A few years ago, I discovered a positive correlation between having places in my life where people know me and my happiness. I call those places “stations”. I noticed that the more stations I have in life, the happier I am.
What is a station?
A station is going into your local coffee shop and having the barista know your name. It’s going to a restaurant and having the waiter know your name. It’s having friends that you can stop at by their house or running into someone you know at the grocery store or going to church and having people recognize you and want to shake your hand. In order for those things to happen, you have to have positive interactions over time (which is one of the definitions of friendship).
A few years ago I started intentionally trying to build up my community. When i would go to a place that I knew I was going to probably visit a lot in the future, I would say, “Hi, my name’s Erich. What’s your name?” It seems simple enough, but you do it and then you try to remember it and say it eventually they they learn your name too. And the next time you’re there, you can start to ask deeper questions like, “How are you doing? How was your weekend?”, and then as time goes on you can get deeper and go as deep as you want to go. You get to the point where you can say, “Hey, that’s rough. If you want to talk about it, maybe we can go talk about it somewhere else,” and then you take that relationship from that place and you move it some other place.
So maybe you start off by talking to someone at church but then after talking to them at church, one day you say, “Hey, maybe sometime we should go get coffee together,” and then you go get the coffee together. And then you can even start to combine these things when you have someone that you know that you’re bringing to a place where you know someone else, you can introduce to people and say, “Hey, this is my friend. I’d like you to meet this person.” Being a connector helps other people be happy as well. Because it’s not just your happiness, it’s their happiness too. It’s “community happiness”.
You are knowing them, they are knowing you. It’s reciprocal.
If you’re old enough to remember this show, Cheers, you know that when Norm walks into the bar, everyone yells, “Norm!” There’s been a couple of times in my life that that’s happened in real life. And it is an awesome feeling. You walk into a room and everybody goes, “Erich! Yeah!” They’re genuinely excited to see you. Everyone in the room is flipping out. It’s only happened like twice in my life, but I remember it vividly. And if you’ve ever gotten married, you know you’re walking down the line or you’ve gone to a wedding and there’s this receding line. and you’re walking out and everybody’s shaking your hand. After intentionally building up the community for years, one time I was just walking out of church (I needed to go to the bathroom or something) and I’m like, ‘just let me sneak out here’ and then left after right, people kept sticking out their hand and saying, “Hey, Erich,” “Hey, Erich,” “Hey, Erich”. It was like a freaking receiving line.
I was like, ‘Wow, I did it. I created community. This is amazing. I’m so happy right now.’
There’s lots of ways to become happy or have moments of happiness or be fulfilled in life. But community is one of them. It’s beyond happiness too. It’s about your life. Like literally. Like you’ll live longer if you have better relationships with people. If you have people that care whether or not you’re alive or dead. And they genuinely like recognize you. care about whether you exist you walk into a place and you’re just nobody and you go home and you’re alone and you never interact with anyone something happens on the physiological level and you just don’t live as long as someone who’s an active part of the community where people actually care that you are there or not.
When i was young, my dad told me one time, “If you want to have friends, be a friend.” And so I’ve tried to be friends with people. And because of that, I have friends as an adult. I even make new friends. It takes effort. It takes being the one to reach out and ask. And I have asked people and they don’t always do stuff, but they have told me, “I appreciate you asking because not everybody asks.” And if you want to go into the world of dating, there are girls that just don’t even get asked out. In sales, people don’t get the sale because they’re not asking for the sale.
Asking is such a huge thing.
I know it’s not really what we’re talking about but it’s a human thing. Even God says to ask Him for things.
Humans want to help other people. They want to be with each other. We are community-oriented people.
If you take a bee out of the out of its hive and just leave it alone, it’s going to die. The bees need the other bees to survive. Humans are the same way. Humans need other humans to survive. If you leave the population, you won’t die on day one, but like eventually you will. Everybody needs each other. So it’s not just the physiological, it’s also the emotional.
In summary, I have found that the more of them you have, the happier you are. And the way to cultivate stations is to reach out to people and build up your community over time.
Third Place
Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, made the term “The third place,” popular in his book, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, but the “third place” is actually a phrase coined by contemporary sociologist Ray Oldenburg. Oldenburg postulated in 1990 that the third place is, “a public place where people gather for the social satisfaction that they can’t get from the first two domains of the home and the workplace.” Oldenburg argued that the availability of such gathering places in America was lacking. Schultz turned America’s ‘lack of place’ into a business opportunity encouraging loitering and turning Starbucks into that third place. In this post I will argue that their is a direct relationship between the number of third places and happiness (in life and work).
