Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much.
—HELEN KELLER
IT’S OKAY TO FOCUS on yourself, to reflect on what you need, to invest in your future. It’s equally important to spend time strengthening your community.
If you spend an hour or two on social media every night, set aside some of that time to meet someone for coffee or attend a concert. It’s possible you feel you don’t have the time or energy to do so, but that may be because you’re unknowingly wasting it online. If you have only two hours’ worth of social energy each day, you can either spend that time arguing with someone on Facebook or hanging out with a friend.
Don’t think about these face-to-face meetings as a waste of your time; they are, in fact, an incredibly good use of time. Lack of social connection is even associated, at times, with less money. When you feel happy, you are more likely to make positive connections with other people, and those connections can lead to increased income. People who are less lonely often have more income.
The social psychologist Gillian Sandstrom is an expert in social interactions and conversations. She and Elizabeth Dunn ran an experiment in 2014 that found many people often avoid chats with grocery store clerks and baristas because they’re in a hurry. And yet, we enjoy a lot of benefits if we take a minute to strike up those conversations. “In the current study,” wrote Sandstrom and Dunn, “people who had a social interaction with a barista (i.e., smiled, made eye contact, and had a brief conversation) experienced a more positive effect than people who were as efficient as possible.” That’s why they ultimately titled the report “Is Efficiency Overrated?”
We persistently resist the impulse to chat, though, and I’m not entirely sure why. I traveled to the United Kingdom and spent a few days with Dr. Sandstrom in order to figure out why we avoid the social interaction that we desperately need. Sandstrom is trying to answer that question too, and believes it may be fear and anxiety that prevent people from reaching out. So she is running an experiment in the hopes that she can train people to talk to strangers and therefore increase their level of comfort with social interaction.
For the experiment, study participants are assigned missions every day through a specialized mobile app. Those missions direct them to compliment someone on their sweater or talk to a person wearing glasses. Participants were required to talk with no fewer than four strangers over the course of a week.
I sat in on a training session for the experiment and asked the people there if they thought they would find it difficult to converse with four strangers a week. Most (more than 80 percent that I spoke to) said yes. Yet I later spoke with several people who had already completed the experiment, and they all said they enjoyed it and found it easy. One student, Amber Brad, said she was disappointed at first to find that she had to talk to people in person instead of texting them, but ended up having a good time. “You can’t really express emotions through text,” she told me. “Things can be taken the wrong way.”
Another student, Donnell Perkins, agreed with her: “Texting is not a real conversation. There are so many emotions that come up in conversation. I got a mood boost from the longer conversations I had. I even tried to extend those talks because I enjoyed them more.” I was fairly surprised to hear these sentiments from young people, since 75 percent of millennials would rather have a phone that can only text than one that only makes phone calls.
I heard echoes of these sentiments again and again when I spoke with people who’d already completed Dr. Sandstrom’s experiment. These are roughly the same results researchers have found during experiments around the globe: People generally expect to hate talking with people in person and on the phone, but enjoy it when they’re forced to do it. That’s why it’s important that you force yourself to do it.
Unfortunately, our lives are no longer designed to accommodate social interactions. Our cars have become tiny living spaces, our phones allow us to distance ourselves from others, even our homes have become bubbles that we rarely have to leave. The ratio of lot size to home size has declined over the past few decades as people added more space inside and stopped spending time outdoors.
One staff member at the University of Essex told me the experimental game had encouraged her to finally speak to some of her neighbors. Mandy Fox, a project officer in human resources, told me she’d seen several of the people on her street before, working in their gardens or walking their dogs, but she’d never spoken to them. “The game gave me an excuse to say hello, and I’ve talked briefly with several of them since,” she told me. “And the same thing happened with the janitor at my daughter’s school. I’ve seen him dozens of times, standing just a few feet away from him and never saying a word. I talked to him for the experiment and now we chat every time I see him.”
If it’s true that many of us need an excuse to start conversations with strangers or to talk with neighbors, I give you full permission to use me as your excuse. Tell them you’re required to talk with someone every day, if that helps. Chat with your coworkers and your taxidriver. You may dread small talk, but study after study shows that those conversations make you healthier, happier, and more relaxed. The benefits of authentic social interaction are immediate and primal. Set aside some time to talk with friends or make sure that you make contact with strangers when you’re out and about.
