I want to save the world.
Seriously.
All of the people I love live in it.
Plus, I grew up in the seventies and eighties, and every film I saw, and every hero I loved, was focused on saving the world. And I wanted to be them.
Plus, it kinda needs saved.
Richard Buckminster Fuller, in his last book ‘Critical path’ argued that there were four areas of focus that inventors needed to address to create a sustainable future for humanity. Those are:
Health, energy, environment and interstellar space travel.
If you’ve followed my journey as an inventor, you’ll know I’m making great progress with health, and I’m in the early stages with energy.
In November 2017 my focus was galvanised when I discovered Project Drawdown.
I saw the brilliant Paul Hawken at Summit 17 in LA explain the mission of the project, which is to reverse global warming by identifying the 100 most substantive, existing solutions to address climate change.
The focus on existing solutions allows anyone to contribute to the collective effort.
However, to an inventor like me, the identified areas are an open brief, fully researched, validated and written.
So, I have a world to save, and a plan to save it. And in the next instalment I’ll go over the ‘how’. But to continue this instalment, I’ll explain the ‘why’.
Life is a constant search for identity and meaning.
Pursuing the quest within the question, who am I and why am I here?
That quest needs two things, guidance and experience.
Let’s start with experience.
In my experience, experience is a process of both accumulation and elimination.
Accumulation of knowledge through both active and passive experience.
And elimination of that which is trivial and meaningless (accolades, wealth, status, etc).
Learning is life’s great, unprejudiced privilege.
No matter what your circumstances, you learn from them.
And with the advent of the digital age, and the sum of all knowledge freely available to almost all, learning is more accessible than ever.
If you can combine experience with an erudite thirst for knowledge, you’ll eventually work out life’s big questions for yourself.
But guidance will get you there much faster.
And I’ve had guidance from a diverse and broad range of my heroes.
From Seneca to Nietzsche, Bruce Lee to Rudyard Kipling, Adam Smith to Albert Camus, Rodin to Goethe and Danny Khaneman to Kevin Keegan, the list is a long one.
But I’m going to focus on the influence of two of the most important guides on my personal journey. Karl Jung and Joseph Campbell.
Intertwining psychology and mythology, these visionary minds have identified the universal truths in our search for identity and meaning as humans.
Jung said, ‘I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.’
And Campbell said, ‘The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.’
The combined works of both of these men would take years to get through, but the basic narrative of both is that we have to push beyond the superficial personas we create to find the deeper truths to our character before we can truly understand ourselves.
A process of ‘individuation’ as Jung called it.
Much of my personal journey has been about the definition of who I really am, and that seems to be a very broadly interested character with an intuitive ability to connect together, and see new patterns emerge, from seemingly disconnected knowledge. And my innate sense of responsibility to contribute positively is where the application of that character lies.
So, through experience and guidance, I think I’ve worked out who I am and why I’m here.
I am an inventor, here to invent a better world.
That’s why I do what I do.
Why do you do what you do?
