No.
That makes a lot of sense.
Uh, alright, that brings us to the last principal.
How does this work online? That is the inner rings principle.
Right.
Well, we definitely see this online because in a community, uh, different people have different roles and different authority in how online communities are organized.
Can they create event? Can they uphold the rules? Can they create a whole new subgroup? Can they invite people in? Can they kick people out? Uh, these are all different responsibilities that are spread around, and especially when we look at very, very large communities online involving hundreds of thousands or millions There can meet thousands of people that, uh, have these roles.
Of course, inner rings aren't simply about just do you have authority? That's one type of progression inner rings.
Inner rings are also about, how we are maturing in a certain way in a community.
And definitely there are inner rings in communities online where not everybody has access to every conversation all the time.
And so online isn't right now is a good place where interrings can be separated, and people can understand what inner ring they're part of, and also be labeled that way so others can understand, uh, what inner ring somebody has earned their way into.
So then I want you to give practical advice to two types of people.
And and we'll do one and then the other.
Uh, start with somebody who finds themself managing or leading a community that maybe predates the internet.
Maybe it's an organization that's been around for a long time and is now trying to figure out how to adapt that community for a world where we're online, you know, what should they be thinking about? What should they be doing? And then let's go the other direction.
Let's talk to somebody who maybe is tasked with launching or managing an online community, and, uh, it is now getting to the point where they wanna start thinking about how to bring that community together in person so that they can have some of these deeper connections and some of the things that come with being in the same room as the other community members.
What advice would you give to them? So on the first the first imagined person you described where they've meeting offline, it's time to online, you know, uh, and I quite frankly have met these groups as part of a mountain adventure, culture.
I meet people who've been mountain adventuring since the seventies, and the internet is very confusing to them.
So one of the things I want them to understand is understand how information can be shared and made infinitely accessible, rules, expectations, etiquette, schedules, uh, that could not be made before.
And we can also update that information very quickly.
Right? So if no no longer meeting, uh, Tuesdays or meeting on Thursdays, it's very, very easy for me to change the document online.
And how everybody see that as opposed to printing something up and mailing it out, uh, to everybody.
So think about how information is shared.
Also, if you've been only meeting in person and you want more members, think about how you can post the stories that are important to the formation of your group and how people are maturing on the in that group in some form online so people who are trying to find you understand, oh, these are the people doing what I wanna do, and they're doing it for the reasons I wanna do it.
And I don't need to go and find them at a coffee shop and spend two hours hoping I get the stories.
I can just find the stories there.
Obviously, different ways of doing that.
It used to be used to write it up, and now video is king.
But nonetheless, understand there are people who wanna be part of a community that wanna hear those stories, and you can put them online.
And then as far as the in person where you said they, uh, they're starting an online community, but you want me to help them understand the importance of in person.
First of all, to understand the in person matters.
And, you know, we very often see what groups have become very important to one another online.
Meeting in person becomes an aspirational activity.
And so don't dismiss that.
And if that sounds intimidating because of the expense or the involvement, uh, think humbly.
People very much just like a room with hot soup and crusty bread.
If you don't like soup and crusty bread, just change those nouns.
Very often when you think of gathering people in a humble way, it reduces our expectation of how much work it will be, and we can just see what unfolds And then when, uh, after we have very humble events, maybe even small events, then we can see where gravity pulls us if we wanna make it, uh, longer or more complicated gathering involving multi day gatherings or, uh, organized activities and not simply people just sharing hot meals together.
But starting with her shared hot meals is a perfectly good place to start.
You know, I think that's one of my biggest takeaways from these conversations that we've been having is that you talk about these seven principles.
And look, in well established communities, often they are very elaborate, but that often they can be quite as effective in small gestures that, you know, having that pizza party where you just take a moment to raise a glass and thank everybody for being there and for being part of that community.
Uh, you know, that that sometimes that's all it takes, and it can be just these small things as long as you pause and take the time to do that.
You're right, Seth, that it can be a very humble event.
You know, one of the things you and I have talked about is, uh, there are a few investments we can make when we're trained to make a humble pizza party meaningful.
And you know, you said raise a glass and thank everybody for coming.
