Table of Contents:

The Four Circles of Belonging

• 4: The Collective

• 3: The Clan

• 2: The Squad

• 1: The Inner Circle

• 0: Putting them all together

Filling the Four Circles

• Approach 1: Throwing Darts

• Approach 2: Becoming a Lighthouse

• Approach 3: Building a Funnel

Finding soul-feeding, all-encompassing belonging

💡 This Essay is part 2/2 of my series on loneliness. 
   Read part 1 here.

The Four Circles of Belonging

In part 1 of this essay, we talked about how repeated failed attempts to address loneliness lead to unhelpful conclusions and ineffective solutions. Part 2 proposes a new framework for thinking about loneliness — The Four Circles of Belonging.

This framework has helped me pinpoint and articulate the precise types of connection I’ve lacked and has allowed me to then be intentional with troubleshooting, making it a lot easier for me to find solutions that actually work.

So without further ado, it’s time to introduce the The Four Circles of Belonging: the Inner Circle, the Squad, the Clan, and the Collective.

This essay will break down each circle in more detail, discuss what it feels like when you’ve filled it, and outline steps to take if you feel you could use a little bit more connection in that area of life. It’ll conclude by discussing strategies for filling all four circles and the importance of prioritizing connection as a lifelong pursuit.

Nice. Let’s get started.

4. The Collective

This circle will feel full every time a stranger smiles at you in the street. You’ll have an internal smile when someone holds the elevator for you and says “have a nice day” when you part ways. You’ll feel it when you share experiences with someone you’ll never meet again — running for cover from torrential rain, listening to a screaming baby in public, making eye contact with a stranger across a crowded bar — for the brief sliver of time that you share, you’ll switch off autopilot and telepathically communicate:

You’ll find it feels full when people glance up from their busy lives to make sure you’re okay. Women’s washrooms are some of the most 4th circle filling locations in the world — whether you’re standing complaining with your neighbour about how long the line is, needing to borrow a tampon, or reading the long chain of stall-door sharpie affirmations from decades of strangers, there’s a feeling of collective womanhood — in the women’s washroom, everyone’s looking out for each other. It’s really beautiful.

3. The Clan

You may be part of many clans — those who share your religious beliefs, share the mission of winning the collegiate sports championship title, share a vision with your neighbours of throwing the best neighbourhood barbecues in the city, or share a mission with your coworkers to deliver shareholder value. 😁 Whatever it is, you’re in it together — being part of a clan will help you feel a sense of purpose as a small but meaningful contributor to something bigger than yourself.

2: The Squad

These people will make a big deal on your birthday. There’s an unspoken understanding that even if you tell them you don’t care if they come to your band’s open mic night, they’re going to be there and ask for your autograph and get a great video. They’ll come to your intramural game with a sign and make you feel special. They hype you up through both wins and losses, and most importantly, they show up.

1: The Inner Circle

This is where you’ll find a shoulder to cry on. When this circle is full, you’ll have someone who wants to listen whenever you feel like sharing a thought. Even your most mediocre, guess-what-I-dreamed-last-night-wait-that-doesn’t-make-sense thoughts. They’ve seen you petty, heartbroken, giggling uncontrollably, and with your laundry all over the floor. Around them, you can just be.

0: Putting them all together

There’s no one way to feel lonely — belonging is something we must strive for in all four circles. If you have wonderful people in your life and are questioning why you still feel lonely, the problem may lie in a circle you’ve never even thought to consider.

Once you’ve analyzed your four circles and identified where there’s gaps, it’s time to move on to the next step: filling them up.

How to fill the Four Circles of Belonging

There are generally three approaches I’ve seen people use to fill their circles.

I’ve named them “Throwing Darts”, “Becoming a Lighthouse” and my personal favourite, “Building a Funnel”. There are no cheat codes or life hacks here — all of these approaches require intentional effort, vulnerability, and practice, and all of them can be effective. I’ll start by giving give a high level overview of each, then give some examples for how you can implement them in your own life.

Approach 1: Throwing Darts

The dart-throwing approach takes the concentric circle model and treats it like a dartboard:

Throwing darts rests on the premise that closeness is found through seeking out and “aiming for” others who share our values, “likes” and “dislikes”, and cultural references. It relies heavily on shared interests. With this model, the pool of people you could connect with is theoretically anyone, and you spend a lot of time observing others, looking for “signals” that they’d be compatible with you, and then reaching out.

Online Examples: 
- Dating Apps
- Online communities (e.g. Discord Servers) 
- A good ol' fashioned DM slide 

Offline Examples: 
- Introducing yourself to strangers IRL
- Moving to different cities to meet people
- Going to events 
- Asking for someone's number 

Words of Caution:

1. “Hitting the dartboard” is only step one
   Dart throwing gets you in the door, but there are diminishing returns if you keep playing the game — the 200+ incredible first interactions I’ve had via dart throwing have rarely had any follow up. Dart throwing can give the comforting illusion that friendships are things you “find” rather than “build”, but genuine connection takes time and effort — it’s built on the back of uncomfortable (but necessary) failures, growing pains, and lessons-learned-the-hard-way.

2. You might end up with “misses” instead of “lower commitment relationships”

   Throwing darts is a one-sided activity that abstracts the most important piece of information: is the other person looking for the same thing as you? Maybe a first date should clearly have actually been a “let’s be colleagues” conversation, but now it’s weird that you met on Hinge. It’s easier to move people from outer circles to inner circles (à la “Friends to Lovers”), but super awkward to move them in the other direction (“colleague-zoned?”). Dart throwing is random enough that even if you find each other, it might be under conditions that don’t set you up for success.

3. What you practice is what you’ll get good at

   Swiping on dating apps didn’t make me better at going on dates (going on dates did!), sliding into people’s DMs to get to know them for 30 mins over video chat didn’t result in strong friendships (3am talks in the living room did!), and simply moving to a different city didn’t help me feel connected to the world around me on its own (building communities did!). Through all this research, I realized I wanted the process of looking for connection to be something that helped me learn and grow, something that was fun, something that gave me great stories to tell my future kids, and something with a lot less planning, evaluation, and algorithms involved. I’ve since been surprised and delighted by new people and experiences, I feel a lot more brave, and I’ve been having a lot more fun.

Approach 2: Becoming a Lighthouse

The becoming-a-lighthouse approach takes the concentric circle model and plops you right in the middle, casting your light upon all the potential friends-to-be-had.

It rests on the premise that if you make yourself extremely visible, people will find you. If you are true to yourself, create many artifacts reflective of your interests and share them broadly, people will flock to your light. Becoming a lighthouse favours highly creative people with unique personalities and a lot of initiative, but can be quite draining for those who need to recharge away from the light. Similar to throwing darts, this continues to rely heavily on shared interests, but with the power dynamic flipped — requests to hangout become inbound when you make yourself discoverable (which sounds like a dream, until you realize you need to be really careful with your own boundaries and limitations as a human being if you want to avoid social burnout).

Online:
- Borderline oversharing on your instagram story
- Thought leadership, engaging in twitter discourse
- Thirst traps (🤡)

Offline: 
- Becoming a ✨leader✨ of an existing community, or starting your own 
- Hanging out in smaller (therefore less intimidating) groups in public - Wearing clothes that reflect your personality (crocs, animal shirts, fun glasses, laptop stickers, fidget spinner = "come say hi!")
- Friendly and approachable body language

Important things to remember:

1. Let your audience curate to YOU.
   Be cautious about advice that tells you to narrow your online existence into "a niche" — if your goal is meaningful connection, you might find you accidentally create a persona that’s very discoverable but is an uncomfortably shallow or inaccurate representation of who you actually are. Being yourself aggressively will attract people who think you’re awesome and weed out people who weren’t going to be your friends anyways.

2. Information imbalance can set a weird tone in relationships

   Being discoverable means that sometimes you’ll meet people who know a lot about your work or your life — almost as if they’ve been watching a TV show about you. I’ve been on both sides of the “one of us clearly knows way more about the other person” dynamic, and reconciling “the persona” with the multi-dimensional real-life person can take some time.

3. You might get too much attention (and it might do weird things to your brain)

   A ton of people and organizations might start to notice you! What a rush! People might start to treat you differently (but you’ll feel like the same person on the inside), you’ll feel overwhelmed, you’ll feel guilty for feeling overwhelmed, you’ll feel like Hannah Montana. You’ll end up finding ways to feel grounded, you’ll remember you’re the same old Miley, and you’ll feel really really grateful for the friends that cared about you before you became “a person to know”.

4. Remember you can ‘turn it off’ if you need to

   The biggest celebrities of the early 2000s can (for the most part) walk the streets today unnoticed. Even Taylor Swift is choosing consciously every day to remain in the spotlight. In comparison, the level of attention you’re receiving is probably small potatoes (even if it doesn’t feel like it) — the world is loud and it can be comforting to remember that if it all becomes too much and you need to disappear for a bit, the void will quickly be filled by all the other people who are constantly yelling for attention. You can fade into the background to rest and recharge, then re-emerge if and when you’re ready.

Approach 3: Building a Funnel (My favourite)

Building a funnel is longer term and higher effort, but extremely foolproof. The funnel-building approach to filling the circles of belonging views the concentric circle model as a one-dimensional representation of a funnel.

