Chapter 7
7
THE POWER OF COLLABORATION
How to do hard things that are too big for you to do alone
As long as Katrina Martin can remember, she’s been interested in anything to do with clothing. She’s sixteen now, but even when she was four years old, she would watch old movies with plots way over her head just because she liked to look at the beautiful costumes. She wants to go into fashion design when she grows up. But here’s the catch: she wants it to be with a fashion company that values modesty.
Her fascination with what she describes as the “forgotten quality” of modesty grew out of her love for fashion—that and many late-night mother-daughter talks as she was entering her teen years. “My desire to dress well expanded into a desire to please God by how I dress,” she told us. “And thus began my quest to figure out what modesty is. In my reading I always found very good reasons why to dress modestly. But everything I read seemed to leave out the important detail of what modest means.”
She knew that modesty was a heart issue, but it was also a clothing issue. She was puzzled by the lack of resources, and she was especially frustrated that nothing she found presented views on modesty from Christian guys’ point of view.
Katrina was sure that other girls had a lot of the same questions she did, but she didn’t know where to turn for answers. She had an idea that someday she’d find some godly Christian guys who would allow her to ask questions about modesty and would give answers she could share with other girls. But how and when and where? Should she just stand in the church lobby with a clipboard?
Katrina felt strongly that she was wrestling with important issues. How do Christian guys really feel about the way girls dress? What is modest to a guy? She thought if she could get solid answers, she could help thousands of teenagers. But she didn’t know how or where to start.
Her challenge was simply too big for one girl to figure out.
If you’ve ever had an idea that you felt was just too big for you or been faced with a project where you didn’t even know where to start, you probably know how Katrina felt. Some hard things are too big to be accomplished alone. We call them “big hard things,” and responding correctly when faced with them is what this chapter is all about.
Big hard things range from Katrina’s quest to things like organizing an event at your church or school, making a film, reaching out to the homeless in your community, campaigning to get a crude TV show off the air in your community, or starting a band. Big hard things can also include really big causes—fighting to end modern-day slavery, abortion, poverty, or AIDS. We’ll be taking a closer look at those kinds of big hard things in chapters 10 and 11.
Unfortunately, more than any other kind of hard thing we talk about in this book, the response to big hard things is usually to give up before we even try. It’s too big for me, end of story, we tell ourselves.
We need to change the way we think about large projects and big ideas. Instead of focusing on our individual limitations, what if we stepped back, looked around, and asked, “Who could be motivated to tackle this with me?” The answer to that question, as you’ll see in this chapter, makes possible a whole new range of options for rebelutionaries. The answer is collaboration—one of the three pillars of the Rebelution.
Notice the parts co and labor in that word? They give you a picture of what collaboration is—literally “working together.”
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
American popular lore tries to persuade us that our destiny was won only by rugged individuals who stood tall, acted alone, rarely talked, and drank their whiskey straight. We’re taught to admire the rebel, the loner, the maverick. But the facts suggest that the achievements of nations—like those of corporations, armies, universities, sports teams, churches, and families—depend heavily on people coming together to co-labor: to agree on a common goal and then collaborate to make it happen.
Who we collaborate with, of course, is a big deal. Throughout the Bible, we’re taught to make sure we’re doing the right things with the right people. For example, in 2 Timothy 2:22, Paul instructs us to “flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.”
We love that verse because it captures the rebelutionary mind-set of collaboration: rebelling against low expectations (“flee youthful passions”), doing hard things (“pursue [or strive after]”), and harnessing the power of teamwork (“along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart”).
A study of horses revealed that a single horse could pull an average of 2,500 pounds. The test was repeated with two horses. You’d expect the weight pulled to double—to about 5,000 pounds. Not so. Two horses working together pulled 12,500 pounds! That’s five times the amount one could pull alone.
Would the numbers hold if instead of horses researchers had used Vespas or Volkswagens? We doubt it. There’s something inside a living being that rises to accomplish exponentially greater things when part of a team.
