When you decide to take on a partner, you decide to share. Sharing means being as happy to see someone else with what you have as you are to have it yourself. There are a lot of things we cannot share and its important to know what those things are.
For example, its very difficult to share the usability of something. Usability requires scheduling and responsibility. Imagine sharing a car, to truly share a car with someone you have to share the cost of the car and take turns using the car or go everywhere together. Because we are all individuals with individual work and life passions its very hard to create a completely parallel usability model for a car, even if you’re married. So sharing usability doesn’t work.
What does work is ideas, passions, values and beliefs because these are flexible and liquid. I can have an idea anywhere and in any form. I can share that idea and I lose nothing when someone else appreciates and adopts that idea as their own. Now we are like-minded and that gives us something bigger than the idea, it gives us a community. Passions, values and beliefs work in the same way.
Jon and I have received much advice on being partners, all of it rather contrary to our actual partnership experience. I believe this is because we did not build our partnership based on a usability model. We didn’t decide to share company dollars, lawyers and a client base, we decided to share a belief around how clients and team members should be included in our community. We partner to bring a creative and game-like strategy to our operations and that free, creative value structure allows us to build a community. This community in turn allows us to share clients and lawyers.
Just like sharing a drive, a restaurant and a payment method on date night is not about going to the same place at the same time it is about having an affection for the other person that you are happy to share.
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