Built to Belong

by Natalie Franke

  With each scroll, each passing day, the narrative we are being told about one another drives us farther into our separate corners.

  We know that we are built for something better—a life alongside others, working together in the pursuit of a brighter future. Modern life brings unprecedented challenges to our fundamental need to belong. However, we shouldn’t give up in the battle against loneliness just yet. There is a way to harness our competitive spirit and still thrive in community with others.

  There is a road that leads us back to belonging.

  There is a future where we once again rise together.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE RISING TIDE

  I was raised in a family full of science nerds. Not in the trendy sense, but rather in the data-driven, eats-metrics-for-dinner kind of way.

  Mom: nurse practitioner

  Dad: nuclear engineer

  Grandfather: rocket scientist (yes, literally!)

  From the time I was little, I embraced my science nerd identity like a badge of honor. I loved learning about dinosaurs and space. I memorized facts using flash cards and could navigate a calculator with my eyes closed.

  I wanted to grow up to be a doctor and follow in the footsteps of my family. That was the predetermined path, and I had all intentions of following it.

  However, in my junior year of high school, everything changed. I hit a brick wall in the form of paralyzing depression, and after I struggled for months to claw my way out of the depths of despair, my mom gave me a camera for Christmas.

  My fierce, resilient single mother was determined to help me find a way back to loving my life again. Her hope was that a little art therapy might help me to find my way… and in her effort to help me cope, she changed the trajectory of my entire life.

  I remember the first time that I held that DSLR in my hands.

  It felt so new and unfamiliar. Just a black plastic box with a cheap kit lens, it was covered in abbreviations that I didn’t understand. Rotating through the dials, I tried to uncover what each of the buttons signified. I spent hours and hours in my backyard learning to master exposure and figure out the difference between aperture and shutter speed.

  Becoming a photographer happened slowly and then all at once. As the days passed, my depression gradually subsided and I reemerged from the fog. That little black box taught me how to create again. It gave me a reason to connect with others.

  In a matter of months, I went from photographing flowers around my neighborhood to taking portraits of people at the hair salon where I worked after school as a shampoo girl. After every shoot, I gained a little more confidence.

  Within a year, I was photographing portraits for friends and second shooting weddings with other local photographers. I created a website and printed my first set of business cards. My hobby had become a side hustle, and in the pursuit of learning photography, I had discovered a part of myself that I never knew existed.

  When I held that camera in my hands, I felt complete. Looking at the world through a lens gave me a new way of communicating. Using pixels rather than words and emotion rather than data, I became a storyteller of a different sort.

  In college, my business continued to grow. On Friday afternoons, I would take the train home to photograph weddings. Lugging my backpack and camera gear into 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, I would hop on board a southbound Amtrak train and watch the sunset from the window as the world flew by. Then, on Monday morning before the sun had even risen, I would begin my trek back up to school.

  Week after week, month after month, I stuck with it. I spent the weekdays studying art, psychology, and neuroscience at Penn and my weekends wiping away tears during father-daughter dances and trying not to get burned during sparkler send-offs.

  I put in the work, both in the classroom and as a budding business owner, until the day came for me to graduate. By the time I held that diploma in my hands, I knew that I didn’t want to work for anyone else. Entrepreneurship was calling my name and Natalie-freaking-Franke was running toward it, full steam ahead.

  I was a left-brained girl in a right-brained world—a science nerd who had fallen in love with the art of photography who wanted to prove that she could build a thriving empire of her own. So, I put my head down and I hustled. When I was done hustling, I hustled some more.

  Within a few years, I reached every goal I had set for myself.

  From the outside looking in, my life seemed perfect. I was happily married, on track to do a quarter of a million in revenue, speaking at photography conferences, traveling to shoot weddings around the world, and living the life that I had always wanted.

  However, on the inside I was falling apart. That deep-seated darkness that introduced me to photography came roaring back. My depression was only painfully exacerbated by my feelings of alienation and loneliness.

  I spent most of my day alone in my home office, hidden behind a screen. I would wake up, pour a cup of coffee, edit in front of my laptop until it was time to pour a glass of wine. I would fall asleep to an almost empty in-box before repeating the cycle the following day.

  From the outside it certainly looked like I was connected—social media friends and followers cheered my business on from the sidelines. But entrepreneurship is lonely, highly competitive, and cutthroat. There was no escape from the waves of comparison that came washing over me.

  There was no running away from the way that business was done.

  Don’t trust your competitors. They will tear you down to pull themselves higher. Kindness is weakness. As an entrepreneur, you must be out for yourself.

