tribe
[ trahyb ]
a group or class of people with strong common traits, values, or interests
Definition 5: Dictionary.com
A mathematician would view a sorting algorithm as a practical method of building a tribe from scratch. If you wanted to build your tribe what ‘sort’ criteria would you pick? Try these:
Honesty, Courage, Accountability.
These three would consistently lead to the best result whether one is looking for a life partner, business partner, friend, employee, teammate or anyone else of any consequence in your life.
Let’s examine each one in turn.
Honesty:
Incredibly the whole concept of truth has become a contentious issue in recent years. There is such a thing as universal truth, in that, events do happen, and words are spoken. Unfortunately human beings do not have the data collection tools or processing capacity to identify universal truth.
First, even an eyewitness account is limited, at the very least, by a narrow field of vision. Sure an observer can say “but, I was there.” OK, but you didn’t see what happened behind you, next to you, above you, below you, before you arrived or after you left. The amount of data at your disposal is, at best, a small fraction of the data available.
Second, the human brain is a poor analytical tool along numerous vectors including, but not limited to, assessing risk, calculating probabilities, comparing ratios, and identifying logical fallacies.
Third, humans rarely consider sources and uses. Where did the data come from? What are the funding sources for the data provider? To what uses are that funding put?
Faulty data combined with primitive analytical tools will result in false conclusions. GIGO (garbage in-garbage out).
The exception is math. Math is true everywhere, all the time. (e.g. you can fact check the numerical value of Pi, you can’t fact check ‘best ribs in town’).
That leaves an honesty standard that is good faith/best efforts. Not perfect but the best we have. Still, associating with people who are committed to communicating accurate, evidence based, credibly sourced information will always be to your benefit.
Courage:
There are many different types of courage (e.g. physical, ideological,personal). The universal characteristic is the capacity to manage fear. Lack of fear is not courage. In fact, lack of fear is a dangerous, even reckless pathology. Fear is a warning to the conscious mind to increase awareness. Courage is the ability to manage fear in a productive manner while pursuing a worthy goal. (managing irrational fear or phobias is the purview of mental health professionals).
Accountability:
The Problem Is Not The Problem. The Problem Is Your Attitude About The Problem. –Capt. Jack Sparrow
Accountability is a decision about decisions. Being offended or disrespected is not an involuntary reflex. It is a conscious decision. Grown ups are capable of controlling their emotions. (Whether they have the resolve to do so is a different question).
Accountability breaks down into two parts. Accountability to oneself and accountability to others. Accountability to oneself aligns closely with the honesty criterion in that a person has to honestly recognize their own decisions, behaviors and standards to be accountable for them (what the kids call ‘owning it’). This is where The Serenity Prayer or the Dalai Lama (your choice) comes in. Own the things you can control but let go of the things you can’t control. Of course the sorting is the tricky part.
While being accountable to yourself is a personal exercise, being accountable to others is more often on public display. Being accountable to others also includes being accountable to the commitments one makes to others.
The utility of using all three of these criteria is enhanced by their abiding co- dependency. Creating a Venn diagram requires all three concepts because there is no world where two of these things could exist without the third. (e.g. accountability can’t exist without honesty and courage etc.).
A tribe is simply the sociological manifestation of a sort algorithm. Whether the output is positive or negative is purely a function of the sort criteria. Don’t sort people on characteristics. Do sort people on these three specific behaviors.