Early in the pandemic, I saw a Tik Tok video of an epic Rube Goldberg machine built by a bunch of bored people in a house.

click if you want to go down a rube goldberg rabbit hole

As intricate as the setup was, what I was most impressed by was the teamwork needed to make it work.

At the time, I had no idea what the engineered chain reaction contraptions were called. I connected the dots a couple of weeks ago while talking to Eleanor Meegoda, founder of JobStep.

Working in venture capital and struck by how segregated Detroit was, she tried to bring people together in the city to build the world biggest Rube Goldberg machine.

I had never built anything like this before. I had always wanted to push myself to do this. And I thought it was a really great metaphor of kind of empowering people who don't think of themselves as engineers or math people or builders or artists to kind of get together.

While they didn’t succeed, they brought ~100 people - entrepreneurs, artists, students, Lyft drivers - together through the most inclusive space in the city: the art community.

Eleanor has gone on to solve real problems with JobStep, a platform designed to help people transition out of retail and hospitality jobs into careers in tech (interview transcript). She's solving a problem I worked through alone ~6 years back with great success (she helped a good friend land a new job just a few months ago).

I've been thinking a lot about problem solving lately. I'm lucky to be surrounded by a group of leaders at Animalz that see problems as opportunities to get better together. They see that problem solving is about process (how) and practice (repetition) as much as succeeding, and aren't derailed by failure. Get up, try again. Doing that repeatedly builds trust, resilience and perspective…maybe even success 📈

I see this willingness to fail while debriefing after coworking sessions on Flow Club too, as entrepreneurs, operators and creators run towards goals and, succeed or fail, keep showing up. They remind me that whatever problems we’re up against, we don’t have to solve them alone.

I see you, I love you, have a great week,