It rests on the premise that closeness is developed through:

It deprioritizes shared interests and relies heavily on shared experiences, imitating the way kids make friends — focus on the pool of people around you, and leverage “gravity” to work in your favour: to make a new inner circle friend, it makes sense to look from the pool of friends in your Squad, and most of those people are probably a subset of the people you’re in a Clan with.

To start, we must fill the 4th circle — luckily, this really just comes down to choosing to participate in society — here’s 9 places to start, from lowest to highest commitment.

Filling your 4th Circle — Participating in the Collective

1. Leave the house. Hang out in public, show up to things your community is running. Drive to a public park or city centre if you feel stuck in the suburbs, then go for a walk or get some work done at a library or cafe. Putting yourself in environments where it is possible to have chance encounters is probably less productive and definitely more effort than staying home, but it will help you feel less lonely.

2. Support the things you value, even when you don’t have to — if you make it possible for someone to make a living by busking on the street corner or running a cute little coffee shop around the corner from your house, that version of the world will continue to exist. Vote with how you spend your money.

3. Question your instinct to pay for private access to stuff — While it’s comfortable and convenient, we don’t talk enough about how sharing has the dual properties of a) making life less expensive and b) giving us reason to connect (and have fun with!) with the people around us. It’s good to need each other.

   When optimizing for connection: 
   - Large dinner table >  several small tables
   - Hostels > hotels
   - Public park > backyard
   - Library > co-working space > home office
   - Public transit > Uber > private vehicle 

4. GET 👏 GROCERIES 👏 FROM 👏 FARMERS 👏 MARKETS 👏

   Rally your friends, make it a weekly ritual. Going to the market alongside families and buying from independent vendors is a super fun, wholesome, and human-feeling experience. The Kitchener Market runs every Saturday from 10am-2pm, year round. The St Jacob’s Market runs Thursdays from 8am-3pm and Saturdays from 7am-3:30pm. Both of these markets offer meat, dairy, and produce products that are noticeably more fresh and affordable than supermarket standards, both are accessible via public transit and paved bike paths (~25 mins from UW campus), and both have student discounts.

5. If you’re moving to a new city, think about walkability.
   There is an abundance of evidence that car-centric city planning is getting in the way of human connection. Cities have the best infrastructure for going car free when they prioritize pedestrians and bikers (Montreal, Toronto, and Waterloo have all been making CRAZY progress). I’ve appreciated the freedom of hopping in and out of busses, bike shares, subways, and ride shares — my days have been spent exploring instead of returning to where I parked my car. Being car-free works best when you fully commit to the lifestyle — get shoes that are comfortable to walk in, find good backpacks, buy a used bike, and those little wheely grocery cart things so that you don’t need a car trunk to move stuff around. 😍 🥰 🎉

6. … but also consider the broader effects of affordability

   Big cities have a bit of a dark side when it comes to belonging— the rising costs mean that many people a) get priced out b) have to work ridiculous hours to be able to afford the lifestyle or c) can only participate for short periods of time. I’ve noticed communities of young tech workers are significantly less “sticky” — an industry-wide culture of remote-first work, high-turnover jobs, and high salaries combine to form a network of people that bounce between city centres and interact mostly at the surface level out of self-preservation — why get invested in people if you’ll only know them for 4 months?

7. … and consider places where people take pride in being friendly to strangers Cities where people chit-chat in grocery store aisles and say thank you to bus drivers are unmatched. Whether it’s Canadian niceness, Southern Charm, or one of the many community-oriented cultures that exist outside of the western hemisphere, there’s a difference in the air. You can feel it.

8. Decide to stay.
   I’m grateful to have had the ability to explore through internships, but living in 4 month increments for 5 years has been a quiet form of heartbreak — each time I pack up my boxes, I leave behind the people who have witnessed me grow up. A piece of me still lives in all 14 bedrooms I’ve lived in since 2020, and I’ve never been able to pause long enough to mourn those losses. As I near graduation, I’ve been daring to dream of letting myself fall in love with places and people in a very long term way. I’m excited to put down some roots.

9. Advocate for other people in your community

   Learn enough to have an opinion and then put it to action. After hearing about proposed changes to the LRT schedule on twitter, Rodney and friends successfully led a charge to keep the trains in Waterloo running at 15 minute intervals during off-peak hours and it worked. Get into YIMBY advocacy, dedicate time to supporting the development of dense, walkable, human-scaled neighborhoods and/or affordable housing projects. Advocacy can take many forms— the Obama Campaign had a CTO and data science team. Surrounding yourself with people who care about the health of their communities will give you a sense of purpose and help you feel less lonely.

Filling the 3rd Circle - Joining and inviting people into your Clans

If you’ve met someone and think you’d like to be closer friends:

1. Ask for their Instagram or contact information (in my opinion, phone number feels a bit personal and high commitment) so you can stay passively aware of each others’ life updates until you can think of some reason to hang out again on purpose.

2. Invite them to do something specific and recurring based on shared goals or interests (e.g. “hey I’m looking for people to do this group activity, feel free to invite someone else too, no worries if not!” v.s. “do you want to be my friend?”) feels a lot less awkward as a starting line to initiate a more ongoing relationship.

   Fun ways to get to know someone over time include:

   1. Making Stuff (band practice, doing a project, crafts)
   2. Learning / self improvement (university, art class, coding bootcamps, cooking classes, fitness classes) 
   3. Sports (intramural, community leagues, competitive teams) 
   4. Work (part time, full time, entrepreneurship, peer groups) 
   5. Volunteering (community centres, advocacy, libraries) 
   6. Cultural spaces, churches
   7. Starting a Socratica Node (atrociously shameless plug, I'm not even being paid to say this, ridiculous, anyways here's the link 😁💃🎉🕺🪩😎✨)

3. Become a“yes person”. Reaching out to people is scary for everyone (what if they say no?), so if you consistently are enthusiastic about participating and say yes often, you’ll probably find you become people’s go-to invite when they want to have a good time.

Filling the 2nd Circle — Assembling a Squad

To “promote” people from your clans (e.g. coworkers, teammates, volunteers, friends from school, friends from church) into genuine friendships, the key is inviting them to do activities beyond what initially brought you together. Introducing your friends from different contexts to each other can be quite fun, and making group chat is one of the most powerful ways to initiate the formation of a squad. The goal is to create a ton of crossover episodes until you stop thinking of people as “your friends from ____”, and just start thinking of them as “your friends”.

Examples:  
1. trips to the beach with your classmates
2. going to the bar with people from your sports team
3. starting a reading club with your friends from church
5. inviting your coworkers, reading club, church friends, sports teammates, classmates, and friends you met at the bar to create the most incredible trivia team your small town has ever seen. Awesome. 

Filling the Inner Circle — Opening the gates & dropping your guard

This is arguably the hardest layer to break through. Turning members of the squad into members of your inner circle requires a level of vulnerability and mutual neediness that many people are uncomfortable exposing. Without fail, I’ve only *really* befriended roommates and close friends at this level after: 1) ugly crying in front of them, 2) throwing up in front of them, 3) going through some sort of otherwise traumatic experience together. With those things in mind, it becomes somewhat obvious that if you are risk averse and strive to be “self sufficient”, you will also struggle to reach a level of friendship this meaningful. Being vulnerable in front of other people is HARD.

(At your own risk), activities that generally work:
1. Being roommates (lower commitment: have a sleepover)
2. Moving to a new city/country together 
3. Travelling together, going camping, road trips 
4. Supporting each other through something vulnerable (e.g. breakups, exams, car accidents, getting unreasonably drunk and dealing with the consequences, interpersonal ✨drama✨💅) 

The line between Squad and Inner Circle is a delicate one — these activities work only because there is real risk involved: leaning on people and finding out which relationships break under pressure can be really painful, but it’s the only way to find the relationships that will stand the test of time.

Your grumpy, anxious, mopey, ‘being ridiculous”, low morale, stinky, bad-attitude self is part of who you are — the only way to feel truly seen is being vulnerable enough to show someone all of that, terrified it’ll scare them away (because you really are being grumpy anxious mopey ridiculous low morale and stinky), and then realizing they’re still there, somehow excited to deal with this messy version of you, honoured to witness your life behind-the-scenes.

It takes a long road to get here, but having people in your inner circle is one of the most empowering and beautiful things you can experience in the entire world. It is worth it.

Finding soul-feeding, all-encompassing belonging

Is a myth. Even if you feel you’ve found it, it will be fleeting — you’ll change and evolve, be influenced by your surroundings, and seek environments that feel in sync with who you are and who you want to become. Connections at all levels will come and go throughout our lives, and life events (moving to a new city, losing a close relationship, integrating with new colleagues or peers) can all make us feel unstable — it’s unlikely that anyone will ever truly have all of their circles full at any point in time.

If you feel a perfect sense of belonging everywhere you go, you’re probably limiting yourself by staying too deep in your comfort zone. Prioritizing connection is a lifelong pursuit, and not something you can (or should!) put on autopilot. Relationships and strong communities require effort (at an individual and societal level), but that doesn’t mean they have to be draining — I can say with complete confidence that investing time into relationships has been the single most rewarding thing I’ve done in my life. I think it’s kind of entire point of being alive.

