My friend Kathleen Gage posted a quote from Albert Schweitzer about people sometimes reacting with hostility or obstruction to your attempts to improve the world. And then she said.
So if you are doing good for praise and accolades, you are doing it for the wrong reasons and it is no longer a good deed. It is an act of manipulation. Do good because you are called to do good and for no other reason.
I’m going to gently disagree. I agree with the first two statements. But I disagree about “for no other reason.” I’m guessing that really what we have is different definitions of the concept of a calling—that mine is a lot stricter than hers. And that’s because, a few times in my life, I’ve experienced a genuine calling: a feeling that I was put into this place at this time to do something very specific—and that I had to do it.
We do good for lots of other reasons than because we are called to: to show your children what is possible. To make conditions better for others. To improve the lot of a group facing oppression that you don’t belong to–or that you do. To right an immediate wrong. Not all of these rise to the level of a calling. But all of them (and far too many more to list). I became an activist at age 12 and remain one. Five times, I have felt that calling—to:
1. Do what I could to stop the Vietnam war
2. Move the country away from a reliance on nuclear power (maybe the worst technology ever invented)
3. Protest publicly when the US bombed Libya (and I was the *only* protester on the first day, but by a few days later, there was a whole group of us out in front of the courthouse)
4. Save the mountain two miles from my house (with a massive outpouring of community support, won that one in just 13 months!)
View of the Mount Holyoke Range, showing the land saved by Save the Mountain in 2000.
5. My current mission of showing the business community how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—not through guilt and shame, but through enlightened self-interest
Yet these are only the tiniest fraction of thousands of actions I’ve taken for social change. The rest were not a “calling” but simply the right thing to do. They were not done for self-aggrandizement. If that had been my goal, I would have taken far faster and easier paths (like the Internet millionaire meme). Some of them were tiny and easy, like signing a petition. Others consumed years of my life, like the time I spent building what we now think of as the LGBTQ movement or my involvement in changing the politics of the city I lived in for 17 years, and the small town where I’ve lived for the past 18. Most were somewhere between, like serving on committees for grassroots groups or local governments.
That said, I gleefully share that my current calling is the most exciting and meaningful work I’ve ever taken on.
When have you felt a calling? What was it for and what was the result?
Someone asked me today what advice I’d give to someone just starting out. If someone had given me these four bits of advice in 1981 when I was just starting out, I’d have been on the success track a lot faster.
Be green and ethical—and willing to proclaim this to the world
Delegate early, especially those things you’re not good at–but keep checks and balances in place
Don’t reinvent the wheel. An off-the-shelf solution may be better and cheaper than reverse-engineering something
Recognize the REAL opportunities that provide first-mover advantage–and walk away from those that aren’t there yet
The two big messages of the Democratic Convention were Hope and Inclusion. Hope, of course, was one of the two themes (along with Change) that propelled Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008.
I have plenty of issues with both Obama and with Hillary Clinton—but government is supposed to be bipartisan, not spoil-sport-losers-blocking everything. The Democrats even allowed George W. Bush to govern, despite his awful, destructive policies from which the country is still recovering. That Obama has been able to get anything done in this climate (and as those two links above prove, he’s done quite a bit) is remarkable. That the Republican Party has thwarted the will of the people over and over again these 8 years is shameful.
Obama also has a tendency to “roll over and play dead” unnecessarily. To name one example, that he gave up so easily on filling the Supreme Court vacancy caused by Scalia’s death is shocking—and very bad precedent. As a former community organizer, Obama should have had a clue about how to break he deadlock—keep the apparatus that twice elected him president active, to deluge Republican legislators with calls and letters supporting particular pieces of Obama’s agenda—to keep people involved and motivated while at the same time disassembling Republican intransigence, making its revelry in being “The Party of No” politically difficult. Obama could have organized a backlash in the 2010 election and accumulated massive majorities in both houses. But he let his eager champions wither on the vine.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders
Inclusion may not be as powerful as hope, but it’s a very strong meme nonetheless. This year’s Republican candidate openly embraces hostility to inclusion—attacking Mexicans and Muslims along with immigrants in general, mocking disabled people, and even attacking the patriotism of decorated war hero Senator John McCain. So it’s a good move for Hillary Clinton to reclaim the emotional territory she gave up to both Sanders and Trump during primary season—and in this case, I do think it’s genuine. The first night of the convention, especially, was all about outreach to those who’ve felt disenfranchised (including the millions of supporters of Bernie Sanders). Clinton’s good dose of Policy Wonk may also be the antidote to Trump’s sketchy sound-bite promises about how he would govern.
