200 Words A Day archive.

There's power in numbers

I have been incredibly inspired that in the last three days, we have welcomed seven new people to #Teamstreak!

Did you know that if you take a neuron from a fruit fly and a neuron from a human and examined them under a microscope, they would look identical? Living organisms are made up of the same stuff. So what makes humans different? For one, for every neuron that a fruit fly has, humans have 100 million.

If you take an ant and put it by itself in a pile of dirt, not much happens. Add another ant, 10 ants, even 100 ants, and maybe they’d start to make a path. Add 1,000 or 10,000 ants, and these ants will build a colony, forage for food, regulate the temperature of the colony within +/- 2 degrees and create specialization of labor. No ant has any more rules than he had when he was wandering around by himself. Put enough of them together, complex adaptive things emerge out of the very simple rules that each of those components has for dealing with another component. It’s quite amazing. 

With enough quantity, quality emerges. This is called the emergent properties of complex systems or more simply, “There’s power in numbers.”

As @seunoyebode wrote in What Baz is Building, 200WAD is an incredible community. So many people out there who may have been struggling on their own to write or find their voices now have a home. We are growing. We are getting stronger every day. We learn from each other. We support each other. 

There’s power in numbers.

5-7-20

This post from a year ago fired me up. I hope it reminds @basilesamel about one of the reasons he started 200WAD now The Co-Writers. We are adding more people to #Teamstreak again. Despite the craziness going on in the world, people are still working to improve themselves and their writing.

Some of us are literally alone. Even those who are not alone can easily feel alone while on the journey through self-improvement. Maybe you don’t know anyone who is on the same path. Maybe no one is at exactly the same stage you are. The important thing is that you are not alone.

Why is everyone saying that the world is so uncertain now? The world has always been uncertain. If you were lulled into thinking otherwise, it’s good that you were shaken awake. 

What is not uncertain is the power in numbers. Now more than ever, it’s important to connect. I tend to be a lone wolf, so I’m taking my own advice. I can do a lot by myself, but I can do more with others. There is a compounding effect when you gather a group of people who are all working on the same skills and habits. 

Yes, there’s power in numbers.