God has made all of us (not just horses) to be more effective when we work in fellowship with others. In fact, the Bible warns us of the danger of isolating ourselves from others. Hebrews 10:24–25 says, “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.” Proverbs 18:1 is even more blunt: “Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.”
People who try to just “go it alone” miss out on the relational advantages as well. Ecclesiastes 4:9–12 tells us:
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
When he was seventeen, Jeremy Blaschke and his home-school group decided to raise money to buy an ultrasound machine for a crisis pregnancy center. Looking back, he says he didn’t really know what he was getting into.
“I’d never paid that much for anything before,” he told us, referring to the ultrasound machine’s twenty-five-thousand-dollar price tag. “I didn’t have a grasp of how much that actually was and what it meant to say we were going to raise it.”
After a big fund-raiser at the local fair and another at Jeremy’s church, they had raised thirty-two hundred dollars toward their goal—and spirits were high. “At the time I was thinking that it was going to be easy, that we could get it done in a few months,” Jeremy said.
Instead it got harder. Spring turned to summer—and summer to fall. But together, exactly a year from when they started, Jeremy’s group reached their goal—and more. The thirty-two thousand dollars they raised was enough for not only the ultrasound machine itself, but also the training necessary to operate it. Jeremy still can’t talk about it without mentioning his sister Diana and two of his best friends.
“There’s no way I could have done it by myself,” Jeremy said. “I would’ve gotten frustrated and bored or just burnt out. They really gave me the support and encouragement to keep going.”
Jeremy’s story is a great example of why we gain such advantage by working “along with those” who share our resolve to do hard things for the glory of God.
For an in-depth look at how teen collaboration works—and at some of its unique challenges—let’s return to one of our favorite collaboration stories ever: how Katrina got the answer to her questions about modesty.
“COULD I POST SOME QUESTIONS?”
In September 2006, Katrina stumbled across TheRebelution.com and joined the forum. It wasn’t long before she got involved in a discussion on modesty in the Girls Only section—and it was there that she had an idea. With hundreds of like-minded Christian teens on one website, what if they could start a discussion on modesty?
When we first received her note, all we knew was that a fifteen-year-old girl from Massachusetts wanted to get Christian guys to give their opinions on modesty. She wrote:
I think girls see girls differently than boys do. Do you think I could post some questions for the guys to answer about what they think is modest and immodest?
We wrote back to say that it sounded possible, as long as the questions and answers were posted anonymously and used the guys’ and girls’ private forums. A few days later we received an almost identical question from another girl. When we mentioned it to other girls and guys, we received enthusiastic responses.
We decided to explore the idea. Katrina opened a thread in the girls’ section of the forum and invited readers to submit questions they had for the guys. In a week we had more than 350 questions from hundreds of high-school and college-age Christian girls from around the world. They wanted to know how guys felt about everything from lip gloss to swimsuits to sheer sleeves—along with open-ended questions like, “As a guy, what’s your responsibility in this area?”
Besides the forum thread, Katrina was receiving dozens of e-mails a day. “My inbox was swamped,” she said. “I was extremely surprised that so many other girls were curious about the same things as me.”
We realized we were on to something important. Clearly it wasn’t just Katrina’s question anymore. Christian girls around the world wanted to better understand how their clothing affected guys. Others wanted to honor God by the way they dressed, but weren’t sure where to start. One thing was clear: they had a lot of questions.
After praying about it and talking with our parents, we decided we would attempt an online modesty survey. But how? Just the issue of how to format questions for the guys to answer was daunting. We would need a secure system that could collect and track answers. But none of us knew how to do that, and we didn’t have money to hire professional help.
Enter David Boskovic, the rebelutionary tech whiz from Canada who had helped us launch our full website earlier that year. In between schoolwork, milking the cows, and running a family business with his older brother, David volunteered his time to design an extremely professional “smart” survey system. It was so good that a survey expert from New York contacted us to ask which company had built it for us. Imagine their surprise when we told them it was an eighteen-year-old—and that he did it from the ground up in less than a month.
