Brian Johnson (Heroic +1) recounts a dream and personal anecdote that leads into a short explanation of the psychological phenomenon called "social loafing": when individuals exert less effort in a group than alone (illustrated by a rope-pulling lab experiment). He offers an antidote — be visibly the person giving full effort — and issues a motivational call to action: "Go be that one person. Give us all you've got today."
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic one. In the last couple 1s we talked about baseline resetting as we made sure we upgraded the resolution of our lives. Note, I would have described the latest TV models more accurately, but I haven't owned a TV in over 15 years. Which for the record is one of the ways I keep my energy resolution so high. Now today we're going to talk about that dream I had which. Get to work. So I vaguely remember playing some super weird Quidditch like game. The kids and wife and I just watched the first two Harry Potters and I might have scored some pretty sweet goals. We won. Let's go. Then I seem to remember walking back to whatever headquarters like camp we were staying at. And apparently we needed to make sure we weren't seen by some bad guys or something. So one of the guys in our group was picking up some trash we had left behind that might have given up our location. Now that I think about it, I think he was kind of like Hagrid. I love that guy. So I followed this awesome guy's lead and I started making sure I picked up the trash stuff as well. But no one else was. So then I, at least the dream version of me, decided to give a little talk on the subject. I was laughing as I typed this, mostly at myself that I have dreams like this and I do plus ones in those dreams. Here's what I talked about. Scientists can bring people into a lab. It asks them to pull a rope as hard as they can as they measure how hard they pulled it. Then they put them in a group and ask them to all pull again. And guess what happens? On average, they don't pull as hard when they're with other people and as they did when they were by themselves. Eek. You know what scientists call that? They call it social loafing. Unfortunately, people tend to be a bit lazy when their individual effort is masked within a collective effort. Eek. Now that's the bad news. But here's the good news. There's an antidote to social loafing. You know what it is? If the group of people can see one person who is clearly going all out, then the other people will work harder. I got tears in my eyes typing that. Today's plus one. Go be that one person. Give us all you've got today.
