Competition vs. Community
Through skateboarding and being a part of Divvy (the design co-working space), I learned a lot about community vs. competition.
At Divvy, we were a community. We all learned a ton from working and sharing with each other, and all of our businesses grew. We didn’t leave anyone behind.
On the flipside with cut-throat competition, people suffer. There’s some shop rivalry among skateboard shops in Omaha. With this cut-throat attitude, I’ve seen skateboard shops talk poorly about other shops and their riders and it hurts themselves (some have put themselves out of business), hurts the skateboarders involved and makes it hard to put on large events together. All in all, it makes the skateboard community suffer.
I believe when we can all get along, we can all work together to build a better community as a whole… come together on events, educate the importance of design and it’s process, and simply learn from each other.
Matt mentioned a good point in his BIGOmaha post a while back,
“Cut-throat competition is dead. Undermining your competition is a disservice to your community. We can all benefit if we commit to helping each other thrive.”
This is one of the reasons we put out The Paper Family for anyone to use. It has helped us stay organized as we continue to grow, and we were hoping it can be useful to help others grow.
We’ll be posting more of the family soon. We would love to hear any feedback… suggestions, if it’s helped you, etc. Leave a comment below, or email us at thepaperfamily@secretpenguin.com
Thanks everyone! We love being a part of this community.
May 18th, 2009 at 6:08 am
Dave,
This only reaffirms what I tell everyone about you; You are the most genuine and decent person I know. I truly do aspire to be more like you because you are a very good example of a good person. Those values have been inexorably linked to your business.
Competition and cut-throat tendencies are so very apparent in our creative community. It really is detrimental to a lot of the efforts that are being talked about but not acted upon, namely co-working and collaboration. You and I know about it well from our cultures of skate, BMX, sports & sneakers. The divisions between skate/blades/BMX has hampered the culture on the whole for a long time. Conversely, the sneakerhead community absolutely soared when the “x.” started to appear between two names, meaning “collaboration”.
Props to you, my friend! And thanks, RDQLUS loves Secret Penguin & the Paper Fam!
May 18th, 2009 at 6:46 am
Collaboration is king; the ideas of open source and the creative commons way of sharing what we know to get to the better outcome, the pooling of our knowledge that leads to greater innovation in a collective exercise of intelligence. Having winners and losers has always made me uneasy. Thanks for your project and for talking about the need for more community to help everyone thrive. -justin
May 18th, 2009 at 7:46 am
This is great to read!
It resonates with my recent thoughts on creating and sharing quality content with others.
Fear and conniving don’t foster vital creativity and community. The companies that continue to play by the old rules are missing out.
Thanks for being such a great example!
May 28th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
You rule! I love the paper family! When are the paper family t-shirts coming out?
July 9th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Steve, Justin, Caleb and Superstix – Thanks so much for the kind words! I agree completely, collaboration is going to make our industry stronger and more fun to work in.
I need to find time to finish putting up the rest of the Paper Family!
Thanks again! Yow!
July 30th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
good words!
just met a couple of the paper family, and i they seem like they’ll be helpful in the future. I would love to meet the print and branding papers. I think we’d get along quite well.
let me know if they are around any time soon.
nicholas