The themes of inclusion, hope, and competence were in tremendous contrast with the Republican Convention, whose dominant message was fear—expressed in xenophobia. The other message of the Republicans was “we don’t have to give a crap about people we can beat up”–a big rallying point for those who agree, but a big push-away for anyone who might be a potential victim–and that’s a LOT of people. This is essentially the message of fascism, and it scares me to see it coming out of the mouth (and Twitter feed) of a nominated major-party candidate for President.
And this is why I will vote for Hillary even though my own politics are closer to Jill Stein’s, and even though I live in a state that will vote Democratic no matter what. I am not thrilled about voting for Hillary, but I will vote for her. I consider Trump the greatest threat to democracy and liberty in my lifetime. His repeated use of Hitlerian memes is very troubling. And I think very deliberate. I want Trump’s margin of defeat to be so “YUGE” that we never see his ugly politics again.
Looking at the election as a whole, I’d bet that Trump, a master marketer for decades, has studied NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming—an extremely powerful approach to getting inside people’s minds through the use of deep psychological triggers) and is far better at getting his (loathsome) message across than Clinton is. The Republicans have been using sound bites that appear to be based in NLP techniques for over 30 years, but Trump has taken it much deeper. Clinton, by contrast, is an old-school politician who hasn’t quite figured out the 21st-century shift in marketing from push to interactive. And Sanders has probably not studied marketing but he’s a natural. His brand is wrapped in an integrity that neither party nominee can offer—and he has a long background in (and deep understanding of) community organizing as well as electoral politics. When he started as a politician, Vermont was not exactly a progressive hotspot. I believe he helped create the climate where his state is now among the bluest in the nation.
Interestingly, all three are around the same age, spanning from Clinton’s 68 to Sanders’ 74 (Trump just turned 70)—yet the oldest, Sanders, had the strongest appeal to youth. And the younger candidates, from O’Malley to Rubio, were all eliminated months ago.
Someone faced with doubt rarely brings her best self to the table. Doubt undermines confidence, it casts aspersions, it assumes untruths…
[W]hat happens if you begin with, “the benefit of confidence” instead? What if you begin by believing, by seeking to understand, by rooting for the other person to share their best stories, their vision and their hopes?
I’ve never articulated this, but it’s a key part of my business philosophy. I assume the best intentions, and the ability to rise to greatness. Sometimes there’s a lot of doubt to overcome.
A client of mine who has now worked with me for several years first approached me by mailing a poorly written typewritten manuscript (probably typed in the 1970s) to my postal address, without including either a phone number or an email, with an almost incomprehensible cover note. I overcame my skepticism and modified and printed out a copy of my response to book shepherding queries, and told him in the letter that he had to give me an email address and phone number, and to get the book into a computer so I could send it to an editor. While I didn’t really expect to hear from him again, I think I may have gotten the job because I was polite and responded as I would to any other prospect. I said nothing dismissive or condescending and simply outlined the (many) steps it would take to turn this into a publishable and published book, and some idea of how much that would cost. He has done everything I suggested and the final book was so good that it won an Ippy Award and the screenwriter we hired to do a movie treatment fell in love with it.
While this was an extreme case, quite a few of my book shepherding clients were starting from an extremely rough place (including several whose first language was not English). They spend several tens of thousands with me by the time the project is done—and they are thrilled and amazed by the finished product. Quite a few have won awards.
On the green and social entrepreneurship profitability/product development and marketing consulting side of my business, I see similar patterns. Some companies would like to go green but have no idea. Others are already going down that route but would like to find a way to tie their work to something bigger. They want to do something that turns hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. Again, the process can be long and slow, but the results are worth it.
So while I’ve never articulated Godin’s “Benefit of Confidence,” I’ve lived it. Thanks, Seth.
Muhammad Ai probably wore boxing gloves like these. Photo by Wojciech Ner.
He was also a man of deep principle, foregoing his career for three years after refusing to fight in Vietnam.
This is what he said about that choice:
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.
Agree or disagree with him , you knew where he stood.
Ali was also a humanitarian and philanthropist, using his fortune—a fortune amassed not through inherited wealth and speculative business ventures, but by coming up out of poverty and putting himself in the ring to be slugged again and again by some of the strongest people in the world—for social good.