You live in a place full of people worth getting to know.

You are worth getting to know.

We are all. right. here.

This essay is dedicated to Anson.

In the depths of the pandemic, she spotted me in our 100+ member SYDE 2025 class Facebook messenger group chat and slid into my DMs:

After a year and a half of infinite conversations, school projects, late night video calls, online hackathons, and links sent back and forth, we finally met in person in summer 2021, and over the past 4 years we’ve leaned on each other through bonks on the head, heartbreaks, exam seasons, and the co-parenting of community organizations.

We’ve cried and fought as we’ve weathered the ups and downs of our intermittently-long-distance friendship — but have come out of each bump in the road feeling stronger and more resilient, both in our friendship and as individual people. I have been changed for good: I would not be the person I am today without Anson, and I cannot imagine the past, present, or future of my life without her in it.

Every so often I’m struck with all of these feelings — most recently I could be found sobbing while listening to Grow as We Go by Ben Platt:

… But I think I captured it best in words in a ✨private friendship essay✨ from 2022:

I’ve been thinking about the thing I said the other day (admittedly a banger), about how loneliness shouldn’t be the reason great people don’t do great things. Today I think I realized, or at least remembered from a long long time ago (from a brain that no longer feels like my own) a feeling that I haven’t acknowledged in a while.

I haven’t felt lonely since the day I met you.

I want you to know that everything I have personally worked on since I met you — even if you had absolutely nothing to do with it — has been supercharged by your existence. I was wandering around, searching for community, and finding great collaborators along the way, but a broad community is only one piece of the puzzle — there’s just something about your inner circle being full that lights you up and lets you be the absolute best version of yourself. 

Though I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to make life better for other people, I think I’ll feel forever karmically indebted to the universe for not only bringing you into my life but for doing it early enough that we have so many incredible years to spend together. 

Who tf gets that lucky?!

:)

- Joss

1. Calendar = Source of Truth

Ok so this one isn't revolutionary but I genuinely do not understand people who don't use calendars?? how do u keep it all in your head ?!

1. Block in when you’ll wake up, eat, and go to bed. You might not follow this schedule exactly, but the reminders ensure that even if you say “10 more minutes” for 2.5 hours, eating and sleeping are still top of mind.

2. For appointments, tests, or things you absolutely cannot be late for, schedule them 30 minutes earlier than they actually are. And make them bright red. 🚨💯

   

3. When you make plans with someone, have them send you a calendar invite immediately or put it in your calendar yourself, right then and there.

4. Sign up for Superpowered — it gives you little reminders on your laptop of how your time blocks are going / what the rest of your day looks like. This has been a lifesaver for me.

   

   
   

   ---

2. TO-DO Lists → Time Blocks

Visualize your time before executing. Make the plan & then do the plan.

1. Every term, spend a few hours blocking out the next 4 months. Time moves really quickly if you don’t pay attention — refer back to this to stay conscious of time passing.

   

2. Every Sunday night, spend 1 hour blocking out the upcoming week. This should include high-level things (commitments, deadlines, travel, intramurals / working out, study blocks, grocery shopping, etc.).

   

3. Spend 5 minutes writing a “plan for tomorrow” before bed.
   If you forget to do it before bed, do it before you get started. This is more than a list of things to do, but a way for you to mentally walk through what you’ll be doing and when. Put “taking a break” and “transit time” in the plan, and make the plan ambitious so that you stay hustling (e.g. overestimate how many problem sets you’ll get through), but expect to not get through it all. Once you’ve made the plan, execute.

   

4. Use Pomodoro timers to execute! 50 minutes on, 10 minutes off, with a sheet of paper for all the random thoughts that come up while working. You can chat about them with a friend during your break. I recommend Cuckoo. This coworking website also seems cool.

3. STUDYING: Consolidate Information

To speedrun massive amounts of learning in very short periods of time 😁

Compile everything you need to learn into one location before you start actually trying to learn it. To download massive amounts of information into my brain (without getting distracted), this is my most effective process:

0. (not a real step, but this happens often so I’ve started using it as a tool).
   Look at the practice questions, try to do them. You will not succeed. This will cause you to panic, which will motivate you to actually start studying. On to step 1!

1. Download all lectures / practice questions / whatever is most useful — sometimes textbooks have a “Chapter Summary” section that is super helpful.

2. Combine them into one massive PDF

3. ‘Print’ this PDF as a smaller PDF with 16 Pages per Sheet. Now that the content only spans a few pages, it will seem manageable.

4. Send this PDF to an iPad / other tablet (a lifesaver if you struggle to get organized / lose stuff a lot / are studying several topics often )

5. Highlight as many words as you need to remain “an active” reader. Sometimes this is literally every word for me — anything to keep my brain from scanning the pages but not actually absorbing anything. Colour code by information hierarchy / topic or whatever makes sense — this is SUCH a powerful tool. Put huge stars around stuff you think is important.

6. Make a summary sheet using your annotations / notes.

7. NOW do practice questions. Refer to your study sheet, and don’t bother looking at anything else. You will not be able to do every practice question (I don’t think I’ve gotten more than 20% through a problem set in my entire academic career), so focus on the stuff that is both a) most likely to show up on an assessment and b) somewhere you’re lacking confidence / knowledge1.

8. Remember that the goal is to pass. If you will simply never understand a concept and you’re crunched for time, stop being stubborn and move on. It’s better to be SOLID on 70% of the content than questionably prepared for 100%.

4. TESTS: Play the game

You're marked on what you show, not what you know. Maximize your points per minute and make the most out of the hours you spent studying! 

1. Leading up to the test: 📆 🔜

   1. Make a list of every “type” of question you predict will be on the test. Make sure you have a framework for how to handle those questions & their variations, and prioritize those types of practice questions.

   2. If you have access to past exams, time yourself while you take them. Use this to understand how quickly you need to move through questions.

   3. Even if your professor lets you bring a study sheet into the test, that doesn’t mean you’ll have time to learn while you’re writing. The act of making the sheet is what puts content into your brain, so don’t just use someone else’s.
      

2. Visualize the test before you start. 👀 ⏰

   1. Have an idea of “how many points per minute” you need to allocate to each question (e.g. if you have a 60 mark test and 60 minutes to complete it, you should spend 8 minutes on an 8 mark question).

   2. Have an idea of which types of questions are “easy wins” — aka you are confident that you can solve it / get a reasonable amount of points.

   3. This might be a sports thing, but I like to play a hype-up song to have a “pace” going in my head before I walk into the exam room. This song is my go-to.

   4. Find where the clock is, and visualize what it will look like a) when you’re halfway through and b) when you have 10 minutes left. Pace yourself to have emptied everything you know onto the paper by the time the clock reaches the “10 minutes left” position.
      

3. The test begins! Take 5 minutes to take it all in. 🚨 🔥

   1. Skim every question from front to back, highlighting all the important details of each question so that they stand out. This includes numbers, keywords, words like “not”, isn’t” and “except for”, and anything else that might be missed later.

   2. Write down the number of marks and your time allocation for each question.

   3. Number the questions (e.g. 1,2,3,4,5) in the order you’ll address them.

      

4. Count “up from 0”, not “down from 100”. 🔢 📈

   1. Start with the “easy wins”. Confidence and momentum are huge for test-taking. Solve a question, gain 10 points. Multiple choice is done, 20 points. Keep your pace up, time will go quickly. If you get stuck, move on after ~1 min.

   2. Attempting all questions > Finishing half of them

      1. University is a game of part marks :’). Especially in physics courses, you can get near passing by writing down all the given information, drawing a diagram, writing some equations, and then taking some educated guesses.

      2. If you have an entire test of questions you have no idea how to do, set up all of the questions and get those marks before you get into solving them.

      3. If you know an answer is wrong (e.g. your car’s velocity is -5000595 m/s) but don’t have time to find your mistake, write “this is wrong” to show you have critical thinking skills 😎. I have gotten marks for this before :)

   3. Check your work really quickly. If you’re like me, you will rarely have time for this.

   4. Move on to the hard stuff (aka do your best & forget the rest). 💕

      Once you pass the “I’m pretty sure I’ve passed” bar, you will be less stressed attempting the more challenging questions and might have a burst of creative genius with the pressure removed. Or not. Sometimes questions are straight-up unsolvable (e.g. the professor made a typo and didn’t proofread), so don’t let this slow your momentum or make you sad. You will learn to laugh about it :)
      

5. Move on! Don’t worry about how the test went until you get your marks returned.
   It is out of your control now. Go for a run, get some food, or take a nap. You did it.
   

6. After the test: Getting your marks back 🤔 💭 🔄

   1. You might be pleasantly surprised! See, you had nothing to worry about. 😁 You’ll find that the relief of getting a 60 on a test you thought you failed surpasses the joy of getting 100% on a test you know you aced — you passed.

   2. If you are unpleasantly surprised, review where you went wrong, talk to the prof, and revise your studying / test-taking strategy. Profs want to know that you care and are often really kind and helpful if you reach out. Ask kids in your class what strategies they’re using, and learn with/from them. :)

5. Independence != Intelligence

Learning everything "on your own" is not a badge of honour. If your pride is getting in the way of your learning, you are wasting your time.

There is an awful “lone genius” myth in everything math / science / coding related.

