About Us

  Buddify Me is the new incarnation of My Mighty Team, and both were created by MYTY Inc. (which we pronounce "mighty" no matter what other people say), a company formed by a small group of friends who have experienced the power of goal buddies and team support in our own lives: Joan Greco, Larry Husten, Ira Stein, David Pearl and Liz Greco-Rocks.

  As fun and fulfilling as it can be to blog or tweet to the whole world at once, we believe there is a special power in the one-on-one connection, in holding oneself accountable to one particular human being.  Each of us can use that power to live up to our goals and improve our lives.  That's what Buddify Me is all about.

  And new research is confirming this premise. Recently two social scientists, studying Framingham Heart Study data covering thousands of individuals and tens of thousands of relationships spanning 32 years, found that healthy behaviors, such as quitting smoking or losing weight, can pass from friend to friend almost like a virus. The impact wasn’t based on proximity to masses of people behaving a certain way – it was based on the closeness of the connection one felt with particular individuals.  (Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Little, Brown 2009) The research has been covered by The New York TimesMagazine, USA Today, Wired, and The New England Journal of Medicine, among others.

  Other studies provide additional support for the power of small groups and individual connections.   Particularly intriguing are the experiments by psychologists Stephen Garcia and Avishalom Tor, demonstrating that competitors tried harder when up against a smaller group of contenders, even when the odds of winning remained unchanged.   (Garcia, S., & Tor, A. (2009). “The N-Effect: More Competitors, Less Competition”, Psychological Science.

  The powerful impact of individual connections was anticipated by author Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point.  In it, Gladwell describes how the organization of multiple small groups can take a particular behavior over the tipping point into a social epidemic, using examples from business, religion, book sales, and the military. Gladwell quotes one businessman who observed, “Peer pressure is much more powerful than the concept of a boss.  Many, many times more powerful.  People want to live up to what is expected of them.”   (Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, Little, Brown (2000), pp. 169-192.)

  If the desire to live up to a group’s expectations is “many, many times more powerful” than the power of a boss, imagine how much more powerful it must be than efforts at personal improvement based on individual “will power” alone.  The goal of Buddify Me is to harness this social force to improve people's lives.