There is a tiredness that doesn’t necessarily come from having too much to do.
It can come from having too much that feels like yours alone to carry.
A decision about your career.
A difficult conversation you keep rehearsing in your head.
A problem with your business.
A parent who needs care.
A project you can’t quite get unstuck.
Something about your life that isn’t working, but you can’t see what to do next.
You may have friends. A partner. Colleagues. A family. Hundreds of contacts in your phone.
And yet when the problem arrives, the operating assumption is still:
I need to figure this out.
I’ve started calling that a Me Problem.
Not because the problem necessarily belongs to you.
Because somewhere along the way it has been configured that way.
Mine to understand.
Mine to decide.
Mine to practice.
Mine to fix.
Mine to carry.
We have become very good at improving the Me
When something feels difficult, there is no shortage of advice.
Get more disciplined.
Get organized.
Manage your stress.
Set better boundaries.
Build resilience.
Meditate.
Exercise.
Sleep more.
Get better at communicating.
Talk to a therapist.
Read another book.
Much of that can be genuinely useful.
I have spent much of my own professional life helping people become more capable communicators.
But I’m increasingly interested in the question that comes before self-improvement:
Why have we assumed that one person is the unit responsible for solving this?
What if the thing that needs redesigning is not only the person?
What if it is the social environment around the problem?
Sometimes one is the right number
I am not arguing that everything should become collective.
Quite the opposite.
Sometimes you should handle something yourself.
Sometimes one other person is exactly what you need: a spouse, friend, colleague, mentor, therapist or expert.
And sometimes the problem could benefit from several different minds, perspectives or pairs of hands.
The important thing is having a choice.
Instead of automatically asking:
How do I get better at carrying this?
we can also ask:
Who, if anyone, could be useful around this?
That is the shift I’m interested in.
What happens if you put a Six around it?
I’m currently testing one answer.
I call it The Six.
The idea is intentionally bounded.
The same small group, aiming for six people, meets for 90 minutes a week for six weeks.
The group does not have a professional facilitator or permanent leader.
Instead, simple cards distribute responsibilities. There are clear agreements. Meetings start and end on time.
And every week, the group works on something real.
Someone might bring in a career decision.
Someone else might have a conversation they are afraid to have.
Another person might be trying to launch something and cannot see what is missing.
The group can ask questions. Offer perspectives. Rehearse. Make connections. Help think something through. Sometimes simply notice what one person cannot easily notice from inside the problem.
Then everyone chooses something small to try outside the meeting.
A week later:
What did you expect would happen?
What did you try?
What actually happened?
That is the experiment.
A clue from the research
One piece of research helped make this question more interesting to me.
In a series of studies involving 2,118 U.S. adults, researchers Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley found that people who needed help tended to underestimate other people’s willingness to help and how positively those helpers would feel about helping. At the same time, they overestimated how inconvenienced helpers would feel.
That study does not show that The Six works.
It does not show that everyone should ask for more help.
What it suggests is subtler.
Sometimes the reason I keep something to myself may not be that nobody would help.
It may be that I am predicting nobody will.
That gives us something we can actually test.
What do I think will happen if I bring somebody in?
And what happens when I do?
How I arrived here
For more than two decades, I have worked with trial lawyers.
A trial is a fascinating communication environment.
Lawyers spend weeks helping a group of strangers understand a complicated story. Eventually the lawyers leave the room.
Then the jurors have to think together.
That has kept me interested for years in a question that extends beyond presentation technique:
What conditions help people think together well when nobody is standing at the front telling them what to do?
I saw another glimpse of this years ago while teaching about 100 lawyers.
The room had been configured in the usual way: stage, speaker, rows of chairs.
Instead of beginning the presentation, I had everyone gather into small groups of about six.
They talked first.
They decided what they most wanted to learn.
Then we reconvened, and I built the session from what the groups had surfaced.
Something had changed before I taught anything.
I had altered the social conditions of the room.
Later, personal experience in carefully structured small-group workshops pushed the question further.
What if a group is not simply something that happens?
What if the conditions of a useful group can be designed?
And then:
What if those conditions could be made simple enough that ordinary people could create them for themselves?
That is the path that led to Survival of the Closest.
This is an experiment, not a finished answer
I don’t yet know whether The Six works in the way I hope it might.
I don’t know which problems benefit most.
I don’t know whether six weeks is enough.
I don’t know which groups will become genuinely useful to one another and which will simply be awkward.
I don’t know whether people will carry what they practice inside the Six into the rest of their lives.
Those are not problems with the project.
Those are the project.
The first Sixes are meeting now so that we can find out.
And perhaps there is something beyond the first six weeks
Suppose some groups become useful enough that their members want to continue.
Perhaps one Six occasionally has a picnic with another.
Perhaps they share a tool, a skill or a resource.
Perhaps several people discover they care about the same problem in their neighborhood and decide to do something about it.
Maybe that happens.
Maybe it doesn’t.
I am not starting with a plan for a new society.
I am starting with a much smaller question:
Can six ordinary people learn to become more useful to one another around real life?
The way to answer that isn’t with another theory.
It’s to try.
Subscribe to follow the experiment
I’ll be writing here about what we discover, the ideas behind the experiment and practical ways to try it yourself.
And I’ll show you exactly how to Try a Six for yourself.
For now, I hope you subscribe and stay in touch.