Social Structure
In Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell recounts the story of a town whose inhabitants rarely got sick. After a doctor named Wolf began looking into why, he “slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself.” The town’s social structure had multiple generations living under one roof, the townspeople talked to one another on the street, they cooked together in each other’s backyards, they went to the same church, and had “twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people”. In short, the towns people were a community and they had places they could go to congregate and interact. It’s these ‘third’ places that I call Community Stations.
Community Stations
If you went to a public school your teacher may have setup your classroom into stations. If you were in first grade there may have been a station for reading books, a station for building blocks or puzzles, and another station to watch an aquarium or greenhouse. These were all places you could go, sub-sections within the larger classroom to hang out with people like you doing things like you. When you grew up you may have been assigned a “work” station at your job and bought a “play” station for your home. In the 1800’s whole towns were built up around “train” stations and now every corner has a “gas” station for our cars. Third places like Starbucks are a “coffee” station – and like the stations set up around the classroom, is one where like-minded people gather to talk and share what’s going on in their work and their community.
Personal Community
Your community is more than the 2 square miles around your home. It’s made up of the various types of community stations, the most important ones being your home, your work, the stores you visit, and your friend’s homes. Each station in your personal community is like a node on a network and like Facebook, the more friends you have, the better the experience. This network value is called the Network Effect. But unless you live in a college dorm or in a close-knit community like Roseto, you have to travel greater distances to these different stations. But the more stations you have, the greater the chance you will be able to interact with these stations and the greater the value of the community. This is why density matters and it’s why more communities are choosing to infill instead of building sprawl.
Walkable Neighborhoods
Alex Steffen talks about infill in communities being used to build denser communities, but there are already places like that: cities. I recently wrote about how people under 30 are moving into the cities and driving less, what Nathan Norris calls The Great Migration of the 21st Century. More and more people want to live in walkable neighborhoods, places where shopping, fun, and friends are all within walking distance. There is even a website dedicated to judging the walkability of a neighborhood. But you don’t have to live in a city to have a walkable neighborhood. Suburburban “sub-divisions” like these in the Indianapolis area can be specifically built to be walkable.
Business Networking
In my post about working in Indianapolis, I wrote about how on Thursdays I would start out at the local BNI meeting, then go to Subway where the local Sandwich artist would remember me and ask me about my business. After breakfast I’d head to Starbucks where I’d normally run into someone I know and begin working. At night I’d attend a meetup or go to a friends house before heading home. After going full-time on my own business one of the first things I noticed was how lonely I was working from home (like right now?). I wrote:
When I worked for other companies I was around other people all day long. We had meetings. I sometimes got to go places on the company’s dime. Some of these times were good. Most of them were not noteworthy. However, once they were gone, I started to miss that in my life. Sure, I met with clients occasionally, but for the most part I stayed in my office at home. While my family is a joy to me, there is a certain need to go beyond that and meetups can help with that.
Work Communities
My ex-wife used to work at a hospital with a man named Melvin whose job was to keep rooms stocked each day. He had worked at the hospital for many years and had developed a routine that involved starting out in the stock room and making rounds around the hospital, stopping to talk to various people in each location. These were his stations within the hospital and without them he would not have been as happy at his job. He needed the community that the stations provided him. As an IT and web consultant, my clients were scattered around the city of Indianapolis and it created many places I could go throughout the day. My clients became part of my community and added to my work enjoyment. It didn’t feel like work – it felt more like visiting a friend.
Seeking Stations
I lived in small, rural town where there wasn’t a whole lot to do. There was no coffee shop and none of my friends live around there. There was a bowling alley, a movie theater, and several gas stations. My kids liked walking to the gas station to get candy and occasionally I’d walk to watch a movie, but the only place for me to go to ‘work’ is McDonald’s or a local diner. One is depressing and the other won’t leave you alone. There is no place to ‘hang out’. It’s a walkable neighborhood, but where would I be walking to? I decided that there must be something to do there, it’s just that I didn’t have the information as to what that is. That’s when I got the idea for Seektivity – an app that lets you share activities and events going on around you – kind of like a Foursquare for activities instead of places. A lot of my friends thought it was a good idea. Shoutt has since come out with something similar, but it adds a ‘borrowing/lending’ feature. I shoutted in that town, but there was been no one listening (give me a shout out on Twitter).
I take a drink of my coffee and get a text from a customer. The room seems brighter now. I feel like I’m a part of a community – and for a second I am happy.