The system would track which questions the participants had answered and allow them to return as many times as needed to complete the survey. Each question was rephrased as a statement (for example, “Bikini swimsuits are immodest”) with which guys could agree or disagree on a five-point scale. Every question included a text box for the guys to further explain their responses. Many questions also included links to pop-up windows with photo illustrations and definitions. Those were compiled by our fifteen-year-old sister, Sarah, and a team of girls from the forum. Honestly, how many teen guys know what gauchos or shrugs are?
On January 8, 2007, we opened the 148-question survey. We hoped for at least a hundred male responders. Best-case scenario, a thousand, but that didn’t seem realistic.
But what did we know? In the first day, we heard from 120 guys, and within three weeks our total respondents numbered 1,700 Christian guys from forty-eight states and twenty-six countries. Together they had submitted 160,000 answers—including over 25,000 text responses.
The next task was to process the data. We wanted to release the results on Valentine’s Day as a gift to all Christian girls striving to dress modestly. That date left us with just two and a half weeks to wade through 3,290 pages of data. Fortunately, David’s incredible programming allowed us to automatically process our findings. That made it possible for us to focus on the text responses, selecting the top twenty to fifty for each question.
For two weeks our living room was filled with stacks of survey results and scattered with highlighters, pens, and paper clips. After several all-nighters—including several thirty-six-hour days—we released the results. By then 130 teens had volunteered to mention the survey on their blogs, send e-mail blasts, or hand out cards at their schools and churches.
Then we waited.
The first signs were not encouraging. About an hour after launching the results we started getting reports that the website was running really slow. “That’s weird,” we thought. “We’re on a fast server. What is going on?”
Here’s the story from Katrina’s perspective:
[That morning] when I went on to find the link to the results, the website took about five minutes to load. I thought it was very strange, and when it finally did load, people kept saying that the survey was kicking them off. In my ignorance of the Internet, I thought maybe a couple hundred people were on there.
Later, when I was instant messaging a friend, she said something about ten thousand people looking at it in the first hour. It was so many that the server had actually shut down.
I couldn’t believe it! I was so excited that I was jumping around the house yelling, “Ten thousand people in the first hour!” despite the fact that I had a sore throat and a fever. My sister said she was going to whack me on the head with her cookie tray if I didn’t stop screaming!
It wasn’t until later that we got the full report from David: even with the server down for over an hour, the survey had received 420,000 hits in the first twelve hours.
What an amazing experience! Our team received hundreds of comments and e-mails expressing gratitude for the survey. One of the most common responses was from girls who were blown away that so many guys actually appreciated their efforts to dress modestly—and cared enough to take the survey. Our favorite response, though, was from Katrina herself, reflecting on what had come from her sincere question and simple idea:
I was amazed that the survey became so big. It started with my little idea and grew into a project with thousands of people involved.
The survey isn’t legalistic and there are no “rules” from it, but the answers allow girls to get a glimpse into the minds of guys. There is no way I could’ve done something like this on my own.
I’ve always wanted to have an impact. Somehow I wanted to encourage Christian girls to dress more modestly, but I never dreamed I would actually have a chance to have such widespread influence.
It was the first time a big dream of mine came true.
The satisfaction that comes from knowing that what we’ve accomplished together dwarfs anything we could’ve done alone is something we’ve seen before. We saw this truth play out beautifully with the Modesty Survey, the Alabama Supreme Court races, and our Rebelution Tour conferences.
We want to pass on a few things we’ve learned about collaboration that might help you when you’re faced with an important task that’s too big to accomplish alone.
TEN THINGS WE’VE LEARNED ABOUT TEAMS
Walk into any Barnes & Noble and you’ll find entire aisles devoted almost entirely to the subject of collaboration. It’s called the business section. We recommend you spend some time there. We obviously can’t compete with authors who are wiser and more experienced on such a complex subject. Besides, we don’t need to rewrite what is written there. We simply offer a teens’-eye view of where to start, how to avoid a few common pitfalls, and ultimately how to harness the power of collaboration to accomplish big hard things for God.