We like to imagine that “smart people” are magically learning how to code in complete isolation, conducting solo experiments in dramatically-lit basement laboratories, and plucking ideas from the stew of genius that’s been swirling in their brains since birth.

In reality, someone taught them how to do stuff and they asked a lot of questions. Learning doesn’t happen alone, so prioritize finding the people you’re going to learn from and ask them questions / talk things through until you actually know what’s going on.

At School:

Prioritize making friends over learning content (to a point). School is hard enough, don’t make it harder by trying to do it alone. Set a culture of giving and receiving help between classmates and everyone will be a lot more successful.

At Work:

• In your first meeting with your manager, figure out what “Success” looks like

  • “I really want to do a great job in this role. In your eyes, what does an ‘Outstanding’ work term look like for a co-op student?” is the golden conversation an upper-year friend taught me to initiate.

  • Have your manager write down their goals for how you will learn and contribute over the course of the term. Collaborate on this list so that your expectations are aligned and neither of you are disappointed later in the term. Once you know “the bar”, you know what to aspire to and what “going above and beyond” might look like.
    

• In your first week, set up 20-minute “get to know each other” calls with every member of your immediate team. Ask them to “tell you their life story” if you don’t know how to break the ice (be prepared to share yours too 😁) and then ask them how the work they do fits into the bigger picture. This will make it 10x easier for you to feel comfortable asking people for help as you start actually doing work.
  

• Ask your manager for a dedicated mentor/buddy to answer questions for you in your first month. This might be your manager, but ideally, it’s a junior employee who just learned the ropes and will be able to anticipate your questions (and make time to answer them in detail). Ask for a “high-level overview” of the team and explanations of the work you’ll be doing. 1 hour of their time will save weeks of yours.
  

• Ask GOOD questions.

  • “What should I do today?” → “I noticed that ______ could use improvement. I was thinking of using today to try to solve this problem, but please let me know if there is something higher priority that you’d like me to work on!”

  • “How does this work?” → “I’m trying to accomplish ___. I have already tried _____ and _____. Do you have time to help me get unblocked?”
    

• ⭐️🔥🚨 Don’t aspire to be “independent”. 🚨🔥⭐️
  Once I got decent at coding, I decided “I don’t need help! I can do it all by myself!”

  My manager had to give me a talking-to. Software development is highly collaborative, and getting shared context from your teammates / collaborating on implementation does not make you worse at your job, it makes you better.
  

• Remember that you are here to learn. Know what your goals are, and be active in making sure you get the opportunities that will help you reach them! Don’t be afraid to set up chats with people on other teams to learn about the work they do (ask your manager if this is alright before you do this), and if you have free time, take the initiative to find work that is useful to the company and would help you learn & grow.
  
  

  

I recently wrote about my ADHD and ‘giftedness’ diagnoses and how I think that a lot of diagnoses boil down to the following two questions:

1. “How sensitive are you to the world around you?”

2. “Do you have the environments and tools to channel this sensitivity productively?”

When nerds like me have intense feelings, they (we) love to intellectualize and hyperanalyze them — this is usually a trap. Whether or not you can pinpoint what you’re struggling with, today we’re going to move past the ‘problem identification’ phase and fast forward into tactical-solutions-that-work territory.

Writing down all the tools I use to stay in the driver’s seat of my own life means I won’t have to problem-solve from scratch every time I’m struggling.

Feel free to pull these tricks out of your back pocket if you ever need ‘em.

ADHD / Distractibility / Sensitivity-to-Environment

For accepting who you are and working with it productively 

1. EXERCISE / SLEEP to reboot your brain, even if you don’t think you have time.

   1. If your brain is overloaded, understimulated, bored, or overwhelmed, there are 2 immediate ways out — take a nap / go to bed, or go run around and get a little energy boost and brain clarity. This is an investment, future you will be more effective — you will gain more than you lose. I will say being *slightly* sleep-deprived sometimes seems to help me stay focused, to a point, but don’t let sleep debt creep up on you too much.

      

   2. If possible, avoid order-of-operations-decision-making traps. For me, reducing the time between exercising and showering (either doing it at the gym or working out in my apartment building so I can shower right away) helps deal with the post-workout “I need to shower / I’m tired / I should unpack / I’m hungry / I’ve been sitting on my phone for 2 hours oops” cycle.

   3. Join or start a workout accountability group to get constant peer pressure to actually remember to work out (like this one!).

2. FOOD IS FUEL.

   1. Eat good and healthy food, even if that means you often eat at restaurants, get a meal delivery service, or rely on ✨low-budget charcuterie boards✨ (well-balanced plates of ingredients that require minimal preparation). If you’re not eating well because you’re pretending like you’re actually going to make home-cooked meals or meal prep someday, make a new plan. Being realistic means can gift your future self healthy choices and means you will have enough fuel to be at your best.

   2. Healthy and easily-grabbable foods keep me going when I’m rushing out the door (because I’ve lost track of time) or when I don’t want to stop to eat / prepare a full meal (typically when I’m deep in a project). Carbs are the most grabbable food group, but set you up for wildly varying energy levels and blood sugar crashes. Protein moderates your energy levels but is less grabbable — meaning a lot of people don’t get enough. Starting my days with Greek yogurt changed my life. :D

   3. Quick and easy foods to help you get enough protein:

      1. Breakfast: greek yogurt / granola / berries OR an egg / avocado / tomato open-faced sandwich type thing

      2. Lunch and Dinner: ham or rotisserie chicken or tuna sandwich, with spinach / pickles / cheese / mustard / mayo / tomatoes or whatever else you want or have in the fridge (get the ratio of protein:carbs to be as close to 1:1 as possible) OR canned soup (I recommend lentil / other soups with protein in them) OR some sort of charcuterie board thing. Frozen broccoli is also really easy to steam and I’m not really sure where to include it but it’s good for you.

      3. Snacks: carrots and hummus, apples and peanut butter, trail mix / roasted nuts, ham and cheese and crackers, protein bars for snacks. Bocconcini cheese is a weird one but it’s fun. Replace your current snacks with a higher protein option and you will be full for longer.

         

3. ACCOUNTABILITY BUDDIES

   1. Schedule forcing functions to keep you on track (calling a friend, meeting up with someone to study, scheduling a ‘check in’ progress meeting at work before you actually have the work done). I love early morning meetings because they force me to get out of bed. I also often try to trick myself into getting work done ahead of schedule by putting artificial deadlines in my calendar before things are actually due. Rushing for an 11:59 deadline and then realizing you still have 2 days left is awesome.
      

   2. “Body doubling” (this is the official term). Work on homework next to a friend, or in a library where other people are doing the same thing. Don’t be afraid to ask people to come hang out with you just to sit quietly next to each other doing independent tasks. Moving out of my recent apartment, I made my mom come sit in the room while I mopped floors and cleaned toilets. Just having the presence of another person passively in the room goes a loooong way for me — both providing subtle pressure to remain on task, and keeping me aware of how much time has passed.

      

   3. Do things on behalf of others so that you do them for yourself — find a person you’re writing a specific essay for, and have them set the deadline of when they need it. Share opportunities with others to bait yourself into finding them for yourself. Make a study sheet and send it to your study group to get yourself to learn the material. Cook a legitimate meal because you’ve invited a guest over for dinner. Go to bed on time so you don’t keep anyone else up late at night. We are better at taking care of ourselves when it conveniently coincides with taking care of other people. Use this to your advantage.

   4. Phone a friend while doing tasks you know you have a hard time completing from start to finish. I like to be on FaceTime while folding laundry, packing for trips, mending, cleaning, and cooking (“hey, wasn’t there something on the stove?” 🤡) so that the jobs get done in the background while I get to have a fun conversation and connect with people I haven’t talked to in a while. I find conversations keep me more alert than watching TV or listening to music.

      

4. CONTROL YOUR ENVIRONMENT (turning the ‘volume’ down)

   1. External ‘volume’: People talking, loud music, rustling paper noises, flickering / too bright / too dim lighting, and itchy clothes are all controllable factors that will make your life ever-so-slightly more difficult for absolutely no reason. Stop worrying about being high-maintenance — if it’s distracting you and it’s controllable, don’t spend 3 hours trying to ‘suck it up’. You know what you need, cut to the chase set yourself up for success.

   2. My key tools to “turn the external volume down” are a baseball hat to block peripheral lighting, noise cancelling headphones/earplugs to block noise, wearing layers of clothing to control for temperature, snacks to make sure I am fed, and putting my phone in a different room / giving it to a friend. If I have my phone with me, to “turn the volume down”, I rarely have Instagram / social media apps downloaded (I redownload every time I post 🤡) and am almost always on Do Not Disturb.
      

   3. Internal ‘volume’: On the other end of the spectrum, silence, isolation, dull environments, and a lack of action can cause me to get equally distracted with random thoughts, side quests, and ideas with no perception of how much time has passed. That or I fall asleep.

   4. Adding some ‘white noise’ to make this volume less noticeable but keep me alert is typically helpful, which is why I often work in public places. My ideal environment for studying is: indoors, with huge windows (so I can tell how much time is passing), one friend to study with (sitting side-by-side rather than across from each other), people walking by occasionally, and a charging port and waterbottle filling station nearby. I’ve also figured out certain playlists and songs to counteract whatever mood is making it hard to focus (sad? not anymore. sleepy? don’t be. brain spiralling? calm down. insecure? strut).