Of course, it helps that he inherited a fortune from his father, a large-scale NYC landlord whose racist policies were so bad that Woody Guthrie (his tenant, briefly) wrote scathing songs about him. Trump’s own record includes lots of failure—including four bankruptcies. It’s hard to imagine him getting rich if he hadn’t had the springboard of his father’s wealth. And he brags about using bankruptcy as a tool to screw the public to further his personal fortune. This quote is on the same 2011 ABC news report on the bankruptcies:
I’ve used the laws of this country to pare debt. … We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. You know, it’s like on ‘The Apprentice.’ It’s not personal. It’s just business.
Results for search for “trump university scam” from Washington Post, CNN, Wikipedia, and National Review
This is the continuation of a long history of unethical business dealings, as this story in US News and World Report notes.
As it happens, I’ve heard both Muhammad Ali and Donald Trump speak in person—Ali at an Aretha Franklin concert in Harlem, in 1971, and Trump delivering the keynote for a conference where I was also speaking, in 2004. Ali’s speech left me feeling empowered. Trump’s left me feeling I’d been slimed by an exhibitionist in a public place.
This bullying, thin-skinned, name-calling racist and sexist who brags about how he gets rich on the backs of others has no grasp of the issues, and apparently no ethics. He doesn’t belong in the White House.
Orlando was merely the latest chapter in a bloody saga of a country that allows pretty much anyone to get not just a gun but a military assault weapon capable of killing large numbers of people in moments.
One of the great failures of the Obama administration is the failure to push through any meaningful gun legislation in the wake of Newtown and all the other horrible massacres. What is wrong with our country that we can watch first graders mowed down by a madman with an assault rifle–a weapon whose only purpose is to destroy the maximum number of human lives in the shortest possible time–and we still have not reinstated the assault weapon ban. We still have not closed the loopholes around background checks, so any idiot with a history of mental health problems can get his or her fingers around the trigger.
These are not hunting rifles. These are not self-protection handguns. They exist only to inflict misery. In this country, you need to prove you’re qualified to cut hair or to drive a car. Why is it so easy to get a death machine like an assault rifle? And more fundamentally, why do we expect parents to automatically know how to parent? I wonder how much violence could be avoided if we provided free training in parenting skills to pregnant and newly parenting couples.
Let’s stop the madness! Let’s get sensible gun legislation into place.
This action was the first in a national and international Occupy movement that sprang up in parks and elsewhere, and lasted for months. I visited Zuccotti Park, as well as Occupy parks in Boston, Northampton (MA), and Montreal; it was clearly a powerful movement. It sparked global awareness that a lot of people, especially young people and people of color, felt pretty marginalized. It popularized “99 percent vs. 1 percent” organizing slogans. And it forced US President Barack Obama to move his rhetoric leftward, and to at least verbally champion the dispossessed.
That action continues to reverberate through American and world politics, four and a half years later. The movement around a $15 minimum hourly wage is just one of its legacies. Another is the amazingly strong presidential campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an outspoken progressive. Sanders, with no ties to the power structure and no reliance on conventional political funding, was given no chance of even having an impact; now, he’s ranked as the contender likely to most easily beat either Trump or Cruz in the general election.
Two Bernie Sanders volunteers decided to set up a short-notice phone bank for Bernie…right in Zuccotti Park! The symbolism of raising money to fight Wall Street in Wall Street’s own shadow—and at the very scene where a bunch of “riff-raff” took on the power structure—is clear…and beautiful.
Here’s what they mean to me, and why I picked them:
Transform
First, there’s the social transformation I want to bring about by transforming the business world. I want to end the biggest crises of our time, and I see the business community as the best lever. Appealing to enlightened self-interest—the profit motive—I want to make the bottom-line business case that just as going green saved costs and increased revenue, so too can addressing big picture issues like how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. When I first started talking a great deal about going green as a profit booster, around 2002, people looked at me funny. Now, it’s common business wisdom. I think the same will be true eventually for creating profitable products, services, and a company DNA that address these issues at their roots.
Second, the transformation in my own business. I see consulting, speaking, and writing on how business can bring about that transformation (and how any particular business can develop and market the right social change products and services for its own culture and markets) as a major part of my business in the coming year, and for the rest of my working life. While I’ve been thinking about these things for many years, have written books and given talks about it, I still have to find the markets that are willing to pay for what I know I can do for them. I go into the year with two possible markets that are quite different: small entrepreneurial and startup companies, and large, established corporations. I’ve developed two different websites for these audiences, because the agenda, methodology, timetable, and price structure will be very different.
