About Survival of the Closest

Hi, I’m Cliff.

For most of my career, I’ve been interested in a deceptively simple question:

How do human beings understand one another?

I wrote Beyond Bullet Points to help people move beyond presenting disconnected information and instead communicate through clear, persuasive visual stories.

For the next two decades, I worked with leaders trying to explain important ideas and with trial lawyers facing an especially demanding communication challenge: standing in front of a group of strangers and trying to help them see a case differently.

Again and again, I encountered the same underlying problem.

What if some of the things we’re trying so hard to handle individually become easier when we get better at involving other people?

That’s the question behind Survival of the Closest.

Many of us have people in our lives and still carry an extraordinary amount alone.

We think through difficult decisions alone.

We worry alone.

We try to solve problems alone.

We manage work, family, uncertainty and everyday responsibilities as if being a capable adult means figuring out what to do and getting on with it ourselves.

Survival of the Closest is exploring another possibility:

Maybe meeting life with other people is something we can practice.

The core experiment right now is The Six — six people who meet once a week for six weeks to practice simple ways of involving other people in ordinary life.

They practice asking.

Listening.

Checking assumptions.

Receiving help and perspective.

Responding without automatically fixing.

Bringing other minds into problems and decisions.

Navigating ordinary friction.

Then they take those practices into everyday life and see what happens.

We’re at the beginning.

This isn’t a finished method, and I’m not going to pretend we already know the answers.

The first Sixes are experiments. We’ll watch what people actually do, where they struggle, what they find useful, what doesn’t work and whether anything changes over six weeks.

Why subscribe?

Subscribe if you’d like to follow what we’re learning from the first Sixes; hear about new Find Your Six gatherings and experiments; get practical exercises you can try in your own life; and explore a larger question with us:

What becomes possible when we stop assuming one person has to carry a whole human life alone?

Free subscribers will receive new posts, invitations and results from the experiments as they happen.

If you’re interested in participating rather than simply reading about connection, you’re especially welcome.

Let’s find out what happens when we practice meeting life together.

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