   5. Sometimes the internal volume will not shut up — this is where writing comes in handy. My brother said that when his brain is in a loop of irrelevant thoughts (e.g. “here is a list of all the TV shows I like, boy do I ever like them!”), he jots them down in his notes app. That way they’re in a safe place, and his ‘head thoughts’ can be more relevant. I’m often gripped with a thought or the beginnings of an essay when on a walk or when I’m trying to study, and I’ve learned to allow myself 20 minutes to jot down the main gist just so I can get back to my day. Sometimes it’s easier to give in than to fight.

   6. To quiet both external and internal noise, listen to thunderstorm noises. This genuinely unlocks something in my brain & is great if you don’t have noise-cancelling headphones.

      

5. LISTEN TO YOUR GUT, FOLLOW YOUR ENERGY

   1. You will feel truly awesome when you work on the things you care about. Channel that hyper-focus, and GO AND BE EXCELLENT (If you want to — having hobbies where your only aspiration is to be mediocre is actually super great). The things I can’t stop thinking about demand my attention whether or not I want them to (most stuff I’ve put into the world begins as a shower thought, an in-class-distraction, or a ‘it’s 4 a.m. how did I get here’) — my attempts to harness this energy have lead to some really cool outcomes that I’m super proud of.
      

   2. On the flip side, you will be significantly less awesome at things you’re forcing yourself to care about. Just because other people are capable, excited, or dreaming of doing a thing doesn’t mean you have to feel the same. Follow the advice of people you relate to who have lives you aspire to — this will be more relevant than the advice of ‘the most conventionally successful person in the room’. Instead of being frustrated with the things that are harder for you, forgive yourself and remember to celebrate all the awesomeness that comes with being you too.
      

   3. Recognize that resting is not the only way to recharge. If you’re feeling exhausted and burnt out, sometimes the solution isn’t sleeping or watching TV, but doing something active that you can get energy from. Don’t quit the things you love, invest time in areas where “adding more” makes everything else feel like less. Edit a video project on a whim, go sing in the stairwell of the engineering building, or organize a silly basketball tournament bracket just because you think it would be awesome.
      

   4. Listen to when your body is ready for deep work. If given complete autonomy over my time, I’m really good at getting stuff done in the morning (6am-12pm) and evening (6pm-12am). I try to avoid using the overnight 12am-6am block, but sometimes the focus is too good and I can’t resist. You’ll notice that the afternoon, 12pm-6pm (a good chunk of the typical work day) is not on that list. I find it best to use that part of the day for other things (e.g. exercise, meetings), but make use of accountability buddies / other tactics to help me focus in the afternoon if I need to. An important note here is that even if your sleep schedule isn’t consistent, make sure you’re getting enough (for me, anything less than 6 hours is a problem, so if I stay up late I also shift my schedule the next day to compensate).
      

6. COUNT DOWN FROM 1 (and then do the thing you’re supposed to be doing).
   Counting down from 3 gives you too much time to change your mind. :)

Stress & Anxiety

For when your life is full of conflict, your calendar is too full, and your to-do list is too long. Especially for extended periods of time. Breathe.

1. Zoom out and think about big-picture stuff. Think about how incredible it is that we figured out how to send rockets into space, turn vibrations into music, vaccinate against diseases, increase widespread literacy through public education, communicate virtually in real-time, figure skate, and love each other. I bring the picture book “Here We Are” by Oliver Jeffers with me every time I move to a new city.

   

2. Imagine how awesome “24 hours from now you” or “One week from now you” will feel. The assignment will be handed in, the test will be taken, the interview will be complete. Whether or not you do well, it will be over, and you’ll be able to flop in bed and rest. The minutes will keep marching forward (at exactly the same speed they always do), and you are getting closer to the version of you that is on the other side of whatever is stressing you out.

3. Ask for help and accept help when it’s offered. University was where I had my first anxiety attacks — getting someone to talk you through it and breathe deeply with you (in real life or on the phone) is essential. If you’re struggling and hesitant to reach out because you feel like a burden, consider how you wouldn’t think twice about helping a friend in need. Learning how to be an adult is 30% gaining independence and 70% figuring out how to support each other in healthy and sustainable ways. Life is a team sport, we are in this together.
   

4. Managing anxiety is about balancing your brain chemistry, not ‘willing yourself to be okay’. After an anxiety attack, you will have a huge energy slump from the adrenaline and cortisol leaving your body (anxiety is really draining in general). This can be really frustrating, but it’s in the past. Onward! Take care of yourself and if you can, give yourself the day off. If you really need to get it together, use the ‘reboot’ trick — either go sprint around or take a nap. Maybe have a snack. You’ve got this.

   

5. Relax your nervous system with deep pressure. Weighted blankets and vests are awesome. You can also ask someone for a really long, firm, hug (this might feel awkward but it works). Sometimes I make my roommates turn me into a beanbag sandwich and sit on top (see diagram below). Asking for this means you have to be a bit shameless, but you will feel the physical anxiety symptoms melt out of your body. It is worth it.

   

6. If you struggle to eat, have some crackers / protein bars / granola bars on hand. I’ve found that working out before trying to eat helps a lot. Pre-workout have some light carbs, and post-workout try to get some more protein / a larger meal if you can. Be proud of yourself when you can get food down, take it one bite at a time. Eating outdoors can also help, and don’t be afraid to ask friends to sit with you while you eat if distracting yourself helps. Something about roasting ur sandwich (verbally) while you eat it makes it go down easier??

   

7. If you struggle to sleep and can’t turn off your brain, play the audio of an old TV show (The Office and How I Met Your Mother are my go-to’s for this) with a timer that pauses the show after 20 mins. I did this all through high school to make my brain turn off. I still use this when I need to.
   

8. Finally, be relentless in preserving your energy. If a particular trigger or environment drains you, avoid it (if that’s possible). Don’t try to tough it out, it’s not worth it. Seek the accommodations you need to be successful (especially academically, but in all areas of life). Do what you’ve gotta do.

Anxiety (existential)

about the world, your purpose, the meaning of life, etc.

1. You can’t do anything about the state of the world if you are breaking.
   Eat, sleep, exercise. Spend time around the people who love you, spend a night giggling on the floor with friends, go ask someone for a hug. The world works best when everyone puts on their own oxygen mask first.
   

   

2. Recognize the scope of your influence and do small, meaningful, local things that can make the problem better (volunteer, help a friend, start something in your local community). If you’ve done this but are feeling disconnected because you’ve delegated all the on-the-ground work to others, close your laptop and go spend time with the real-world people who are impacted by the work you’re doing.
   

3. Pursue achievable goals alongside a team or community. Maybe this is a hockey team trying to win a provincial championship, maybe this is directly related to the issues you care about but you’re organizing events or fundraisers as part of a larger goal. Small wins are awesome and we need them.
   

4. Zoom in and distract yourself with non-heartbreaking, challenging (but solvable) problems. The fastest way to relieve yourself (temporarily) of existential grief is panicking about studying for a math test tomorrow. Yay for school <3
   

5. Do something for pure joy, where there is no possible way you could frame it as a productive activity. Go dancing, play laser tag, walk the streets at night, go lay in some grass. Do not cross an item off of your to-do list, and cooking doesn’t count because you need to eat for sustenance. There has to be absolutely no point in doing the activity beyond having fun.
   

That’s all I really feel qualified to speak on from personal experience.1

While the symptoms can be less than ideal, our bodies have built-in alarm systems that yell at us when we’re not taking care of ourselves (thirst, hunger, loneliness, nausea, skin problems, etc). As much as we think our brains control our bodies, our bodies make the rules — most people you admire have likely learned that lesson the hard way.

Hope this helps :)

Joss

Table of Contents:

Preface

The Way Things Work™️

If everything is temporary, why build anything?

So you’ve decided to build. What’s next?

1. How to find great people

2. How to get people to show up

3. How to help people be the best versions of themselves

4. How to get great people to stick around

5. How to preserve “the quality” of a community at scale

Maximizing resource use at scale

• Your only finite resources are time and energy (use them wisely!)

• Less-finite resources — leveraging the community to build the community.

Whatever you do, it will be imperfect. Do it anyways.

Preface

World-building is something we associate with authors, cinematographers and video game designers — we constrain our creativity to fictional universes that exist behind screens or in the pages of books.

Choosing writing, film or coding as your world-building medium feels so… possible. Pick up a pencil, whip out your camera, learn game development — suddenly you can establish a whole reality where you get to make the rules, craft tidy storylines, and ✨curate the vibes✨.

Pouring our hearts into universes that are one step removed from reality is a wonderful outlet, but there will always be some emotional distance when a glass screen or paper boundary separates us from the world we create. It’s easy to forget that the world we wake up to, complain about, and exist in every day is a world we can influence.

If you ever feel tempted to give up on the real world, remember that this is where we have water gun fights, breathe forest air, eat awesome sandwiches, go dancing, and are brought to tears laughing with friends. We will always return to the messy and imperfect lives in front of us1, meaning they are worth directing our creativity towards.

Real-life actions are the most powerful world-building medium we have, and appreciating the true scope of your influence is the first step in building a world you are proud and excited to be part of.