All of this is a natural outgrowth of the green business profitability work I’ve done the past several years—but while it builds on the past work, it is different. I’m confident that I can make it work, but am still a bit fuzzy on the how. Which brings us to the second word:
Win
My original choice was “succeed,” but then I went to Chris’s post. He chose “win” as one of his words, and I think it’s like success, but stronger. It can also work as both a noun and a verb, as can my third word.
Also, I feel that on many levels other than the material, my life IS a success. I made a conscious decision about 30 years ago to have a happy life, and I’ve made good on that: I love the marriage I’m in, the house and community where I live, the places I visit, the local organic fresh food I eat, the books I read, the performances I watch, and so on. That decision rippled through all areas of my life. As early as 1985, it was the difference between feeling angry and frustrated and cheated when I had to spend an entire day of precious vacation mailing packages back to myself, as the old me would have—and thinking, even before I was married, about the wonderful story I’d have to tell my grandchildren.
But there are two areas where I need to replace that general feeling of success with a clear, strong victory: the economic underpinning of my business (which has now had two low-producing years in a row while I retooled for the transformation)…and the deeper impact of my work on the world.
The problem with having many interests and multiple skill areas is that it’s really hard to focus. When everything is fascinating, how do you choose? Yet, to succeed—to win—you have to close some doors so you can pass through the doors that remain open.
This is the lens: I’m using to help me choose what to focus on:
Over the past few years, I’ve worked hard to overcome a case of what my friend Noah St. John calls “success anorexia.” I’ve looked at my money/success blocks, and overcome a number of them. But, watching my own failures doing things that have worked really well for others, I realize there’s still some hidden piece, deep in my subconscious, that courts failure. I need to find that piece, hold it up to the light, make an alliance with—and redirect—the parts of it that act out of love, excise the parts that are rooted in self-hatred, and have a clear win. This will be difficult, because I don’t even know what it is that’s holding me back. But it’s essential.
Once that hurdle is overcome, I want to look at how to broaden my impact. I have a great message and great examples of how we can solve these big problems. But for that to really change the world, I need to find tens of thousands, maybe millions of people who are open to that transformational message. None of my books have ever sold more than a few thousand copies. My blog and social media audiences are limited. The number of people who hear me speak in a year is much too small. The second big win I need is to get myself in front of a far larger number of people. That this will help with selling more books, doing more paid speaking to larger audiences, and getting more consulting gigs—in other words, contributing to the win I’m looking for in my own blocks—is an extra benefit. At age 59, I have a limited time to make a big impact on the world. I want to leave a legacy of creating deep transformational change, because I love this planet. And that’s a nice transition to the third word.
Love
Love of others and of self, love of the ecosystem and the planet. In my youth, I was a very angry, loud activist who felt utterly betrayed by governments and corporations and wasn’t good at finding common ground or seeking alliances with those who thought or felt differently from me. Over the years, I’ve learned how mistaken I was—starting all the way back in the 1970s. Some might say I’ve softened but I don’t see that way. I’ve learned to approach with love, respect, and an understanding that almost all of us want a better world; we just have different ways of understanding how to bring it about.
Love is often about deep listening. It’s also about seeking a higher good for a greater number of people, without sacrificing the needs and desires of others. It’s about building the communication skills to allow environmentalists and Tea Partiers to discover their common ground (something I talk about very specifically in my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World).
Going deeper, this is what allows even the most hate-filled opponents to go past the hurt and build a better world for everyone. Nelson Mandela was a master of this. So were the people who formed the various Arab-Israeli joint projects such as the magnificent Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom community in Israel, where Jews and Arabs study and work together—the name, in both languages, translates as “Oasis of Peace”—or Combatants for Peace, which pairs Arab and Israeli former combatants to travel around and speak about cooperation.
It’s easy to love those who agree with you. It’s much harder to love those you might blame for the death of a loved one or the loss of your land. I have tremendous admiration for those involved in these sorts of cooperative efforts and I want to be more like them.
Screenshot of KPMG’s internal “higher purpose” video
This Harvard Business Review article and accompanying video are too good not to share. The video is less than two minutes and well-worth watching. Watch it with your marketer hat on. Pay attention both to the direct message and to the outcomes.
KPMG is positioning itself as an agent of social change, a social entrepreneurship giant involved in everything from keeping the Nazis at bay during World War II to certifying the election results that allowed Nelson Mandela to become the first president of a free South Africa.