1. Start with Questions
The first thing you need to do is ask yourself some foundational questions:
• What is God saying to me about this idea?
• What is the advice of my parents and others I trust?
• Am I the one to lead? If not, can I be a catalyst and help get things moving?
• What are my personal strengths and weaknesses?
• Which people I know can help fill the gaps where my ability or knowledge falls short?
• Do I care enough about this issue to not just start something big, but to see it through no matter what?
As you saw in Katrina’s story, God does give guidance and help to those who are seeking Him. You might get all green lights, or you might see a lot of yellows or even reds. Make sure you ask—and listen—before you launch.
2. Walk with the Wise
Right from the beginning, look to those who are older and wiser for reliable guidance. One of our favorite verses about collaboration is Proverbs 13:20: “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.” This verse reminds us that friends can be a curse or a blessing depending on whether they are wise or foolish. It also tells us that we become like our friends. You’ve heard the old saying, “You are what you eat.” It’s probably just as accurate to say, “You are who you hang out with.” If we want to be wise, mature, and godly, we have to make friends with people who have those qualities.
Walking with the wise usually means spending time with those who are older, more experienced, and godlier than we are. This is one reason why we find it so important to be plugged in to our local church—the number one source we’ve found for wise and godly companionship.
Walking with the wise has special significance for collaboration. Proverbs 20:29 says that the glory of youth is “their strength” and that the glory of the old is their “gray hair.” In ancient Israel, gray hair symbolized dignity, honor, experience, and wisdom. Teens have a lot of energy, but we don’t always know what to do with it; older people often have better insight but don’t always have the time or energy to see it through. The beauty of collaboration between older and younger generations is that we combine strength with wisdom—a surefire way to accomplish more for the glory of God.
3. Don’t Overlook Home Field Advantage
Family is a God-designed vehicle for collaboration that most teens miss, even though we’re right in the middle of it. God intended your parents to be your primary mentors, and unless you’re an only child, siblings can be some of your best team members.
Look back at the stories we’ve covered in this chapter: Katrina’s biggest supporter and mentor was always her mom; Jeremy’s main assistant was his sister Diana. We’ve seen this over and over in our own lives and in the stories of countless teens.
The Rebelution conferences are put on for teens by teens. The local coordinators for our Denver and Dallas events in 2007, Joanna Griffith and Marshall Sherman, were seventeen and sixteen when they started work securing facilities and assembling their local teams. We had publicity captains as young as thirteen spreading the word in their schools, local papers, and youth groups. Our facility captain in Denver, Robert Anderson—in charge of event setup and logistics—was fourteen.
Although teens have the titles and carry the responsibility, it’s a whole-family affair. Joanna’s parents ran countless errands and manned the book tables and checkout station. Her sister, Susanna, was the refreshments captain for the event, providing lunch and snacks for over five hundred people. Joanna’s other siblings helped by running errands, carrying boxes, stuffing name tags in plastic holders, and any number of other tasks.
In our family, not only is our father one of the main speakers at the conferences, but our older brother Joel leads worship. When it comes to organization, schedules, supplies, accounting—and everything in between—our mother is a third-degree black belt. Our sister Sarah helps to coordinate volunteers, makes phone calls, sends e-mails, folds and arranges hundreds of “do hard things” T-shirts, stuffs name tags, and is our mom’s right-hand girl. Our thirteen-year-old brother, Isaac, is a jack-of-all-trades. Before the events he is in charge of brochure mailings—packing, addressing, and mailing hundreds of envelopes to families around the country. Even our seven-year-old brother, James, helps. At the Indianapolis conference in 2007, he spent hours with older volunteers, zip-tying over two thousand folding chairs into straight, even rows.
