10 vs. 100
A few months ago, my oldest, Max, introduced me and our entire family to a person known as Mr. Beast.
Mr. Beast is a twenty-seven year old YouTube star whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson. In June, Mr. Beast became the most subscribed person on the platform. He has a staggering 266 million subscribers.
While YouTube content made him famous, Mr. Beast now has a line of candy bars, toys, clothing, beef jerky, backpacks, sports equipment, and lunch snack-packs for school kids. He also just signed a "significant" deal with Amazon (though, I’m not sure what the deal is). He was named one of Time’s Most Influential People in 2023, and he’s worth, as of my writing this, over 1 billion dollars.
We watched his show, Beast Games, as a family, and as much as I know I’m not Mr. Beast’s target audience, I was riveted.
In Beast Games (and in general), Mr. Beast’s modus operandi is that he creates games and, in many ways, impossible choices for the contestants playing them. For instance, in one episode of Beast Games, 1,000 contestants were in equal groups of what looked like 50 or 75 people. These people were all vying for the ultimate prize of 5 million dollars. As they were competing, Mr. Beast offered $10,000 to anyone who was willing to give up and leave now. The catch is, everyone else on that person’s team would then get disqualified and have to be sent home as well.
When no one took the 10K, Beast jacked it up to something like $20,000. Then $30,000. All this was happening as team members were all yelling at each other and making agreements, in real time, not to take the money.
One person, who agreed not to take it, flipped when the amount hit somewhere near $50,000, leaving with the money, but breaking his word to everyone else on his squad.
I watched a video a few days ago of an event, orchestrated my Mr. Beast, in which 10 of the strongest men in the world (this is an actual thing. There are strongmen contests every year in which these monsters are ranked based on their feats on strength) competed in a tug-of-war against 100 children.
Again, 10 of the strongest men in the world against 100 totally average kids.
If you don’t want me to spoil it for you, stop reading now and watch it here.
For those of you who stayed with me, I’ll share that I was truly surprised by the result. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been as I’ve seen so many examples of what occurs in this video happening in real life, in business, and on teams in general.
The kids win.
And they win relatively easily.
Despite all the strength of their opponents, the combined effort of a lot of people pulling in one direction, the combined effort of a lot of people - even if none of them individually is as good as any one person on the other team - with one goal and one purpose, can shift everything.
How aligned are your people? How aligned is your team? How aligned, to what you say you care about, are you?
To be honest, I’ve been out of alignment on that last one lately. Watching this video was a good reminder that every last person on a team and every last cell in each of our bodies needs to be pulling in the same direction. Otherwise, we risk losing to those folks who are.
