Why I Don’t Fly Solo

I’m an unabashed team player and you should be one too

Yesterday, I quit my day job to become part of a venture I’ve had my hand in for a while, Goopply, a growing community tech news website. If you come to find out more about it, you will see that we are searching to find folks who would be interested to join the Goopply team.

So far, we are a crew of four including myself. We started with two, and brought two onto our team the one month we’ve been running. We have been aggressively trying to find more people to enlist on our team, and we had gotten letters of interest from more people who wanted to be a contributor for the website. But upon connecting with these folks, we decided it was in our best interest not to bring in some of these individuals into the fold. What was the key factor that kept us from letting them into the team? The absence of a team-based mindset.

Teamwork and collaboration are at the core of our values here at Goopply. When Matt and I started drawing a blueprint for the website, we both shared this principle as foundational for future growth. We cannot emphasize enough that it is much more beneficial for you to join a team as opposed to pursuing your dreams alone. Here are some key reasons why we believe this:

The power of synergy: 1 + 1 > 2. You can almost always count on the fact that when you link minds and efforts with even just one another person, you end up accomplishing more than you both could’ve done individually on your own. This phenomenon, synergy, is the basis on which most companies are built, and rightly so. Don’t underestimate the power of this.

You get a more well rounded perspective, not just a tunnel vision into your own thoughts. I don’t know about you, but I almost always start with a pretty lousy prototype of an idea. What helps me get from that idea to a viable opportunity is the perspective of others. You can’t do this very well on your own. We are too jaded by our own excitement and hope to succeed to not want to think about the potential obstacles and road blocks. But trust me, that perspective could be just the thing your idea needs right now.

You learn to work with people who are different from you and learn to be more accessible as a whole. If you are part of a business, organization, startup or just looking to appeal to a mass audience, it is important to understand how different people can be and why these differences matter, and how your product or service could fit in with these differences. This can only be done if you put yourselves in a team, filled with people from backgrounds different from you and with different personal vantage points. A team of diverse individuals can be indicative of how your mass audience will be, helping you polish your pitch for the world out there.

Here’s the deal: Gone are the days when you live in your little community with your little traditions, going about your little routine. This is the age of the internet, the global village, and classical culture as we know it is disseminating to an amalgam of different world cultures, along with religion, politics, language, technology and much more. You can choose to withdraw yourself from it all, or you can embrace it, dare yourself to collaborate with people who don’t look, talk or think like you, and benefit from the exchange of ideas happening, and improve your own ideas accordingly.

Those are some of the essential reasons I will always take the opportunity to work on a team towards achieving any goal. I am not my best, and often am my worst, as a lone wolf. I’m willing to bet that if you assess yourself well, you’ll find that, at the very least, there’s room for improvement that can come only by being part of something bigger than yourself.

This is why I love being the editor in chief at Goopply. I get to already work with a multi-faceted, international, interesting team of four who share a common love for technology, social media, and the digital world. If you are a fan of these things, and are now inspired to join a team, we hope you’ll consider joining the Goopply team. We’d be thrilled if you do.