Who Helped You Move?

Ask anyone about the last time they moved and they'll skip right past the boxes and the parking ticket. What they want to tell you about is who showed up.

There's usually a friend who arrived at eight in the morning with coffee and work gloves and stayed until the last box was in. Somebody else promised noon and walked in at three, just after the heavy stuff was done, and everyone remembers that too, for different reasons. If you were lucky, a neighbour you'd barely spoken to saw you wrestling a mattress through the doorway and grabbed the other end without being asked.

Moving is one of the few times adults still ask each other for plain physical help. You can't do it over text. Somebody has to actually come, and it shows you very quickly who your people are.

The strange part is the numbers. You can have hundreds of friends on social media, and moving day still comes down to four or five people and a pizza. Most of the others don't know it's happening, and plenty of them wouldn't come if they did.

I'm not complaining about that. It's just the difference between an audience and a community. An audience is there to watch, and a community is the group that picks up the other end of the couch. Both have value, but they aren't the same thing, and a lot of us spend years building one while telling ourselves it's the other.

Think about who shows up for you. Almost always it's someone you showed up for first. Maybe you helped paint their first apartment years ago, or drove them to the airport at five in the morning when nobody else would. No one was keeping score, but something got built anyway.

Business works the same way, and I don't think we say it plainly enough.

If you only turn up in a community when you need something, whether that's a launch, a link or a favour, people notice. They aren't keeping score either. It's simply that they don't know you yet, and you're asking strangers to carry your couch.

Look at who gets the most help in any group and you'll usually find someone who's been helping for a while. They answered a question on a quiet Tuesday when there was nothing in it for them, and they were as willing to share what didn't work as what did. None of it felt like much at the time. Moving day is built out of small things like that.

There's always one person at a move who sticks to the light boxes, the pillows and the one marked “bathroom.” They're welcome, and every box has to go somewhere. The one you remember, though, is whoever picked up the heavy end of the dresser without waiting to be asked.

In a community, the heavy end usually looks like patience. It might mean reading someone's long post properly before you reply, or telling them the truth kindly when they were hoping to hear something else. Coming back a week later to ask how it went counts too. You don't need any particular talent for that, only a willingness to show up when it isn't convenient.

Here's a simple test for anyone building something with other people. If you had to move tomorrow, who would come?

The harder question is whose move you'd show up for. If that list is short, the first one probably is too.

The good news is there's always another couch, and somebody out there is looking around for a second pair of hands.