Through skateboarding and being a part of Divvy (the design co-working space), I learned a lot about community vs. competition.

At Divvy, we were a community. We all learned a ton from working and sharing with each other, and all of our businesses grew. We didn’t leave anyone behind.

On the flipside with cut-throat competition, people suffer. There’s some shop rivalry among skateboard shops in Omaha. With this cut-throat attitude, I’ve seen skateboard shops talk poorly about other shops and their riders and it hurts themselves (some have put themselves out of business), hurts the skateboarders involved and makes it hard to put on large events together. All in all, it makes the skateboard community suffer.

I believe when we can all get along, we can all work together to build a better community as a whole… come together on events, educate the importance of design and it’s process, and simply learn from each other.

Matt mentioned a good point in his BIGOmaha post a while back,

“Cut-throat competition is dead. Undermining your competition is a disservice to your community. We can all benefit if we commit to helping each other thrive.”

This is one of the reasons we put out The Paper Family for anyone to use. It has helped us stay organized as we continue to grow, and we were hoping it can be useful to help others grow.

We’ll be posting more of the family soon. We would love to hear any feedback… suggestions, if it’s helped you, etc. Leave a comment below, or email us at thepaperfamily@secretpenguin.com

Thanks everyone! We love being a part of this community.