If you’re in the Dayton area, I hope you’ll join me for a special discussion and workshop on Building Future Ready Businesses. It’s June 27, 5:30 at The Spark, in downtown Fairborn, Ohio. I’ll be unveiling a new talk and workshop on building Future Ready Businesses, and giving away a new guided journal!
The event is free, but space is limited. Learn more and sign up here.
The pushback against the kind of future we want can make everything feel hopeless. God knows I’ve been there. You probably have, too.
My son, who is completing a degree in ecological engineering and working this summer for an environmental remediation firm, came home briefly last weekend, and as he was leaving mentioned that he was having his doubts about whether the career he had signed up for was only a fool’s errand. He has spent much of the summer testing and modelling and working on methods for dealing with the damage caused by invasive species, and he came home with something of an existential crisis. I think it sounds in his head a little like this:
I’ll never fix it all. There are more and more and more invasives.
Is this worth doing?
Am I wasting my time?
And other than giving one of those rueful sympathy-laughs that says more about your internal wincing than anything actually funny, I didn’t have an answer.
Not exactly the master parenting move I was looking for.
Later on, I texted him the cover of a book I had listened to recently: The Book of Hope by Douglas Adams and Jane Goodall (yes, that Jane Goodall). And recommended that he listen to it. Goodall actually reads all of the words attributed to her in the book, so the “read versus listen” debate isn’t worth considering on this one. Hearing her workds, in her voice, is a profound endorsement of the contents.
Goodall has seen more environmental deterioration, more loss, more reasons for sadness and anger and depair than just about anyone. She’s been dealing with natural and human disasters for longer than many of us have been alive. As I started to understand the scope of her work, I asked myself those same questions, alongside her interviewer:
I’ll never fix it all. The catastrophes keep piling up.
Is this worth doing?
Isn’t she wasting her time?
Am I wasting my time?
Her answer: no. And she gives four reasons why.
When you type out those reasons on a page - “The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit” ….
The Gen Xer fights an urge to roll her eyes.
But when you hear Goodall speak life into these catch phrases, and surround them with her eyewitness and her facts and her rebuttals, the world starts to look a little different.
Somehow — and I wish I oompletely understood how, but I don’t — Goodall is convinced that our individual efforts, our individual organizations and efforts and the victories that often seem so tiny are part of making a huge difference.
Jon came home for the weekend again, just now, and I asked him about that comment last week. And he said he was feeling better, even though he hadn’t looked at the book yet.
“It’s amazing how many people are working on this,” he said.
Maybe that’s how our work extends past the little piddly bits that we can manage to do ourselves. Maybe the real impact is how we work together without always realizing it, a little like ants. Maybe we’re having tons of impact just by the example, and the encouragement, that we give to each other unawared.
We do, after all, have some kind of Indominitable Human Spirit.
Jane said so.
I think I can go with that.