What About Oakland Inspires You?
Today was not what I would call, an average Monday. In fact, it wasn’t an average day by any stretch of the imagination. Full of the inevitable ups and downs of the entrepreneurial lifestyle, today was…taxing. There were however, many notable highlights. Ironically enough, they all related to AT&T’s 28 Days campaign and my Oakland Digital (ODALC) team.
The morning began with a bang. We received our first challenge from Wayne.
Cool. It’s officially go time!
Ideas were running through my head all day about how we can accomplish the goals mentioned in the video. A great, and always welcomed energy. In preparation for a call we had scheduled later in the afternoon, I jotted down some questions and talking points, which was good.
The greatest takeaways from the call however, did not come from my questions being answered or discussing my talking points, but rather hearing about the history of ODALC’s Inspire Program. ODALC Founder and Executive Director, Shaun Tai, was on the call and walked us through the program, which is a 3-5 week on-site engagement with educational institutions that aims to expose youth to tangible design skills.
The question that ODALC prompts the students in the program is what was most enthralling to me…
What about Oakland inspires you?
It makes sense to ask Oakland (or East Bay) youth to visually create something that represents inspirations they’ve seen, heard, or experienced in their city. This is a great premise for anyone to create meaningful art.
After listening to the conversation a bit more, my mind began to wander as I tried to answer this question for myself. As a Brooklyn transplant (3 years ago) thrown into the tech scene of Silicon Valley, I think Oakland represents something different to me. Furthermore, I believe the reasons why Oakland inspires me are not quintessential.
Having just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, David and Goliath, the notion of “near misses” and “desirable difficulties” is fresh on my mind.
In the fall of 1940, the German Air Force launched a bombing campaign on London, which has come to be known as The Blitz. The Blitz lasted for eight months and included a fifty-seven consecutive day bombing spree. Approximately eighty six thousand people were either injured or killed. It was awful…at first glance.
As the bombing began, some Londoners fled to the countryside to escape the danger. Many however, stayed in the city. Think about all of those people trying to live a normal life while bombs are being dropped overhead. It would seem that chaos and panic would ensue. It didn’t. Quite the opposite actually.
Gladwell lets us know Canadian psychiatrist, J.T. MacCurdy was the first to articulate this phenomenon.
MacCurdy argued that when a bomb falls, it divides the affected population into three groups. The first group is the people killed. They are the ones for whom the experience of the bombing is the most devastating…The next group is called the near misses. They feel the blast, they see the destruction, are horrified by the carnage, perhaps they are wounded, but they survive deeply impressed…Third, he said, are the remote misses. These are the people who listen to the sirens, watch the enemy bombers overhead, and hear the thunder of the exploding bombs. But the bomb hits down the street or the next block over. And for them, the consequences of a bombing attack are exactly the opposite of the near-miss group. They survived, and the second or third time that happens, the emotion associated with the attack, MacCurdy wrote, “is a feeling of excitement with a flavour of invulnerability.” A near miss leaves you traumatized. A remote miss make you think you are invincible.
This is seemingly true in the metaphorical sense as well. There are many people that fit in this “near/remote miss” category, that overcame existing boundaries to reach their full potential. This is what drives me, and I believe a lot of people, to volunteer and give back.
What inspires me most about Oakland? It’s knowing that there is a city of near/remote misses, awaiting greatness. I am going to find them, and I am going to empower them, directly or indirectly.
