Big Potential

Do More Together

Achor delightfully points out that people, like lightning bugs, are stronger in a group. He tells of a night in a mangrove forest in Southeast Asia in 1935 when biologist and professor Hugh Smith recorded how the trees glowed as if struck by lightning. Except Smith wasn’t seeing lightning. Achor reports that Smith saw a mass of bioluminescent lightning bugs all glowing at the same moment. 

Smith published his results, but other scientists didn’t believe him. Why would male fireflies – who compete for females – light up in unison? Achor describes the way researchers Andrew Moiseff and Jonathan Copeland later discovered that a lone male firefly has a 3% chance of attracting a mate in a mangrove forest, but when males light up as a group, female response increases to 82%. When fireflies timed their coordinated pulses to the millisecond, Achor writes, they weren’t competing anymore; they were perfectly spaced out and positioned for attracting females. Achor argues that instead of embracing a “survival of the fittest” view, a better model for success is “survival of the best fit” – working together.