Why is Everyone Crying?
A True Story of Community
Every morning I wake up with a heavy burden. There are 30 people who have traveled across the world to Exosphere in Reñaca, our little neighborhood in Viña del Mar, Chile, to forge themselves into self-reliant entrepreneurs. We aren’t a normal incubator. We do incubate start-ups, but that is our by-product, not our product. We work with people to improve themselves.
It’s strange, even to me, when I step back and think about it. We read American Transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson and the late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck alongside Nassim Taleb, Jaron Lanier, and FAKEGRIMLOCK—World Famous Robot Startup Dinosaur.
Participants arriving here don’t know what to expect, and we readily admit that our program guide is just a guess. We don’t know, from day to day, exactly what is going to happen either. It’s a huge risk, and it has alienated some people—we’ve lost a number of staff because of it. Planning is one way out of chaos, but it is not necessarily the best way.
Everything we do in our lives, from our personal relationships to our hobbies to our work is full of chaos. Detailed planning and attempting to control every aspect of circumstance, in spite of being futile, is still the favored approach to dealing with the chaos that we have in our lives. The reality is that the chaos doesn’t go away, we’ve just covered it up with a layer of what we call “organization.”
Planning is a serendipity inhibitor. It is a creativity stifler. But complete disorganization and total chaos aren’t productive either. It’s simple to choose one over the other. Most people do. Most incubators, most educational institutions, most corporations—perhaps the vast majority—choose one or the other. We have been ingrained with the notion that it’s an either/or proposition. I submit this is a false dichotomy.
Attempting to strike the balance of healthy planning and healthy chaos is frightening, and we are not accustomed to showing the courage to make the attempt. But at Exosphere, we do. We fail a lot—we fall too far one side or the other, sometimes both in the same day. But the days we get it right, everybody involved, including ourselves, are exposed to a unique experience we would have found in no other place and in no other way. It’s simply something that cannot be planned.
Instead of operating by schedules and plans, we operate with philosophy and strategy at our core. We have a well-defined methodology with a clear philosophy, and we implement it tactically in the moment, on the fly. Sometimes we change plans hour by hour when we see that it will lead to a better experience for our participants. It is the sort of risk that we are willing to bear because we believe that learning and entrepreneurship need to regain their humanity.
And so we do something even more bizarre. We attempt to build genuine community within the group. Most people have never experienced true community. We failed to achieve it at our last boot camp. It is not easy to achieve, but it is instantly recognized as precious by anybody who has experienced it for the first time.
In our culture of rugged individualism—in which we generally feel that we dare not be honest about ourselves, even with the person…next to us—we bandy around the word “community.” We apply it to almost any collection of individuals—a town, a church, a synagogue, a fraternal organization, an apartment complex, a professional association—regardless of how poorly those individuals communicate with each other. It is a false use of the word.
-M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum
Peck goes on to talk about things that are difficult to define because they are larger than we are—God, goodness, love, evil, death, consciousness. “Being so large,” he writes, “they are many-faceted, and the best we can do is describe or define one facet at a time. Even so, we never seem quite able to plumb the depths fully. Sooner or later we inevitably run into a core of mystery. Community is another such phenomenon…Community is something more than the sum of its parts…What is this “something more?” Even to begin answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short.”
We do not use the word lightly. We do not talk about “the start-up community,” or “online community.” Those are false uses of the word. They are cheap imitations, places where language games substitute for authenticity.
If you had walked into the Exosphere discussion hall today at about 4:45 in the afternoon, and all you knew was that we are running an entrepreneurship boot camp, you almost certainly would have asked “why are so many people crying?”
They were crying because we had a breakthrough as a group. We had truly become a laboratory for personal disarmament, a safe place for people to be themselves, to seek support from each other, and to talk about all the things occupying their minds and affecting their daily lives and interactions. The walls came down. The hidden hurts and pains we were carrying with us were suddenly no longer bound by secrecy. Not everybody poured out their souls, but it was a place where they could. Many people who had facades of having it all together shared deeply about family and personal struggles, fears, and resentments.
I can’t say much more about the experience. Community really is something that defies description. But I can say how I felt.
I felt relieved—and that relief gave way to joy. The kind of joy where one cannot help but cry.
It may seem woo-woo, but it’s not. I’m not a woo-woo person. The vulnerability cult that goes around encouraging people to just spill their guts upon first meeting has it all wrong. It’s cheap grace. There has to be a struggle, people have to work together, committed to the process, to achieve real community. It doesn’t come easily, and it’s not just a matter of will.
We are at the beginning of a journey, not its end. We have 6 weeks ahead of us now, and it is my hope that we are planting the seeds of a genuine long-term community of innovators, artists, and entrepreneurs whose shared struggle will produce machines and products and creations that will impact people everywhere and make new meaning on this planet.
Each and every new experience I have with true community reaffirms my resolve with the late Dr Peck that “in and through community is the salvation of the world.”
