THE SOCIAL MAGNET

The strongest communities have what I call a “social magnet.” The new types of scavenger hunts are a good example of social magnets. Scavenger hunts aren’t just for children anymore. Adult versions have become really popular recently. They’re popping up in every major city.

Here’s how they work. You join the scavenger hunt usually by registering online with a group of three or more people. At the hunt, one person from the group gets a list of activities the group needs to complete. Unlike traditional scavenger hunts from fifteen or more years ago, new age scavengers use their smartphones to take pictures of things, upload pictures to social media, or research the answers to questions. And the hunts don’t end in an hour or two. They can last for up to forty-eight hours.

Why would people give up forty-eight hours, or a full weekend of their time, to do a scavenger hunt? Because of the social magnet. Group scavenger hunts aren’t just fun, they also have a magnetic force that keeps people participating. The scavengers are a team on a joint mission, pulling each other together to keep working like a magnet pulls metal toward it. The team members might have moments where they get bored, lose motivation, or get tired, but they can’t stop what they’re doing because of the magnetic force from the team. That’s a social magnet, and that’s how it creates lasting change.

Take social media. How many of you were reluctant to join Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other social network? Remember the first time you got an email from Facebook asking you to join? You might have been unimpressed. Maybe you thought that social media was only for people with too much free time. They could post what they ate for breakfast and who they bumped into during the day. But then you realized that the invite from Facebook was sent by a good friend. Maybe that wasn’t enough to motivate you to sign up, but it was enough to get you thinking about it and to remember the site. Soon enough, your other friends and coworkers started inviting you, too. Some of them began using Facebook instead of email. Now you had to join to keep in touch.By that point, you realized there was a community of your peers on it. Even though you were reluctant to join at first, you joined so that you weren’t left out of this growing community. And you kept using it once people started commenting on things you wrote. That made the community even stronger.

This is how the force of community compels people to keep doing things.

But it’s not as easy as it sounds to build or leverage a community for lasting change. Even if a community is designed for the right purpose, communities also need to have a social magnet. People often attempt to build or join communities that don’t have this social magnet. And they usually won’t work.

Take gym buddies. For many people, it’s easier to keep going to the gym if you have a gym buddy to go with you each time. But what happens when you or your gym buddy gets sick or goes on vacation for a week? The routine typically ends and it’s tough to get started again. That’s because it’s missing the social magnet.

It’s not enough to find a buddy who will go with you to the gym. Building a community from the ground up requires giving to the community to form the social magnet. People do this by setting expectations of other group members, like texting a gym buddy, sending a link to an article on a new type of workout, and expecting her to show interest and reciprocate by responding to it. Calling out a specific person or group of people, for example by sharing a video and tagging a person or group of people, is one way to build that social magnet. But not everyone has the time or energy to build their own community to keep them doing things. If that’s the case for you, then join an existing community. Just make sure it already has a social magnet. You’ll just need to know what to look for, and we’ll explain that soon. But remember this important fact: for the community to continue to have a lasting impact on people, there needs to be enough people in the community who are nurturing it to create a social magnet. I’ve found that for very small communities (fewer than five people) to create lasting change, everyone in the community needs to work on building the social magnet. For larger communities, about 15 percent of the people involved in the community need to be building the social magnet. More about these details later when I describe an example of how to build a community.

         Communities push people to keep doing things that are good for them, like exercising regularly.³ They also push people to keep doing things that are bad for them, like smoking cigarettes.

         But do we choose our communities, or do our communities choose us?

There are few better examples of how communities influence the highs and lows of people’s lives than the story of the actor Robert Downey Jr. Maybe you heard some of his stories about his life when on drugs and alcohol, like when he was found half-naked on an eleven-year-old’s bed after breaking into a house and passing out. Or maybe you’ve heard the success story of how he turned around, cleaned himself up, and has become Ironman 1, 2, and 3. What most people don’t know about him is the story of how communities influenced his journey.

From his early childhood, RDJ was surrounded by people using drugs.⁵ He didn’t have to search for this community; it was brought to him by his father, a long-term drug user. When RDJ was eight, his father offered him marijuana at a party so they could socialize together.⁶ He said, “When my dad and I would do drugs together, it was like him trying to express his love for me in the only way he knew how.” This lifestyle quickly created an addiction. As RDJ got older, he searched for friends who could help him satisfy his addiction. Every night he started by drinking alcohol and making “a thousand phone calls in pursuit of drugs.”

When RDJ moved to Hollywood as an actor, he found himself surrounded by another group of drug addicts. Famous actors known for their binge drinking and drug use like Kiefer Sutherland, Mel Gibson, and Rob Lowe became part of RDJ’s close circle of friends. As his alcoholism and drug use continued, he was arrested numerous times for things like cocaine and heroin use, carrying a .357 Magnum, and for that story of trespassing and falling asleep on a stranger’s bed while under the influence. After going through court-ordered rehab a bunch of times, he finally hit a low enough point where he felt he had no choice but to get clean. That’s when he found a new community to keep himself free from drugs. He believes that the social communities of his family, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and therapy have led him to kick his addiction.