This awareness led me to spend a lot of time joining, growing, and founding organizations and… social movements? Whatever you want to call “a group of people who come together to build a world better than the one we’re currently in”.

This work often feels like being on the cutting edge of research — starting with a hypothesis of “the way things could be”, casting that vision into a void, and persevering with nothing more than a belief in a version of reality that doesn’t exist yet.

While this can be lonely and terrifying at first, you’d be surprised at how quickly people will jump on an idea when it comes from a place of “I wish this existed”. We like to think our problems are unique, but most of us are exactly like other girls.

When these organizations gain momentum, the questions “Why does this work?” and “What are you doing that’s different?” come up often, and these questions make a lot of sense: from an outside perspective, it’s really hard to understand how SVP Teens grew from 8 to 85 kids in a month, why Socratica coworking sessions consistently attract people from ✨Downtown Toronto✨ to Waterloo, Ontario on Sunday mornings, or why 200-person UW Startups events now sell out in less than 24 hours (with 49% female attendees!) — from the outside, all we’re really doing is putting a bunch of people in a room. In fact from the outside, the incredible teams I’ve worked with have been under-resourced, our venues have been slightly harder to get to, and our food has been ✨minimalistic✨ (read: pizza served on napkins).

These stats are the highlight reel, and they are really exciting. What’s talked about less is what goes on behind the scenes — capturing and holding the attention of overcommitted-young-people long enough to accomplish anything is no easy task.

“Gut feelings” have guided a lot of my decision-making over the past few years, and while intuition is a totally valid (and shockingly effective) strategy for world-building, “Doing a vibe check” is a wholly unsatisfying answer to “Why does this work?” for anyone that wants to do anything similar. There is probably some value in writing it down.

This is my best attempt to codify what’s been goin’ on up there.

The Way Things Work™️

From anecdotal observation, I can *somewhat confidently* say that every organization lives and dies following roughly this cycle:

1. There’s a lurking dissatisfaction with “the way things are” in a certain environment.

2. People start verbalizing their desire to change, they come together, and they form a community around a certain shared vision of what the world should look like.

3. For a time this works really well! These are the glory days.

4. The community grows and grows. And grows… and grows? With more attention and success, everyone rushes to be a part of it. Being a part of it is “the cool thing to do”. FOMO is incredible.

5. Tasks become repetitive, monotonous, and stale. Work stops being exciting, organizers feel overwhelmed. The founding group loses interest, the sparkle dies.

6. Tasks are delegated, and in a last-ditch effort to save the sinking ship, new leadership comes in. In most cases (other than the rare case of someone truly special making it “the cool thing to do” again), the organization rides out its reputation, diluted to a shadow of what it once was, until it fizzles and ceases to exist.

7. The cycle repeats.

Pretty much everything in life is cyclical *something something… the moon… seasons… animal populations…*, and I think the rise and fall of various ideologies and groups of people is not only inevitable but necessary for progress. But if that’s true, what’s the point?

If everything is temporary, why build anything?

We tend to view companies and organizations like this:

With this mindset, the meteoric rises and catastrophic downfalls of social movements and corporations seem earth-shattering. We personify organizations to the point where we forget that under the layer of logos, there are people who go about their everyday lives. When one hype cycle comes to an end, people simply hop onto the next wave and reshuffle under new branding.

Each organization will have a finite lifespan, and each individual person will have their own timeline within that organization — we all change and grow and move on, and that’s ok. This means that succession planning, mentorship, and handoff should constant and expected daily processes rather than momentous torch-passing moments.

People saying their goodbyes doesn’t necessarily mean that the organization is failing, in decline, or any worse than it was when they joined. It’s often actually indicative of success — in that person’s life, the organization has served its purpose. Sticking around out of obligation makes things grow stale, idealizing “the way things were” distracts from the present, and being loyal to logos that no longer serve us is silly2.

Personal growth, ideas, and relationships persist — and compound — long past the lifespans of organizations and individual contributors.

This is what leads to long-term societal progress. Organizations are nothing more than idea-transporting vessels and friend-making machines.

So even if the vessel is temporary (which it definitely is, as all organizations are), build it anyway. This is not about the rise and fall of the branding you package your ideas behind — this is about adding your piece to the world you want to be a part of and enjoying the friendships and personal growth you experience along the way.

So you’ve decided to build. What’s next?

Here are the somewhat counterintuitive rules that I’ve learned through experimentation. No one really teaches you these things, but I’m going to give it my best shot.
Putting on my teacher hat.

1. How to find great people

When I was in grade 10, like many young Canadian nerds, I went to a summer enrichment program called SHAD. I cringe as I write this, but for the first time in my life, I felt I had found a place where I fit in — where the people weren’t just smart, but funny, ambitious, pursuing a huge variety of interests, and not letting themselves be put into boxes. People were just as likely to be tinkering with robots as they were to be performing in musical theatre (and more often than not, they would actively be pursuing both).

When I returned back to my hometown, the entire world outside of that socially-engineered environment felt dull. Everything I used to love had lost its sparkle. Like the melodramatic teenager I was, I moped around for several months, lamenting being separated from “my people”, convinced I’d never find them again.

At a SHAD reunion later that year, I expressed this feeling to a friend, to which they responded: “So? Make it better!”

Something clicked for me that day. There was no way that in my hometown of 350,000 people, there was no one who I could talk about big ideas with. I snapped out of it, and instead of moaning about how “all my favourite people” were elsewhere, I focused on finding the ones that were right in front of me. With an Instagram account and an intent to find great people locally, SVP Teens was able to fill the void that SHAD left behind. SHAD showed me that intense and vibrant and silly3 spaces could exist, and SVP Teens taught me that I could to will them into existence.

In my life today, I see the manifestation of the “there are no good people here” attitude most prevalently with Waterloo students and Canadians in general flocking to the United States. New York and San Francisco are ✨where the pretty people are ✨ — shiny, better, smarter, and cooler — moving to these places will make all your problems go away. While I can’t deny the magic of being surrounded by awesome people, the problem with everyone constantly chasing the hype is that it essentially turns us all into leeches — if 100% of people are focused on “finding where the best party is”, none of the parties will actually be fun. Communities die when everyone seeks to gain more than they hope to give.

I’ve also witnessed this with several fellowships and programs (and have caught myself feeling this way as well) — once you get accepted into something that was once the dream (usually because it was competitive to get into), you feel like it’s not all you painted it out to be. There are two ways to deal with this disappointment: keep searching for the next shiny thing because that’s where “your people” will be, or double down and believe in the magic within the people right in front of you. If you’re constantly searching and feeling unstable, unsettled, or like you don’t belong, you may find that choosing to stay in one place long enough to build the magic right where you are is the only path that puts an end to this cycle4.

Our Canadian king said it best:

I still absolutely spend time going to other places to meet great people, and I get a lot of energy from doing so. The difference now is what happens when I come home — because I’ve invested heavily in the communities around me, when internships and leadership retreats come to an end I’m just as excited to come back as I was to go explore.

Everywhere I go, I feel I’m surrounded by kind, ambitious nerds who care about the world and want to have a fun time. There are great people everywhere. It makes me so incredibly optimistic about the future.

2. How to get people to show up

If you have a disappointing turnout, don’t focus your energy on the people who aren’t there. Don’t lecture the people in a call about how attendance is important, and don’t spend the first 40 minutes waiting for people to trickle into your event. Everyone in attendance will feel their time is wasted, and that will probably be the last time they attend.

Instead, focus on the experience of the people who did show up, and have so much fun that the people who skipped feel FOMO for not being there. In your post-event marketing, show people laughing and having a good time, and set it to fun music. Don’t beg, stay winning. This is how you get returners coming back again and again, and this is how you get people to prioritize showing up next time.

Word-of-mouth marketing is powerful, and people will tell their friends how they really feel (whether they have a great time or an awful time). How you adapt to slightly-disappointing circumstances is the most powerful marketing tool you have, so think quickly on your feet and play the long game.

3. How to help people be the best versions of themselves

It’s comforting having a shiny vision of far-away places where the people are exactly who you want to spend your time around — but this blatantly ignores the fact that most of the people you interact with are tailoring their external personas to adapt to the social norms in given environments. Want people to be more authentic, not flex on you, and to have a real conversation? Take the first leap. People who think others are boring are usually just projecting — the secret to having great conversations is being a great conversationalist, and most people have really interesting things to share if you know the right questions to ask.

When we leave the house each day, we emotionally “suit up” — putting on an external personality that all but our closest friends get to interact with. Most of us choose the personality-equivalent of a grey trenchcoat, because grey trenchcoats are the safe and sensible option that no one will question.

Social engineering is the ‘vibe-curation’ equivalent of asking people to check their trenchcoats at the door — when the spaces we enter (parties, companies, and even countries) invite us to celebrate who we are under the layers of protection we’ve carefully compiled, we can all connect meaningfully with each other. All people are interesting — it’s a place’s job to make people feel comfortable enough to stop pretending they aren’t.

How do we help others do this?

