My story
My journey toward community expertise began with my own lonely years wondering if I’d ever create the friendships that I wanted or find a place where I knew that I belonged.
Now my work on leadership development and community building is used to support operations within firms, including Google, Airbnb, Amazon, Twitch, ServiceNow, Meetup and the U.S. Army. I’m a founding member of the Google Vitality Lab, a project to innovate healing to address global health problems that plague our era. I’ve also authored three books The Art of Community, Storytelling for Leadership, and Building Brand Communities.
However, as a young man over years, I sought out many groups, looking for the right one, the one to which I it would be clear that I belonged.
It took many years and travel through several time zones in Africa and Asia to get to a place where thoughts of loneliness no longer distract me. On the journey, the miles were less important than the wise words from mentors, examples from my now heroes, and too many embarrassing experiments to remember. And it’s a journey that never ends.
When I was twenty-five, I served in the US Peace Corps in northern Zambia, near the Congo-Zaire border. When I left home, I looked forward to meeting people as brave and adventurous as I wanted to be. The villagers welcomed me generously, but I felt lonely many nights, in a new place with a different language and different food, and where I didn’t really fit in among my fellow volunteers. Turned out making a difference in AIDS-plagued sub-Saharan Africa as a twenty-something was hard, and I came back burned out and cynical.
After the Peace Corps, I moved to New York City, where I learned to produce and write, starting with insufficient skills and resources, what became the independent PBS documentary New Year Baby. It tells the story about a family escaping the Cambodian genocide and becoming American, and its screenings have started new conversations and created healing for countless families.
Also in New York, I secretly organized fellow restaurant workers to seek protection and restitution from a company that flagrantly ignored labor laws. The multi-year effort led to legal outcomes that helped restaurant workers protect themselves nationally.
All these adventures taught me the importance of and how to bring people together around shared values and purpose, and to face often frightening challenges together over years.
But, for me personally, I was still hoping to find the exact right group to which I would belong.
A pastor on Manhattan’s East Side introduced me to wisdom from C. S. Lewis’s lecture “The Inner Ring.” Lewis wrote that we all want to enter inner rings of exclusivity. These are groups that are more exclusive and cooler than the groups to which we already belong. The problem lies not in the rings themselves but in our desire and longing to get inside them.
Lewis’s solution was to find something we like to do and do it often, and then invite others to join us. The people who join us will create friendship that will inoculate us from the longing of more inner rings. I was inspired by the notion that if I could not find the right community for me, perhaps I could create it.
In my thirties, I studied religion, ethics, and business in graduate school at Yale. One thing that surprised me, when I arrived at Yale, was the discovery that its history and brand loomed so large that I, and many other students like me, thought that we could never be good enough to truly belong there.
With Lewis’s wisdom in mind, my now wife Socheata and I chose to host dinners in our home every Friday night.
We prepared a large multicourse dinner and served it to anyone who would come. The early dinners had uneven and occasionally disappointing attendance, but eventually we compiled weekly waitlists of others wanting to join us at our table. While working with the dinner volunteers, cooking old family recipes, laughing together at our table, and cleaning our kitchen, I formed many of my dearest friendships.
In my studies, professors and books introduced me to spiritual communities that stuck together for over a thousand years, even through existential threatening times. I was inspired that we can still meet the descendants of many of these communities still bound together. It’s obvious there’s time tested wisdom for bringing us together that can be applied to our record lonely time.
All of these experiences were crucibles to learn how to bring people together in community so that we care for one another, hold each other up on hard days, and celebrate together on good days.
Now, I’m an advisor to influential commercial and non-profit organizations.
I hold an M.Div. from Yale, where I studied religion, ethics and business as a Jesse Ball duPont Foundation scholar. I also authored three books The Art of Community, Storytelling for Leadership, and Building Brand Communities.
