Leo Babauta of Zen Habits posted about the connection paradigm, even though he didn’t use those words. He talks about cooperation over competition, which is basically the connection paradigm over the control paradigm. Here’s an excerpt from Leo’s post:

Success Isn’t a Competition

Blogging, for example, is not a zero-sum game. If I gain readers, it doesn’t mean you’ll lose readers. In fact, if we as bloggers link to each other, we can help each other gain readers at the same time.

Helping other bloggers, in that sense, does nothing to hurt you as a blogger. You aren’t competing for readers, even if you’re both trying to get the same readers, because readers can read multiple blogs.

Sure, you might say that readers can only read so many blogs, so we are competing for their limited attention. But that’s a very limited and limiting view. That’s assuming that there’s a very limited pool of readers with a small amount of attention. That isn’t true: there are lots of blog readers out there, and even more, there are MANY non-blog readers who will soon become blog readers, and that number is increasing all the time.

Think about your field of work: while the mainstream view is probably that everybody’s competing with each other, is there a way to see it as just the opposite? That we can all be successful, and that helping each other is actually a good thing?

Leo then offers his readers a “helping hand program”: he offers concrete ways to help out his readers, both bloggers and non-bloggers.

He has inspired us to do the same.

We like to help, and it sounds like a fun way to meet some new people and find some interesting new blogs! Here are our ideas for how we can best help.

1. Links. Email us a link to one of your posts. If we think our readers would enjoy it or find it useful, we’ll include your link in one of our future posts on a related topic. This will be a fun way to share good content with our readers and help other bloggers at the same time!

2. Guest posts. Guest posts are fun! If you’d like to write a guest post for our blog, email us a one-paragraph summary of your topic. If it’s related to something our readers are interested in (communication, self-improvement, ethical entrepreneurship, or the connection paradigm) then we’ll work out the details from there. Or we could do it the other way around — if you’d like Kyeli or myself to write a guest post for your site, email us some information about your blog and we’ll see if we can come up with something we’d like to write about that would also be interesting to your readers. Or heck, we could do both — a guest post here and a guest post on your site too!

3. Post requests. For our readers who don’t have blogs of their own, we hope we’re helping you by writing content that is helpful to you. We’d love to do an even better job of that, so we’re taking requests. Send us an email or leave a comment with a request for a topic you’d like us to talk about, and if we have something to say about it, we’ll put it on our post queue.

Email us at [email protected] and let us know how we can help you.

We look forward to hearing from you!