  However, I knew that the only other people who could possibly understand how I was feeling, the only ones who had walked a mile in my shoes and could empathize with my experiences, were my competitors. In fact, it was other photographers, creatives, business owners who struggled with the same struggles and faced the same hardships. But why should they trust me? What reason could I possibly give them to join forces together in the pursuit of community?

  That night, sitting at my computer, crying in the darkness of my office, I hit a breaking point. I couldn’t continue living like this.

  The success I had been pursuing, the accolades I was chasing, meant nothing without being accompanied by a deep sense of purpose and a space to belong. I was tired of competing, comparing, and yearning for connection. I was tired of fighting for a seat at the table. I was tired of searching to find my community. I needed something better. All of us deserved something better.

  There had to be a better way.

  There had to be a way to build a business alongside others—a community that would rally behind one another and fight to see one another succeed. There had to be a bigger, better table out there. And hell, if it didn’t already exist, I was going to need to build it.

  So the following morning, that is exactly what I set out to do. I took to Instagram with a hashtag: #communityovercompetition.

  I asked other small-business owners to use their platforms to elevate the voices of a competitor, to share about someone else in their field who was doing incredible work. One person shared, then another, and another. Within a matter of hours, hundreds of people were using the hashtag and cheering one another on. It went viral.

  That conversation continued several weeks later over dinner with my husband, Hugh, and two of our photographer friends, Davey and Krista. We talked about the struggles of entrepreneurship and our similar lonely nights spent working late, alone, in the darkness of our offices. We knew that a hashtag alone wasn’t enough, that in order to turn the tide, we needed to make waves.

  “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

  It was my husband who brought up the famous saying, in his best John F. Kennedy impression no less. (I think it was followed by “We’re gonna go to the moon” as he lifted his beer into the air… but you get the point!)

  The adage references the idea that an improved economy will benefit everyone involved. When one of us wins, we all win.
When we champion small-business owners, when we fight together, we are all better off. We were independent boats in the same ocean. We were a part of something bigger.

  In the spring of 2015, the Rising Tide Society was born. The four of us, Hugh, Davey, Krista, and myself, worked together to build a community of creative entrepreneurs determined to rise together in the spirit of community over competition.

  In May, we hosted twelve grassroots gatherings along the East Coast. We called friends, one by one, and asked them if they were interested in leading a group.

  By June, we published a blog and began accepting dozens of local chapter applications to spread these meet-ups to other cities as word about Rising Tide spread. Requests for new gatherings were flooding in faster than we could sort through them. By the end of that summer, we had groups meeting monthly in cities all around the world.

  We had struck a chord. The pain we had been feeling was also being felt by other small-business owners on a grand scale.

  A single spark born from loneliness caught fire in the hearts of thousands.

  In a matter of weeks, with the help of hundreds of others across the globe, we built one of the largest volunteer-led, grassroots communities of creative entrepreneurs in the world. Community over competition was no longer a random hashtag being shared by a small-town wedding photographer in Annapolis, Maryland. It was a living, breathing movement changing the way people viewed one another and the opportunities that existed to grow together in community. However, not everyone was on board with the idea.

  WE RISE TOGETHER

  When I first started sharing about the concept of community over competition, I was met with a large amount of skepticism. The harshest remarks often came from business owners who had been in the game the longest.

  You see, they had tight-knit circles where only a select few were invited to the table. Even within these exclusive groups, knowledge wasn’t shared. Information was kept close to the chest. No one was open about best practices or business advice.

  I once had another photographer tell me that she would only teach new photographers who lived farther than 250 miles from her hometown because she didn’t want them to eventually compete with her and take away all her business.

  Many apprentices were forced to sign non-compete clauses and swear to never start a business of their own. New entrepreneurs were shunned and made to feel scared to ask the wrong person the wrong question. Networking events were about what you could get out of someone else, rather than what new relationships you could form or how you could support one another.

  The idea of collaborating and cheering for one another in the entrepreneurial space was a foreign concept. Many people who saw the hashtag were quick to respond with why it was nothing more than a naive dream or an unrealistic vision. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who told me:

  “That will never work. Competing business owners will never help each other.”

  “You’re naive to think you can change things. Business is cutthroat, dog-eat-dog.”

  “I’m never sharing my knowledge. If it was hard for me, it should be hard for them.”

  However, the business world was rapidly changing. It used to be that you needed a fancy degree or a large sum of money to start a successful business. Now all you need is access to the internet and a willingness to work.

  The democratization of education, the breaking down of traditional barriers, the shifts in technology were making it easier for anyone to turn their passion into a profitable business. As a small-business owner myself, I believed that we had an opportunity to leave our corner of the world a bit better than how we found it, and along the way we proved that community over competition isn’t just a feel-good phrase—it’s also a strategic business decision.