I’m not passing judgment on the accuracy of the claim that the wonderful, world-changing projects highlighted in the video represent KPMG’s (and predecessor Peat Marwick’s) overall corporate culture over many decades. I haven’t done the due diligence on that, and frankly, I’m pretty skeptical of the claim. Big Four accounting firms don’t tend to be known as cauldrons of world-changing social entrepreneurship.
But clearly, the company decided to spotlight its role as a changemaker and to foster an employee culture of empowered action—and that’s terrific. Not at all surprised to see the excellent results. Every manager should look at the amazing engagement this campaign created, with over 42,000 stories submitted by employees and 76 percent agreement that their jobs had deeper meaning.
Be sure to note the graph at the bottom, contrasting several employee satisfaction metrics under managers who emphasized or didn’t emphasize a higher purpose.
If one of the largest accounting firms in the world can take this on, your probably much simpler business can do it too. Every person who supervises others should take that data to heart and make sharing their own organization’s higher purpose a consistent part of their own employee motivation (if you get stuck on this, contact me; I can help).
Leslie Hinkson: If we want real desegregation, we need to not only make sure black and white kids attend the same schools, but that they interact socially within the school.
Bill Miller: To deal effectively with homelessness, first get people off the streets and into housing. THEN start addressing the other pieces, like jobs, addictions, etc. And this is good for the community, even the business community.
Amanda Herman: Making films “focusing on what people wish to happen, in their dreams. What is it to make someone else’s dreams come true? I gather with people to transform their ideas into public arts projects…The outcome of each project is joy…What’s possible and impossible in the world is largely a social construct. It’s up to us to redefine what is possible…and make it happen.
Darby Dyer: Despite 100,000 objects between the sun and Jupiter, our risk of being hit by the kind of cataclysmic asteroid that may have wiped out the dinosaurs. And the sun will keep producing energy and light for the next 5 million years or more. We are the “Goldylocks planet,” with perfect conditions to support human life. But even if we don’t have to worry about the planet surviving, we do have to worry about human survival. Catastrophic climate change is real, it’s here, and our window for addressing it is shrinking.
Nick Cummings: A recent high school graduate who has faced disability-level breathing problems since birth, he shared insights on being social when you don’t fit in, and on overcoming the depression of being different: “DON’T think the answer is in a pill or a bottle, unless that pill is made of chocolate and the bottle is Mr. Bubble bubble bath…Find the positive in every situation. Take all that raw emotion and have it drive you to be better…We’re all gloomy depressive messes some time. But there must have been something so fantastic before that to make you feel that way. A roller coaster doesn’t only go up.
Laney Rosenzweig: If we can replace the images we have of traumatic events (often with metaphors), we can reduce the post-traumatic stress. Our memories are not fixed, but fluid, and we can create memories of traumatic events that we can live with, that don’t trap or paralyze us.
Thom Fox: As a former drug abuser and gang member, “I’d been on my way to being dead…Life doesn’t have to be miserable. If you don’t like your life, change it. I understood that I could reach out and they’d be kind enough to help. No one succeeds alone. Once you get through hell, you can help one person, two people. That could be exponential and change the world. The more opportunity you create for others, the more you create for yourself.
“The one commonality for all the bad things that happened to me—was me. That’s what I had to overcome.
“Tofu takes on the flavor of whatever it’s with. People are like tofu. Surround yourself with potential, and it will be fulfilled… One person changed my life. I’m passing that on exponentially. What if your conversation was that one thing that changed their life?”
Angela Lussier: “When I graduated, I thought I had to abandon the artist in order to become a business person. What I realized is I can be an artist and a business person. Even stuffed celery could be an art project…I did a video, with sliding down slides and swinging on swings. I thought, is this something business people do? But the response was, ‘we had so much fun watching you have fun as you taught business principles.’
“The difference is my mindset. I was really outcome-focused at the beginning. Today, I have a creator’s mindset, more focused on learning and growing—the journey. The creator’s cycle: Being–>Dreaming–>Doing–>Making–>Being (reflect on what happened/worked: what happened, what didn’t, what am I scared of). The moment we want to quit lies right before the doing stage. When you move from ‘this won’t work’ to ‘let me just try this,’ a lot of things happen.
“When I figured out that I’m a weird person, I found out everyone else is too; we’re all just pretending to be normal.”
Several other speakers were also on the program, and they had good insights as well—but the notes I took on their sessions don’t lend themselves to reportage. Here are their storyboards (all prepared in real time by the graphics agency Collective Next).
