The Power of Your Community.

If you could do it alone, you’d have done it already.

4 min readJul 31, 2017

It was Sunday morning.

8 AM.

8 of us got together in front of Bulletproof café in NYC to empower our journey towards our goals, towards our better selves.

I chose 8 AM Sunday, not only because it’s the most probably time you won’t have any other plans and commitments (Who is crazy enough to meet up at 8 am on Sunday, right?!), but also because I wanted to get together people, who are committed enough to their vision, their goals, better selves, enough to quit the excuses, that they needed extra hours of sleep to recover from the week of hard work and all the sleepless nights, and all the other things they got to do (most often caused by lack of priorities and waste of time as a result).

I wanted to meet people, who really want to make measurable progress, who want feedback and real solutions from other people, from the real world, solutions that actually might help to move them forward, to change their life, to transform themselves. Of course, change is always scary, so we tend to find “other” priorities not to make the goals, we just said we were committed to, happen.

Let me tell you one thing (and it’s just as much note to self guys) — if you have other priorities, that are more important than the goals you said you wanted to achieve, you’ll never reach those goals. You are just not committed enough. It’s as simple as that.

My family is more important to me, my current job is more important, my spouse is more important, my kids, my relationship, my current clients and making everyone happy, my… list goes on. But nobody achieved ANY goal, if it wasn’t a priority, while the rest is in maintenance mode. There will come time, the less serious you are the faster it will come, when you will have to make a choice, work more, do what’s needed to be done to reach the goal or to give yourself to your “other” more important priorities.

And I’m not saying any goal or priority is more or less important. I’m saying, if you are not prepared to go ALL IN on something, putting other things into maintenance box, and good-enough box — you’ll never change the thing you said was important to you. For one reason or the other — lack of time, lack of resources, lack of confidence, fear of failure, fear of change, fear of uncomfortable situations, too many commitments — you will give in to your old standards and your goal will remain what it is. A goal, you had once.

Now back to our Sunday meetup.

Being accountable to people who you can really, honestly, openly connect with, who you can share everything with, without coloring it, making it look fancy, making it look better or less important than it is, people who can hold you up to your own standards, when you want to give up on them, people who won’t let you bail out and ultimately give up on yourself — that’s priceless. If you can get that — rarely you’ll find a goal that is unattainable. If you can get that — the sky is not the limit.

We humans are social animals, we need social support and social connections, where we can be ourselves, where we can feel supported, trusted and understood, accepted. Not because we are weak and incapable of achieving anything ourselves, but because nobody is an island, nobody is a whole without a community. Community is a basic human need of survival and thriving. And nothing makes sense, nothing has a meaning, unless you connect with others, unless you serve others and allow others to serve you on our common journey of creating our future.

The ONE feature, that unites all the longest living people (“Blue Zones” study) — strong social connections and the sense, that their life has a meaning, purpose, that it serves something bigger than themselves.

The ONE feature, that unites all the people, who commit suicide (Left notes and data, from the ones who didn’t succeed) — they didn’t feel like they belonged, that anyone cared whether they lived or not, they didn’t feel their life had any meaning, they didn’t feel they mattered.

The more you move one direction or the other — more connections, more purpose, more service or less connections, less purpose, less service, the more the quality of your life, your happiness and joy will grow. Or die.

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