Group think and Time slotted sub efforts

Ever since I can remember, I've been bombarded with ideas on how decisions are made in life--personal or group. This is a large topic, but personal side is roughly about ambition versus personal freedoms. On a larger scale, people behave very differently when functioning in groups.

Many of Bob Marley's lyrics have been about taking aspects of life into your control, "I know you don't know what life is really worth...; Get Up, Stand Up, stand up for your right". But there are also philosophies out there which say that you should rather try to obtain peace in your life and enjoy it. Life is short after all. This is also to communicate that you can't do much to change your status, that you are one person among billions, and that you can't change much; you will be put down. Roughly, this is hard for us to imagine these days, because being active is in, but I've seen it best captured in Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

Dostoevsky takes time to describe that there are many people in the world whose imaginations will take them everywhere, but they will go nowhere in reality. I look at this as a sort of an ineffective ambition. To me, this is very much in conflict with the idea that if you put your heart into it, anything is possible. The author I mention, does make a good point though, that everyone in the world can't possibly cause revolutionary change, nor can everyone be heard. Put this in any way that you can, but some were not meant for anything. Read that again, it's such a depressing thought, but it seems that way, because we have all been motivated to do our best for so many years, nurtured to perfection. Life is competition, but could it be said that we could have otherwise lived happier lives, numb about our failures if we weren't brought up to believe ultimate failure is not even trying. Now put all of those individuals together and make them into a group.

You have lots of time to think running in the somewhat known nyrr half marathons going on every now and then. Everyone starts off in one big clump, thousands of people, ready to release. Then people start right off at the alarm and advance ahead. As time goes on, the average distance between people gets larger, but eventually many many little groups of people start to form, each having roughly the same pace. Each one behaves almost like an organism, moving as one mass, but every so often, there are individuals who separate to go ahead or join in from the rear. The most devastating event is when the group slowly splits in the middle when peoples' paces differ too much. It really takes lots of ambition and personal push to keep with the front group, but there are always some who make up the group in the rear. Contrary to personal fortitude, it is much easier to continue with a group at its pace rather than try to advance ahead. This concept of groupthink is then in my experience, a very powerful connective tissue, mentally bonding people together.

The point I'm attemping to make here, is that there our success-driven upbringings are causing personal conflicts as well as personal-group conflicts.

More on the few vs the group here., in Washington Post's "The Top Pickers vs. the Pack" by Alan Sipress.

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In another type of issue, I find that peoples' efforts are often scattered among devoted and nondevoted events. That is, we can spend short bursts of time handling problems, or we can arrange periods within which to address them. The conflict here is between which is more successful. When The task is idea generation, for example, it's easy to point to how people often get bursts of great ideas, randomly throughout the day. However, we accept meetings as the standard way of generating ideas by brainstorming. Maybe these two ideas simply go hand in hand and don't even need to be discussed, only to say that they are two types, each reviewing and contributing to the other.