scaling an innovation to change the world for good, would be really cool. we all like superheroes. no?
[imagine one man, say sal khan, was enough to intrigue us all into unsatiated curiosity about the universe. imagine gever tulley could get us all tinkering more. imagine sugata mitra could get us all to hand out resources and get out of the way more. imagine if the only thing any of us really needed was an ipad.]
most of us like shiny things, we like to see answers. but even if we did find a silver bullet solution - to redefining public ed, or whatever, it would never exponentiate the hastening of equity and the ongoing sustainability, the thrivability, as much as scaling the individual would.
we’re believing that simply getting people to talk to themselves everyday, asking themselves if they’re doing what matters, would be the fastest means to a global shift for good. we believe people are good. most, however, don’t think that it’s legal to think for themselves, or that it’s legit to do the work they love, the work that matters to them. this is a simple fix. so simple most of us won’t accept it.
because we believe it to be so, from brilliant people and projects we’ve researched, ie:
From Chade-Meng Tan’s Search Inside Yourself:
"A study by Stefanie Spera, Eric Buhrfeind, and James Pennebaker had a group of laid-off professionals write to themselves about their feelings for five consecutive days for twenty minutes each day. These people found new jobs at a much higher rate than the people in the non-writing control group. After eight months, 68.4 percent of them found jobs, versus 27.3 percent from the control group. Those numbers just blew my mind! Usually, if an intervention can make a difference of a few percentage points, you can publish a paper. But here, we are not talking about 3 percentage points. We are talking about more than 40 percentage points! And all it took was one hundred minutes of intervention."
and from our last four years of experimentation, our longest chapter is on just that: what if we get people to believe it is legal to think for themselves. what if that jump starts us ..back to ourselves, to authenticity, to being alive. we just need to be about setting people free.