JANUARY 31, 2021
Some people think they can’t contribute to a trivia team. It’s something we hear fairly often at Anywhere League, “I shouldn’t participate. I’m not good at trivia. I wouldn’t be any help to anyone.” People get caught up in the competitive side of things that they forget how fun it is to see what other people know.
Sometimes you come across a person who’s genuinely good at trivia. It can be annoying to have a little sister who always wins at Trivial Pursuit. But when you’re playing as a team, having diverse people with a wide variety of interests is often a better path to success than just having one person who knows everything.
At Anywhere League, we aim to write quizzes that allow as many people as possible to shine. Over the course of the season, we want everyone to feel like they got a chance to contribute. Part of the fun of team trivia, after all, is finding out that someone you thought you knew is secretly an expert on 90’s British pop music or a huge fan of fantasy novels.
We do this because a big part of our working lives is learning the strengths of our coworkers and learning to get the best out of everyone. Over the course of a season, regular quizzing helps strengthen communication and lets your team develop stronger bonds than one-day team building activities can. Building relationships come first, the trivia is just the means of doing so.
Most importantly, being a know-it-all doesn’t help. In fact, it’s in everyone’s best interest that your entire team feels like they can speak up. You might think you know European history well, but you probably don’t now as much as the person on your team who majored in the subject in college before switching to computer science. Watching teams quiz, we see teams learning to figure out who feels most confident about what. It’s at those moments that we really feel like we’re helping build strong teams.
Anywhere League is designed so that the same things needed to succeed as a team in the workplace help you in our trivia — you have to respect your teammates’ strengths, know when to listen and when to press your point, and know that working together to come up with the right answer beats being the know-it-all every time.
All this is to say that if you’re on the fence about joining us, please do! You’ll learn more about your teammates, have a chance to share some (possibly unexpected) interests you have, and be able to grow communication and teamwork skills. And all that without needing to be a trivia champion already.