By the way, when we let younger kids work alongside us, we’re doing for them what we ask of our older mentors. When they walk with us, relatively speaking, they walk with the wise. They get to be mentored in how and why to do hard things. We get energetic and enthusiastic help. Everybody wins.
We understand that not everyone has a family like ours, and we’d be exaggerating if we tried to make our family sound anything near perfect. But we hope you catch a vision for collaborating with family—if not with the family you have now, then with other families in your community and with the family you’ll have someday.
4. Use Technology to Grow Your Team
One of the greatest benefits of modern technology is that it lets us connect with like-minded people regardless of location. Many of our best friends are people we know primarily online, and yet we’ve been able to work together on some exciting projects.
The Modesty Survey is one fine example. The Alabama campaigns are another. For one candidate’s website design, we used a company that is the co-enterprise of Jake Smith and another rebelutionary Alex King. Alex lives in Maine and Jake in Oklahoma. They’ve still never met, but they delivered top-notch service.
These same guys, along with several other online friends, also headed up an online magazine, podcast, and blog network for Christian teens called Regenerate Our Culture. It ran for almost two years and brought together teen writers, editors, and radio hosts from around the world. Hardly any of them ever met in person.
In fact, one of the most common responses we’ve received since launching TheRebelution.com is from young people who thought they were all alone in their convictions about the teen years. They express how grateful and relieved they are to finally find a community of like-minded teens—and it’s all online. So take advantage of technology.
5. Treasure Constructive Criticism
From early on in the development of the Modesty Survey, we asked for and received counsel from family and friends. Modesty is a sensitive topic, and we knew that we needed help framing the questions. We also knew that the survey results could easily come across as a list of rules or as a bunch of guys telling girls how to dress. We didn’t want that. Thankfully we were able to receive high-quality input as we developed the survey, which helped us provide biblical teaching on modesty in the weeks leading up to its release. Of course, getting corrective input doesn’t always feel good at the time. It would have been easy to react defensively to the criticism. But without it, we could’ve ended up doing more harm than good.
6. Credit Is Free if You Give It Away
One of the common dangers we’ve come across is that pride (for example, looking for credit or taking offense when we feel overlooked) often sabotages team efforts. What to do? We recommend dealing quickly and respectfully with hurt feelings. We also recommend establishing a team code that says, “Credit is free around here, and we give it away.” That helps individuals focus on the needs and accomplishments of others and of the group as a whole and makes for a much happier, healthier, and more effective team.
Any one of us involved in the Modesty Survey could’ve made a wreck of the project if we had been seeking all the credit. Katrina could have demanded a bigger role in everything—it was her idea. We could have tried to take all of the glory—it was our website. And David could have done the same thing (plus charge a lot of money we didn’t have)—it was his survey system, and none of it would’ve been possible without him. But thankfully none of that happened. Instead we focused on accomplishing something we believed in, and thousands have been blessed as a result.
7. Other People Are Sinners Too
Probably the hardest thing about working with other people is that you actually have to work with them. Know what we mean? Even good, solid, sincere Christians are sinful and imperfect (that is, difficult if not impossible at times). And pressure, weariness, and frustration often bring out the worst in people. That’s why big hard things require patience, humility, and a nearly endless supply of forgiveness.
One of the reasons we love stories like Katrina’s and Jeremy’s is that they’re all about big hard things being accomplished by a group of ordinary teens. One of the things our dad likes to say about the church is that it “runs on regular.” The same is true about the Rebelution, and it’s certainly true about accomplishing big hard things—it doesn’t take superheroes or saints. It just takes a small handful of like-minded people willing to do hard things together and extend a lot of grace along the way.
8. Expect a Nightmare or Two
Over the course of putting together the survey—and working on the campaigns in Alabama—we ran into countless miscommunications, disagreements, and silly mistakes. At times the unbelievable, impossible, and disastrous happened—all at the same time.