Large scale community organizing / vibe curation:

(Watch on 2x speed, start at 13:45)

Normal conversations:

My go-to questions when I meet people for the first time:

1. Tell me your life story in 5 minutes or less (or more if that stresses you out)!

2. What’s a problem you really care about?

3. What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you?

4. What's something that always brings a smile to your face?

Sillier questions:

1. Let me guess if you’re an oldest / middle / younger / only child (okay so this isn’t really a question but is a fun game to play with groups who only slightly know each other).

2. What's the weirdest food combination you've tried and actually enjoyed?

3. If you were stranded on a deserted island, what three things would you want to have with you?

4. What's your favourite dance move? (and show it to me, obviously that’s where this was headed).

Crowdsourced:

1. If you could take a year off to do anything, what would it be?

2. What are you “bottom 10%” at?

3. Share your recommendations (recommendations are my love language)! Jaclyn Chan

If you’re not feeling creative:
“What about you?” can take you really far. Remember to ask as many questions as you answer, this is a conversation not an interview.

The most important thing is to not take yourself too seriously. Someone always has to take the lead in making people drop their guard, and if you can get the hang of consistently setting a tone that’s silly, honest, and vulnerable, you will have great conversations wherever you go.

4. How to get great people to stick around

Let’s talk about commitment! 🤭

With most organizations I’ve joined, I’ve found that once I enter a role, I’m expected to commit something like 10 hours a week to a volunteer position. For the first little bit I’m moderately bought in, but I get tired of doing the same thing over and over again. I get to the point where I’ve developed enough skills to do the job well, but I’m so bored that I stop trying and I eventually quit because I want my time back.

As a leader I’ve watched this occur from the other side: I’m hiring for a role and there is a candidate who is SO awesome, perhaps even overqualified for what they’re being asked to do. I am THRILLED, we have a dream team. What’s less thrilling is watching them quickly get bored — they become unresponsive, drop the ball on a few deliverables, and my entire relationship with them becomes chasing them down to complete ✨tasks✨. A lot of resentment builds up on both sides of this nagging relationship, and the work that’s outputted is mediocre.

Everyone in these scenarios is losing — the person asking for help, the person recruited to do the work, and all the people would have benefitted from the work being done well. If we return to the idea that organizations are nothing more than idea-transporting vessels and friend-making machines, this organization has failed.

To diagnose why people leave:

1. They are not having fun

2. They don’t have enough autonomy or ownership

3. Their work doesn’t feel meaningful

4. They feel trapped by commitment

5. There are dumb rules

To address these problems:

1. Have fun! (but for real)

   If you think working hard is the opposite of having fun, you’re doing it wrong. We often make the mistake of prioritizing efficiency over relationships and stop being silly under stress, but fun is the glue that holds us all together and is SO important. If you’re not having fun leading a volunteer organization for which you are unpaid, genuinely what are you doing? If you or the team are not enjoying yourselves, that is your number one red flag. Your attendees/customers/whoever-you’re-building-for will feel it. Don’t think about quitting as step one, think about how you can make whatever it is that you’re doing fun again.

   
   

2. Stop “pretend delegating”. Give real ownership.

   While some people like being given piece-meal tasks and completing them one by one to be approved by an authority figure, my hypothesis is that most people thrive when given a loosely defined direction and permission to do what they think is best. Giving other people true ownership and autonomy is so scary, but ambitious and creative people generally don’t enjoy being babysat or told what to do and will leave if you don’t give them the chance to shine. Stop getting in their way.

   

   You are surrounded by incredibly competent people who are eager to be trusted to do a good job. You are probably underutilizing their talent and enthusiasm, limiting their personal growth (and your own), and I can almost guarantee you’re leaving yourself overworked and burnt out. Believe in their competence, don’t try to frantically swoop in and save them when minor problems occur, give them real responsibility, and be a “genius-maker”.
   
   I am not generally a podcast person, but my mom made me listen to this one and it was seriously worth it.

   
   Furthermore, don’t hand off a sinking ship. You should be pulling people in to do the work that gets you excited, not the work that makes you groan. For maximum personal and organizational growth, you should be doing handoff the second others are ready for more, even if you’re emotionally attached to the work they’re eager to do.
   
   This philosophy has pushed me outside my comfort zone as a leader — as I hand off the work that I previously thought was my ‘upper ceiling of leadership,’ I’m forced to level up. I learn how to teach and coach others on how to teach and coach others on how to teach and coach others…. the learning never stops, it keeps me on my toes, and I stay excited by the novelty of the work I’m doing too.

   
   

3. Only do meaningful work.

   Sometimes there comes a task no one wants to do.

   
   As leaders, we often jump to the classic two motivational tools — rewards and consequences. Instead, I’d like to argue that our first response should be figuring out why no one wants to do it in the first place. People enjoy doing work that is meaningful, and when they feel they are being challenged, learning, and contributing value, they do a good job.

   
   If there is a task that is being completed halfheartedly, the cause is usually that it doesn’t feel meaningful or important to the people who are being asked to do it — your response should not be thinking about how to motivate them to do it anyways, but questioning if it’s worth doing at all. Trust your team. If you know there is real value in doing the work and can communicate that value, it’s usually pretty easy to get the work prioritized.
   
   An example of this in my own life was choosing to run @uwstartups as an Instagram account rather than an official club. The objectives I hoped to achieve (distribute existing opportunities and help people make friends) didn’t require the hoop-jumping most leaders subject themselves to.

   
   Here’s a list of things I didn’t want to do:

   

   These things didn’t feel meaningful enough to be worth my time or the time of anyone I’ve been working with, and every limitation of existing as an Instagram account has been extremely possible to overcome through partnerships. By being a bit creative, we are staying super lean while keeping our ratio of energy expended : value created in check.

   
   

4. Make everything opt-out by default and keep timelines short

   Don’t hire people for roles, hire them for jobs to be done. Your “events coordinator” will likely feel trapped in their commitment. The 10 people you message to “help organize a one-off event” will make great friends, feel super engaged, and be grateful for the opportunity.

   
   Formal applications are typically not good signals for how someone will actually perform in a volunteer role — to mitigate your own disappointment, all you have to do to figure out who should be given more active leadership roles is pay attention to who is doing it anyways. If someone is consistently engaged within the community (keep a particular eye out for introverts and people from underrepresented groups), that is the biggest indicator of future engagement.

   
   We call this approach “effort-gating” — start with as low of a barrier to entry as possible (“merit” is not considered when approving people to attend events), pay attention to who shows up consistently, and promote from within! The people who lean in the most get the most benefits. Additionally, people should always feel like they can be honest about their capacity to commit to things and should be able to walk away without facing negative reactions. Life happens, the only expectation is honesty and clear communication from both you and the people you’re working with.
   

   By taking this approach, you get the outcomes you want (great events, marketing, etc.), you get to work with fantastic people (who might be afraid to make ambiguous long-term commitments), and with everything you do, every single person in the room is there because they want to be. The impact this has on ✨the vibes✨ can not be overstated. Enthusiasm > Experience.

   
   This also applies to recurring calendar RSVPs — never assume that a recurring RSVP is an honest reflection of someone’s intention to attend. No matter how long you’ve been a part of our community, every coworking session and event we run requires a fresh RSVP. People get comfortable and complacent — for your own sanity, make them opt in every single time (even if the only reason is to ensure you’re ordering the right amount of food).

   
   

5. All rules should be both defensible and enforced

   Sometimes people think they’re being sneaky and try to work on school at our Socratica coworking sessions (which is not allowed, because it’s a space to work on high-effort passion projects that normally get de-prioritized). First of all, you’re not sneaky. Second of all, as an organizer, what’s the best way to deal with this?
   
   The best way to enforce rules is to treat people like adults. ”No working on school or work because those are the rules!” is a lot less compelling than “When you started coming to Socratica, is school really what you wanted to use the space for?”
   
   Sometimes we make so much progress that we forget what got us there — even the best of us think we can cheat the rules (I too have been tempted to work on school at Socratica). Almost always, organizers and long-time attendees will begin to think they’re above the law — the correction for this is reminding ourselves that our example sets the culture and that people will only buy in if we do.

   
   We should all continuously question rules (including our own rules), but if you come across a rule that seems dumb, try to understand why it was created before removing it. You’ll either be reminded that it exists to serve you (and that by cheating it you are really cheating yourself), or you’ll realize it’s not defensible (meaning you can’t find a realistic worst-case scenario that explains why it exists). If a rule is not defensible and/or not worth enforcing, it shouldn’t exist. Changing rules is a longer-term strategy than breaking them.

   

   Finally, don’t stress too much. Making and enforcing rules often detracts from fun, and future-scenario-anxiety spiralling is helpful but only to a point. Sometimes you need to just believe that people are generally good and that future you can be trusted to make sound decisions.

   
   

5. How to preserve “the quality” of a community at scale

“How do we preserve the quality of the community?”
This question comes up time and time again.

Without even realizing it, many people’s gut interpretation of this question is actually “How do we protect the community from ‘low-quality people’ getting in?”. We’ve all had these feelings, and especially if you’ve seen a community go off the rails before, this primal instinct to protect your special place is extremely well-intentioned.

It would be ridiculous to make the claim that all people are the same, and it’s true that if you let masses of people flood into a community with no plan, the vibes will shift. The correction here is that the influx of people being “of lesser quality” is a misdiagnosis — the real problem is actually a lack of planning on how to integrate them successfully.

