The Power of Partners

So how do you make your world bigger and really live ‘large’? Probably the biggest key to living large is through other people. Unfortunately, there is a big misconception when it comes to other people that seem to be living large and have achieved super success. We think they did it alone.

When we see someone who has come up with a great invention, a super creative piece of artwork or, for that matter, a new and very successful business, most people think it came from a single person’s mind, someone who has had a mental breakthrough all on their own. I certainly used to think that, but if you and I take a closer look at some of the most successful people in the world and even around ourselves, we’ll see that it just isn’t so.

A few years back I heard Joshua Shenk on NPR radio talking about world changing technological breakthroughs along with great works of art, each of which came, not from one brilliant person working alone, but from teams of two or more people joining their brains and forces to come up with heretofore unheard of successes.

Shenk wrote a book called Powers of Two and what a great book it is! In it he talks about great people like Paul McCartney, Steve Jobs, George Lucas and Vincent Van Gogh. It turns out that the key to their super success was hooking up with another person so that the power of those two brains could come up with unequaled genius and huge breakthroughs.

Those breakthroughs Joshua talks about may never have happened if those people had not met the right partner at the right time. For Paul McCartney the breakthrough came when he met and worked with John Lennon, a collaboration that later spawned the Beatles. For Steve Jobs it was hooking up with Steve Wozniak when one was a teenager and the other was only 20 years old. And for filmmaker George Lucas, it was his wife Marcia Lucas who is his secret weapon. Lastly, there’s a very good chance that you and I would probably never have known the name Vincent Van Gogh if it were not for a guy named Theo, Vincent’s brother.

The author goes on to make an undeniable case that most great and important breakthroughs that we think came from one genius working alone came from the ‘Powers of Two’. Joshua Shenk also talks about how critical it is for you and I to go out and find our tribe and to hook up with others there that we truly connect with. Sometimes it’s people like us and sometimes it’s people that are very different from us but regardless, they hit certain hot buttons with us that lifts us to a much higher level and pushes us to fulfill our great potential.

So, if you want to live large and do great things, don’t try to go it alone. Find that other person or persons who you can partner with and create big and amazing new things.