Go fast, go alone; Go far, go together - Lessons from founding an organisation

Reading time: 2 min

I watched the video accompanying this article, 'Building a Million Dollar Business – 10 Tips for Entrepreneurs' by Ali Abdaal some time ago, and one of the lines always resonated with me:

“If you want to go fast, you should go alone; if you want to go far, you should go together”.

Apparently it's a common saying in start-ups (according to the article), and an African proverb (according to a search on a search engine).

Anyway, I read @Cubes Day 91, Operating system narcissism and one thing jumped out at me that reminded me of the above:

"You have to build on top of what others built, you can choose how much you want to do but at the end of the day you MUST depend on others to have whatever you're building work."

I'm in the process of founding an organisation for something. Its inauguration is mostly complete and it's now a growing phase. I started alone in the planning and initiation phase to move quickly, to jump across all the writing, communicating and administrative hurdles with minimal delay.

After some time, I learned that to go further, I have to go together. I have to depend on others, to rely on the expertise of others for planning, their judgement, and distributing the workload so that others can suggest improvements to my plans, and so I don't become overburdened with the weight of the entire thing.

This is becoming increasingly true as the workload and commitments continue to increase- I can't carry all tasks alone anymore. While I have skills in various fields including research, writing, speaking and graphic/UI design, that's not everything I need. And even if it is, my time is limited.

In the end, we must depend on others to go far and to have whatever we're building work.