In a community-building context, we often get in our own way by drawing a hard line between “us” and “them” — we forget that the people around us are full of potential. Whether you’re running a hackathon, celebrating your culture, advocating for animal rights, creating safe spaces for women, or just trying to meet interesting friends, frantically trying to preserve “the quality” of a community by keeping others out typically plays out like this:

1. Organizers and activists work extremely hard to share our vision of a better world

2. When people cautiously take the initial steps into understanding, we get territorial, tell them they’re not doing enough, prescribe conflicting versions of “the right way to get involved”, and criticize them for being imperfect

3. They get scared away (often into the arms of people whose ideal visions of the world are polar-opposite to our own)

4. We get frustrated that “no one cares”, while they feel completely attacked and rarely try to see the world from our point of view again

   
   

   

Communities don’t die at scale when you “dilute all the good people”, they die when you stop believing in levelling-up the people around you.

Rather than stressing about how we enforce the boundary between “us” and “them”, we should be allocating most of our brainpower to helping the people around us grow.

The ASU Charter Statement is one of the best things I’ve ever read:

ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves.

In a world that needs more nurses, teachers, engineers, researchers, and more, ASU doesn’t aspire to “keep acceptance rates low”. Rather than equating quality with exclusivity, they measure success by optimizing for “net value to society”, and this means investing in as many people as possible.

So how do we help other people level up?

1. Hold mainstream spaces where everyone is invited
   Communities like Women In Engineering are necessary and visible places where people can seek refuge and support, but when women leave these safe environments, they go back to a world that is hostile. Conversations about “how hard it is to be a woman in engineering” need to be reaching the other 87% of engineers who identify as men.
   
   The world will remain hostile if we exclude majority populations from conversations about how to make it better. A lot of this exclusion is implicit and due to awkwardness — even if men are technically allowed to join DEI conversations, they are typically too afraid of how they’ll be perceived to ever initiate a meaningful discussion about workplace culture. Because events run by Women In Engineering are obviously not going to attract men, we need to be initiating important conversations in every single environment we’re part of.
   
   A big callout here to not to engineer social environments where the dominant population will feel punished for their inclusion efforts (e.g. men invite so many women into a community that they themselves are forced out). “More women” does not mean “less men” — great men are friends with great women, and they are necessary allies in building the world we want to be a part of. Believe in them. We want to align incentives in such a way that prioritizing diversity and inclusion is win-win, because it is5, and because we need all hands on deck. This distinction is subtle but so important.

   
   

2. Make yourself easy to talk to

   Whether or not you’re a StraightWhiteMan™️, many people who try to be allies are trapped here:

   I’ve been this person and squirmed with discomfort watching this person. Whether or not you want to make yourself a resource (and you absolutely don’t have to), I’ve found declaring myself as “a person to ask dumb questions to” has resulted in many great conversations with people who are genuinely interested in hosting welcoming spaces for others and want to learn how. Most people are just waiting to be invited to the conversation.

   
   
   Times I’ve been impressed:

   1. When conducting an interview, I asked a candidate “how they would make tech spaces feel safe for underrepresented people”. They gave a subpar answer, but a few days later they sent a follow-up email with a list of fantastic ideas for inclusion — unprompted. After being asked to think about it, they kept thinking and thinking and helped me level up too. We need more brains on this.

   2. After posting Social Engineering 101 (How to not be Cringe), several people reached out and we have had great discussions since. Many of these conversations resulted in longer-term friendships and collaborations.

      
      

   Rather than criticize things like performative activism and asking dumb questions, we could view them as initial signals that someone is interested in taking further action and make those pathways to further action accessible. We need to be cheering for people, even if their progress is painfully slow.

   
   

3. Erase the line between “us” and “them”.

   The only reason “we” are part of “us” is because someone believed in us and extended an invitation to be part of something special — we can do the same for others.

   To typecast people as “not-values-aligned” forces them into that role, and to expect others to act with an understanding of our lived experiences is a big ask. There is only one way towards the world we want to see — and it’s not“hoping that people randomly start caring about things they’ve never been exposed to and are somehow able to come up with effective solutions without talking to people who actually understand the problems”.
   
   Whether you’re running a hackathon or a volunteering organization, everyone is somewhere along a sliding scale of values alignment, buy-in, and skill development. Most people are not evil, “less-skilled people” are only really a few hundred hours and a confidence boost away from becoming “highly-skilled people” and pretty much everyone in the entire world shows up to things because it’s what their friends are doing.
   
   You’ll never know why someone is supporting your movement or attending your event (and it doesn’t matter). We do not need to be guessing at motivations, we need to be measuring outcomes.

   

4. Design escalation paths for people to level up

   Everyone starts with a different level of experience. In the context of hosting spaces for others, here’s a general framework that outlines how most people evolve over time when given progressive leadership opportunities within a community.

   

   Curating these escalation paths and knowing what to look out for means you can manage the development of several people simultaneously (and give them the opportunity to help each other level up too).

Maximizing resource use at scale

So I got tired of writing things as a “how-to” guide and figured I’d wrap this up by talking less about ✨vibes✨ and more about the tools you have at your disposal when world-building IRL.

Your only finite resources are time and energy
(use them wisely!)

In almost all scenarios, the set of resources available to support a good thing at scale is a lot more malleable than you think. Sometimes resources are finite-ish (e.g. only having the funds to hire 2 employees), but you can always raise more money, find more people, or get a bigger room. Your only truly finite resources are time and energy.

What if we built a world where instead of defensively locking people into commitments, we focused on making it super fun to stick around? What if instead of spending our time on gatekeeping, we instead invested it into figuring out how to actually support more people?

If we viewed organizations as what they actually are — loose collections of people clustered around an ideological point (with a fuzzy barrier keeping them together rather than strictly defined circles of “in” and “out”), we would be a lot more effective at idea-transporting, friend-making, and world-building.

Less-finite resources — leveraging the community to build the community.

Your time and energy might be finite, but what about the ever-growing swarm of people trying join in on your fun? Instead of viewing that as a threat, view it as what it is — a huge accumulation of potential energy.

A great example of this in the real world is how Reddit leverages its user base to assist with moderation. While most social media platforms have struggled with moderation, Reddit recognized that the only thing that scales with users are users and that when given the right infrastructure, users could take ownership of curating the spaces they wanted to be part of. So Reddit built the structure, and a huge community of volunteer “Mods” formed, each of whom takes ownership of setting and enforcing specific rules within their own Subreddits. Additionally, users take ownership over the feed hierarchy and can influence how highly content is displayed via upvotes and downvotes, incentivizing people to share high-quality content if they want it to be seen. These social mechanisms allow Reddit to save 3.4 million dollars per year in moderation costs.

Reddit shows that momentum is not something to be feared, but something to be harnessed. This potential energy is not inherently good or bad — all that can be said is that it’s powerful.

If you find yourself with an overwhelming amount of interest, your job is to design and implement infrastructure (social, technical, etc.) to harness this energy and turn it into something productive (this might look like incrementally teaching people how to lead, supplying them with tools, raising more money, finding larger spaces, etc.).

This is why we call it “social engineering”. 😁

In Waterloo, we have yet to hit the upper limit on enthusiasm for the creative spaces we’re holding. This means we are constantly thinking about how to optimize our system to efficiently convert energy into value for the constantly-growing community of people who want to be a part of something special. What works at one scale has to be reimagined for the next — this keeps us on our toes but is all part of the fun.

Next up is figuring out how we decentralize community organization (ooh! decentralization! buzzword alert! 🤩) so that anyone can initiate anything they want and be guaranteed the same friend-making and idea-transporting goodness we’ve been getting when we put a bunch of people in a room.

We envision a world where believing in the power of the people around us results in a population of creatives, engineers, and leaders that believe in themselves and each other, and who have the tools to incorporate inclusion and ✨good vibes✨ into everything they do.

Stay tuned.6 😁

Whatever you do, it will be imperfect.
Do it anyways.

I’m typically around 80% happy with most things I put into the world — and I think that’s about where it should be. Having some room for improvement means you’re doing things that are challenging enough to be worth your time, and waiting for something to be at 100% means it will never see the light of day7.

There are days when you cry because everything feels pointless (and you question why you try so hard), and days when you cry alongside the people who tell you the positive impact you’ve had in their lives (this is why you try so hard). World-building IRL is highly emotional — it is rewarding, and it hurts, because of how much you care.

When things go well, remember to celebrate. When they go… less well, don’t beat yourself up. It’s tempting to try to pre-solve problems that don’t exist yet, but let future you worry about future problems — any rule you set now will undoubtedly be unwritten, and whoever is in charge at that point in time will have way more resources and context to solve it.

Take care of yourself.

Breathe.

If you have a team, pull them in as much as you can, whether it’s sharing the wins 💯 or reflecting honestly on where you need to course correct for next time (and there will be a next time, we are playing the long game). The learning you gain is valuable whether you succeed or fail (and almost always it will be somewhere in between), but remembering that most things are done better together will take you far.

In our IRL world-building endeavours, we are experimentalists. We are on the cutting edge of research, iterating step-by-step toward our vision of a better world that doesn’t quite exist yet.

THIS is how we build the world we are proud and excited to be a part of.

The end. Finally.8