People Are Power — how a random phone call can change things

6 years ago, I agreed to take a phone call from a stranger.

I had no idea what to expect.

An interview? A business pitch? An article idea?

Was this guy normal?

I paced around my queen-sized mattress, trodding across the hopefully-clean hotel carpet. Big drifts of snow were plopped randomly across the parking lot outside the window like some half-done impressionist painting.

It’s funny how life works. If the call had been offered a week earlier or a week later, I would have never taken it. I’d have been at my own dining room table, shoveling down spaghetti with Kate.

The appointment came right on time.

Although I didn’t know it yet, the second that phone rang, my life would change forever.

I pressed the little green button, and we started chatting.

5 minutes.

10 minutes.

30 minutes.

An hour later, we were still going. Complete strangers, at opposite ends of the country — we become old friends in 60 minutes.

“We should make this a habit,” I said.

He and I started talking every week. A month later, we added another member to our little group. A year later, we added one more.

The four of us have been talked each week for five years.

We all started as cubical dwellers.

Now we all run our own businesses.

Along the way, we helped each other go through sudden layoffs, canceled contracts, broken relationships, failed adoptions, family deaths, and the general resistance of everyday life.

Last week I talked about the overexposure of hustle advice. Our addiction to individual effort is crippling us. What should we replace it with?

The answer, quite simply, is a collective.

Assume everything in your life is a team effort, and then find your board of advisors.

Here’s how our particular call works:

• We are on the call for an hour.
• Each person gets 10 minutes to talk about our lives.
• Then, each person receives 5 minutes of feedback.

During those 10 minutes… it’s pure, bald faced truth. We talk about our dreams of writing NYT bestsellers, building million dollar companies, or throwing our wives a good birthday party. We plot and plan.

We spill our darkest secrets and our deepest ambition. The group works because of that level of honesty. Imagine the power that comes from simply saying what you want, out loud, every single week.

Individual hustle might get you through a day. A collective can keep you on the right trajectory for life.

None of the four of us are special.

But every 7 days, we come together and say: “keep going.”

That has made all the difference.

This article first appeared on Medium.