Questions, Choice, and Changing the World.

COMMON
COMMON
Sep 1, 2018 · 5 min read

By COMMON member Lester Crafton. Edited by Julia Dopp

What can shift the world the way a question can?

As a kid who started out on a rural West Tennessee farm, I’m blessed to have been asked some fabulous questions as I’ve made my journey through Chapel Hill, Nashville, New York and now Hollywood.

“Where do you want to be when you’re thirty?” was one “What gives you the confidence to think you’ll be one of the few to succeed?” was another.

As an eighteen-year-old student at UNC, I chose to work in the summer educational book sales and leadership program of the Southwestern Company (now called Southwestern Advantage) because of being asked these questions. I didn’t know what I’d end up doing in the future, but I knew developing communication skills, emotional intelligence, a service-minded attitude, resiliency, and the ability to lead likely wouldn’t hurt. This was an journey that would last nearly two decades.

My adventure began with leaving home for a week’s worth of training in Nashville, and then knocking on doors to find a new place to live for me and my roommate for the summer in Zanesville, Ohio, home of the famous Y-Bridge.

After Wilma and Emerson Jenkins were kind enough to agree to let us stay in their basement, the rest of the summer involved visiting homes to talk with families about education and their kids’ futures… and doing it for 80+ hours a week while being rejected thousands upon thousands of times. But, it also meant meeting some truly kind people and having meaningful conversations with them.

On Sundays, it meant coming together with the team to share stories about the families we’d met, to support each other through the trauma that results when most people you meet look at you like you just ate their beloved cat. We had fun together and learned from each other, set goals and repeated the process. I think this is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in the power of a collective — we were all competing to see how effective we could be, and although we were competing with each other, we weren’t competing against each other.

And although 30–50% of the people who started the program left within the first few weeks, I enjoyed almost everything about the experience: the camaraderie with other self-motivated students willing to face fears and engage in the world; the challenge of remaining engaged no matter how I’d been treated by others; and feeling like I was providing families with a chance to hear about something that could help them with their kids’ education.

And when I enjoy something, I love sharing it with friends. So I came back to school, recruited a team of friends to come with me the next year and began the journey of learning to how to lead people. This journey continued with leading progressively larger teams on the field for seven summers, and an additional twelve years as a sales manager and director of sales.

This experience gave me a chance to meet tens of thousands of students and practice having conversations capable of shifting futures by asking the kind of questions I’d had asked to me before beginning the adventure.

In short, I was a mixture of a recruiter, coach, salesperson, mentor, counselor, motivational speaker, teacher, entrepreneur, crisis management expert, leader and friend.

Where else could I have asked so many people questions like:

“What are your goals?” “What are you going to do about it?” “How may I be of service to you in reaching those goals?”

From these interactions, I have come to believe that we, as humans, have a self-evident (if rarely stated) universal goal: we want to do what we want, where we want, when we want, with whomever we want, for whatever purpose we choose, and we want to be healthy, safe and loved no matter how that pursuit turns out.

Doing what we want, where we want, etc. requires energy. I believe it’s possible to create a world where we can all do what we love, and that possibility begins with clean, abundant, free, renewable energy.

I now see our energy infrastructure as the factor which most limits human potential, as it forces us to compete for dollars to access the energy we need to connect with the people and experiences we choose.

After being asked one more massive question: “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” and answering with, “Add as much value as possible to as many lives as possible,” it was a short leap to go from what I was doing with Southwestern to working on climate projects that equipped and inspired individuals and organizations to make a simple choice with the potential to shift the future.

Because I believe in our ability to create this reality faster by working together, I describe my current ‘work’ as such:

I connect people and concepts to catalyze the conscious creation of a cooler climate (and I like alliteration).

As the Creative Partnership Person with CHOOOSE, I work with organizations to create programs that make taking climate action as simple as buying a drink, streaming music, or playing a video game. We are on a mission to unify climate action, culture, and creativity. I’m also the co-founder of Ovanova, a free service nonprofits can use to raise funds by inviting their supporters to explore using solar energy.

CHOOOSE’s climate positive platform provides organizations with low barrier, high impact climate action solutions that create proven value internally (recruiting, engagement, CSR) and externally (marketing, events, product plugins).

One of our first partnerships supported a wind power project in India. The resources that project has created led to the recent founding of an all-girls school in the community. This means progress towards multiple sustainable development goals simultaneously.

Through such programs, in under two years, CHOOOSE has become the global leader in blocking carbon pollution from reaching the atmosphere by retiring carbon credits with the United Nations.

Regardless of what my title or role or level of ridiculousness is at times, I’m a human being. And I believe in our ability to work together as humans to create a clean, abundant, thriving, super-duper-fun reality. I’d love to connect with you. There’s no reason saving the world can’t be fun.


Email Lester: rlester.crafton@chooose.today

Visit Lester’s LinkedIn Page: Lester Crafton

CHOOSE Website: http://chooose.today

Follow CHOOSE on Twitter: @chooosetoday



COMMON is a creative accelerator and community for social businesses and projects. We help entrepreneurs build, launch, and promote products and ideas that take care of the planet and all the creatures on it.

Visit www.common.is

Follow us on Twitter @commonworks

Write us at: itmatters@common.is

Follow us on Twitter @commonworks

COMMON

COMMON is a collobaorative community and accelerator for social businesses and projects. We’re working to build international excitement, conversation and action around entrepreneurialism

COMMON

Written by

COMMON

A creative accelerator for social businesses and projects. We're working to build international excitement, conversation and action around entrepreneurialism

COMMON

COMMON

COMMON is a collobaorative community and accelerator for social businesses and projects. We’re working to build international excitement, conversation and action around entrepreneurialism

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