The Power of Collaboration

From my experience I have had a lot of challenges when it comes to collaborating with others, it has always been an uphill battle working with others when it comes to putting ideas together to achieve a goal, not necessarily because I am bad at collaboration but mostly for the reasons listed below. Despite this, I understand clearly the power of working together, and I know there is very little anyone of us can do alone. No matter how smart, strong, resilient, powerful you are there is always going to be a limit to how far you can go alone but when we all work together towards a common goal, there is no limit to how far we can go.

Everybody I believe understands this much, but there are just some reasons which still hold us back and prevent us from working together at least to a certain extent. I am not implying that we can’t work together, or we aren’t already, but I think we could be doing more.

Reasons why we can’t work together

Lack of trust and communication

In a world where everybody is doing ok and everybody has enough to eat or at least isn’t struggling to survive, you can trust people’s intentions to a certain degree but when that's not the case, you can’t guarantee what interests the other person will be fighting for and their survival instinct might push them to betray you at any time. This is one of the major issues which comes with collaborating with others, its knowing where their interests lie, is it with the project or personal. People might share the same ideas with you, but that doesn’t mean your interests are all aligned, for example you might be working on a project for altruistic reasons while they do it for personal gain, eventually this will create conflicts in decision-making.

Ego and competition

We all do have ego to a certain extent, and when working on a project its important not to let our ego get in the way of making the right decisions. Unfortunately, some people have an overinflated ego which eventually leads to the downfall of the project because it affects their actions and decisions. People have different levels of importance when working on a project, this isn’t often proportional to their ego, a person might have a very little importance to a project yet have a lot of ego which might corrupt others.

Closed Thinking

A closed mindset which refuses to change and welcome new ideas can often spell defeat for any collaboration. Working together isn’t just a matter of 1 or 2 persons but a collaboration which might imply 200 or even 1000 persons, in such a case being closed off to new ideas is sure to stifle growth and progress especially when people don’t feel appreciated or allowed to contribute.

Clear goals

When working together it's easy for the goals to evolve rightfully or wrongfully so, as we meet different challenges we try to adapt and this sometimes refocuses the goals. We have to be careful not to miss the mark and deviate totally from the initial goal which brought everybody together

What can we do together

I think when you look around you, there is no doubt as to what the power of collaboration is able to do. From the small examples all around us like the buildings, equipments and innovation we use on a daily basis to fully functional societies made up of millions of persons working together. I have yet to see a worthwhile innovation built by a single person, that's virtual impossible given that even what they know, they learned it from somewhere, from the research of somebody else. Closed off civilizations are still living in the Stone Age, for any civilization to grow, collaboration is inevitable.

At your small level that means working with your neighbors to fix up your neighborhood, collaborating with friends on projects which can help everyone, building businesses which can scale to thousands of people etc There is only so far you can go if you walk alone, only so much you can do by yourself but by actively working with others, we get the chance to do amazing things.

Here are some examples of some of the most audacious projects and the estimated number of persons involved

• Human Genome Project — 13 years (1990–2003) : Thousands to tens of thousands
• The Great Wall of China Construction-Over 2,000 years : Estimated millions
• The International Space Station (ISS)-Ongoing (since 1998) : Hundreds to thousands
• The Panama Canal Construction-33 years (1881–1914) : Tens of thousands
• The Apollo Moon Landing Program-11 years (1961–1972) : Hundreds of thousands
• The Manhattan Project-6 years (1942–1945) : Tens of thousands
• The Transcontinental Railroad Construction-6 years (1863–1869) : Tens of thousands

Now you can imagine what you can do with 10 friends, 100 friends, 1000 friends. The sky is the limit. Obviously collaboration is far from being an easy task, but the results are totally worth all the work. What are some projects you think you could do if you had 1000 friends collaborating with you?

Thanks for reading ☺️

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