In the next year, I want to help ~2-5+ individuals to build crews of their own. People I know well, trust, respect, believe in. People who are going to roll up their sleeves, put in the work, go on to do cool projects that benefit the world. A crew accelerator!
At a certain point, I hit a wall. I’d hit the limits of what I could do on my own. It became very clear that my ambitions exceeded my own individual capacity.
I’d been active on Twitter since 2007, and the internet since the 90’s. I’d done GTD and Productivity stuff for years, since I was maybe twelve or thirteen—when I was obssessed with sites like Lifehacker and 43Folders. I’d taken Building a Second Brain, and built extensive note-taking systems. I had taken Write of Passage, and had started blogging extensively. And I’d developed a weird, obsessive interest in military strategy, which was inexplicable to everyone at the monastery I was training in…
I decided to start asking for help. To build a team. To find the people who saw what I wanted to do, and who could help me make it possible. People who I respected, and enjoyed working with, and would be able to do great things with.
I described those first efforts as a Publishing Cooperative. In retrospect, this was an early predecessor of what is now called the Curiosity Department.
My current crew is called The Service Guild. We have three “departments,” teams or subcrews: Love, Curiosity, and Empowerment. We have eleven people total, including me, with three more candidate members likely to join in the coming months. We’ve hosted retreats, gatherings, dance parties, and online events. We’ve written several books, held contests, and made music videos. And, something I’m most proud of—we have approximately 40-50 SOP’s at the time of this writing! We’re better friends than we were to start, we’re better collaborators, and we’re giving more, bigger, and better gifts to the world.
Building The Service Guild has been a major focus of the last three years of my life, since April 2022. Everything I’d done before that led up to this project. And what we’ve done so far is still just the beginning. We’re still so early!
Building a crew takes work. U can’t half-ass it. U have to put your whole ass into it, your whole heart.
It takes every skill U have, every gift and capacity U’ve been blessed with, every bit of genius and creativity and inspiration U can pour into it.
It takes self-knowledge, so U know who U are, what your values are, what U stand for. U need to know what U are good at, what your weaknesses are, and have a sense of your blindspots.
It takes vision, because U need to know where U are going. It takes commitment, because people need to know that they can trust U to keep showing up. In my case, I literally tattooed icons of The Guild’s departments to my body.
And it takes humility—the willingness to ask for help and advice, the willingness to succeed and be rejected, the willingness to try and fail. The willingness to be humbled by your mistakes. To listen to criticism and alternative perspectives. To learn and grow from everything that happens, the successes and the failures, no matter what. To hold your head up high, even in your lowest moments.
It’s hard to estimate just how valuable having a crew has been to me. It’s qualitative, not quantitative. But if U put a gun to my head, and forced me to put a number to it, I’d tell U that I wouldn’t trade it for a million dollars. Not for ten million dollars!
And I’d bet that, if U asked me the same question at the end of my life, when all is said and done, that this qualitative-benefit-to-quantitative-value number will probably be more than a billion dollars—the value it’s had for me in my life, and for the world at large. Maybe more—maybe The Service Guild’s value to the world at large will be multiple billions of dollars!
Would U like a crew like that? To have a team that U know, love, and respect? That U have extensive collaborative experience with, and coherent shared visions with? That U’ve laughed and cried and learned and grown with, through thick and thin? The people who will be at your wedding, who will cross the finish line with U, be there at the Award Ceremonies and also your funeral?
Would U like to have an impact like that? To have tremendous benefit? To make an enormous impact with your life, to shake history?
If so, maybe U Are:
- someone who is capable, skilled, competent—who has extensive experience, and gets things done
- someone who is ambitious, has big visions, big dreams, big aspirations—a clear connection to your vow
- someone who longs for a crew—2-7+ other people to coordinate with, collaborate with, hold a larger vision and shared values with—who knows what that would make possible for them, for the world
- someone who is willing to put in WORK to make it happen—2-5+ hours a week or far more for weeks, months, and years to come. U will get out what U put in!
What Kind of Crew
Here are the kinds of crews i’m interested in helping people build:
- friend crews that work on thematic projects together (Ă la The Service Guild)
- early stage nonprofits
- early stage startups
Less interesting to me: friend crews for the sake of friendship—although those are great too! I have them myself! The differentiating variable is that your crew has a clear (if nebulous and emergent) purpose, that U DO things together that have real IMPACT and benefit.
The Format
I’ve gone from zero to one crews formed—now it’s time for me to help other people to do the same, to go from one to ten.
This project is about DOING. There is a clear success metric: that U actually start a crew! That your crew persists, past a few months—goes on to do great things.
It’s designed to take place over roughly a year. I’ve been building The Service Guild for three years: let’s help U get off to a great start in your first year. Rather than a quick-and-dirty download, let’s proceed without rushing or hesitating. My guess is that with my help, U can do what I did in two years in one.
By the end of this program, if U put in the work, U will have a crew of 2-3+ other people that are in it to win it, who have a shared vision, shared values, active projects, and clear next steps—not just individually, but collectively.
Here’s what it will look like:
- An estimated 2-5+ hours of homework and experiments/week, designed to help U clarify what U want, find collaborators, and build a crew
- 6 1-1 coaching calls with me, scheduled at mutually convenient times over the next year (if we’re doing our jobs right, we’re both very busy people!)
- Asynchronous support from me by text or email
- A group chat for all people who are participating to ask questions, support each other, share victories etc.
Potential Topics Covered:
- Visioning and Unblocking
- Choosing Collaborators
- Structures for Crews and Organizations
- Management and Leadership
- Productivity and Strategy
- Failure Modes
Cost
This is my first time running this program. There will be bumps. There will be learnings and growth. And there will be victory!
I’m pricing this pilot offering with an initial sticker price of $5,000. I’m going to be investing a lot of time, care, energy—and my hard-earned expertise—into U for a year. And we’re going to be building the foundations of something that is going to change the course of your life.
This number reflects the value I think I bring from my experiences, and the benefit that I think this program will have in your life, and for the world. If all goes well, I expect to charge more for future versions, with an established curriculum and proven outcomes under my belt.
I’m going to be accepting a limited number of people for the time being. I want to make sure we both feel good about this, that it’s a fit for U. And on my end, I want to filter for people who are going to put in the work, towards building a crew that’s aligned with what I’m imagining.
If this program sounds exciting to U, if it feels like a whole body “hell yeah!”—please apply here:
If that price is prohibitive, U can pitch me by email or DM on a lower price or alternate arrangement, but I’ll prioritize people who can pay the full price.
If this program is exciting, but U can’t pay anything at this time, good news! I put as much of what I know into the world as possible, so that it can benefit as many people as possible, as deeply as possible—so that it can be of maximum deep benefit.
In particular, I’ve poured much of what has worked for me into the blog post How to Build a Crew. U can go read that post, click all the links, and apply what U find. That way, U can be off to the races without spending a penny.
As I learn more about what works for other people, I will be improving and iterating this blog post, as well as creating other resources that can help more people, at scale. And—the blog post is a great start! Go read it! Apply what U learn! Go forth and prosper! We flourish together!
But if U want help, if U want context-specific advice at every milestone—then this program is for U, and I can’t wait to work with U!
This Crew Accelerator is an offering of the Empowerment Department of The Service Guild!