In this day and age, it’s unlikely that other people will strike up a conversation with you on the elevator or the subway, so take the initiative and say good morning. As the behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley has said, few people wave, but almost everyone waves back.
Humans are so biologically primed to take benefit from social encounters that we get a bump to our mood and mental health even when a stranger simply makes eye contact and nods as they pass us on the street. Just that small gesture—a smile or a nod or a wave—helps you feel more connected to your community. That brief hello from someone on the elevator can make you feel as though you belong.
These brief interactions are no replacement for long-lasting relationships, of course, and will not truly fulfill your need for belongingness, but they will make you feel better and less stressed. They also may encourage you to invest more in either finding a confidant or spending more time with the close friends you have.
If you take away nothing else from this book, I hope you understand that human beings are at their best when they are social, and human minds work best in connection with other human minds. It may not be the most efficient way to live, but it’s the most likely to foster well-being.
Join a club, go to a book talk at your library or bookstore, sign up for a group hike at a local park. It may sound old-fashioned to become a member of a bowling league or a Rotary club, but those kinds of social networks can quite literally save your life. My son spends every Saturday playing complicated board games with his friends at a local gaming café.
Playing cards with your cousin might seem silly, and gossiping with an old school friend might seem frivolous, but socializing regularly can add as many years to your life as quitting smoking. Avoiding social contact is making us sicker, and seeking it out will make us healthier. It really is that simple.
Because human beings are beautifully designed to work in conjunction and collaboration with other humans, the next change you should make is to work in teams whenever possible. Perhaps the most effective solution to our modern obsession with productivity and efficiency is to tap in to the human hive mind. In the words of Rudyard Kipling, “The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.” It may sound cool to be a “lone wolf,” but real lone wolves don’t survive as long.
We have evolved to think in groups and bounce ideas off others. Analysis of data from diverse industries going back decades shows that even the most experienced expert reaches better conclusions when their recommendations are merged with the advice of less-knowledgeable people.
Brainstorming, or generating new ideas, is often best done alone, when people can focus in quiet. But the process of evaluating those ideas and choosing the best path forward should be a group activity. Study after study shows that groups of people outperform individuals on a wide range of tasks, from math to linguistic problems to business decisions. Groups of three to five students repeatedly outperformed even the smartest individuals, and they were less prone to mistakes.
Oddly, we tend to do the opposite in the working world. We call brainstorming meetings in order to generate new ideas and then return to our offices to decide which idea will best suit our needs. This practice should be flipped on its head. Brainstorm alone and evaluate or analyze as a group. A good rule of thumb is that diverse groups who are allowed to make decisions independently will outperform even the most expensive consultant.
We often decide to make decisions alone because we feel it’s more efficient. “Design by committee” is a common insult, used to describe a project that’s flawed and uninspired because it included the input of too many people. Most of us have had some experience with meetings at work in which coworkers shot down good ideas, quibbled over meaningless details, or consistently supported the safest option.
The error in these situations, though, was not in gathering input from many people but in trying to reach consensus without minimal conflict. Consensus is about being comfortable and avoiding arguments, but comfort is the enemy of innovation.
Cognitive diversity is disconcerting to many people because it almost always brings differing opinions, but it is essential for creative problem-solving and accuracy. It is what our big Homo sapiens brains are designed to respond to and exploit.
Again and again, we’ve seen that better decisions are made by polling all employees of an organization than by relying on the judgment of a CEO or one executive team. “However well-informed and sophisticated an expert is, his advice and predictions should be pooled with those of others to get the most out of him,” James Surowiecki says in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. “The more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.”
Most businesses are not set up to gather the opinions of all employees, though, so how might this look in practice? Let’s say you’re deciding on a venue for an annual conference. You ask the members of your team to send their ideas, so they’re coming up with proposals independently. Then you gather those ideas and sift through them as a group. Research shows you’ll then make the best choice by polling everyone you can. Send out a mass email and ask everyone to vote. That increases your chances of getting the best decision.
