There is an old story that often gets told in motivation retreats: a miner digs for years and years for gold and comes up with nothing; despondent, he sells his mine to someone else who then spends a few days digging in the same direction as the original owner before he strikes a rich seam of the precious metal. The lesson? Don’t give up, you may be only days away from striking riches. The same story can yield another lesson: more than one person working at the same thing has a better chance than one person who has limited strength, resources, and willpower.
And so it is in our country, and with healthcare. We have a daunting job to do. It will take far more than any one player’s limited resources to correct the system, adequately resource it, and ready it to take on the massive burdens it faces. We need to work together, to innovate, and lean on each other’s staying power. This implies relationships must exist and be strengthened; like in 2010. Remember how we cane together, defied negativity and the odds in 2010, and gave the world our 2010 FIFA World Cup when international press doubted us?
Success is ours to have if we work together, innovate, respect each other’s roles, strengths, contributions, and place. And if the example of 2010 isn’t enough, a look back over time shows how the remarkable power of people working together with similar mindsets can change the world:
1. GH Hardy sponsored and worked with Srinivasan Ramanujan whose work on Fermat’s last theorem and elliptical curves now finds application in cryptology and Internet security.
2. Albert Einstein collaborated with two of his fellow students at ETH Zurich, Marcel Grossmann and Michele Besso. Discussions among the three helped Einstein derive the special theory of relativity. It’s told that Einstein once told Grossman, “You must help me, or else I’ll go crazy.” If Einstein did not eschew collaboration, why should we?
3. The double helix structure of DNA was discovered thanks to the combined effort of four people James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Williams and Rosalind Franklin. Watson and Crick met at the Cavendish laboratory (Cambridge University) in 1951, where they began to study the structure of DNA together. Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Williams obtained high-resolution photographs of DNA through X-ray crystallography at King’s College London.*
(*https://www.kolabtree.com/blog/six-powerful-examples-of-collaboration/)