For example, in the process of organizing the successful distribution of over 120,000 campaign newspapers at the Talladega Superspeedway Aaron’s 499—an enormous event with hundreds of thousands of people in a single weekend—we ran into more than our share of what felt like minor catastrophes.
First, the fifty college students driving in from four states away forgot to factor in the time difference and arrived an hour before we were ready for them. We didn’t have sign-in sheets to check them in, and pizza hadn’t been delivered yet. It was a bad start.
Then we discovered a major miscommunication. The students’ professor had told them they’d be campaigning for the governor’s race—not the supreme court races. When they found out, they were disappointed, and some were upset. They felt like they had been tricked, and a few of them wanted to leave right then and there.
At this point, only three campaign members were at the campground: Alex, Brett, and another seventeen-year-old named Jonathan Monplaisir. We wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Then the college students found out how old we were—and that we were in charge—and it seemed like things couldn’t get any worse. Thankfully they didn’t.
We made a lot of phone calls and were able to get the candidates there quickly to give the students a pep talk. We called the professor and obtained a statement from him admitting that the mistake was his and that he firmly believed that helping our candidates was just as important as helping the governor’s race.
Over the course of that evening, we were able to pull things back together, get pizza to the hungry students, assemble over one thousand campaign signs, load tens of thousands of newspapers into the vehicles, and get everyone into bed. Compared to those first few hours, the next two days went like clockwork.
Nightmares happen. But we shouldn’t be surprised. The Bible warns us that when we actively pursue Christ’s mission, we’ll face obstacles. So our best response is to be forewarned—and not to panic when it happens. Actually, we’ve found that nightmares give your prayer life a real boost—and teach you a whole lot at warp speed. Protect yourself and your team from being discouraged by looking for God’s hand in every situation.
9. Don’t Give Up
Successful collaboration almost always requires a lot of people working together over a long period of time. So teamwork requires perseverance.
It would have been easy for Katrina to give up on her big idea long before it came about. She didn’t know anyone else who could (or would) help her. Even on our forums, the initial response to her idea of asking guys questions about modesty was less than enthusiastic. Other girls pointed out how awkward a public discussion on the topic would be. She almost gave up altogether, but her mom encouraged her to keep going and to ask us directly. “It took some convincing,” she says, “but I’m so glad I didn’t give up.”
10. Success Happens (in More Ways than One)
We’ve found that collaboration is not just how we accomplish big hard things; it often turns into a big hard thing itself. That means we should measure our success not just by the goal we’re shooting for, but also by how well we work together to get there. Look inside your team effort for small but important victories—personal firsts, spiritual breakthroughs, tough to-do lists completed, lessons learned, total disasters turned into qualified successes. They’re all successes of different kinds, and they’re all important.
Our two major collaborative efforts—the Alabama campaigns and the Modesty Survey—had very different final results. The Modesty Survey turned out better than we’d ever imagined. We lost the elections. But in a way, both were successful because the young people involved grew stronger in the process. They made real accomplishments, gained valuable experience, impacted others for good, and learned lessons about teamwork and big hard things that they’ll be able to hold on to forever.
TACKLING BIG HARD THINGS
The most exciting thing about stepping up to the challenge of big hard things is that when God calls on you, He will bring the help you need to get the job done. So don’t be afraid of tackling big goals with others. Your first big hard thing might not be raising thirty-two thousand dollars, coordinating a grass-roots campaign, or launching an online survey. But just like with any hard thing, the big hard things you can accomplish will get bigger as you get stronger.
We hope you’ve seen that big projects don’t have to wait until later. Together we can accomplish great things for God, starting today. We love the way Katrina put it:
At the time, nothing seemed at all strange, but when I look back on it now, it totally blows me away. We were all eighteen or younger. I was only fifteen. It makes me wonder, what more is possible when teens work together? There were about five main people working on the Modesty Survey. Imagine what we could do with a team of one hundred people!
What could you do with three people, or ten, or a hundred? Pray and plan. Then go for it.