The Greatest Change You Can Make in the World Is to Change You
Our own personal development is the legacy we leave behind
It’s true: these are weird times.
Regardless of which side of the political, religious, and sexuality spectrums you identify with, it’s easy to see that the world has changed quite intensively in the past few years.
Throughout just a couple of months, I have personally witnessed or heard stories from people close to me that made me want to bury my head like an ostrich. It’s in the news (or when has it not been?), in the conversations, and it’s in the streets.
A gay friend of mine was harassed at a grocery store. A woman was thrown out of a plane after a political back-and-forth with another passenger (luckily for her, the aircraft was still on the ground). A news report by The Guardian covered how the far-right wing is gaining momentum across Europe, preaching against Muslims.
I’m sure that at this point, none of this is news to you. And I’d risk saying that, just like climate change, we oddly seem to be getting used to this.
We seem to be getting numb.
Systemic Numbness
It’s easy to go numb about problems that are hard to put into scale.
Take homelessness, for example.
It’s reasonable to think that this is not a governmental issue only, but a systemic problem that involves many different stakeholders. It’s not about sheltering people, but understanding how they ended in the streets and restoring their citizenship.
There seems to be a gradient where issues become problems; which then become complicated problems, eventually becoming complex — and too large for us to understand how they started in the first place.
Just like walking into the middle of a meeting, we lose focus when we can’t see the thread that explains how things began.
When complicated problems overlap, they form complex problems, also referred to as systemic problems: the kind that belongs to no one and to everyone at the same time.
The expression “systemic problem,” used interchangeably with “wicked problem,” refers to problems that require more than one discipline to be solved. They have numerous entry points and many possible solutions.
It’s easy to go numb when we are surrounded by challenges that depend on many different entities. However, numbness does not mean indifference.
One might very well think that (s)he can’t directly do anything about it, or just not know what to do about it.
Growing up in Sao Paulo, it was hard for me to avoid the reality before my eyes.
Brazil’s immense inequality shows up everywhere, in every single context or situation. It is so commonplace that, for someone with a privileged upbringing like myself, the urge to act on it felt so incredibly overwhelming that it paralyzed me.
I spent most of my life there not really knowing how I could effectively change things around me.
As a consequence, a feeling of guilt seemed to build into my very fabric gradually.
The Systemic Problem of Me
It was only later in my life I began to study and get involved in solving systemic problems. It entailed a hardcore process of personal development that spanned over a decade when I finally stepped out of my career as a strategist in the corporate world.
Nowadays, there are many initiatives related to a field called Social Innovation, which basically means projects aimed at solving for any challenge that could be categorized under the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, for example.
One of these initiatives is a Masters program in Transdisciplinary Design, at Parsons School of Design in New York (which I’m proudly an alumnus). Another example is the X Prize Foundation that organizes social innovation challenges to advance the human frontier.
With a series of wicked problems threatening our species from left to right, the importance of such initiatives is indeed one to be underscored. No doubt about that.
However, I must say that before and after my involvement in Social Innovation projects, I experienced the same sense of lack that stemmed from the impression that perhaps I still wasn’t doing enough to be in service of something bigger than me.
Over time, I discovered that more people than I could imagine felt the same way. They wanted out of numbness, though they didn’t know how to actively participate in life in a contributing way.
Moreover, they were growing dissatisfied about themselves almost unfairly, not knowing what to do to change the world.
Flipping Problems on Their Head
That’s precisely the point: you can’t change the world. In fact, you can’t even change another person. What you can do is to change your world. And the only person you can change is yourself.
The first thing I reframed was the notion that whatever I did had to be vastly impactful.
I chose to scale down from vast and complex problems, and prioritize the things that were within my own reach. For a moment, I suspended my innate urge to thinking globally and went local.
I’m particularly bothered by issues related to climate, so instead of thinking that I’m not doing enough to stop climate change, I opted to get clear on my intention to tackle it whichever way possible for me through my relationships and my work.
I noticed a calm from reducing an internal pressure, and that gave me the clarity to look around my life and find the openings where I could make a difference.
With time, I began to collect my first small wins, and they inspired me to do more. I sought for more of my own development and ways I could help people around me take a similar approach in their lives.
Abraham Maslow, when once approached by a student seeking to create more meaningful pathways in his life, summarized things in an elegant way:
How can I develop myself? asked the student.
Develop others. answered Maslow.
How do I develop others?
Develop yourself.
Flipping around the big problems that we care about gives the opportunity for each one of us to relate to that which is all of us. It gives us the chance to claim our agency back. This is where I see the greatest leverage one can have to effectively contribute to the whole — and leave a legacy.
