The Joy of Building Communities
If you’ve known me, you might have heard me talk about one of the “clubs” I started in my local community in New York City. Looking back at 2019, a theme for me this year was the idea of “Building Communities”. From Book Club, 530 Basketball Club and NY Photography Club. I enjoy these activities in solitary already, bringing people from different groups together to form new and deepen relationships truly brings joy to my heart. There were also insights along the way — how to best organize, scale as more people join. With this writing I want to reflect on this beautiful journey and document my learnings from a year of focusing on communities.
530 🏀Club
Playing basketball at 5:30 AM once a week. At first it was just me who shot around at the empty courts, then Jesse, Giff, Mike, Sean, Alex joined until we slowly grew to often having around 8–10 people weekly and played competitive full court.
Why so early? Because that is when the court is empty and we can have to ourselves. Also, getting up early and get a great workout done before 7 am just feels GREAT, the rest of the day flows with momentum and productivity. I wrote a whole post about the value of Discipline that is directly related the forming of this club
The foundation of this club is the love for basketball, but the beauty of this club is the culture of discipline and accountability.
Book Club
Book club has been one of my favorite things in the world. In the beginning it was Cat and I who liked to talk about books we are reading then we found more like minded friends to join us. We read a book and meet once a month at different locations every time. Coffee shops, hookah bar, someone’s rooftop in the summer, or someone’s apartment living room…etc. The discussion starts from ideas in the book and expands to sharing intimate personal stories, philosophical debates, exchanging dating/relationship advices or the best sleep routines.
We’ve gone through more than 10 books now, started off with a few memoirs, non-fiction, philosophy and short fictional stories. Some personal favorites were “Exhalation”, “Atomic Habits”, “Educated”, “Becoming”, “Stephen King — On Writing” and “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Each genre has a different taste that blossoms into unique and fruitful discussions.
Reading is fun, but it’s even better to have a close group of people to riff on what we all just read to really help internalize it. We are also able to touch deeper on topics that normally don’t surface in casual conversations, a safe space where people can be open and vulnerable.
Photography Club
I attended a photowalk hosted by Fujifilm and had a blast and thought it would be fun to try this with friends. The idea of a photowalk is you pick a location, plan a route and everyone takes their cameras or phones on a walk taking photos of architecture, scenery or portraits of each other.
We’ve done 2 so far: West Village and Central Park. We then post photos we’ve taken in a shared facebook group afterwards. It’s a great way to explore new areas or admire how the scenery changes with the season.
Learnings
Other than all the fun we had, I also learned a lot in the process of starting and organizing activities. Some personal insights:
- Doing something that requires discipline is a lot easier and enjoyable when you have a group of people to keep you accountable. Such as waking up before 5 to play basketball or reading a book every month
- Communication — general rule is the bigger the group chat, the less effective communication will be. Try to keep group chats tight and high signal. At some point we had a giant group chat of people who expressed interest in playing basketball. However, a lot of people never participated. Having an unreasonably large group chat made people feel like they were talking to an empty room. Once we cleaned up the group chat by removing stale members, it felt a lot more close knit. Often when people are part of a big group chat that isn’t providing them value, they can feel awkward to leave, sometimes it does people a favor to help reduce their spam.
- It’s useful to figure out the Critical Mass and Saturation Threshold for different types of activity that provide the most value. For example basketball needs a critical mass of 6 people to play 3v3 and threshold of around 10 so everyone can play in a full court 5v5, making 6–10 even number the sweet spot. Book Club can be very intimate starting with 3–4 people, have rich group discussions around 8; when you get to 15 people it can be hard for everyone to have enough chances to talk. Often multiple conversations start happening at once, making it chaotic and overwhelming. With any activity, once you hit the critical mass and find the saturation threshold, the hard part is maintaining that sweet spot.
- Feedback is important to make sure everything’s working and make improvements but can sometimes be hard to get. An anonymous survey is a great way to understand what people prefer. We had one for book club and it helped with informing future direction:
- It’s not always easy to integrate friends from different friend groups. If you host a party and invite all your friends from different groups, most people tend to stick with people they know rather than mingling by human nature. A common interest and shared activity is the best way to break the ice and provide context. I usually find starting with an intimate group size of 3–4 people while doing a specific interactive activity the best way to connect people you love with other people you love.
- I believe the more you give to your networks by connecting like minded people, the more your networks will grow, strengthen and blossom. One of those things where the more you give, the more you will receive. But it’s not easy to realize because the compounding effects take time to show but is incredibly rewarding and delightful.
- Not every club will stick, but you have to try to find out and learn. We had a writing club where we started strong and did 1 writing prompt together and shared our essays with each other to get feedback. It was great to read each other’s story on a deeper topic but we didn’t have enough momentum to continue on a second prompt as writing an essay takes a lot of effort, and that’s okay!
- I think the ultimate validation of a club/community being successful is if it can survive without the founders running it. If people are eager to take part in organizing things, it’s a reflection of the value it provides. Though it takes time and work to get there.
Conclusion
To me, communities are what makes a city feels like home. Building communities is a great way to explore your hobbies deeper, learn about other perspectives and bring great people together.
I really enjoyed focusing more on communities this year. Historically I liked expanding my horizons in breadth through traveling and new experiences. Building communities feels like going the other direction in depth, where you are investing in people and meaningful relationships — where the true gold in life is buried.
Thanks to Jesse Hendrickson, Stepan Parunashvili, Joe Averbukh and Alex Reichert for reviewing this essay