You know, so we call that in my work, the punctuating collect, collect as in collecting people, punctuating as in marking the beginning of something.
And it makes a difference for people when they understand, oh, there's a host.
In this case, Seth, standing up and punctuating the beginning of this event and not just letting it like, oh, it's kinda started.
I think the pizza's out now, and then collecting everybody and saying, um, we have gathered to do this thing to make friendships.
That might take thirty seconds or a minute.
It makes a difference.
And there are a whole number of things we can do like that that may go invisible.
They're very easy to do, but by doing that, it changes a very humble gathering from just being at what I call gather and hope.
I put people in a room, ordered pizza and hoped it would all work out to something that has intentionality and can be a venue for really rich conversations.
So because of that, one of the things I've done is I've written a number of guidelines example, for nonprofit organizations, for education professionals, and for military families so far, and those are free for download on my site under growth resources so that someone can learn from those lessons and turn a very simple pizza party into something that could generate really rich relationships and be the beginning of something that's really powerful.
That's what's so amazing to me about reading the book is that once you understand these seven principles, you start to see these punctuations all over the place, and you start to realize how how present they are in our lives, maybe without us fully understanding why or or how they came to be there, but they they really are.
Uh, and so that's really amazing.
Yeah.
Let me reiterate here, Seth.
We've been through all seven principles.
They're not there as a checklist for everybody who wants to bring people together.
You know, I think of all these things we've talked about, uh, much like, uh, cookbook.
If I'm making you dinner, Seth, I'm not gonna make sure that there's a fried dish and a grilled dish, and a steamed dish, and a broil dish, and a braised dish, that's ridiculous.
You may wanna just come over for fried chicken, and that's good enough.
So I don't want anybody to hear this conversation thing.
Oh, this is what I have to do to make a good community.
No.
These are all options or tools or ideas you can use when you're ready, when they're helpful, when you have the bandwidth to bring people together in an ever more powerful way.
And just like if you and I Seth created a restaurant and maybe created meals across the country, eventually, There would be fried food and steamed food and broiled food and braised food.
Not because we have to have that all the time, but because well, now we're making lots of meals for lots of people.
So for those who hear this, please understand, start humbly.
We've articulated all these things so you know they're available to you so that you know, uh, there are ways to bring people together more powerfully when you're ready.
And please don't do that until you're ready, and that would be fun and make the experience more powerful.
Alright.
Well, there it is.
Uh, we have come to the end of our conversations.
Are there any final words you wanna say to anybody who is out there who is either in charge of a community, a leader in the community now, or aspiring to be a leader in a community? Yes.
Absolutely.
So when I meet people, and I do often who are investing themselves, bring people together, whether it's humbly, a group of friends in their neighborhood, or on a giant level, say across a, uh, a national education institution, or even people who work with military families, they're trying to bring people together around, literally around the world.
Um, I have the same piece of wisdom I wanna share, is that you think you know the difference you're making with the people you're inviting.
And I know that you're wrong.
I know that you're making a much more powerful difference than you know.
For example, the research is clear that uh when we meet people we all generally underestimate how much other people like spending their time with us.
And when we're spending time with people, they underestimate how much time we like of the time with them.
So at all these events we're creating, even if there's only three people there, even if people aren't going on and on how great it was, uh, this thing that's called the liking gap, the difference between how much we people like spending time with us and how much they do is going on all around us.
So when you create these vents, when you invite people, when you're trying to assess, do people like spending time with me? No.
You're almost certainly wrong.
People like it more than you know.
People don't share how powerful the time was for them, sometimes for embarrassing reasons.
So I want you to trust that what you're doing is far more important than you know and that's a reason to keep on going.
Charles, thank you so much.
The book is the Art of Community Seven Principles for Belonging.
Second edition is out now.
And like I've said over and over again, there's even more information in there than there was in the first edition.
Uh, look, these have been really enlightening conversations for me.
So I really appreciate you taking the time to do it.
Thank you for being a part of this.
Well, it's wonderful, Seth, that you and I get to talk about something that's important to both of us, and that we know without exaggeration when others start playing with these ideas, uh, it literally can make a difference for more than one generation, and that's really pretty powerful
