Month: August 2017

Some have called the electric light bulb the most important invention since fire.

If you look at the history of artificial light, you first had fire. Eventually, we moved to candles and oil lamps. And as we moved through the centuries, gas lamps became popular. Then Sir Humphry Davy invented the first electrical light. Soon after, Pavel Nikolayevich Yablochkov created the Yablochkov Candle, the first practical arc lamp, a major step in bringing light to the masses. Edison came in with his incandescent light bulb. Again, people continued improvements to halogen and now LED’s.

It took thousands of years until the first artificial light source was produced in 1770’s. Think about that for a minute. What’s fascinating is that it took only 27 years (from 1990 to today), to turn the lights on for 1.7 billion people. That’s a miracle.

To think that only three decades ago, besides a handful of people in urban cities, your day was over when the sun went down.

Yet, billions are still stuck. The thing is darkness isn’t limited to energy poverty. Darkness exists in illiteracy and in clean water or lack of food. But darkness can’t exist with the lights on.

For the rest of us benefiting from access to abundant resources, we can do better teaching each other. Let’s do better by turning the lights on for someone and help them see for the first time (literally and figuratively).

Like candles, when we share our light with those around us, we all benefit from the extra light in the room.

Repentance doesn’t mean that you have to work all day, every day until you die. It isn’t a constant stream of punishment to make amends for your misdeeds. It’s certainly not a bank account that balances before you can be “forgiven”.

Repentance isn’t a zero-sum game.

Repentance is originally a Greek word that simply means a change in mind.

So instead of spending that time figuring out better ways to punish ourselves, why don’t we consider spending that time helping someone who needs to be helped or make something that needs to be made.

Wouldn’t that be a better way to change the way we think of ourselves and those around us?

Measuring how many mistakes we have made doesn’t get us closer to the person who we can become.

It’s your choice on how you keep score.

Every day, I see a man walk around the neighborhood as I head to work. At first, he was slow. You almost felt sorry for him. At the time, I’m sure I thought that he would be done in a month or so.

But he didn’t quit. He kept at it. Each day he got a little faster and a little stronger. Now he walks like a mad man.

What’s interesting is that he is not alone anymore. His wife joins him around the block. And I have been inspired to ride my bike to work more.

To the untrained eye, these changes are unnoticeable. But when you keep at something long enough, your movement begins to grow. One-step at a time.

The way forward to solving poverty is not to throw more money at more problems and hope they will solve themselves. Because culture doesn’t care.

Culture pushes us to be a certain type of person. Everything from what we wear, to what we eat, to how we act and what we say. Culture teaches us what the “manly” thing to do is and how to be “lady” like. Culture teaches us to fit in with our tribe.

Tools like education, sanitation and infrastructure aren’t enough to change the culture alone. It begins with story telling. The stories we tell ourselves and those around us. It starts with developing a posture—people like us do stuff like this. It starts with standing up and shining a path for others to follow. It’s about leaping and doing something that has never been done before.

Until, one day, the tools, the technology becomes ubiquitous and the culture changes. One generation at a time. Moving closer to more dignity, equality and respect. Because investing in human beings is worth it.

When we realize how little the culture cares about us, we realize how important we are to each other.

The way you clean up the world is by picking up one piece of trash at a time.

It isn’t your responsibility but you are there in that moment to make a difference.

It isn’t your job but someone has to do it.

You won’t be thanked for it; there is no recognition, no award. No one will notice what you did.

It’s only one piece of trash today. But tomorrow, you can do it again. And again. Until finally you have filled bags.

Maybe someone will want to join your movement.

And the message can spread.

We can all do better to pick up the trash around us in a physical and emotionally sense.

The world is not going to change for you.

Quit expecting it to.

I have never meant a single person that hasn’t said to themselves, “Why am I here?” or “I just don’t feel like I belong.”

It’s not a coincidence.

I think that is one way God nudges us to explore and re-discover.

If only we could just remember Him.

800 million.

That is how many people live without access to clean water today. Another billion on top of that don’t have adequate sanitation.

Everyone who is reading this has access to clean water. But, I think many of us still wake up thirsty.

We wake up with a different kind of thirst because we are not being the person we were born to be. We are living below our potential. We know we could be doing something different or better.

We have more power than we can imagine. We could do better in building a life that others might emulate. We can do better distributing our resources.

One difference at a time.

We all spend way too much time trying to put all of our ducks in a row before we will act. A better use of our time is to decide what are we going to do with that duck? The one you have.

Anyone who watches an hour of television a day has just demonstrated they have an hour of their time they could use to help someone who needs to be helped or make something that needs to be made.

We live in the safest, richest, most prosperous country in human history with clean water, education, health care, access to technology, recreation…and still some of us are waiting. Waiting for a time that will never come before they will start.

We don’t need more resources. We just need to decide. Decide what it is we are going to do, what change we are going to make.

Not many of us get to do what someone like Bill Gates does on an everyday basis. That’s fine. We don’t need a billion dollars, but could you donate a hundred? How about ten? Better yet, could you start a movement? Is there something you see that could be better?

So. Stand up. Stand out. It’s not like it is going to get done unless you do something about it. Don’t wait for excuses to run dry, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. It is up to us to decide what kind of culture we are going to build. It is up to us to decide what kind of world we are going to live in and leave behind.

It will be easy to leave it for someone else to do. That is the point. If everyone did their best work and made their best contribution, how much better of a world would this be?

You can start today. We need you. Desperately.

Starting a project is an important skill to develop. I do believe it is a skill, not a talent. Since I have never met a baby that was born motivated.

But, more importantly than starting a project, is learning how to finish.

When we finish projects and overcome the Resistance, we get more comfortable at trying bigger projects.

Overtime, as the work scales, we finish projects that make a bigger impact, that make a bigger difference.

Until one day, you become what others coin as an “overnight success.”

Of course, we know that isn’t true. It was consistency. It was the thousand failures you finished before anyone started noticing.

Drip by drip by drip.