Here’s the bottom line: The average of answers from a large, independent, and diverse group of people will often be more accurate than the answer arrived at by a smart individual or a small group of smart people. In our culture, which focuses on personal achievement and sometimes worships charismatic individuals like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, this advice can seem counterintuitive, but it’s backed by decades and decades of evidence from a wide variety of industries.
I know it feels more efficient to work alone, but the point of this book is to encourage you to ask more questions about efficiency. Does your current process really save time, or are you taking that on faith? Are you hoping merely to save a little time or to do the best work, find the best solution, live your best life?
It’s essential that we ask these kinds of questions so we can clearly articulate our goals instead of blindly investing in strategies and tools that promise to improve our lives but don’t explain what’s being improved or what the end result will be. Let’s be honest: I’m not sure most of us have stopped to consider what our larger goals are. There’s no time for that.
The world can be a cruel place, so it might surprise you to know that science has proven, over and over, that humans are mostly kind. Kindness is intuitive for the vast majority of us, and given the choice to treat people well or treat them badly, we generally choose the former. Goodwill is human and natural.
It turns out, we are most likely to be unkind when we overthink things and get wrapped up in our own thoughts, our own issues. Since self-absorption is a global phenomenon at this point, it can be useful to intentionally break that pattern and reestablish habitual kindness.
So, if you truly want to break free of the obsession with efficiency, practice random acts of kindness. I’m not telling you this because I think it’s the moral or nice thing to do (even if it is). I’m telling you to do this because years of research proves that doing nice things for other people, even small things, is incredibly good for you. As the psychotherapist and Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello wrote: “Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism.”
Humans are biologically incentivized to be kind to each other, and we’re rewarded by our bodies when we do it. Committing a selfless act triggers a release of endorphins, the neurotransmitters that help block feelings of pain and even create a euphoric sensation. Altruism can produce the same elation as vigorous exercise, an effect that’s sometimes called the “helper’s high.”
There may be a physical benefit as well, since people who volunteer regularly tend to live longer and be healthier. There are a great many variables that might affect this finding, though, so it’s not possible to know the precise nature of the connection. It could be that the types of people who volunteer are also more active or less likely to engage in risky behaviors like smoking. Still, there is a connection between altruism and physical health that we simply don’t understand yet.
Another significant benefit, especially for those who are driven and busy, is that focusing on someone else’s needs helps to distract you from what’s going wrong in your own life. As long as what you do for another is not so difficult or time-consuming that it becomes overwhelming, a random act of kindness can be healing during times of stress.
The link between kindness and happiness is not new. It’s been a theme of literature and morality tales for hundreds of years, and many of us watch it play out again every year through some version of Charles Dickens’s tale of Ebenezer Scrooge. A study from the 1980s demonstrated that families who donated their deceased loved one’s organs felt better and less depressed. Even people who suffered from chronic pain or cancer found they felt better after helping someone else.
In an article for the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, the author Stephen G. Post reviews the scientific case for kindness and points to an evolutionary connection. “Anthropologists discovered that early egalitarian societies (such as the bushmen) practice institutionalized or ‘ecological altruism,’ ” Post wrote, “where helping others is not an act of volunteerism but a social norm. Perhaps those of us in contemporary technological cultures are isolated in various respects and have strayed too far from our altruistic proclivities.” Perhaps this is one more negative side effect of our increasingly isolated lives.
Kindness is certainly good for others and good for society, but I’ll let others make the ethical case for generosity. Here, I’m focused on the benefits to the agent of altruism, not the target. I would argue that doing one small selfless act every day could reduce your stress significantly and increase your well-being.
While you are making your checklist of things to do, just include one act of kindness, no matter how small, and you may eventually see a significant impact on your stress level and health. The person you’re kind to, by the way, is also more likely to be kind to someone else.
Imagine this: You’re in the drive-through getting lunch and you decide to pay for the person behind you as well. That means they are more likely to pay for the person behind them. It also means that you’re all helping each other to break away from a cultural emphasis on individual needs and ultimately reengage your instinctive (and kind) human nature. That’s a pretty big bang for your buck.