  This mindset shift applies to far more than just entrepreneurship. In all aspects of our lives, we have the choice of whether to view one another as competition or embrace one another as community. We can see the accomplishments of a friend as evidence that we are falling behind, or we can cheer for them passionately and accept the fact that there is more than enough happiness in the world for both of us.

  Choosing to be for people rather than against them changes everything. It impacts the way we view ourselves and others. It changes our focus and shifts our trajectory. It creates opportunities for all of us to rise together.

  Business owners who understand the value of community over competition are at an advantage in the marketplace. Frankly, all human beings who adopt this mindset are better off in their personal and professional lives. Below I share some of the reasons why.

  They are focused on the right things.

  Where your mindset goes, your actions follow.

  Have you ever tried to throw a ball toward a target while looking in the wrong direction? It won’t travel straight. Your gaze shifts your focus, and that focus turns your shoulders in just enough of the wrong direction to shift the ball’s trajectory. The same is true in our personal and professional lives.

  A community-over-competition mindset brings attention back to what matters the most. It enables you to keep your eye on the target.

  You can’t lead the way when you are constantly chasing after what other people are doing. In business, this means keeping your eyes on your customers and your mind on serving them well. In our personal lives, this means remaining focused on lifting others up rather than tearing them down.

  When we become obsessed with competing, we lose the opportunity to create meaningful relationships. When we become obsessed with comparing, we forget all of the incredible things we already have that we should be grateful for. By cheering for others and rooting for everyone to make it, we free ourselves to move forward and reach our full potential.

  Likewise, businesses that are constantly in reaction mode, constantly looking to the left and right to see what their rivals and their competitors are creating—fail to look right ahead at what their customers need. When you’re focused on chasing after your competitors, you lose sight of serving your customers.

  Championing others and focusing on what matters most brings success in the long run. Quit the constant rat race of competing and start putting that energy where it needs to be.

  They know that relationships lead to success.

  Have you ever heard the saying “It’s not what you know, but rather who you know”? In business and in life this is absolutely the truth. However, I like to go even further and say, “It’s not just who you know, but more important, how you make them feel.”

  All relationships—personal or professional—succeed or fail based on that simple principle: How do you make people feel? Does each interaction feel transactional or relational?

  Networking gets a negative reputation for this reason. Traditional networking is about entering a room, shaking as many hands as you can, and gathering every business card you can find. Participants become more focused on what they can get than what they can give, and in the process, people leave feeling used.

  That’s why businesses and individuals who champion community are setting themselves up for success. They don’t walk into a room looking to take advantage or leverage relationships before they have even been formed. They show up with a heart of service, ready to offer value, provide support, and cultivate relationships for the long run.

  They give and give and give, often without expecting anything in return. People leave feeling truly supported because they genuinely were. That earnest goodwill becomes the backbone of their brand.

  We remember the people who have made us feel seen, heard, and valued. Likewise, we all remember interactions with institutions and individuals that took care of us when it would have been easier for them to look out for themselves. A reputation is a powerful thing, and relationships are at the heart of how a reputation is formed.

  The golden rule in business is the same as the golden rule of life: treat people as you would want to be treated, and success will follow.

  They und
erstand that successes are shared.

  When you are working in community with others, their successes can bring about a positive impact on the collective. The wins of others drive us all forward.

  When you see someone else succeeding and you choose to view their accomplishments as proof that you are falling behind or falling short, you have already lost. That mindset has the power to derail your forward progression and leave you feeling unfulfilled in seasons when you truly should be proud of all that you have accomplished.

  However, when you shift your attitude to see the successes of others as proof that there is an opportunity for you to also achieve greatness, you are fueled to continue forward.

  This fundamental mindset shift is the difference between feeling discouraged and feeling encouraged by the same piece of information. Welcoming and championing the successes of others opens our minds to the opportunities that exist all around us.

  I’ve seen this in my business as a photographer as well. There were only so many weekends in a year and therefore only so many weddings I could shoot. During my most successful seasons, I would end up reaching quota and started referring out business to other photographers in the area.

  When my business was successful, I was able to pass along referrals to others in my community and share opportunities. The better I became, the more inquiries came in through my website, and the more business I ultimately had to share. My success became a vehicle for the success of others.

  Additionally, the emergence of competitors can create opportunities for the collective by spurring innovation and increasing adoption in the marketplace. Think about electric cars. An emerging technology that for many years was perceived as a moonshot of the environmental movement rather than a highly desirable automotive technology.